If NASA scientists are right, the Thames will be freezing over again.

It takes around a hundred thousand years for a photon from a nuclear reaction at the centre of the sun to make it to the surface. Effectively a diffusion style random walk in a highly scattering plasma medium.

Sunspots merely tweak the effective transport properties of the relatively shallow uppermost surface layer slightly.

Although it is true that the *sunspots* are cooler than the main photosphere there is one crucial point you are missing. The sun on average is mostly *brighter* when there are lots sunspots visible as the lost output from the spots themselves is more than compensated for by the much larger areas of bright faculae that accompany them. An active sun is a brighter sun this is not in dispute and is included in all the climate models. The effect of the sunspot cycle variation in TSI of 0.1% on the global climate is however right at the limits of detection.

You cannot blame the sun for all the recent warming - the satellite data rules out magically making the sun brighter.

Regards, Martin Brown

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It could be very important in terms of short term fluctuations in the "solar constant", but it isn't going to change the average amount of heat coming out over any kind of extended period - the proposition that changes in solar output could explain the ice ages is obvious nonsense.

The energy emitted by a Solar flare can amount to 15% of one second's worth of solar output.

Stellar flares can be more intense - but they seem to happen on smaller stars with stronger magnetic fields.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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The changes are limited to 0.2% of the average solar output, and they have to be short term - there's not enough mass in the photosphere to store any climatically significant amount of energy.

This isn't true. The scientific evidence does make it fairly clear that while CO2 is the major player, methane, ozone and soot all contribute. They don't contribue all that much, and their residence times in the atmosphere are a great shorter than CO2's 800 years. We can win ourselves a few extra years of time to tackle the CO2 problem by reducing methane, ozone and soot, but we've got to get CO2 emissions under control if we want to hold anthropogenic global warming to less than or close to 2 degrees Kelvin.

The wonder is that you can, given the capacity for sloppy thinking that you exhibit here.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

It's not dogma - what I'm saying is based on the available scientific evidence.

Dogma "is authoritative and not to be disputed, doubted, or diverged from, by the practitioners or believers."

Scientific evidence is fairly authoritative, but it is regularly doubted, and disputed, and can be diverged from if you have better counter-evidence, so it isn't dogma.

John Larkin's problem is that he treats denialist propaganda, which purports to doubt and dispute the scientific evidence, as if it was dogma. Most of what he posts can be traced back to failed attempts to cast doubt on the generally accepted understanding of anthropogenic global warming, and on those rare occasions when we can trace his opinions back to real evidence, you can usually find a more recent paper that demolished the case originally made.

This particular thread is even less soundly based. It starts with a gross misinterpretation of the British Meteorological office climate records for the last 15-years, published by the UK's Daily Mail, which would fall apart if the journalist involved considered the climate record over a rather longer period.

As Martin Brown has pointed out, this isn't the first time the Daily Mail has sacrificed scientific accuracy to make a misleading rhetorical point.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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There wasn't a lot of weasel wording in the climategate e-mails - the researchers involved were talking privately, and didn't hesitate to call a spade a spade. There was a lot of weasel wording in the commentary on it.

I bought and read Fred Pearce's "The Climate Files"

He exonerates the scientists involved from dishonesty, but is unhappy about the enthusiasm they displayed in getting rid of a denialist editor on a journal that published a really bad paper that was useful to the denialist propaganda machine. What he doesn't seem to realise was that what motivated them was more that the editor had ignored the advice of no less than four referees to not publish what really was a very bad paper, rather than the fact that the paper was useful to denialists - like most British science reporters Fred Pearce was never trained as a scientist nor inculcated with the idea that scientific literature is the basis of all scientific knowledge.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

=20

"Dogma is the established belief or doctrine held by a religion, or a parti= cular group or organization[1]." =20 AGW is the established belief for your particular religious group, so much = so that you ignore all evidence which conflicts with it and try to pretend = you are the only scientific ones. There is no science but your science. Here is an even better definition: a point of view or tenet put forth as authoritative without adequate groun= ds (Merriam-Webster) You could learn something from King Canute. People have to be incredibly e= gotistical and semi-hysterical to believe they can determine the climate.

sunspots.

serious

thing

temperature:

The outer layers of the sun are well stirred. Convection moves at almost exactly the speed of sound, which in the solar interior is a _big_ number, so you have to worry about the heat capacity of a lot more than the photosphere.

The large-scale, time-averaged structure of the Sun is determined by hydrodynamic equilibrium, but there are smaller variations on all time scales--0.1%-ish since good satellite measurements have been available.

As for "obvious nonsense", that's not very persuasive. Those tenth-of-a-percent wobbles were widely considered impossible too, until there were measurements to back them up.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net

Hydrostatic equilibrium, doh.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Bill, this has all been discussed here ad nauseam. You seem to stick to your conspiracy theories, and I don't believe them.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

particular group or organization[1]."

that you ignore all evidence which conflicts with it and try to pretend you are the only scientific ones. There is no science but your science.

(Merriam-Webster)

egotistical and semi-hysterical to believe they can determine the climate.

And they have to be incredibly inept to dither for years over a simple

2-transistor oscillator.

--

John Larkin, President       Highland Technology Inc
www.highlandtechnology.com   jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com   

Precision electronic instrumentation
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators
Custom timing and laser controllers
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links
VME  analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators

Leaving the merits of the argument aside - a conspiracy theory would be where you think all the experts in the field are wrong, suppressing evidence and so forth. If this is what you think, then surely it is

*you* that believes in a conspiracy theory, not Bill?

E.g., you presumably think the "climategate" scientists were engaged in a "conspiracy" to defraud the public or some such?

--

John Devereux

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The only "conspiracy theory" that I espouse is the proposition that Exxon-Mobil fund a number of groups who deny the reality of global warming. This is rather better supported than the average conspiracy theory - the payments can be seen in Exxon-Mobil's public accounts.

The book "The Merchants of Doubt" spells out what has gone on in some detail.

Some of the groups that now tell us the anthropogenic global warming is nothing to worry about were originally set up to tell us that smoking didn't necessarily damage our health. It's a fairly depressing example of human wickedness.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Bill believes everything that opposes his climate panic is sponsored by Exxon Mobil. He has put that in writing many times, right here in the NG. To me that is like the mother of all conspiracy theories.

No, I just think that some of them were rather dishonest and have exhibited ethically questionable behavior. It does not matter whether the emails were "believed to be private", it is unbecoming for a scientist to write such words and has damaged the credibility of some of the scientists beyond repair. This is merely an observation when talking to others about climate change.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

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Only if you don't engage your brain. The heat output of the sun is generated by nuclear fusion in the core - 99% of the energy is generated within 24% of solar radius from the centre.

There may be some 100,000 years worth of output proceeding through the sun at any one time, but it's kind of hard to imagine a mechanism operating in the convective zone (from 70% of the solar radius out to the surface) that could change the solar output for long enough to create an ice age (for which the current cycle time seems to be about

100,000 years).

until

"Widely considered" in the absence of precise measurements is scarcely a scientific opinion. I suspect that if anybody had actually been asked back then they wouldn't have said that it was impossible, merely that the weren't any observations that suggested that anything like that might be going on. Remember that the variation is paradoxical - the "dark" sunspots that we can see accompany an marginally increased solar output from the adjacent bright areas which more than compensate from the reduced radiation from the dark areas.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

ticular group or organization[1]."

The scientific establishment is not a religious group, and the belief is only established to the extent that it hasn't yet been falsified.

o pretend you are the only scientific ones.

I don't ignore, I'm just aware that the evidence that purports to conflict with it has - so far - been either inadequate or bogus. The post that opened this thread is a typical example if the inadequate "counter-evidence" that gets presented,

Science isn't monolithic, but it all rests on the same facts and mostly relies on the same interpretations.

rounds =A0(Merriam-Webster).

You may think that the scientific case is inadequate, but that does strongly suggest that you don't know much about the science involved.

ly egotistical and semi-hysterical to believe they can determine > the clim= ate.

King Canute's example was the tide, not the climate. At the moment you wanting us all to do a King Canute - recommending the persistent burning fossil carbon and injecting more CO2 into the atmosphere,on the basis that you can't understand how anything that puny man can do could cause the global temperature rise.

That isn't humility, but ignorance.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

rticular group or organization[1]."

ch so that you ignore all evidence which conflicts with it and try to prete= nd you are the only scientific ones. =A0There is no science but your scienc= e.

ounds =A0(Merriam-Webster)

Unfortunately, his grasp of what constitutes "adequate grounds" is inadequate.

bly egotistical and semi-hysterical to believe they can determine the clima= te.

Actually, all that's required is some grasp of the physics involved. Once you've got that you don't have to be either egotistical or semi- hysterical to get the point.

I'm not dithering. I know exactly what I want to do, but I'm finding it difficult to get around to actually doing it. And I'd be inept if I though that the Baxandall class-D oscillator was a simple 2-transistor oscillator - Jim Williams (who wasn't inept) found it tricky enough to justify publishing six Linear Technology application notes on the subject - AN45, AN49, AN51, AN55, AN61, and AN65.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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That's pretty amusing--you're way outside your field, Bill, and it shows. You've shot yourself in the foot again.

If basing a claim on the excellent agreement between physics-based models and the best available observations isn't scientific, that sort of knocks the pins out from under your climate research friends, even on your showing.

Stellar structure calculations based on hydrostatic equilibrium have been made since Kelvin, and with appropriately tweaked values for the solar composition, they model the life cycle of main sequence stars pretty well. Schwarzschild's classic book on stellar structure was published in the

1950s, and we were still using it as a textbook in the 1980s. My stellar structure prof at UBC, Dr. Jason Auman, was one of the first to make a full numerical model of the Sun, back in the early 1960s when that was hard. (Back in the day they used the photosphere to infer the initial composition, and ran the nucleosynthesis model to figure out how it changes with time. Progress has probably been made, but I haven't followed it very closely.) The boundary condition used in the early models was that the photosphere temperature was absolute zero--that perturbed the luminosity calculation only a little.

So the previous received wisdom on the constancy of the solar constant wasn't poorly supported at all. It was supported about as well as anything in astronomy, and quite a bit better than anything in climatology. It was just wrong, at least in detail. That's how science advances.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net

sunspots.

temperature:

It seems by now we should have a staffed position here at s.e.d. ... a foot surgeon :-)

I guess according to Bill solar activity changes are an invention of Exxon Mobil :-)

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

sunspots.

serious

thing

layers

certain

surface.

temperature:

Of course it's hard for you to imagine.

**********************************

John Larkin, President Highland Technology, Inc

jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com

Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom laser controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro acquisition and simulation