Re: Protesters on UK Parliament

[Rich Kulawiec <rsk () gsp org>]

On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 08:05:28AM -0500, Richard M. Smith wrote:
> The earth appears to be entering a cold spell due to low sun spot activity.
> The data is now in:
>
>    Temperature Monitors Report Widescale Global Cooling
>    http://tinyurl.com/3b6zje
>
>    A compiled list of all the sources can be seen here.  The total 
>    amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large 
>    enough to wipe out nearly all the warming recorded over the past 
>    100 years. All in one year's time. For all four sources, it's 
>    the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.

This is also part of a chain email that's apparently circulating,
and it's nonsense -- contradicted by the very sources that it
references.  It's appearing at places like this:

        http://www.dailytech.com/Temperature+Monitors+Report+Worldwide+Global+Cooling/article10866.htm

which reads in part:

        Twelve-month long drop in world temperatures wipes
        out a century of warming

        ... All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley,
        NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that
        over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.

Except that's not what they say.  Rather the opposite.  For example,
NASA's GISS site at:

        http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2007/

says:

        The year 2007 tied for second warmest in the period of
        instrumental data, behind the record warmth of 2005, in the
        Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) analysis.

It's worth reading that entire page, by the way.

Any number of people appear to have fallen for this "it's the sunspots!"
canard -- and it is a canard, as Bad Astronomy points out:

        http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2007/04/29/is-global-warming-solar-induced/

which reads in part:

        Over the whole sunspot cycle, at most, this would raise the
        temperature of the Earth on average by 0.2 degrees Celsius, and
        we are measuring increases much larger than that (not to mention
        the trend just keeps going up, and doesn't rise and fall with
        the sunspot cycle). People who try to tie global warming to the
        Sun have very little evidence, and what they do have does not
        come close to explaining the rise in temperature we see on Earth.

That entire page is worth reading, too.

I know that most people don't follow physics that closely, so let me
point out something: solar output is one of the most closely watched
phenomena in all of astronomy.  Every twitch, every flutter, anywhere
in the electromagnetic spectrum, is dutifully recorded and peered at.
This is partially because it's nearby, partially because it's relatively
easy to observe, and partially because we have ample reason to care
about it.  If there were a correlation between sunspot activity and
the presently observed climactic variations, the people doing all that
peering would be the first ones to jump all over it.  Journals would be
flooded with papers.  People would be scrambling for a Nobel Prize.

None of this is happening.

And while "global warming" is actually an accurate description in
thermodynamic terms, it's probably not the best one to communicate
the results.  Even "global climate change" doesn't quite cover it.
The best one -- as someone pointed out recently, and I need to find
that citation again -- is "global climate weirdness".  The injection
of additional energy into (or the decrease in the rate at which energy
is dissipated from) a partially-closed hydrodynamic system results in
larger, stronger, and lengthier local effects.  And "effects" doesn't
just mean Weather Channel highlight reel stuff like larger snowstorms
and more severe droughts; it can also mean things like exceedingly stable
air masses or unusually persistent ocean currents.

---Rsk
_______________________________________________
Fun and Misc security discussion for OT posts.
https://linuxbox.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/funsec
Note: funsec is a public and open mailing list.