For the reasons discussed in a journal article I published last spring, it is clear that the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) hypothesis does not satisfy the scientific method and thus does not explain global warming/climate change. So what does? The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claims that they cannot think of any natural cause, so in their view it must be CAGW, but of course this cannot be correct given the negative findings using the scientific method. But if there is a natural cause, one of the IPCC’s principal but very weak arguments disappears anyway.
This post will sketch one such possible natural hypothesis that has the major advantage that it much better explains the available global temperature data since 1850 on the subject than all of the general circulation models used by the IPCC in their 2007 report.
A Major Natural Cause of Climate Change Needs to Be Much More Carefully Examined
The possible natural cause is that Earth’s climate is primarily but not exclusively determined by variations in the sun, the source of all our heat and light. These variations may in turn be determined by changes in the effects of planetary orbits on the center of mass of the solar system. As the IPCC agrees, there is also an important effect of major volcanic activity, particularly in the mid-latitudes. The IPCC claims, however, that solar variations are too small to explain the observed variations in global termperatures. This appears not to be the case because of indirect effects that the IPCC chose not to examine.
The best known (but not necessarily the only one) of these indirect effects occurs because cosmic rays reaching the Earth’s atmosphere from outer space increase the production of small particles by more than a factor of ten (see Svensmark and Calder and more recently CERN’s Kirkby et al.). This appears to increase the probability of formation of low clouds, which in turn influences the reflection of solar radiation back into space. This, in turn, appears to influence global temperatures since low clouds generally reflect a much higher proportion of solar radiation than the earth or its oceans do. Global climate also appears to be closely related to various oceanic cycles.
There Is an Amazing Relationship between the Various Solar System, Solar, Oceanic, and Climate Cycles
In fact, unlike the poor correlations between CO2 and global temperatures, all these effects–of solar system mechanics on the sun, of solar variations on cloud formation and oceanic cycles, and of cloud formation and oceanic cycles on global temperatures–appear to have amazingly similar cyclical properties. So although the system is quite complex and very little has been done to understand it, this astronomical explanation of climate change appears to be a much more likely hypothesis than the IPCC’s CAGW hypothesis.
Current research suggests that the major solar/global temperature cycles include 20, 60, and approximately 1,000 years, and possibly a 200 or 210 year cycle, in addition to the 100,000 year astronomical/ice age cycle. So if, as it appears, the 60 year cycle reached its peak in the last decade, the 100,000 year cycle about 6,000 years ago, and the 1,000 year cycle either recently, or at the latest, in the next few decades, the prognosis for Earth’s climate under this hypothesis would appear to be for a colder rather than a warmer climate. The only major cycle that may defy this shift, but only for the next ten years, is the 20 year cycle, which appears to be nearing its low point. Various observations of Earth’s climate over the current Holocene period can be explained by assuming reasonable strengths and phases for the solar cycles that have been examined so far. The ice age 100,000 year cycle has long been attributed to astronomical cycles. Why not the shorter cycles as well? Why are they alone unrelated to astronomical cycles as the IPCC argues?
The Need to Move Climate Research Out of Its Current Pre-Copernican, Medieval Mindset on the Earth Alone
Unfortunately, the US has spent well over $100 billion on CAGW research over the past two decades and almost nothing on astronomical hypotheses. I would argue that at least 50 percent of US-funded research should be on non-CAGW hypotheses in order to have a balanced program that gives equal weight to all the possibilities. Surely a major portion of this 50 percent deserves to be used to explore astronomical hypotheses. Some of the obvious tasks are to better determine the major cycles of the solar system, the sun, the oceans, and global temperatures, what phase each one is in, and the extent to which and the mechanisms by which these cycles influence each other.
It is time for climate researchers to go beyond the confines of Earth to seriously examine astronomical sources of climate change. Astronomers have done so for hundreds of years in seeking to understand Earth’s role in the universe; climate researchers need to follow their lead rather than continuing to pretend that the rest of the universe plays only a minor role in climate. It defies common sense to think that the sun that provides all our light and heat has little impact on Earth’s climate. But this is what the IPCC and other CAGW supporters do to this day.
Unfortunately, the underlying reason that little serious research has been done on the astronomical hypotheses for climate change is the same reason that the results of using the scientific method in determining the validity of the CAGW hypothesis have been ignored–little funding is available for non-CAGW research. Research follows the money and for several decades the funding has been primarily for CAGW. Until this changes we are destined to repeat the mistakes, waste, and bad policy prescriptions that have characterized the last two decades in climate research.
[…] also eine Art kopernikanische Revolution in der Forschung zur Klimaänderung, wie auch Alan Carlin vorgeschlagen […]
Another way of calculating the earth – sun ditansce is to look at the centrifugal and the gravitational force. This solution assumes that one already knows the mass of the sun, but thats a different problem ;-). One does only need High-School Math and Physics in order to derive a solution.Thanks to Newton we knowFg= GMmr2where G=6,67410 11 is the gravitational constant. We also know the centrifugal force to beFz=mv2rPutting these two equations together one gets:mv2r=GMmr2 r=GMv2Furthermore we know the duration of a year and therefore we know v:v=ωr=2πfr=2πrTConsequentlyr=GMT24π2r2 r=GMT24π2 3=149,8109mWhich is very close to the real value, which is varying between 147,1 Mio. and 152,1 Mio. km. According to Wikipedia the average ditansce is 149,6 Mio. km, so our result is actually quite good.
[…] In brief, Earth’s climate can be explained by solar cycles of 983, 115, 61, and 130 years. Scafetta’s hindcast is spectacular. Scafetta’s paper represents the most sophisticated effort that I know of to explain Earth’s climatic changes in terms of observationally-based science. Unlike AGW-based climatology it actually contributes to our understanding of this important topic, and in my view represents the beginning of the Copernican revolution in climate science that I recently advocated. […]
We sure need a revolution in climate ….
Climatologists love to talk about energy being trapped by carbon dioxide and thus not exiting at the top of the atmosphere (TOA.)
It is nowhere near as simple as that. All the radiation gets to space sooner or later. Carbon dioxide just scatters it on its way so you don’t see radiation in those bandwidths at TOA. The energy still gets out, and you have no proof that it doesn’t, because you don’t have the necessary simultaneous measurements made all over the world.
In the hemisphere that is cooling at night there is far more getting out, whereas in the hemisphere in the sunlight there is far more coming in. This is obvious.
When I placed a wide necked vacuum flask filled with water in the sun yesterday (with the lid off) the temperature of the water rose from 19.5 deg.C at 5:08am to 29.1 deg.C at 1:53pm while the air around it rose from 19.0 to 31.9 deg.C.
What did the backradiation do at night? Well from 9:15pm till 12:05am the water cooled from 24.2 deg.C to 23.4 deg.C while the air cooled from 24.2 deg.C to 22.7 deg.C.
According to those energy diagrams the backradiation, even at night, is about half the solar radiation during the day. Well, maybe it is, but it does not have anything like half the effect on the temperature as you can confirm in your own backyard.
This is because, when radiation from a cooler atmosphere strikes a warmer surface it undergoes “resonant scattering” (sometimes called pseudo-scattering) and this means its energy is not converted to thermal energy. This is the reason that heat does not transfer from cold to hot. If it did the universe would go crazy.
When opposing radiation is scattered, its own energy replaces energy which the warmer body would have radiated from its own thermal energy supply.
You can imagine it as if you are just about to pay for fuel at a gas station when a friend travelling with you offers you cash for the right amount. It’s quicker and easier for you to just pay with the cash, rather than going through the longer process of using a credit card to pay from your own account. So it is with radiation. The warmer body cools more slowly as a result because a ready source of energy from incident radiation is quicker to just “reflect” back into the atmosphere, rather than have to convert its own thermal energy to radiated energy.
The ramifications are this:
Not all radiation from the atmosphere is the same. That from cooler regions has less effect. Also, that with fewer frequencies under its Planck curve has less effect again.
Each carbon dioxide molecule thus has far less effect than each water vapour molecule because the latter can radiate with more frequencies which “oppose” the frequencies being emitted by the surface, especially the oceans.
Furthermore, it is only the radiative cooling process of the surface which is slowed down. There are other processes like evaporative cooling and diffusion followed by convection which cannot be affected by backradiation, and which will tend to compensate for any slowing of the radiation.
This is why, at night, the water in the flask cools nearly as fast as the air around it. The net effect on the rate of cooling is totally negligible.
The backradiation does not affect temperatures anywhere near as much as solar radiation, even though its “W/m^2” is probably about half as much.
And there are other reasons also why it all balances out and climate follows natural cycles without any anthropogenic effect. This is explained in detail in my peer-reviewed publication now being further reviewed by dozens of scientists.
http://principia-scientific.org/publications/psi_radiated_energy.pdf
Within about 24 hours there will be a new paper Radiated Energy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics at http://principia-scientific.org/
In over 6,000 words it covers a wide range of reasons why carbon dioxide can have no warming effect and only a slight cooling effect.
This is only the sixth paper to be accepted by this organisation which is dedicated to the truth in science.
This comment hits the spot……the astronomical side was “neglected” by the IPCC…..
Neglected? No, but on purpose kept under the table, in order that any resulting RF, which
occurs due to astronomical (orbital and 3-body-planetary) movements is given
to atmospheric physics, CO2 and AGW….. The LA-meeting of AR4-wg1 in 2006 agreed to “assume the orbital forcing to be ‘invariant’ ” and great HAPPINESS broke out…. (Email of one participant)….. Invariant = neglectible on less than millenium scale… (AR4-wg1-chapt 2).
They all knew there is substantial astronomical RF and agreed to collude…..to hide it….
The evidence/proof of this: See AR4-wg1-chapter 9 of Mrs.Hegerl: The astronomical side
is referred to with “Goosse et al, 2005” in which the Earth’s orbit is modelled by simplistic
Keplerian parameters of Berger, A. 1978 !! , which, according to the NASA JPL is only
good enough for high school standards but “not for professional use” (JPL Horizons)
Goosse et al knew they hide orbital forcing…..
Scafetta is on the right trail and others (including me) will lift the cover …
[…] So, is a kind of Copernican Revolution needed in climate change research, as Alan Carlin has also suggested? http://www.carlineconomics.com/archives/1456 […]
[…] So, is a kind of Copernican Revolution needed in climate change research, as Alan Carlin has also suggested? http://www.carlineconomics.com/archives/1456 […]