Is the Earth warming? The current theory is that all this CO2 emission into the atmosphere is causing the Earth to gradually warm. This is expressed frequently as the "hockey stick", showing a gradual cooling from about 1300 to maybe about 1750, and then after that, a slow warming until about 1980, then suddenly shooting upward, producing a graph that looks like a hockey stick. An example might be this one from the UK. People concerned about global warming are saying that unless we do something about this, irreversible adverse things will happen such as the expansion of deserts and the flooding of coastal cities. Indeed, these graphs show about a 1.3 degree F increase in global temperature in the past 100 years.
We have now a new player in the game, however. The Sun has just passed the supposed minimum of its sunspot cycle and should be rapidly increasing in sunspots, especially at moderately high latitudes. However, for the past year, the Sun has shown almost no spots. What's happened to it? This is not the first time this has happened. In the 1600s, the Sun had no spots for an entire human lifetime. During this span of around 100 years, global temperatures fell about 0.9 degrees F, causing the "Little Ice Age".
Are we entering a new Maunder minimum? If so, the increase in temperatures caused by global warming will slow down or stop. The figures I have cited seem to suggest that the Earth will warm only by 0.4 degrees per century, or 0.04 degree F per year. That would then suggest that instead of preventing global warming caused by carbon emissions, we need to keep sending carbon dioxide into the atmosphere or else we could go into an Ice Age. Further, we will not be able to do this, because oil and other fossil production will eventually (and soon) decline and stop, at which point the ice age will come.
But I see a contradiction in this. The problem is that these figures suggest that the decrease caused by lack of spots is a substantial fraction of the increase caused by human-induced global warming. This should be reflected in the hockey stick graph. Since sunspots usually (and in the past century has) followed an 11-year cycle, that should cause 11-year oscillations in the graph of global temperature. But the graphs you see on warming in the past 100 years show no such oscillations. That suggests instead that temperature changes caused by sunspot changes are a minuscule fraction of the changes caused by human-induced global warming. But clearly they aren't.
Another way of looking at it is to look at the "solar constant", the amount of energy striking the Earth on the average. This is 1365 watts per square meter, and it can vary from 1363 to 1367 watts per square meter. Since the Sun has no spots, I would suppose the 1363 holds now. That translates into a decline of 0.3 degree F over the next few years. This also shows that sunspots cause a substantial part of the change in earthly temperatures, but by not as much as the 0.9 degree change cited earlier. and it does not resolve the contradiction between this type of reasoning which suggests 11-year oscillations in the global temperature and the lack of evidence of such cycles.
Until we resolve the contradiction, we don't know which way the world is going to go. Much discussion on global warming is one-sided, with people arguing unequivocally for one side or the other, both the global warming zealots and the global warming deniers. We need to stop arguing and do some analysis. Will the real global change determiners please stand up?
4 comments:
FIRST CAUSE
"If we regard the fulfilment of our purpose as contingent upon any circumstances, past, present or future, we are not making use of first cause, we have descended to the level of secondary causation, which is the region of doubts, fears and limitations, all of which we are impressing upon the universal subjective mind, with the inevitable result that it will build up corresponding external conditions."
Thomas Troward,
Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science 1904
I am quoting Troward because the current political climate of junk science zeitgeist is madness, or at least crazy making. History tells us that prosperity has always advanced as inflation permitted. A steady increase in the money supply leads to higher prices and wages to measure them, and more people able to participate. Adjusted for inflation, copper, iron, oil, and gas, e.g., are not much more expensive than they were in the early 20th century, and we have more supply available and more people have electricity and transportation. There are no shortages of resources; only the cautionary principle keeps resources from being elevated to economic reserves. The bleak Dickensian world has gotten a great deal smaller as the 'American Dream' expanded to Asia. The environmental impact also, adjusted for inflation, is less and society has generally progressed, as is reflected in human lifespan in the west.
A common web of fear links misguided environmentalism, peak oil and AGW. Environmental lobby groups (ELGs) since their inception have had a stronger inflationary effect than historical supply and demand pull and push. Witness the oil sands, for example, uneconomic in the early going but reaching ore grade by gradual steps and external (secondary) jumps, ratcheting upward to economic viability. In recent years, a number of ELGs have come to question the cost in CO2 and open pit mining. I will come back to that later.
Gradual inflation has allowed the development of oil sands and similar projects, and will lead to logical scientific and technical development of kerogen shale as it has already permitted the developments in unconventional shale oil and gas. Furthermore, there are vast areas untouched on continental shelves and in arctic Canada. How much hydrocarbon lies under the shelf off Bangladesh? I do not know, but I am willing to bet there is some. The Alaskan NWR could be drilled today from a platform of 2,000 acres.
Our situation in 2009, however, is that secondary causation (fear of the future) has disrupted the steady growth of prosperity. For instance, after 30 years of mining the oil sands footprint covers 0.072% (72 /100,000) of the total land area of Alberta and could ultimately reach 3,000 km2 (0.45%) without equilibrium reclamation (No reclamation has ever been approved by Alberta, so you see where that puts the companies; Syncrude has reclaimed over 23% but is vulnerable to not having that approved by bureaucrats in the thrall of ELGs). With reclamation, the proportion will shrink from 0.072% to zero. The annual CO2 contribution, moreover, is 4% of Canada's 2% of the global 2% or 6 parts per billion (0.0016% of 380 ppm), a di minimis figure considering the CO2 seawater equilibrium of 50; nearly all of it will dissolve in the cooling oceans. That estimate is vanishingly small in the context that CO2 may not even be a greenhouse gas, and that water vapour moderates climate modulated by cosmic radiation. As I look out my Toronto window at the current rainy season, I realise I am in the Great Lakes cloud chamber and have been watching scenes like this for the past three years of the sunspot cycle. The sun, not CO2, drives the weather and the climate. Government in the thrall of ELGs is attempting the modify behaviour, based upon a deeply flawed secondary causation argument that resources and ingenuity are finite, and that CO2 is pollution. All this arises from fear; history shows that, in fact, prosperity is the best birth control.
http://dailyreckoning.com/oil-shale-reserves/
Not likely to survive the censorship of my free speech...
These comments are a bit long; you should have given us a hyperlink to a web page with this essay on it instead. There is at least one serious error in what you say. You say that CO2 does not cause global warming. Take a look at Venus. The reason why that planet is at 900 degrees, hotter than Mercury, is because of CO2-induced warming; the concentration of that gas there is 90 times that on Earth. You also seem to have an agenda and the best way to find out what is happening is to abandon all such agendas.
I rejected your other two comments as they seem to be incomplete.
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