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ZeroHedge asks: What the hell are NASA Hiding?
The NASA site used to have a page titled “What are the primary forcings of the Earth system?“. In 2010 this page said that the Sun is the major driver of Earth’s climate, that it controls all the major aspects, and we may be on the cusp of an ice age. Furthermore NASA Science said things like clouds, albedo and aerosol behaviour can have more powerful cooling effects that outdo the warming effect of CO2.
Today that page says Share the science and stay connected, and “Access Denied”.
https://science.nasa.gov/earth-science/big-questions/what-are-the-primary-causes-of-the-earth-system-variability/
Whatever you do, don’t tell the world that NASA says the Sun is more important than CO2.
The Wayback Machine captured the same NASA “Primary Climate Forcings” link in 2010.
Click to enlarge.
Here’s the text from the original page (my bolding).
NASA 2010: What are the primary forcings of the Earth system?
The Sun is the primary forcing of Earth’s climate system. Sunlight warms our world. Sunlight drives atmospheric and oceanic circulation patterns. Sunlight powers the process of photosynthesis that plants need to grow. Sunlight causes convection which carries warmth and water vapor up into […]
Image Erin Silversmith
Three amazing things in this story. One that solar cycles might influence the oceans to such an extent that jellyfish plagues are cycling in tune with the sun. Second is that the sun might control food for jellyfish on Earth somehow but have no effect on clouds, temperature or our climate (join the dots that expert climate models don’t). Third is that (briefly) there was actual scientific debate published on the ABC (even if only a few Australians were exposed to it). No one called anyone names, and both sides got to speak (albeit on different channels). Put it in your diary.
A couple of weeks ago on the ABC jellyfish were booming and it was because of climate change:
Jellyfish are causing mayhem as pollution, climate change see numbers boom
RN By Hong Jiang and Sasha Fegan for Late Night Live
…the brainless, spineless, eyeless, bloodless creatures are booming in numbers — and causing mayhem around the world.
Some scientists think jellyfish numbers are increasing as the climate changes — the creatures reproduce well in warmer waters.
Last year, Nick Kilvert of the ABC saw it as a […]
Our understanding of the sun’s effect of Earth’s weather is so immature
Remarkably, some Japanese families kept weather record diaries in the 1700 and 1800s, and some for as long as 150 years. The connections they reveal are tantalizing but so incomplete. We are trying to fish out primitive signals from murky water. The Sun turns around on itself every 27 days, so these researchers are looking for repeating patterns in lightning that fit, but the poles of the sun spin slower than the equator and the sun spots can take their own time. Hence, it’s not a neat “27” days.
During periods of high solar activity, they found regular peaks in lightning activity with the right timing, from May to September when the cold Siberian air mass is not so influential.
Other studies we’ve discussed here have investigated long solar cycles on the 11 year or 200 year scales. But here, the researchers are thinking of day to day weather, and looking for a solar influence on timeframe that might improve weather forecasting. Obviously there is a long way to go. As for mechanisms they suspect that it’s the solar wind that is influential, but they don’t know, when […]
Yet another paper showing the spooky non-relationship with the local thermonuclear reactor. Thanks to climate models we all know that jiggles in solar radiation mean nothing much to Earth, otherwise we might wonder if the pattern of lows in sunlight and highs in floods meant something…
The River Ammer is in Southern Germany, and Markus Czymzik and others dug through the sediments nearby and graphed the flood layers alongside the small changes in solar radiation (TSI). They noticed that a less active sun correlates with more floods. At the low point of every solar cycle there appears to be more rain. (Don’t buy a house on a floodplain in southern Germany in the next few years.)
There is a pretty neat correlation there in the last 90 years, and then in the second graph they take that correlation back to 3,500BC, back when the Funnelbeaker culture was making nice pots in the same area. This same odd coincidence of the sun and rainfall patterns was also found by researchers in Chile, China and Australian and Indonesia. Low solar activity tends to occur at the same time as the winter jet stream in the North Atlantic gets blocked. And solar activity […]
This new paper by Adophi et al uses beryllium, oxygen and carbon isotopes from Greenland ice cores right back as far as the depth of the last ice age, 22,500 years ago, and finds there is a link between solar activity and the climate. It follows these proxies of temperature and solar activity as the planet warmed to the start of the Holocene 10,000 years ago.
It is gaining attention in The Daily Mail, with the headline:
Is the SUN driving climate change? Solar activity – ‘and not just humans’ – could be increasing global warming, study claims
During the last glacial maximum, Sweden was covered in a thick ice sheet that stretched all the way down to northern Germany and sea levels were more than 330ft (100m) lower than they are today, because the water was frozen in the extensive ice caps.
‘The study shows an unexpected link between solar activity and climate change,’ Dr Muscheler said in a press release.
‘It shows both that changes in solar activity are nothing new and that solar activity influences the climate, especially on a regional level.
Dr Joanna Haigh, […]
A new study by Steinke shows that the sun could have been a driver (somehow) of some of the monsoonal rain changes over the last 6,000 years over Indonesia and Northern Australia. h/t to The Hockey Schtick
In the spirit of the Perfect ClimateTM that existed prior to Henry Ford, we also find that Indonesia had a dry spell that lasted for a while, like say, 3,000 years. It ended about 800BC whereupon things got wetter, and mostly stayed wetter. The authors (Steinke et al) think this might have something to do with solar minima which was very low 2800 years ago. (Though I note the Greek Dark Ages also finished then, and “city states” arose, right, so it could have been that too. Ahem?)
To get straight to the action in Figure 6 the top squiggly line is AISM Rainfall (that’s the Australian-Indonesian summer monsoon). It shows how things were wetter in the last 2800 years ago and drier before that (annoyingly, the present time is on the left). The second part of the graph in red shows sunspot numbers. That gets flipped upside down and superimposed on the rainfall graph in the third part, and we can see […]
Could this be why climate models do rainfall with all the competence of tea-leaf-reading? Tiwari et al report that as much as 47% of the recharge rates of ground water in China are controlled by the sun. Apparently climate models miss the minor factor of the major cycles.
Try this radical idea on: imagine a world where climate models worked. Not only could the BoM warn people that there would be a drought coming, they could name the region, and the years.
Tiwari et al:
Here for the purpose of comparison of long term ground water recharge rates with long term solar activity, we used the 10-year average sunspot time series, for the period 1300 to 1905 AD, published by Solanki et al., [2004]. Also the additional average annual sunspot number time series (1700 to 2000 AD) is used from data source Solar Influences Data Analysis Centre. In addition to decadal data annual sunspot number data from 1700 to 2000 AD downloaded from Solar Influences Data Analysis Centre is used in the present study. The cross-correlation coefficient (+0.63) between the groundwater recharge rate time series and decadal sunspot number [Solanki et al., 2004] shows that there is statistically significant solar […]
A new paper (Moffa-Sánchez et al) reports that they looked at layers of dead plankton in ocean mud (otherwise known as foraminifera in marine sediments) and have reconstructed the temperature and salinity of a couple of spots in the North Atlantic between 818AD – 1780 with data on δ18O and the Mg/Ca ratios. One immediate thought, an aside, is that if this technique works, there is no shortage of ocean mud, surely, and perhaps we could drill and analyze more mud for solar correlations in other places. (I hear foraminifera live in the Southern Hemisphere too). Perhaps no one is looking for the connection with the sun?
Moffa-Sánchez et al find the big climate shifts (the 100-year variations) correlate with total solar irradiance (TSI). See especially that orange line black line track in the d graph below. I stress, correlations don’t mean causation and the mechanism is mere speculation. But I find the graph intruiging. There are a lot of turning points, and in pure “curve fitting” type of analysis, this is a better curve fit than the one with CO2. (Find me a turning point that matches with carbon dioxide!) I suspect we’ll be referring back to this paper, […]
A team of researchers looked at the solar influence on Southern Hemisphere Westerly Winds (SWW). These winds influence rainfall patterns and ocean currents in the Southern Hemisphere. Varma et al infer rainfall patterns by looking at iron deposits in marine sediments near Chile, which are apparently higher during drier conditions and lower during wetter times. They compared these to both Beryllium (10Be) and Carbon-14 (14C) which they use to estimate solar activity.
The end result is they find that the westerly winds shift northwards towards the equator during lower solar activity, and conversely move southwards towards the poles during higher solar activity. The shifting wind patterns move the rainfall. An effect is apparent in records for the last 3,000 years.
In graph a below, 10Be (solar activity) and Fe (rainfall) have a decent correlation coefficient (r) of 0.45, while the 14C (solar activity) and Fe (rainfall) correlation in b has a lower correlation (r) of 0.21. Varma et al say:
“the large correlation coefficient for 10Be would suggest that ca. 20% (i.e., r2) of late Holocene rainfall and hence SWW variability could be attributable to solar forcing.”
They conclude that the current models don’t give the sun a […]
“…the role of the Sun is one of the largest unknowns in the climate system”
Meteorologists are already aware that changes in the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) can affect the polar regions of Earth. Now, for the first time Lam et al report the magnetic field appears to influence atmospheric pressure in the mid latitudes. Lam compared the average surface pressure at times when the magnetic field is either very strong or very weak and found a statistically significant wave structure similar to an atmospheric Rossby wave. They claim to show that this works through a mechanism that is a conventional meteorological process, and that the effect is large enough to influence weather patterns in the mid-latitudes. The size of the effect is similar to “initial analysis uncertainties” in “ensemble numerical weather prediction” (which I take to mean “climate models”).
They are suggesting that small changes in this solar influence on the upper atmosphere could produce important changes through “non-linear evolution of atmospheric dynamics”.
Jo suggests that IPCC-favoured climate models don’t include any solar magnetic effect at all, which is just one of many reasons why they don’t work.
The large scale wandering convolutions of the jet […]
Svensmarks Cosmic Ray Theory. TOP: If the sun’s magnetic field is weak it allows more cosmic rays, which may seed more clouds on Earth. BOTTOM: A strong solar magnetic field blocks the same rays and could mean less clouds and clearer skies.
People have known for 200 years that there’s some link between sunspots and our climate. In 1800, the astronomer William Herschel didn’t need a climate model, he didn’t even have a calculator — yet he could see that wheat prices rose and fell in time with the sunspot cycle. Since then, people have noticed that rainfall patterns are also linked to sunspots.
Sunspots themselves don’t make much difference to us, but they are a sign of how weak or strong the sun’s magnetic field is. This massive solar magnetic field reaches out around the Earth, and it shields us from cosmic rays. Dr Henrik Svensmark has suggested that if more cosmic rays reach further down into our atmosphere, they might ionize molecules and help “seed” more clouds. As it happens, this year, the sun has almost no sunspots, but for much of the late 20th Century, the solar magnetic field was extremely active. If the theory is […]
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