I am no scientist,  and quite frankly I know better how to lie with graphs than to tell the truth. But it is difficult to compare these graphs with other’s I think.

Take a look at Nasa GISS’s data for example. All these graphs show a peak before WWII, levels around pre-war levels until 1980, and than a rapid increase in temperature. Unfortunately I can’t see what happened with teh sunspots after 1985.

The sunspots over the last 30 years graph in deed shows a totally different story than the Nasa data.

Be that as it may… you write that lowering CO2emission will cool down temperatures, that will inevitably rise. Should we lower them or do you mean that it is useless?

Do you think lowered CO2emisions is the most efficient way to mitigate a warmer climate?

What kind of consequenses do you foresee form the temperature rise caused by solar activity? Can we survive them? How do we deal with them?

I suggest the solar irradiance measurements are wrong.

Great. We have one man with no academic nor scientific reputation challenging the work of thousands of engineers, mathematicians, physicists, geologists and computer scientists.

I wonder…

I have to second Federico’s simple concern: It’s quite a bold statement you make, Vitezslav.

Then my next thought is: why should this correlation - from an indicator of solar energy received to sea-only temperatures - be better than the one Federico showed - from TOTAL solar irradiance to a global land AND ocean measurement!? Why not compare cloud cover to lake temperatures? Or whatever else?

Here’s some serious info on the subject:
<ul>
<li>New Scientist / “Climate myths: Global warming is down to the Sun, not humans”</li>
<li>RealClimate / Fun with correlations!</li>
<li>IPCC / Solar Forcing of Climate</li>
</ul>

OK… we can do bold, italics and even links... but not lists

a) Disappointing, that so many people have read/commented on this blog post of mine. Because this one is CRUCIAL for the whole climate change debate. Most fellow bloggers afraid of listening counter-arguments?... To those who have come: thanks.

b)Why use sea surface temperature as the key indicator? Because it is the only one reliable, easy to measure and global. Satellites have proven to be questionable so far. And the temperatures in various land regions differ (in some regions no warming at all, in some regions big warming).

It is not really true, that I am the only person impyling, that the current TSI (total solar irradiance) measurements use wrong methodolog/technology. While in reality TSI did increase during the last 30 years.

See for instance the work of Lean
http://www.biocab.org/MGW_to_2006.html

I know you are not the only one with these claims (online). That’s why Grist, WWF and New Scientist put up guides to the most common “denialist” claims. If I were you I’d read those closely, trying not to repost long debunked theories.

Benno, actually right now I am reading the Grist guide “how to talk to climate sceptics”. And I am going to react to their statements. However so far the Grist guide seems quite weak minded to me. Could you give me a link to some guide with stronger arguments,please?

The ocean acts as a flywheel for climate activity.  Increased temperatures at the ocean surface lead to increased evaporation and the transport of the latent heat of water evaporation from the ocean surface to the atmosphere. Once in the atmosphere this heat of evaporation is released when the water vapour condenses to form water droplets.

This is the power of steam and it far exceeds the claims for carbon dioxide in its ability to store and transport heat.

I’ve compared your graphs to many others, such as this one http://chartsgraphs.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/ssn_plot_mo_ann_lowess_sc1.png

Why are they so different?  It looks to me like you purposely warped the curves to match, and then drew an artificial trend line through the two that mirror each other (but are not appropriate to the underlying curves).

This is a sad, sad misrepresentation of facts.

@above:

Welcome to statistics! It is a world where anything anywhere can be warped to support ones own opinion!

If the above article’s contents are a “gross misrepresentation of the facts”, that IPCC hockey stick must be the anti-christ!

Seriously speaking, both graphs represent the same data with different applications of smoothing and time scales. It’s pretty hard to misrepresent something like sunspot numbers. Unlike the vague Vostok ice records!

The SST (sea surface temperature) and sunspot graphs are not identical. Sure. They never match exactly (e.g. increased sunspots around 1950 did not lead to adequate increase in temperatures worldwide). But the correlation is pretty neat still. I agree it is not exact match, of course.

And also remember the evergreen: Maunder minimum, no sunspots, cold times of little ice age.

The sun-temp relationship seems pretty solid.

Both NASA and the WMO have published the Earth’s mean surface temperatures for over a century. Sunspots occur about every 11 years and then fade way.I have looked carefully at their data and there is no noticeable 11 year pattern on the graphs. Sunspots may have a small effect but it is not noticeable among the other random variations.

Que, what are you talking about? Always in the history Earth temperatures fluctuated according to solar activity. Sunsposts are an indicator of that activity.

Sunspots were rising until 1980 and stopped. Temperatures were rising until 1998 and stopped. Such 20 year lag is nothing unusual. Due to thermal inertial of oceans and other effects we yet do not understand.

Result: we still do not know, if the warming was manmade, because it may have been quite natural.

What you say is true about the Earth being affected by the Sun.  There are 11 year sunspot cycles superimposed on longer cycles. However,  a thorough study of the Sun’s output by Mike Lockwood & Claus Fröhlich published in The Royal Society Proceedings A,  2008 showed that for the last 20 years, the Sun’s output has declined. During that period, the Earth’s average temperature continued to rise.

@ Mr. Moore.
1)Earth temperatures may rise even after solar activity stopped rising. Due to thermal inertia of oceans. For a decade or two. It is normal. I wrote a post about it.
2) In the last 10 years the increase of temperatures stopped/slowed down. Also the rise of sea levesl stopped/slowed down. Which corresponds to lower solar activity.
3) Temp x Sun never are a PRECISE match. Their curves never were identical. So it is rather hasty making hysteria due to a decade or two of inconsistencies.

What is your reference to the Earth’s temperaure? Both the WMO and NASA show that the trend in temperature is upward in the ;ast 10 years. But that may not be the most important thing.

Whether you believe the earth is warming or cooling , we should all be worried that power plants are putting 30 trillion tons of CO2 into the air along with mercury, lead, cadmium, arsenic and radioactive isotopes. Much of those end up in the water and in the food chain. We are now finding mercury in fish even where there are no natural sources. The mercury in tuna has gone up 30% since 1990.

Like carbonated water, the oceans are now 20% more acidic than a century ago and if that keeps on species that make carbonate shells won’t be able to do so. Saying adios to shrimp, crabs and lobsters will be hard but it is worse than that. The corals that form the fisheries and the plankton that that produce the dissolved oxygen and form the basis for the food chain also make carbonate shells.

CO2 is not a pollutant, the oceans aren’t acidifying. Nature puts 33 times more CO2 into the air than humans do.

Haven’t heard that one about tuna having 30% more mercury, so I’d like to see your source for that little statistic.

Please point out where the man-made global warming is in this graph.

See http://soundwaves.usgs.gov/2009/08/ The study found 30% more Hg in Tuna than in 1990 and it seems to be from atmospheric sources off Asia.

Whether CO2 is a pollutant or not, it is being absorbed into the oceans and has caused the pH of the oceans to drop from 8.18 to 8.10 in the last century. pH is a logarithmic scale so that drop translates into an increase in acidity of 20%. See wikipedia for a discussion of this. 

See http://jcmooreonline.com/2009/10/11/george-wills-climate-deception/ Your temperature graph was of the lower atmosphere which may mean the upper troposphere. The temperature pattern found there shows a different pattern than the Earth’s surface. I can’t paste graphs into your website so you’ll have to look it up.
             
        http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2007/      Credit: NASA/JPL/MSSS

If you are interested in climate change, I’ve posted several articles on my website at
jcmooreonline.com on the topic.

One last thing. The USGS says man is now putting over 130 times more CO2 into the air than all the world’s volcanoes.

Interesting read about the mercury. No reason to shutdown coal plants though. Go tell those Asians to clean up their act. Just out of curiosity, are you against CFL bulbs?

Once again, Oceans are not acidifying. And even if they were, they would not be a threat to marine life.

UAH is lower troposhere, you can read a comparison between the two datasets here. I believe the UAH satellite measurements are more accurate and consistant than the contaminated and data-manipulated GISS dataset.

And I said nature, not volcanoes. Nature puts 33 times more CO2 into the atmosphere than humans through respiration, decay and ocean out-gassing.

People, look. There is no denying that people pollute and destroy their environment. Even the first farmers destroyed forests so as to get enough arable land for their fields.

But it does not seem, that it is leading to a catastrophic increase in temperatures that will destroy the Earth.

If the oceans rise, they will rise no more than 30 cm, just like in the previous century. Also life survived multiple higher CO2 and temperature levels before. So why freak out.

The polluting and primitive industry are a NECESSARY phase in the development of our technology. We cannot quit this phase until we develop clean-n-effective better technologies.

So the green movement is
a) premature, too early
b) useless, we would quit fossil fuels anyway sooner or later

Regarding ocean acidification, I recommend this write-up of several recent journal articles: Climate Change - what’s worse than the heat?

the most dramatic effect of climate change won’t be due to the heat - it will be due to ocean acidification. I might seem biased (being a marine biologist and all), but trust me, the addition of carbon dioxide to the ocean and its subsequent effects will be far worse in the long run than a change in temperature. [...] Carbonate-requiring organisms are primary producers which are responsible for the majority of the ocean’s estimated 90% contribution to the world’s oxygen production - which means the loss of them could have a more devastating impact on atmospheric CO2 than chopping down all of the world’s forests.

Benno, I do not know. This is all “could”, “might”, “perhaps”. Predictions. Estimates.

I repeat: in the history of life on Earth, we experienced much much higher CO2 levels than now. And life was OK. Expect my blog post about this in the next 2 days.

So perhaps we are rather overreacting to the acidification.

Ocean acidification has even less credibility than anthropogenic global warming. If you want to save face I’d suggest you abandon it.

The oceans contain an estimated 38,000GT C. Humans emit 8.5GT C each year. Supposedly, about 40-50% of it stays in the atmosphere and about 30% goes into the oceans.

Total cumulative emissions 1900-2005: About 300GT C

If 30% goes into the oceans, then our emissions have added 90GT C to the ocean’s 38,000GT C.

(90/38,000)*100 = 0.24%

I think if the oceans were on a 0.24% knife’s edge all life would have ended long ago. This doesn’t account for sequestration of CO2 in calcium carbonate and removal by other marine organisms which would remove a significant portion of the CO2 we add, nor does it account for the ocean’s buffering capacity, which is surely larger than 0.24%.

Yes to CFL bulbs. Using them will actually cut down on the mercury entering the environment.See http://jcmooreonline.com/2009/08/21/mercury-in-fish/ for a commentery on this.

Even lower-troposphere temperatures are very different from surface temperatures and there is no simple relationship to convert one to the other. NASA’s and the WMO’s data are from surface measurements and they relate more to global warming.

It’s true that the ocean is a large buffer system. Acid buffers work by converting a weak base to a weak acid. In this case the carbonic acid is converting carbonate ions to bicarbonate ions. Plankton can’t make shells using bicarbonate ions.

The oceans are not in equilibrium and the most important reactions are at the surface in this case. Tht CO2 dissolves at the surface and that is where the photosynthetic plankton live.

I’d love to have China reduce their Hg emisssions. They are not likely to do so unless the US also agrees to do so. That is why it’s so important that the US pass a climate bill before the Copenhagen meeting.

Well, Americans buy about 2 billion light bulbs per year. At 4 milligrams per bulb:

4*0.000001*2,000,000,000 = 4,000kg mercury.

50,000kg of mercury are produced from burning coal. About 35% of grid usage is residential and of that 8% of that demand is for lighting. CFLs are supposedly 4 times more efficient than incandescents. So let’s assume this reduces energy consumption from lighting by 6% (three-quarters). Let’s also assume that the energy saved directly translates into less coal burned, thus less mercury emitted:

50,000kg—- Mercury emitted by power plants.
35% residential—- 17,500kg
8% lighting—- 1400kg
75% less energy consumption compared to incandescents—- 1050kg

Mercury contained in 2 billion CFLs—- 4,000kg
Mercury offset through replacement of residential light bulbs—- 1,050kg

Net addition of mercury—- 2950kg

Now the article claims that CFLs last 10 times longer than incandescents, but in reality I find that they last, at most, 4 times longer. I also haven’t taken into account energy inefficiencies during the warm up period of CFLs, or the fact that only 50% of energy generation is from coal, nor that not much energy is actually saved since demand at night is lower than baseload supply. But if we assume that a 4-fold greater lifetime directly translates into fewer light bulbs bought per year:

Mercury contained in 0.5 billion CFLs—- 1,000kg
Mercury offset through replacement of residential light bulbs—- 1,050kg

Net removal of mercury—- 50kg

Not exactly an impressive achievement. Though I’ll hope you’ll appreciate my analysis.

—————-

And a short note on troposhere measurements, AGW hypothesis predicts a warming of the entire troposhere, not just the surface. And as I’ve pointed out, there are reasons to doubt the accuracy of surface measurements.

Ugh, well this is what I get for posting at 3am.

Corrections:

Mercury contained in 2 billion CFLs—- 8,000kg
Mercury offset through replacement of residential light bulbs—- 1,050kg

Net addition of mercury—- 6950kg

Let’s pretend in the later case that CFLs last 8 times longer and translate to 0.25 billion bulbs per year, just to give the benefit of the doubt.

I did appreciatre your analysis. You didn’t include the amount from bulbs that would be recycled or the amount of Hg that might leach from those sent to the landfill. It would seem that very little of the Hg from light bulbs would end up in the fish.

_______

You seem to do good research and are good at math. I have a question about the troposphere. Is CO2 concentrated in the lower atmosphere since it’s heavier than air? That would mean global warming effects would happen very near the surface. I haven’t seen any research on that, have you?

I imagine it is easier to target coal plants to scrub their emissions of mercury than it is to get hundreds of millions of people to regularly recycle CFL bulbs. The mercury might not end up in fish, but it’s still contaminating the environment and poses a threat to human health one way or another.

CO2 concentrations are evenly distributed throughout the entire atmosphere; though higher altitude means lower density which means less actual CO2. Global warming from GHGs does not occur near the earth’s surface, because the first 100-1000m is near-infrared opaque. This means that the GHGs such as water and CO2 are saturated and absorb 99% of the radiation available to them in a very short distance (10-1000m), where it is converted to heat. This means that adding CO2 near the ground will not increase global warming, since radiation is the limiting factor. There is also overlap between the greenhouse gas absorption spectrums (mainly water), further diminishing the effects of additional CO2. The mechanism for GHG-induced global warming occurs high in the atmosphere about the tropopause, and it is in this “zone” that CO2 is supposedly not saturated and radiation is absorbed where it otherwise wouldn’t be. This is why the IPCC models predict a “hot spot” about the equator in the upper troposphere. Thus we have the UAH monitoring tropospheric temperatures.

Why don’t we move back to the topic of this article. The skeptics predicted that Earth temperatures will react - with a lag - to lowered solar activity. And it happened.

The 21 sunspot cycle was the last one rising. 1,5 sunspot cycle later (amidst the 23 sunspot cycle) the temperatures stopped rising. A natural lag (due to thermal inertia of oceans etc.). Nothing more.

Off the subject : Mercury has a high vapor pressure and is mostly a gas at stack temperatures so it, and Radon, are not removed by filters or scrubbers. Then, where does the Hg and other stuff from the scrubbers end up?

Mike - Do you have a reference to the information in your last pararaph?. That’s just the information I’m looking for.

Back on the subject: The long term solar cycle ended in 1980 but the Earth’s mean surface temperature has been increasing. The CO2 distribution is relevant as its distribution will affect the difference between surface and tropospheric temperatures.

Some think that the surface tempersture is logrythmic and thereore self limiting as CO2 increases. The graph looks much more like an exponential function. The CO2 absorbs the IR leaving Earth and then re-emits in all directions, directing some back to Earth. More absorbers would mean more IR coming back to Earth - so the CO2 concentration would then be important. (That’s just an idea.)

Current scrubbers don’t remove mercury, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Mercury can be removed in a stable state that can be disposed of as non-hazardous waste, or it can be reprocessed for assorted uses, such as manufacturing CFL bulbs.

Here’s a couple of papers/articles you can read. There are very few papers that deal directly with the basic science. It also doesn’t help that most descriptions of the greenhouse effect are misleading or wrong.

http://icecap.us/images/uploads/HANSENMARSCHALLENGE.pdf

http://www.john-daly.com/artifact.htm

Sorry for going off-topic Vitezslav.