Sometimes the overuse of words make them unsustainable and actually reduces their impact.

This work, at http://xkcd.com, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.
This means you’re free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). More details.

Just over a quarter of Nebraska is mixed grass prairie on grass-stabilized sand dunes, referred to locally as the sandhills. It is the largest area of sand dunes in the western hemisphere.

In 2007, we visited a relative’s ranch in the sandhills, a place of fond memories for me.  The accompanying video was produced from pictures from that visit.

• Sand Hills – Wikipedia
• The Nebraska Sandhills
• The Sandhills – U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service
• Valentine National Wildlife Refuge
• Sandhills Journey Scenic Byway
• The Nebraska Sandhills – Lincoln City Library: “The Nebraska Sandhills are the largest area of sand dunes in the western hemisphere. Over 50,000 square kilometers, or close to 20,000 square miles in extent (not counting some outliers), the Sandhills are fragile grasslands that are wild, sparsely settled, desolate, and beautiful in unexpected ways.”

When it comes to many projects, endeavors, and merchandise touted as “green” these days, I find myself becoming more and more skeptical.

“Green” – for whatever reason – has come to symbolize environmentalism, likely through the association of green color with nature, health, and growth, and “green” energy generally refers to renewable and alternative production and use of energy.

An recent article in the Washington Post looks at five myths about green energy:

Americans are being inundated with claims about renewable and alternative energy. Advocates for these technologies say that if we jettison fossil fuels, we’ll breathe easier, stop global warming and revolutionize our economy. Yes, “green” energy has great emotional and political appeal. But before we wrap all our hopes — and subsidies — in it, let’s take a hard look at some common misconceptions about what “green” means.

5 Myths:

1. Solar and wind power are the greenest of them all.
2. Going green will reduce our dependence on imports from unsavory regimes.
3. A green American economy will create green American jobs.
4. Electric cars will substantially reduce demand for oil.
5. The United States lags behind other rich countries in going green.

Check out the full Washington Post article: Five myths about green energy.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is getting a lot of heat these days on the claim that the Himalayan glaciers will be gone by 2035.

While the information used by the IPCC is supposed to be peer-reviewed and well vetted, it turns out that this gem is derived from a magazine article in New Science several years ago that was based on a single phone call to an Indian scientist.

An IBD Editorial says:

The scientists who said that Himalayan glaciers will be gone by 2035 have admitted the claim has as much credibility as sightings of the mythical Yeti. It’s their fraudulent claims that are melting away.

We hesitate to call it Glacier-gate, but the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N. body tasked with scaring us to death about global warming, has admitted that the claim in its 2007 report about the Himalayan glaciers disappearing was not based on any scientific study or research. It was instead based on one scientist’s speculation in a telephone interview with a reporter.

This issue has been hitting a number of other media sites over the last week or so.

Read the rest of the  IBD Editorial at Investors.com.

… more than a tad unusual lately, here in Arkansas, as I’m sure it seems to people in a lot of other places.

But, the weather for the next week is…, well…, ah…, it’s Winter!

It’s winter like winter was when I was a kid growing up in Nebraska.  It’s cold – and it’s staying cold.

And it’s doing it in a lot of places other than Arkansas.

Something called the Arctic Oscillation has gone into a deep negative phase, where atmospheric pressure in the Arctic is relatively high, while pressure is low in the middle latitudes.  In the negative phase, frigid winter weather extends further  into  the middle of North America than usual.

Hopefully, this thing will moderate soon – but I’m not counting on it.

How’s the weather where you are?

Telegraph.uk.co, December 14, 2009, quoting Tony Blair

Following the ‘climategate scandal’, Mr Blair said the science may not be “as certain as its proponents allege”.

But he said the world should act as a precaution against floods, droughts and mass extinction caused by climate change, in fact it would be “grossly irresponsible” not to.

BBC News, December 14, 2009

Negotiations at the UN climate summit have been suspended after developing countries withdrew their co-operation.

Delegations were angry at what they saw as moves by the Danish host government to sideline talks on more emission cuts under the Kyoto Protocol.

GlobalWarming.org, December 14, 2009

Today’s dominant mindset that any climate change at all is bad is puzzling. It implicitly assumes that today’s climate is the best of all possible climates. Maybe that’s true. But maybe it isn’t. The trouble is that few climate activists seem to have had that thought. The idea of change is so scary that nobody has the presence of mind to ask if that’s a problem or not.

Reuters.com, December 14, 2009

The head of the Asian Development Bank said on Sunday that rich countries’ offers of funds to developing countries for measures to mitigate or adapt to climate change remain insufficient a week into U.N. talks.

ADB President Haruhiko Kuroda also told Reuters in an interview that if governments were to fail to reach a climate deal in Copenhagen, it could lead to a collapse of the carbon market which would hit efforts to deal with climate change.

GlobalWarming.org, December 14, 2009

It has always been hard to persuade the public that invisible gases could somehow warm the planet, and that they had to make sacrifices to prevent that from happening. It seemed, on the verge of Copenhagen, as if that might be about to be achieved.

“But he says all that ended on Nov. 20. ‘The e-mails represented a seminal moment in the climate debate of the last five years, and it was a moment that broke decisively against us. I think the CRU leak is nothing less than catastrophic.’”

December 14, 2009

DOE Litigation Hold Notice

DOE-SR has received a “Litigation Hold Notice” from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) General Council and the DOE Office of Inspector General regarding the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England. Accordingly, they are requesting that SRNS, SRR and other Site contractors locate and preserve all documents, records, data, correspondence, notes, and other materials, whether official or unofficial, original or duplicative, drafts or final versions, partial or complete that may relate to the global warming, including, but not limited to, the contract files, any related correspondence files, and any records, including emails or other correspondence, notes, documents, or other material related to this contract, regardless of its location or medium on which it is stored. In other words, please preserve any and all documents relevant to “global warming, the Climate Research Unit at he University of East Anglia In England, and/or climate change science.”

As a reminder, this Litigation Hold preservation obligation supersedes any existing statutory or regulatory document retention period or destructive schedule. The determination of what information may be potentially relevant is based upon content and substance and generally does not depend on the type of medium on which the information exists. The information requested may exist in various forms, including paper records, hand-written notes, telephone log entries, email, and other electronic communication (including voicemail), word processing documents (including drafts, spreadsheets, databases, and calendars), telephone logs, electronic address books, PDAs (like Palm Pilots and Blackberries), internet usage files, systems manuals, and network access information in their original format. All ESI should be preserved in its originally-created, or “native” format, along with related metadata. Relevant backup tapes and all indexes for those tapes should also be preserved. Further, information that is reasonably accessible must nonetheless be preserved, because such sources will, at the very least, need to be identified and, under compelling circumstances, may need to be produced.

If you have any doubts as to whether specific information is responsive, err on the side of preserving that information.

Any employee who has information covered by this Litigation Hold is requested to contact Madeline Screven, Paralegal, SRNS Office of General Council, 5-4634, for additional instructions.

(From Watts Up With That)

Michael L. Wamsted
Associate General Council”

.

Many scientists and others who are skeptical of anthropogenic global warming would like the answer to one question that, so far, has not been answered:

While there is laboratory evidence that carbon dioxide acts as a greenhouse gas and carbon dioxide and global temperature have both been rising, real world proof that CO2 has caused the rise in global temperature does NOT exist.

While, at times,  there appears to be a rough correlation between CO2 and global temperature, correlation does not prove causation.

Even though anthropogenic global warming is an unproven hypothesis, it is likely that some historical warming resulted from carbon dioxide released to the atmosphere by humans. However, because of the physical properties of CO2, it’s done all the warming it can do.

Predictions of rising temperatures and the dire consequences of anthropogenic global warming are based on computer climate models.  The climate models include the assumption that global temperatures will rise as CO2 continues to rise.

Over the last decade, global temperatures have leveled off while CO2 continued to rise.  Temperature is trending below all of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predictions.

Joanne Nova, an Australian freelance science presenter & writer: Professional speaker, author, and former TV host, has prepared and published two excellent — and free — booklets on global warming.  The first, The Skeptics Handbook, has been translated by volunteers into many other languages, including German, French, Norwegian, Finnish, Swedish, Turkish, Portuguese, Japanese, and Danish.

Carbon dioxide acts as a greenhouse gas by absorbing infrared radiation in three narrow bands of frequencies, (2.7, 4.3 and 15 micrometers (µM)), meaning that most of the heat producing infrared radiation frequencies escapes absorption by CO2.  The main peak, 15 µM, is absorbed completely within about 10 meters of the ground meaning that there is no more to absorb.  Doubling the human contribution of CO2 would reduce this distance. Reducing the distance for absorption would not result in an increase in temperature.

The sun appears to have entered a less active period and is providing less warmth to the Earth.  The sun is in an extended solar minimum that was predicted to end in March 2008, nearly 20 months ago.  Since 2004 there have been 770 days without sunspots.  A typical solar minimum averages about 485 days.  Solar magnetic activity continues to drop.

A number of scientists are projecting that global warming is over, for now, and that global average temperatures will be dropping for the next 20 to 30 years.

“Tricks” apparently have been performed on more climate data than just the tree ring proxy information.  The figure below shows the adjustments made to the historical temperature record of Darwin, Australia.  The blue lines show the values for the original, “raw” temperature data. The red lines are the official NOAA/GHCN  ( National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — Global Historical Climate Network) data  after the values have been “homogenized” and averaged.  The black line are the values for the adjustment that was made (uses the scale on the right of the figure).

“Before getting homogenized, temperatures in Darwin were falling at 0.7 Celcius per century … but after the homogenization, they were warming at 1.2 Celcius per century. And the adjustment that they made was over two degrees per century …” – Willis Eschenbach, The Smoking Gun At Darwin Zero

American climate sceptics are now demanding a thorough investigation of NASA’s earth science programme, including the possibility that instruments on its satellites have been “tweaked” to give a “correct” result, and pointing out that the agency has repeatedly had to correct its data, going back to the 1930s. The common factor between CRU East Anglia and NASA is the destruction or withholding of research models and data which, if they are reliable, should be their pride and joy – documentation that would secure these institutions’ place in history, like Einstein’s equations. Telegraph.co.uk

“They’ve lost the raw data on which all the models, all the computer generated forecasts, the graphs and projections, are based.”

“Poor Al Gore”

Climate politics continue to be interesting.  Australia’s opposition Liberal Party has ousted its leader, Malcolm Turnbull, after the resignation last week of several senators from their “front-seat” positions.  The Aussie government’s climate change bill is now in jeopardy, raising the potential of an early general election in 2010.

The Climategate emails and documents are being investigated by a number of organizations, including an inquiry by Penn State University, where Michael Mann, creator of the discredited hockey stick graph – used by Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth – is a professor. Inquiries are also under way at the University of East Anglia, the source of the leaked material.  Government investigations are either ongoing or pending and there has been at least one civil lawsuit filed.

At a minimum, the emails document the violation of UK Freedom of Information laws.

Many believe that the leaker was not a hacker, but, rather, was an insider acting as a anonymous whistleblower by leaking the emails and documents, including information that had been unsuccessfully been sought under the UK FOI statutes.

The emails are not the only incriminating material.  Computer codes and their documentation show fudged numbers and “blatant data-cooking” that tell a story of twisting reality to a desired view.

Many of the fantastic claims in the media about climate change are likely predicated on the same sort of skewed science.

An article in the Wall Street Journal titled The Climate Science Isn’t Settled, by Richard S. Lindzen, professor of meteorology at MIT gives a more balanced view of the state of climate science.

Claims that climate change is accelerating are bizarre. There is general support for the assertion that GATA has increased about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the middle of the 19th century. The quality of the data is poor, though, and because the changes are small, it is easy to nudge such data a few tenths of a degree in any direction. Several of the emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) that have caused such a public ruckus dealt with how to do this so as to maximize apparent changes.

While I have been skeptical of global warming claims for quite some time, this Climategate fiasco appears to show  a conspiracy to doctor the evidence.

In my interest in climate change, I wasn’t looking for a conspiracy, just the truth.

While I haven’t blogged about it for a while, I read material related to global warming climate change every day, so it was with great interest yesterday morning that I read of the release of allegedly stolen anthropogenic global warming climate change correspondence.

I had woken early for some reason and was unable to get back to sleep.  By 4:30, I was up and checking email, blogs and the news-feeds that I subscribe to.

A little over an hour later, I was downloading the files.

It’s going to be interesting to see where this is going to end up.  Articles are already appearing in the mainstream media.

See new article: Climategate update.

A musical take on cap and tax… er, trade.

day 25

I discovered just a little while ago that access to individual posts on this blog was unavailable and commenting was not available. This was because of something I did with some files on the server earlier today — not a web host issue. I knew that I should have checked after I was done, but didn’t.

It’s all back to normal now. It was only a 30 second fix, because it’s something that happened before and I knew where to look.

——

A couple of days ago, a park visitor from Spain was injured by a Yellowstone National Park bison (aka American buffalo).

“At approximately 11:25 a.m., the woman and her husband were using a pay phone in the Canyon lodging area with their backs to the road. According to witnesses, two bull bison walked down the road, passing within 20 feet of the couple. One of the bison left the road, walked up behind the woman and butted her into the air. The couple, who were facing away from the road, did not see the bison.”

The woman was taken to the Lake Clinic where she was treated for minor injuries and released.

This quite an unusual event. Bison are not usually aggressive unless someone has encroached upon their space. We have seen numerous instances where people have gotten way too close to these critters and nothing happened. Park regulations require that a minimum distance of 25 yard must be maintained from bison.

Bison are very, very common in the Canyon area.

We still hope to make it to Yellowstone this year. However, we may not have as much time available as we had originally thought.

——

Climate change legislation — The Waxman/Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act pass by a very slim margin today in the US House of Representatives. I actually watched some of the debate on CSPAN. I’ve got just a few comments.

• They didn’t even have a properly collated official copy of the bill in the room during the debate. Three hundred pages were revised overnight and one of the House staff was in the process of inserting pages into the correct place in the “official copy” during the closing minutes of the floor debate.
• The debate on the floor was limited to 3 hours for a bill that may be one of the largest tax bills in the history of the country.
• While virtually every American would end up with higher energy costs as a result of the bill, as I understand it, it’s requirements would have negligible impact on global warming, if anthropogenic (human caused) global warming (AGW) were a proven fact rather than an unproven hypothesis.
• The premise of the bill is predicated on the assumption that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is a proven scientific fact. The earth has been warming up until the last ten years. Global carbon dioxide levels have been rising, at least in part due to human activities, even during the last ten years as global temperature anomalies have been stable or dropping. While it would seem obvious to blame rising temperatures on carbon dioxide produced by man, there is no proof that continued rising CO2 will result in a continued rise in global temperatures. The predictions of rising temperatures are the product of computer climate models that assume that anthropogenic global warming is a proven scientific fact rather than an unproven hypothesis.
• Our Representative, voted against it. I think I voted against him in 2008. He’s got my vote in 2010.

——

Climate change — I read material on climate change almost every day.

I am absolutely appalled at the gloom and doom, the-sky-is-falling alarmism that is in the media on a daily basis.

I’m not sure at what point I stopped simply accepting anthropogenic (human caused) global warming. I can say that for well over a year I’ve been reading a lot of climate change related material and have a much better understanding of the topic than I once had. My first blog post on climate was It’s not a hypothesis… It’s not a theory… it’s a CONSENSUS! last year.

Below is some of what I’ve come to believe and understand related to the Earth’s climate.

• Anthropogenic global warming is an unproven hypothesis.
• Even though anthropogenic global warming is an unproven hypothesis, it is likely that some warming has resulted from carbon dioxide released to the atmosphere by humans.
• There is no proof that continued rise in CO2 will result in continued rise in global temperatures.


Carbon Dioxide Absorption Peaks

• Carbon dioxide acts as a greenhouse gas by absorbing infrared radiation in three narrow bands of frequencies, (2.7, 4.3 and 15 micrometers (µM)), meaning that most of the heat producing infrared radiation frequencies escapes absorption by CO2.  The main peak, 15 µM, is absorbed completely within about 10 meters of the ground meaning that there is no more to absorb.  Doubling the human contribution of CO2 would reduce this distance. Reducing the distance for absorption would not result in an increase in temperature.
• The science of climate change is not settled.  Science is never settled. There is always more to learn, more to add.
• Consensus on climate change is not science.  It’s politics.  Science isn’t done by consensus, as I understand it.
• For a scientist to be a skeptic on climate change is not a bad thing.  Scepticism and questioning are important aspects of science.
• The Earth appears to have been cooling overall for most of this young century — 2000 to 2009.
• The reports of the danger to polar bears are premature.  They are also recycled over and over again.
• The prediction of an Arctic free of  ice is  premature.  AMSRE-A Sea Ice Extent has 6 1/2 years of history. The sea arctic sea ice extent currently is higher than any of the other years at this point in the annual cycle. AMSRE-A (Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer – Earth Observing System).
• Antarctic sea ice extent is getting larger.
• A recent survey found Arctic ice to be thicker than expected.  (radiobremen)
• The heat content of the world’s ocean is dropping – Q = mc∆T. (The Global Warming Hypothesis and Ocean Heat)

day 22

You’ve heard the claims:

“The entire global scientific community has a consensus on the question that human beings are responsible for global warming.” — Al Gore

“In its most recent assessment, IPCC states unequivocally that the consensus of scientific opinion is that Earth’s climate is being affected by human activities…” — The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change, by Naomi Oreskes, Science 3 December 2004: Vol. 306. no. 5702, p. 1686

I’ve looked for the consensus.  I haven’t found it.  I’ll let you know if I do.

Even if there is a consensus, it’s of little value if the underlying basis of the consensus is faulty:

It is amazing that some political leaders proclaim the debate over global warming is “over” when some of the meteorological community’s best minds continue to clash over the nature and magnitude of a phenomenon that could entirely offset the effects of anthropogenic CO2 emissions. (Climate Change Reconsidered , the 2009 Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), page 17)

The hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming and the predictions of future temperature rise are heavily dependent upon computer models that do not incorporate many of the significant complexities of Earth’s climate.  See The problem is in the modeling.

Is consensus science or is consensus politics?

1

Predictions of global warming hinge not upon proven scientific principles but, rather, upon climate models — in other words, computer programs.

Unfortunately, even modern advanced computers appear to be unable to accurately model the complexities of all the diverse natural and human related processes that do or may impact global climate.  Climate Change Reconsidered , the 2009 Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), states:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) places great confidence in the ability of general circulation models (GCMs) to simulate future climate and attribute observed climate change to anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases. It says “climate models are based on well-established physical principles and have been demonstrated to reproduce observed features of recent climate … and past climate changes … There is considerable confidence that Atmosphere-Ocean General Circulation Models (AOGCMs) provide credible quantitative estimates of future climate change, particularly at continental and larger scales” (IPCC,
2007-I, p. 591).

To be of any validity, GCMs must incorporate all of the many physical, chemical, and biological processes that influence climate in the real world, and they must do so correctly. A review of the scientific literature reveals numerous deficiencies and shortcomings in today’s state-of-the-art models, some of which deficiencies could even alter the sign of projected climate change.

The first chapter of the recently published NIPCC report is “Global Climate Models and Their Limitations

The sun wasn’t totally spotless in April.  Unfortunately, the most recent new spot is an old spot.

“Say WHAT?” You ask. “How can a new spot be an old spot?”

Sunspot polarity, March 27, 2008 magnetogram

Right now, the sunspot activity is in a low period between sunspot cycles.  Sunspots are features on the sun that are cooler that their surrounding areas.  That’s why they appear dark.

Sunspots are also magnetic features, having polarity, with north and south poles, much like a magnet.  Their magnetic alignment — where the poles are in relationship to each other — is dependent upon what hemisphere they are in and, more importantly to this discussion, what solar cycle they are in.

Sunspot polarity is reversed from one sunspot cycle to the next.  During the solar minimum period when sunspot activity is at the lowest, sunspots from both cycles can appear.  Most of the recent sunspots have had the polarity for cycle 24; they have been “new” sunspots.  The most recent sunspot has the polarity of cycle 23; thus, an “old” sunspot.

Sunspot 1016, April 30, 2009

There were but 2 sunspots, as I recall, during the month of April, neither of them very significant.  Overall solar activity remains low.  According to spaceweather.com, “Until these old cycle sunspots go away, the next solar cycle will remain in abeyance.”

What does it all mean?

It wasn’t that long ago that scientists were predicting a much different level of activity for the sun.  A March 10, 2006 NASA article headlined Solar Storm Warning, said:

This week researchers announced that a storm is coming–the most intense solar maximum in fifty years. The prediction comes from a team led by Mausumi Dikpati of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). “The next sunspot cycle will be 30% to 50% stronger than the previous one,” she says. If correct, the years ahead could produce a burst of solar activity second only to the historic Solar Max of 1958.

It looks like they really missed the mark.

Last month, in The Sun Has Lost Its Spots — Part 2, I asked, “What happens when the solar indicators remain low  for an extended period of time?”

A number of scientists are projecting that global warming is over, for now, and that global average temperatures will be dropping for the next 20 to 30 years.  This is based on predictions that solar output will remain low for an extended period of time.

A number of indicators seem to be supporting the idea that global warming has stopped for now.

I used to accept that the Earth was warming because of rising concentrations of carbon dioxide, although I was a little troubled by some of the media buzz around it.  The electric power company I worked for had committed to limiting its carbon emissions at or below its 2000 levels, so there had to be substance behind global warming theory.

I’m not sure at what point I stopped simply accepting anthropogenic (human caused) global warming. I can say that for well over a year I’ve been reading a lot of climate change related material and have a much better understanding of the topic than I once had. My first blog post on climate was It’s not a hypothesis… It’s not a theory… it’s a CONSENSUS! eleven months ago.

Below is some of what I’ve come to believe and understand related to the Earth’s climate.

• Anthropogenic global warming is an unproven hypothesis.
• Even though anthropogenic global warming is an unproven hypothesis, it is likely that some warming has resulted from carbon dioxide released to the atmosphere by humans.
• There is no proof that continued rise in CO2 will result in continued rise in global temperatures.

Carbon Dioxide Absorption Peaks

• Carbon dioxide acts as a greenhouse gas by absorbing infrared radiation in three narrow bands of frequencies, (2.7, 4.3 and 15 micrometers (µM)), meaning that most of the heat producing infrared radiation frequencies escapes absorption by CO2.  The main peak, 15 µM, is absorbed completely within about 10 meters of the ground meaning that there is no more to absorb.  Doubling the human contribution of CO2 would reduce this distance. Reducing the distance for absorption would not result in an increase in temperature.
• The science of climate change is not settled.  Science is never settled. There is always more to learn, more to add.
• Consensus on climate change is not science.  It’s politics.  Science isn’t done by consensus, as I understand it.
• For a scientist to be a skeptic on climate change is not a bad thing.  Scepticism and questioning are important aspects of science.
• The Earth appears to have been cooling overall for most of this young century.
• The reports of the danger to polar bears are premature.  They are also recycled over and over again.
• The prediction of an Arctic free of  ice is  premature.  AMSRE-A Sea Ice Extent has 6 1/2 years of history. The sea arctic sea ice extent currently is higher than any of the other years at this point in the annual cycle. AMSRE-A (Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer – Earth Observing System).
• Antarctic sea ice extent is getting larger.
• A recent survey found Arctic ice to be thicker than expected.  (radiobremen)

Climate change “alarmists” want to stop the use of coal and predict that the fabled Northwest Passage will be free of ice and passable in the near future.

West Seattle Herald, Seattle, Washington, March 26, 1931

Spotless Sun - April 5, 2009

A little over 2 months ago, I wrote about the extended lack of spots on the sun (The Sun Has Lost Its Spots).

The sun has remained essentially spotless since then and has been blank 87% of 2009 through April 4th.  In 2008, the sun was blank 266 out 366 days (73%) and was the blankest year since 1913.

We are currently in the solar minimum phase of the solar cycle — the part of the cycle where the fewest sunspots appear. A typical solar minimum is 485 days.  The current solar minimum is 594 days and counting.

A typical solar cycle is about 11 years in length, with lengths since 1900 varying from 9.8 years to over 12 years. The current solar cycle length, which began in May 1996, is approaching 13 years, though several years ago the end had been projected for Spring of 2007. According to sunspot expert Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center, “We’re experiencing a very deep solar minimum.”

NASA has taken an interest in the current solar minimum and has solicited proposals “to study the causes and consequences of the minimum of Solar Cycle 23.”  Scientists intending to propose a study have to let NASA know of their intent by April 17th and their proposals must be submitted by June 5th.

Besides a dearth of sunspots, other solar indicators are also much lower than normal.

• Measured by instruments on satellites, the solar wind is 20% below what it was in the 1990s and is at the lowest point since solar wind measurements began in the 1960s.
• Measurements of solar irradiance by other satellites indicate the sun’s brightness has dropped by 0.02% in visible light and 6% in extreme ultraviolet wavelengths – a 12 year low.
• The sun’s radio emissions, measured by radio telescopes, are the lowest since 1955.

The sun is the source of the energy that warms Earth and likely has a significant impact on climate and climate change.

What happens when the solar indicators remain low  for an extended period of time?

I’m not a scientist and will never be one; thus, I’ll never participate in the scientific investigation of climate change.

However, I do have a fairly technical background and do have some ability to do a little bit of critical thinking and evaluation, so I’ve been doing quite a bit of online research related to climate change. I must admit that a good share of what I’ve read is by people who are skeptics — sometimes called deniers by some of the most ardent global warming alarmists — to one degree or another of human caused global warming.

I’ve included links on the site to quite a few of the items I’ve been looking at and I’ll continue adding more as I find them.

For any who may be interested, the links can be found from the drop down menu on the top bar by clicking on References and then select the appropriate category, as shown in the picture on the right.

I’ll be going back to review a lot of these, including those that I have printed out, to refresh my memeory and to weigh some of the newer (to me) material against some that I read a while ago.

My reading is derived from a number of sources.

I have two google news feeds related to the topic. One of them sends me news stories containing the key phrase climate change. The other feed gives me stories that contain the words sunspot and solar.

I am also subscribed to several blogs that are related to climate change. Most of them can be found on the sidebar on the right side of this page.

Other sources include

• those found on Google searches on words or phrases related to what I am currently trying to understand

• links from other pages or sites

My blogging plans for On Climate are to publish on a semi-regular basis, probably a couple of times a month, but it may be more or less often than that depending on what other things are happening in my life and on my other blogs.

(In the interest of consolidating online material, this post and the reference material was moved from a blog that has been inactive since last year. —  MpG 9/11/2010)

Audio

• Patrick J. Michaels on Climate of Extremes – National Review Online

From the Blogs – Interesting Posts

• UK Met Office Fact 2: Temperatures are continuing to rise – The Blackboard, March 1, 2009
• The Trade Winds Drive The ENSO – Watts Up With That
• William Schlesinger on IPCC: “something on the order of 20 percent have had some dealing with climate.” – Watts Up With That
• The heliospheric current sheet as solar cycle proxy (and how it relates to the “current”solar cycle) – Watts Up With That
• Hansen on “death trains” and coal and CO2 – Watts Up With That
• How I Became a Skeptic about Global Warming Forecasts – The Global Warming Challenge
• Snow job in Antarctica – digging out the data source – Watts Up With That
• Another NASA Defection to the Skeptics’ Camp – Roy Spencer, Ph.D.
• No Scientific Forecasts to Support Global Warming – jennifermarohasy.com
• Antarctic Warming? Part 2 – A letter from a meteorologist on the ground in Antarctica – Watts Up With That
• Increasing Atmospheric CO2: Manmade…or Natural? – Roy Spencer, Ph.D.
• New Study Doesn’t Support Climate Models (But You’ll Never Hear About It) – Roy Spencer, Ph.D.
• Brutal Cold in the IPCC Models versus Nature- Roy Spencer, Ph.D.
• Don Easterbrook’s AGU paper on potential global cooling – Watts Up With That
• NCDC updates database for Dec08 – NCDC’s own graphic shows decadal cooling trend
• Mr. Gore: Apology Accepted – Huffington Post
• Satellite and Climate Model Evidence Against Substantial Manmade Climate Change – Roy Spencer, Ph.D.
• Global Cooling is Here!  Evidence for Predicting Global Cooling for the Next Three Decades – Icecap (Joe’s blog)
• Global Warming and Some Maths: A Note from William Kininmonth – jennifermarohasy.com
• Sarewitz on Innovation – Prometheus
• Carbon Dioxide (CO2) is Not Pollution

Images and Graphs

• Global average temperature series – Met Office Hadley Centre observations datasets
• “Global Warming” at a glance – JunkScience.com
• Climate Change Science – Includes graphs and figures
• The Frozen Thames 1677.jpg

Media

• Warning signs seen on climate change – Cape Cod Times, March 9, 2009
• Natural Global Warmings Have Become More Moderate – By Dennis Avery  Sunday, March 8, 2009; International conference of man-made warming skeptics, predicting global climate temperatures
• Dark Green Doomsayers – George Will
• Al Gore’s Climate of Extremes Dr. Patrick J. Michaels
• Nuclear Nonsense
• Chicken Littles taken to task
• Ex-Astronaut: Global Warming Is Bunk
• Sammy Wilson should take the lead in reversing climate change policy
• Climate: Warmed or Worshipped
• Will the U.N. Chill Out on Climate Change?
• Examiner.com
  • Battle of the climate scientists and the ‘Hijacking of the American Meteorological Society’
  • Battle of the climate scientists – Gray versus Hansen  part 2
  • Battle of the climate scientists – Gray versus Hansen part 3
• Despite the hot air, the Antarctic is not warming up
• Northern Lights Disappear in Lapland
• The Heartland Institute’s Climate-change Conference
• Czech president attacks Al Gore’s climate campaign
• The Amazing Story Behind the Global Warming Scam
• Al Gore and Venus Envy
• Warming the Warming Debate
• Sunspot cycles may hold key to global warming, cooling
• The Sky Is Falling?
• Professor denies global warming theory
• 2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved
• No Matter What Happens, Someone Will Blame Global Warming
• More hot air from Met Office
• 2008: Another Grim Year for the Global Warmers
• Cooling global warming hysteria just one story of ’08
• Global Warming’s Last Gasp
• The Bear Truth About Arctic Warming
• Global cooling?
• Skepticism on climate change
• Cold reality of fuel bill rises
• Scientists urge caution on global warming
• The ‘consensus’ on climate change is a catastrophe in itself
• Forecasting based on climate change is delusional
• Could the Earth be cooling its heels?
• Lord Nelson and Captain Cook’s shiplogs question climate change theories
• Global Warming Did It! Well, Maybe Not.
• Lonely voice of dissent declared valid
• Will the Economy Kill the Global Warming Hoax?
• Scientists question climate change consensus
• Global Warming’s Fatal Flaw?
• Al Gore’s Doomsday Clock
• Makin’ Up Climate Data… From Junk!
• What’s the point of a cure if the patient may not be sick?
• Evidence doesn’t bare out alarmist claims of global warming
• Opposing view on global warming will be aired
• Bigger trees helping fight against climate change
• UK Met Office’s forecast on human induced climate change – a mixed message?
• Intel chief: Climate change threatens U.S. security
• G20 should send clear signal on climate change: Denmark
• Can geo-engineering rebuild the planet?
• Global Warming – It’s heating up!
• Global Warming Nearing “Critical Threshold” – Financial Times
• Model Sees Severe Climate Change Impact By 2050
• Climate Change Coming Faster Than Expected
• Climate change alert for Bahrain
• ‘CO2 reduction treaties useless’
• Global warming seen worse than predicted
• Ethiopia: Climate Change Taking Toll On Livestock in Southern Lowlands – Study
• Malaria Patterns May Be Altered By Climate Change
• Space manoeuvres & climate change – Pakistan Observer
• Climate change: ‘Feedback’ triggers could amplify peril
• Coal-fired power stations are death factories. Close them – Op-Ed by James Hansen
• Bushfires — just chance, or climate change?
• Climate change will be more devastating than predicted, top scientist warns
• ‘Apocalyptic climate predictions’ mislead the public, say experts
• The Planet Gets Cooler in ’08. Say What? -  Time Magazine
• High CO2 boosts plant respiration, potentially affecting climate and crops
• Climate change takes a mental toll
• Sweden dumps nuclear ban as part of new climate change strategy
• Just science: Opposing views on climate change
• The last word: US and climate change – Rescue of the planet postponed?
• What’s Happening to the Sun?
• Climate change debated
• Economy, Jobs Trump All Other Policy Priorities In 2009
• Briefing: Nuclear power
• Germans to invest £20bn in new UK nuclear plants
• Humans started causing global warming 5,000 years ago, UW study says
• New US military report on global warming raises worry
• Nobel Prize-winning scientist answers critics of climate change
• Record low for climate science
• North Pole Could Be Ice Free in 2008
• ‘Arctic Ice in Death Spiral’

Testimony

Videos

Web Sites and Blogs

Blogs

• Climate Audit
• Real Climate

Web Sites

• The Climate Sceptics – The world’s first up-front political party representing climate sceptics. Australian and New Zealand Scientists against AGW alarmism.
• ICECAP
• Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change
• The Carbon Sense Coalition
• The Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI)
• The Global Warming Challenge
• Science & Environmental Policy Project
• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
• Solar Influences Data Analysis Center – SIDC (warming neutral)
• The National Snow and Ice Data Center
• Solar Cycle 24 (neutral)
• National Snow and Ice Data Center – state of the Cryosphere
• Climate Change Science – Includes graphs and figures

Wikipedia

• Carbon dioxide
  • data page (properties)
• Cosmic Ray
• Global Warming
• Little Ice Age
• Medieval Warm Pariod
• Milankovitch cycles
• Singer, Fred
• Sunspots
  • Sunspot Number Projection animation
    • Larger version

Work, papers, letters, and other reference material

• Irreversible CO2-Induced Global Warming? – CO2 Science magazine
• Contribution of thermal expansion to present-day sea-level change revisited – Alix Lombarda, Anny Cazenavea, Pierre-Yves Le Traonb, Masayoshi Ishiic
• Recent Ice-Sheet Growth in the Interior of Greenland; Ola M. Johannessen, Kirill Khvorostovsky, Martin W. Miles, Leonid P. Bobylev
• The rising tide: assessing the risks of climate change and human settlements in low elevation coastal zones – Gordon McGranahan, Deborah Balk, Bridget Anderson
• Climate Change and Its Causes: A Discussion about Some Key Issues – Nicola Scafetta, Duke University, Feb. 26/2009
• A 2000-Year Global Temperature Reconstruction Based on Non-Treering Proxies – Loehle, C., and J.H. McCulloch. There are reasons to believe that tree ring data may not properly capture long-term climate changes. In this study, eighteen 2000-year-long series were obtained that were not based on tree ring data.
• Coastal Sensitivity to Sea-level Rise: A Focus on the Mid-Atlantic Region – U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in collaboration with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
• Bringing Balance, Disclosure and Due Diligence into Science-based Policymaking, Ross McKitrick, Department of Economics, University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada – “Academic research, even when used used to drive multibillion dollar public investments, is done to standards that would never be acceptable in the business sector.” October 16, 2004 (pdf., 19 pages)
• The Myth of Dangerous Human-Caused Climate Change, R.M. Carter, Professor, Marine Geophysical Laboratory, James Cook University, Townsville,  Queensland, Australia
• Solar Cycle 24: Implications for the United States, David Archibald, International Conference on Climate Change, March, 2008
• North Atlantic Deep Water Formation – CO2 Science
• Permafrost (Impact of Thawing on CO2) — Summary – CO2 Science
• Sea Level Response to Global Warming
• UN Infects Science with Cancer of Global Warming – Edward F. Blick PhD
• Testimony of Patrick J. Michaels to the Subcommittee on Energy and Environment of the Committee of Energy and Commerce, U.S. House of Representatives – “… the rates of warming, on multiple time scales, have now invalidated the midrange suite of IPCC climate models.”  2/12/2009; Dr. Michaels is an active IPCC participant
• Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate – Summary for Policymakers of the Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (50 pages, pdf)
• Public Comment by Dr. Craig D. Iso on EPA’s Advanced Notice of Proposed Regulation of Greenhouse Gases (830 pages, pdf)
• Analysis of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking for Greenhouse Gases – Drs. J. Scott Armstrong and Kesten C. Green
• Global Warming Petition Project – over 31,000 American signees, including more than 9,000 PhDs
  • Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide – (12 pages, pdf)
• On The Hijacking of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) by Bill Gray, Professor Emeritus, Colorado State University (pdf)
• Validity of Climate Change Forecasting for Public Policy Decision Making by Kesten C. Green, Willie Soon and J. Scott Armstrong
• Global Warming: Forecasts by Scientists Versus Scientific Forecasts by Kesten C. Green and J. Scott Armstrong (27 pages, pdf, Energy & Environment, Vol. 18, Nos. 7-8, 2007 )
• Convenient Fibs about an Underlying Truth: Al Gore’s Tortured Brief on Climate Change’s Causes, Effects, and Solutions, by Caleb Stewart Rossiter
• Under the Weather – Confessions of a Climate Doubter by Karel Beckman in European Energy Review
• Polar bear populations – Armstrong, Green & Soon ( Interfaces Vol.38 No.5 2008)
• A 1,000-Year History of Sunspot Numbers
• The Physical Evidence of Earth’s Unstoppable 1,500-Year Climate Cycle – Singer & Avery
• Solar Cycles 24 and 25 and Predicted Climate Response by David C. Archibald (9 pages, pdf)
• Solar Influence on Temperature (Global) — Summary
• Is the Earth still recovering from the “Little Ice Age”? – A possible cause of global warming; Syun-Ichi Akasofu, International Arctic Research Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks (14 pages, pdf)
• Biological Effects of “Ocean Acidification”
• Permafrost (Degradation) — Summary
• The Permafrost Temperature Record of Barrow, Alaska
• Earth’s Temperature History: Putting the 20th Century in Proper Perspective
• Permafrost Degradation in Central Alaska
• What’s Happening to the Climate of the Arctic?
• There Has Been Little Net Global Warming Over the Past 70 Years
• The Global Surface Air Temperature Record May Be Significantly in Error
• Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change (video links do not work)
• Don Easterbrook’s AGU paper on potential global cooling – Solar Influence on Recurring Global, Decadal, Climate Cycles Recorded by Glacial Fluctuations, Ice Cores, Sea Surface Temperatures, and Historic Measurements Over the Past Millennium – posted on Watts Up With That
• Climate Science: Is It Currently Designed To Answer Questions?
• Kilimanjaro’s Summit Glaciers
• Global Warming every 1,500 Years — What it Means for Engineering
• How many errors can there be in 23 seconds of an advertisement?
• Editorial Bias and the Prediction of Climate Disaster:  The Crisis of Science Communication by Benny Peiser
• No smoking hot spot by Dr. David Evans in The Australian, one of the Kyoto Protocol compliance modelers
• Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
• Unresolved issues with the assessment of multidecadal global land surface temperature trends – Roger A. Pielke Sr. et. al.
• Climate Impact of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide – James Hansen et. al., 1981
• El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) Diagnostic Discussion
• James Hansen’s Former NASA Supervisor Declares Himself a Skeptic – US Senate EPW Minority Pages
• A Tutorial on the Basic Physics of Climate Change By David Hafemeister & Peter Schwartz
• NASA Finds Sun-Climate Connection in Old Nile Records NASA/JPL (neutral)