Day one at the COP 21 meeting in Paris has now concluded. And the result? A good one for CFACT. A bad one for the President.
First the President.
Obama’s speech before the main plenary was not exactly a barnburner. As is his custom, he began by apologizing for his nation’s misdeeds – this time against the environment:
“I’ve come here personally, as the leader of the world’s largest economy and the second-largest emitter, to say that the United States of America not only recognizes our responsibility in creating this problem, we embrace our responsibility to do something about it,” Obama told the summit.
Then, after going through a litany of alarmist hype ranging from “abandoned cities” and “submerged countries” to rapidly rising temperatures and new conflicts being caused by global warming, he pledged to throw money to the UN to make sure “resources flow to the countries that need help” dealing with these things.
Perhaps the most memorable thing about the President’s speech was that it went too long – so much so that UN staff gave up trying to get him off-stage.
Obama was just one of 147 world leaders given three minutes to talk at the event. After he more than nearly tripled his allotment, three beeps were given by organizers to try and dissuade him from continuing – to no avail. The president just plowed on. In the end, Obama spoke for nearly 14 minutes, something which even befuddled NBC news which noted that if everyone was as long-winded as the U.S. President the addresses would have lasted more than 33 hours.
In addition to making his marathon speech at COP 21, the President slipped off to dine with President Francois Hollande at one of the finest dining restaurants in the world, L’Ambroisie. The lavish 17th century-style restaurant located in the secluded Place des Vosges (where an average dinner costs $380 a person), caught the attention of several newspapers as a somewhat opulent place to meet at a time when the president is talking about dire consequences of global warming to the developing world and calling on citizens to make sacrifices to save the planet.
CFACT, on the other hand, had a much better start to COP 21.
Recognized as the leading voice of skepticism to the UN global warming program at these conferences, several major media outlets sought out CFACT’s unique perspective on developments as they unfolded. Marc Morano, in particular, has become the go-to source for many outlets on all things related to climate change.
USA Today invited Marc to publish an opposing view to the COP 21 proceedings in its editorial page, and he was also featured prominently on the Drudge Report announcing the premiere of CFACT’s new movie Climate Hustle being debut next week in Paris. Sean Hannity then invited Marc to visit his studio in New York as a special guest on his nationally syndicated radio program, and he rounded off his Monday with an appearance before Neil Cavuto’s program on Fox News. The impact: Our ClimateDepot.com website has already received well over 300,000 unique views in less than 24 hours and that number continues to grow by the minute.
All in all, a pretty solid start for CFACT’s Truth Squad efforts covering Paris!
CFACT will, of course, be continuing to cover events as they develop, and will report them to you in the coming days ahead. Stay tuned!
OK, I’ll do my bit too. The Sun is responsible for the run up in global temperature. And the Sun will be responsible for the cooling that is to come.
In my blog I use the revised sunspot data series to graph the Sun’s activity during the last 165 years (Part 1) and then use the revised group number data series to graph the Sun’s activity back to the time of the Maunder Minimum (Part 2).
https://geoscienceenvironment.wordpress.com/
Part 1 discusses the mechanism. I speculated that two dynamos are active in the Sun and their beat frequency is observed as the long Gleissberg-like cycle that gives low activity (Maunder Minimum around 1600) and then high activity up to 2000 or so. I claimed that cycle length is variable because of the gravitational pull of the planets.
A recent peer-reviewed paper supports the basics of this speculation (abstract below) although after publication the authors denied that major decline in solar activity will have major climate effects.
However this is hardly credible. A paper I cite by Dr. Nir Shaviv (see part 1) estimates that the range during one 11-year cycle is 0.1 degree Celsius, presumably 0.05 C up and 0.05 C down.
I estimate that, if even a small part of the Sun’s energy accumulates in the oceans over periods as long as 150 years and more, that would explain a large part of the rise in temperature (about 0.9 degree Celsius) since the end of the Little Ice Age, perhaps most of the rise in global temperature.
Reference:
Zharkova, V. V., et al. “Heartbeat of the Sun from Principal Component Analysis and prediction of solar activity on a millenium timescale.” Scientific reports 5 (2015).
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4625153/
Abstract
We derive two principal components (PCs) of temporal magnetic field variations over the solar cycles 21–24 from full disk magnetograms covering about 39% of data variance, with s = 0.67. These PCs are attributed to two main magnetic waves travelling from the opposite hemispheres with close frequencies and increasing phase shift. Using symbolic regression analysis we also derive mathematical formulae for these waves and calculate their summary curve which we show is linked to solar activity index. Extrapolation of the PCs backward for 800 years reveals the two 350-year grand cycles superimposed on 22 year-cycles with the features showing a remarkable resemblance to sunspot activity reported in the past including the Maunder and Dalton minimum. The summary curve calculated for the next millennium predicts further three grand cycles with the closest grand minimum occurring in the forthcoming cycles 26–27 with the two magnetic field waves separating into the opposite hemispheres leading to strongly reduced solar activity. These grand cycle variations are probed by a – O dynamo model with meridional circulation. Dynamo waves are found generated with close frequencies whose interaction leads to beating effects responsible for the grand cycles (350–400 years) superimposed on a standard 22 year cycle. This approach opens a new era in investigation and confident prediction of solar activity on a millenium timescale.
he Sun is responsible for the run up in global temperature. And the Sun will be responsible for the cooling that is to come.
Soooo…decreasing solar output INCREASES temperature?
Who knew? https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/63f412aeb23da0b0ab1a11cc598d1663cb0e69fad2a723c5efaf5a40dc120b92.png
Best,
D
Thanks for the graphs. The sunspot line (orange) illustrates changes in solar activity, a proxy for solar power. Integrate and you will get a proxy for accumulated energy that can be compared to ocean heat content. (Power * time = Energy)
The world ocean acts as a low pass filter. If you take the orange line in your graph above and smooth it with a low-pass filter you will see the line slowly top out. (I suggest a 15 to 30-year moving average, something to simulate multidecadal oceanic oscillations.)
Alternatively, you can do what I did, integrate the sunspot data to reveal the upward trend in energy stored in the oceans. (I think your graph demonstrates that further cooling is already locked into the climate system. The integral I display on my blog seems to confirms this.)
There is a fairly substantial literature on this subject. James Hansen of NASA used ocean heat content among other variables to derive his estimate of radiative imbalance. In 2011 Hansen and others revised their 2005 estimate of global energy imbalance from 0.85 Wm-2 to 0.58 Wm-2 based on later data.
Nir Shaviv used a variation on this approach to ocean heat content.
Loeb et al and Stephens et al. accepted Hansen’s estimates but for more recent years they revised his figure to 0.5 Wm-2. This appears consistent with the graphs you provide in your comment: the positive global energy imbalance seems to have been falling for a couple of decades.
Steinhilber and others estimated that there has been an increase of 0.9 Watts per square meter in solar power since the Maunder Minimum 400 years ago. This suggests that the increase in solar power since the Maunder Minimum is 80% greater than the total radiative imbalance derived from ocean heat content in 2012.
That implies the radiative imbalance was negative for much of the period between about 1600 and 1850, which would explain the Little Ice Age. The decline in solar activity probably began before 1300.
I would not claim that all of the warming during the last 400 years has been caused by the Sun, but it does appear that the increase in solar activity can explain most of the global warming. If we merely applied Occam’s Razor, we would ignore greenhouse gases, except water vapor.
While we cannot be certain about any of these claims, we can see that natural factors MAY be more important as drivers of climate change than is being recognized by governments worldwide when they allocate funding for scientific research.
References:
1.Steinhilber, F., J. Beer, and C. Fröhlich. “Total solar irradiance during the Holocene.” Geophysical
Research Letters 36.19 (2009).
2.Hansen, James, et al. “Earth’s energy imbalance and implications.”Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics 11.24 (2011): 13421-13449.
3.Loeb, Norman G., et al. “Observed changes in top-of-the-atmosphere radiation and upper-ocean heating consistent within uncertainty.” Nature Geoscience 5.2 (2012): 110-113.
4.Stephens, Graeme L., et al. “An update on Earth’s energy balance in light of the latest global observations.” Nature Geoscience 5.10 (2012): 691-696.
5. Shaviv, Nir J. “Using the oceans as a calorimeter to quantify the solar radiative forcing.” Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics (1978–2012)113.A11 (2008).
Thanks, scientists are way beyond you. Read the literature.
Best,
D
I trust that you have now had time to read the references I provided and have now caught up with me and the scientists.
Thanks, I’ll stick with the robust empirical literature that finds ~1.7W/m^2 forcing from human agents.
Best,
D
Yes, that is what I expected you would do.
Why wouldn’t I? That is what everyone does – go with the latest, robust scientific findings.
Best,
D
Well We know That Big oil is The big villain Right ? Clue You For Your production of Vanes for Wind turbine Solar panels your Smart phone medicines …..You need BIG OIL !!
Has everyone forgotten that the earth started tilting on it’s axes in 1999? Some of us learned that in high school, some through other means. Of course our climate is changing but there is zero proof of global warming. The testing for temperature changes is not complete enough to make that judgement.