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Monday, December 21, 2009

The Greatest Hoax Since The Piltdown Man

-Great American Journal: The Greatest Hoax Since The Piltdown Man
*Hat to CJ- she's on a roll!!
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2 comments:

Tad said...

This article is too full of misinformation to address all of the errors and misstatements of fact, so I will just stick with an area that I know a bit more about than the average person, and that is sunspot activity.

Warming and cooling cycles do not correlate well with sunspots. In fact, over the course of a sunspot cycle, solar irradiance varies by only a fraction of a percent. You can see some slight correlation with climate over very long periods of time in the past, but the small effect is completely overwhelmed by greenhouse gasses.

One easy thing to consider is solar activity in the 20th century, which had its highest level in 1957-59. In fact, solar activity has never been higher before (for as long as sunspots have been counted) or since, yet there wasn't any pronounced warming in the late 1950s.

The author claims there have been no sunspots for the past three years. This is total nonsense. On Monday, December 21 there were FIVE sunspot regions visible and facing earth, and the daily sunspot number was 42. It was also 42 on Sunday, and 43 the day before.

NASA has a wonderful new tool, accessable to all of us, the STEREO mission:

http://stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Now we can see activity facing earth, AND activity on the other side of the sun, delivered by two satellites in the same orbit as earth, one leading, and the other lagging. Some time next year they will be in position to see the entire sun. For all of history only half of the sun has been visible, and it rotates relative to earth approximately every 27.5 days. Sunspots formed on the side of the sun facing earth, then would rotate into view, affecting the earth's ionosphere, which is what my area of interest is. Currently we can see all but 13% of the sun, and every day we can see a little more. Each of those bright areas on the rotatiing globe at the STEREO website are areas of intense solar activity. With STEREO, we've been seeing activity all month, both facing earth, and forming on the other side and rotating into view.

STEREO is a fantastic tool, and the image is updated every few minutes.

For actual fact-based information on climate from real climatologists, some good sources are here:

http://www.realclimate.org/

They have a nice index, and a bit over half way down the page, they take on some of the contrarian arguments from the skeptics:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/index/

Other interesting sites:

http://www.desmogblog.com/

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/12/07/the-real-climate-scandal/

http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2008/07/how_to_talk_to_a_sceptic.php

http://www.skepticalscience.com/

December 22, 2009 at 1:49 AM
Anonymous said...

You did nothing to discredit the article. But you keep drinking that koolaid!

December 24, 2009 at 10:46 PM

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