Global warming and solar activity

[boishakhi]

Is it reckless to ignore NASA scientists who warn us that the Sun is causing Global Warming? "Historical records of solar activity indicate that solar radiation has been increasing since the late 19th century. If a trend, comparable to the one found in this study, persisted throughout the 20th century, it would have provided a significant component of the global warming the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports to have occurred over the past 100 years," said Richard Willson, a researcher affiliated with NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University's Earth Institute, New York. He is the lead author of the study recently published in Geophysical Research Letters.


Mod note: This post is highly spambottish, so you may not get a reply. --Lagmonster

[LaCroix]

http://acrim.jpl.nasa.gov/

The ACRIMSAT Mission will measure Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) during its five-year mission life. The ACRIMSAT spacecraft, carrying the ACRIM III instrument, will be secondary payload on a Taurus vehicle scheduled to launch in December 1999. The instrument, third in a series of long-term solar-monitoring tools built for NASA by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, will continue to extend the database first created by ACRIM I, which was launched in 1980 on the Solar Maximum Mission (SMM) spacecraft. ACRIM II followed on the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) in 1991.

The Active Cavity Radiometer Irradiance Monitor (ACRIM) I instrument was the first to clearly demonstrate that the total radiant energy from the sun was not a constant. However, the solar variability was so slight (0.1% of full scale) that continuous monitoring by state-of-the-art instrumentation was necessary. It is theorized that as much as 25% of the anticipated global warming of the earth may be solar in origin. In addition, seemingly small (0.5%) changes in the TSI output of the sun over a century or more may cause significant climatological changes on earth.

The ACRIMSAT mission is funded by NASA through the Earth Science Programs Office at Goddard Space Flight Center. The ACRIMSAT Project Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Pasadena, CA) manages the design, fabrication, and test of the ACRIM III instrument and manages the subcontract for the ACRIMSAT spacecraft being built by Orbital Sciences Corporation. The ACRIM III data products will be available through the Langley EOS Data Analysis and Archive Center.

The Principal Investigator for the ACRIM mission is Dr. Richard Willson of Columbia University. Roger Helizon of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is the ACRIM Project Manager and Instrument Scientist. (Other personnel are listed on the Contact List on the Organization/Feedback page.)

Emphasis mine...

No one disputes a partial solar cause, but at the same time, most scientists agree that Carbon and other gaseous emissions are the main culprit...

I'd like to see the source of your quote...

[Simon_Jester]

What actually happens in this kind of research is that you get people reconstructing multiple causes of a warming trend, saying "OK, this much is due to the sun, this much is due to this other thing, this much is due to carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere..."

I've attended seminars where they talk about this at length- it doesn't make any one of the sources go away to talk about how multiple things can be warming the world up at the same time.

[Dalton]

Continue the discussion, but the OP was a spammer. Copypasta from one of those spammer/blogger networks.

[Count Chocula]

What the hell, I'll throw this into the ring.

The science is now all-but-settled on global warming, convincing new evidence demonstrates, but Al Gore, the IPCC and other global warming doomsayers won’t be celebrating. The new findings point to cosmic rays and the sun — not human activities — as the dominant controller of climate on Earth.

The research, published with little fanfare this week in the prestigious journal Nature, comes from über-prestigious CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, one of the world’s largest centres for scientific research involving 60 countries and 8,000 scientists at more than 600 universities and national laboratories. CERN is the organization that invented the World Wide Web, that built the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider, and that has now built a pristinely clean stainless steel chamber that precisely recreated the Earth’s atmosphere.

In this chamber, 63 CERN scientists from 17 European and American institutes have done what global warming doomsayers said could never be done — demonstrate that cosmic rays promote the formation of molecules that in Earth’s atmosphere can grow and seed clouds, the cloudier and thus cooler it will be. Because the sun’s magnetic field controls how many cosmic rays reach Earth’s atmosphere (the stronger the sun’s magnetic field, the more it shields Earth from incoming cosmic rays from space), the sun determines the temperature on Earth.

The rest of the article is well worth the read, as it outlines the political back-and-forth within CERN itself.

The data appear to be verifiable and already subject to peer review as a factor in global warming/cooling; I suspect an article on such a politically volatile topic as GW/CC/We're Gonna Die!1!1 was thoroughly vetted before publication in Nature. At this stage, the study doesn't seem to have the, shall we say, taint of the "hockey stick" graph or the embarrassing AGW e-mails out of England from last year.

You mean to say that the big yellow variable output fusion reactor in the sky affects our weather? Wow.

[Alyrium Denryle]

What the hell, I'll throw this into the ring.

The science is now all-but-settled on global warming, convincing new evidence demonstrates, but Al Gore, the IPCC and other global warming doomsayers won’t be celebrating. The new findings point to cosmic rays and the sun — not human activities — as the dominant controller of climate on Earth.

The research, published with little fanfare this week in the prestigious journal Nature, comes from über-prestigious CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, one of the world’s largest centres for scientific research involving 60 countries and 8,000 scientists at more than 600 universities and national laboratories. CERN is the organization that invented the World Wide Web, that built the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider, and that has now built a pristinely clean stainless steel chamber that precisely recreated the Earth’s atmosphere.

In this chamber, 63 CERN scientists from 17 European and American institutes have done what global warming doomsayers said could never be done — demonstrate that cosmic rays promote the formation of molecules that in Earth’s atmosphere can grow and seed clouds, the cloudier and thus cooler it will be. Because the sun’s magnetic field controls how many cosmic rays reach Earth’s atmosphere (the stronger the sun’s magnetic field, the more it shields Earth from incoming cosmic rays from space), the sun determines the temperature on Earth.

The rest of the article is well worth the read, as it outlines the political back-and-forth within CERN itself.

The data appear to be verifiable and already subject to peer review as a factor in global warming/cooling; I suspect an article on such a politically volatile topic as GW/CC/We're Gonna Die!1!1 was thoroughly vetted before publication in Nature. At this stage, the study doesn't seem to have the, shall we say, taint of the "hockey stick" graph or the embarrassing AGW e-mails out of England from last year.

You mean to say that the big yellow variable output fusion reactor in the sky affects our weather? Wow.

Lets see... who should I trust... the creative editing of an article written by the British National Party... or the original paper

here is its abstract

Abstract: Atmospheric aerosols exert an important influence on climate(1) through their effects on stratiform cloud albedo and lifetime(2) and the invigoration of convective storms(3). Model calculations suggest that almost half of the global cloud condensation nuclei in the atmospheric boundary layer may originate from the nucleation of aerosols from trace condensable vapours(4), although the sensitivity of the number of cloud condensation nuclei to changes of nucleation rate may be small(5,6). Despite extensive research, fundamental questions remain about the nucleation rate of sulphuric acid particles and the mechanisms responsible, including the roles of galactic cosmic rays and other chemical species such as ammonia(7). Here we present the first results from the CLOUD experiment at CERN. We find that atmospherically relevant ammonia mixing ratios of 100 parts per trillion by volume, or less, increase the nucleation rate of sulphuric acid particles more than 100-1,000-fold. Time-resolved molecular measurements reveal that nucleation proceeds by a base-stabilization mechanism involving the stepwise accretion of ammonia molecules. Ions increase the nucleation rate by an additional factor of between two and more than ten at ground-level galactic-cosmic-ray intensities, provided that the nucleation rate lies below the limiting ion-pair production rate. We find that ion-induced binary nucleation of H(2)SO(4)-H(2)O can occur in the midtroposphere but is negligible in the boundary layer. However, even with the large enhancements in rate due to ammonia and ions, atmospheric concentrations of ammonia and sulphuric acid are insufficient to account for observed boundary-layer nucleation.

In other words, yes. Cosmic rays and things like ammonia help create half of the condensation nuclei in clouds, which increases how much sunlight is reflected away from earth.

This is one input in a multi-part system. It counter-acts the effects of climate change (in terms of temperature anyway), but guess what. Average temps are still increasing. The net effect is insufficient to counter-act our CO2 and Methane output.

[Surlethe]

Realclimate on the CERN cloud chamber results:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/ar ... echanisms/
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/ar ... teresting/