Originally posted by audas
water vapor has always occurred - through every period in history and yes it is a natural green house gas - step inside any hot house and you will see this - however what has caused the increase in vapor is of course increase GHG.

Sun Energy Output At Over 1,000 Year Peak
Sami Solanki, Professor at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich Switzerland, says the Sun has been burning more brightly over the last 60 years than over the previous 1090 years.

“We have to acknowledge that the Sun is in a changed state. It is brighter than it was a few hundred years ago, and this brightening started relatively recently – in the last 100 to 150 years. We expect it to have an impact on global warming,” he told swissinfo.

The sun's brightness hasn't changed much over the last 20 years. But it has been brighter for the last 60 years than it has been at any time in the last 1,150 years.

According to scientists, the Sun’s radiance has changed little during this period. But looking back over 1,150 years, Solanki found the Sun had never been as bright as in the past 60 years.


The team studied sunspot data going back several hundred years. They found that a dearth of sunspots signalled a cold period - which could last up to 50 years - but that over the past century their numbers had increased as the Earth's climate grew steadily warmer. The scientists also compared data from ice samples collected during an expedition to Greenland in 1991. The most recent samples contained the lowest recorded levels of beryllium 10 for more than 1,000 years. Beryllium 10 is a particle created by cosmic rays that decreases in the Earth's atmosphere as the magnetic energy from the Sun increases. Scientists can currently trace beryllium 10 levels back 1,150 years.

Sunspots have been increasing in number as the Earth has been getting warmer.

Over the past few hundred years, there has been a steady increase in the numbers of sunspots, a trend that has accelerated in the past century, just at the time when the Earth has been getting warmer.

Variations in sunspot activity are probably behind the increases and decreases in solar radiation and consequence changes in Earth's climate.

During the Medieval maximum of 1000-1300 there was an extremely large Sunspot which is believed to have warmed the Earth higher than normal. There were no accurate measurements of the weather to call upon during this time but the discovery and colonization of Greenland by Eric the Red supports this hypothesis. Eric was exiled from Iceland for manslaughter and sailed west discovering Greenland. He then led many ships, filled with people who wanted to make a fresh start, to this new land. For 300 years Greenland flourished, new communities settled, trade with other countries grew, and the population increased. Around 1325 the climate cooled down considerably, people started to abandon the northern settlements. By 1350 glaciers covered the northern settlements, and the southern most settlements were dying out as well.

The Sporer minimum of 1400-1510 and the Maunder minimum of 1645-1715 were each known as a "little ice age." They were both droughts in Sunspot activity, and a link to a time of abnormally cold weather on Earth. In addition to finishing off the Greenland colonies, the Sporer minimum showed increased rates of famine in the world, and the Baltic Sea froze solid in the winter of 1422-23. Some of the more notable effects of the Maunder minimum included the appearance of glaciers in the Alps advancing farther southward, the north sea froze, and in London there was the famous year without a summer where it remained cold for 21 consecutive months.

The evidence supports the effect of Sunspot activity on the Earth's climate, but that is only one of many areas that effects us on Earth. On March 13,1989 a large Sunspot ignited powerful flares that tripped the circuit breakers a generator station. The started the collapse of the Quebec power system and left people without power for hours to days. These same flares damaged several man made satellites, and caused smaller outages all over the U.S and Canada. There are countless other times when large Sunspots have effected similar damage to various electrical systems on Earth.

The Sun could start going through a down trend in sunspot activity at any time. We could find ourselves back in a state similar to the Maunder Minimum with decades of much colder weather. Or sunspot activity could increase to an even higher level and temperatures could rise more than the amount some models project as a consequence of higher atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Originally posted by audas
The natural cycle of global warming is caused by two factors - the first is the natural variation in tilt in the earth which ranges up to 27 degrees, and the variable wobble of the earth caused by the the pull of other planets etc. This has been the determining factor in the worlds periodic ice ages over the eons.

The earth's magnetic field impacts climate: Danish study
(AFP) – Jan 12, 2009

COPENHAGEN (AFP) — The earths climate has been significantly affected by the planets magnetic field, according to a Danish study published Monday that could challenge the notion that human emissions are responsible for global warming.
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Originally posted by audas
What we are facing now are massive forcing on a fractional scale relative to the historical record of climate fluctuations.

Originally posted by audas
The historical data does indeed point to many of the issues raised by global warming skeptics - however what is NOT understood by them is that these processes take thousands upon thousands of years to occur - the current process has taken less than a century.

Originally posted by audas
The danger in this is what is known as INERTIA - the ocean for example absorbing massive amounts of heat which will in turn be transmitted into the ice caps etc -

Originally posted by audas
The reality is we now face an almost certain global meltdown of civilization due to the procrastination of people like electric universe who simply do not understand the what is being said to them - and instead prefer to think there is some conspiracy in science which is absurd as it is merely a neutral science.

Originally posted by audas
The IPCC is populated by as many skeptical scientists from EXXON MOBILE as it is from people such as Openhiemer (the head and an environmentalist) they are impartial and look at the evidence - and they all agree global warming is real and true -

Climate chief admits error over Himalayan glaciers
16:00 21 January 2010 by Fred Pearce
For similar stories, visit the Climate Change Topic Guide

The head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been forced to apologise for including in its 2007 report the claim that there was a "very high" chance of glaciers disappearing from the Himalayas by 2035.

Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the IPCC, conceded yesterday that "the clear and well-established standards of evidence required by the IPCC procedures were not applied properly" when the claim was included in the 900-page assessment of the impacts of climate change.
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It is suggested that the postulated interstellar cloud should encounter the solar system at some unspecified time in the 'near' future and might have a drastic influence on terrestrial climate in the next 10,000 years

Originally posted by pyrts
Wow. What an unpleasant argument. And it's the same one (mostly) over and over.

Originally posted by pyrts
So I looked up the papers (yeah, another person who reads them). I noticed that the two quotes that are NEVER given from the "giant interstellar cloud" are the real title which is a question" Is the solar system entering a nearby interstellar cloud"

Originally posted by pyrts
So... doesn't that mean that they're not sure it's a cloud... AND that they haven't seen Earth or the solar system in contact with it? In fact when you read down to the 6th page or so of the article, you find that they estimate that it's 1-2 parsecs from Earth. That's 3 1/4 light years away.

Originally posted by pyrts
So that's not evidence against AGW.

Originally posted by pyrts
Nor is the breach article. In the first place, it's from 2008 and the breach happened in 2007. In the second place, if you read a little more, the events don't last long.

A Giant Breach in Earth's Magnetic Field
12.16.2008

Dec. 16, 2008: NASA's five THEMIS spacecraft have discovered a breach in Earth's magnetic field ten times larger than anything previously thought to exist. Solar wind can flow in through the opening to "load up" the magnetosphere for powerful geomagnetic storms. But the breach itself is not the biggest surprise. Researchers are even more amazed at the strange and unexpected way it forms, overturning long-held ideas of space physics.
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"The opening was huge—four times wider than Earth itself," says Wenhui Li, a space physicist at the University of New Hampshire who has been analyzing the data. Li's colleague Jimmy Raeder, also of New Hampshire, says "1027 particles per second were flowing into the magnetosphere—that's a 1 followed by 27 zeros. This kind of influx is an order of magnitude greater than what we thought was possible."

The event began with little warning when a gentle gust of solar wind delivered a bundle of magnetic fields from the Sun to Earth.
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The size of the breach took researchers by surprise. "We've seen things like this before," says Raeder, "but never on such a large scale. The entire day-side of the magnetosphere was open to the solar wind."
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The earth's magnetic field impacts climate: Danish study
January 12, 2009

The earths magnetic field impacts climate: Danish study
COPENHAGEN (AFP) -- The earths climate has been significantly affected by the planets magnetic field, according to a Danish study published Monday that could challenge the notion that human emissions are responsible for global warming.

"Our results show a strong correlation between the strength of the earth's magnetic field and the amount of precipitation in the tropics," one of the two Danish geophysicists behind the study, Mads Faurschou Knudsen of the geology department at Aarhus University in western Denmark, told the Videnskab journal.
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