Sun's rest means Earth's cooling

NASA: Quiet Sun Means Dramatic Cooling Of Earth's Upper Atmosphere

Published on 12-18-2009 Email To Friend Print Version


New measurements from a NASA satellite show a dramatic cooling in the upper atmosphere that correlates with the declining phase of the current solar cycle. For the first time, researchers can show a timely link between the Sun and the climate of Earth's thermosphere, the region above 100 km, an essential step in making accurate predictions of climate change in the high atmosphere.

Scientists from NASA's Langley Research Center and Hampton University in Hampton, Va., and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., will present these results at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco from Dec. 14 to 18.

Earth's thermosphere and mesosphere have been the least explored regions of the atmosphere. The NASA Thermosphere-Ionosphere-Mesosphere Energetics and Dynamics (TIMED) mission was developed to explore the Earth's atmosphere above 60 km altitude and was launched in December 2001. One of four instruments on the TIMED mission, the Sounding of the Atmosphere using Broadband Emission Radiometry (SABER) instrument, was specifically designed to measure the energy budget of the mesosphere and lower thermosphere. The SABER dataset now covers eight years of data and has already provided some basic insight into the heat budget of the thermosphere on a variety of timescales.

The extent of current solar minimum conditions has created a unique situation for recent SABER datasets. The end of solar cycle 23 has offered an opportunity to study the radiative cooling in the thermosphere under exceptionally quiescent conditions.

"The Sun is in a very unusual period," said Marty Mlynczak, SABER associate principal investigator and senior research scientist at NASA Langley. "The Earth's thermosphere is responding remarkably -- up to an order of magnitude decrease in infrared emission/radiative cooling by some molecules."

The TIMED measurements show a decrease in the amount of ultraviolet radiation emitted by the Sun. In addition, the amount of infrared radiation emitted from the upper atmosphere by nitric oxide molecules has decreased by nearly a factor of 10 since early 2002. These observations imply that the upper atmosphere has cooled substantially since then. The research team expects the atmosphere to heat up again as solar activity starts to pick up in the next year.

While this warming has no implications for climate change in the troposphere, a fundamental prediction of climate change theory is that the upper atmosphere will cool in response to increasing carbon dioxide. As the atmosphere cools the density will increase, which ultimately may impact satellite operations through increased drag over time.

The SABER dataset is the first global, long-term, and continuous record of the Nitric oxide (NO) and Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the thermosphere.

"We suggest that the dataset of radiative cooling of the thermosphere by NO and CO2 constitutes a first climate data record for the thermosphere," says Mlynczak.

The TIMED data provide a fundamental climate data record for validation of upper atmosphere climate models which is an essential step in making accurate predictions of climate change in the high atmosphere. SABER provides the first long-term measurements of natural variability in key terms of the upper atmosphere climate. As the TIMED mission continues, these data derived from SABER will become important in assessing long term changes due to the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

TIMED is the first mission in the Solar Terrestrial Probes Program within the Heliophysics Division in NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

For more information:

http://stp.gsfc.nasa.gov/missions/timed/timed.htm

NASA Langley press releases are available automatically by sending an e-mail message to langley-news-request@lists.nasa.gov with the word Subscribe in the subject line. You will receive an e-mail asking you to visit a link to confirm the action. To unsubscribe, send an e-mail message to langley-news-request@lists.nasa.gov with the word Unsubscribe in the subject line.

Glacier is advancing

Warming? - AK's Hubbard Glacier Advancing 7 Ft Per Day!

From Robert Felix
IceAgeNow.com
5-14-9


This past week, climatologist Cliff Harris of the Coeur d'Alene Press received an astounding report from Yakutat, Alaska, concerning the Hubbard Glacier. The glacier is advancing toward Gilbert Point near Yakutat at the astonishing rate of two meters (seven feet) per day!

"The Army Corp of Engineers special Web site for the Hubbard Glacier - www.glacierresearch.com - contains some absolutely amazing photos of the advancing glacier," says Harris. "One can easily see the expanding wall of ice. It's HUGE!" (The website may tell you that viewing is restricted, but if you keep clicking on stuff you'll find the secret.)

"Even the dedicated global warmists need to know the truth about the recent extended period of global cooling caused by our 'SILENT SUN,' Harris continues.

'When' and 'if' the Hubbard Glacier eventually closes the Russell Fjord, the fjord will fill with fresh water, becoming a 30-mile-long lake creating a new 40,000-cubic-feet-per-second river system. This will have an extremely 'negative' economic impact on Yakutat and the surrounding regions. It's possible that at the shocking rate of seven feet per day in its advancement, the Hubbard Glacier could close the fjord by later this summer, or even prior to that time, if the current rate of advancement speeds up, say to perhaps 10 or 12 feet per day.

"Not only has our 'SILENT SUN,' almost completely devoid of sunspots, been at least partially responsible for the expanding glaciers in Alaska, Norway and elsewhere, but 'Ole Sol' is likewise, in my not-so-humble climatological opinion, to blame for our recent colder, snowier and wetter spring seasons in North Idaho and the surrounding Inland Empire.

"Heavier snows -- up to six inches or more above 5,000 feet -- have accumulated in the nearby mountains on a daily basis since early May. It may be mid June or later before Glacier Park's 'Going-to-the-Sun Highway' opens. (Next week, we'll take a look at what's happening to the glaciers in the park. Are they also beginning to expand? Find out the truth in just seven days.)"

http://www.iceagenow.com/Alaskas_Hubbard_G...eet_per_day.htm

Glaciers in Norway are growing again

Glaciers in Norway Growing Again
__________________________

27 Nov 08 - "Scandinavian nation reverses trend, mirrors results in Alaska, elsewhere.


Norway’s Svartisen_Glacier (Source: NRK)

"After years of decline, glaciers in Norway are again growing, reports the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate (NVE). The actual magnitude of the growth, which appears to have begun over the last two years, has not yet been quantified, says NVE Senior Engineer Hallgeir Elvehøy.

"The flow rate of many glaciers has also declined. Glacier flow ultimately acts to reduce accumulation, as the ice moves to lower, warmer elevations.

"The original trend had been fairly rapid decline since the year 2000.

"The developments were originally reported by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK).

"DailyTech has previously reported on the growth in Alaskan glaciers, reversing a 250-year trend of loss. Some glaciers in Canada, California, and New Zealand are also growing, as the result of both colder temperatures and increased snowfall.

"Elvehøy says that the glaciers were even smaller during the 'Medieval Warm Period' of the Viking Era, prior to around the year 1350.

"Not all Norwegian glaciers appear to be affected, most notably those in the Jotenheimen region of Southern Norway."

http://www.dailytech.com/Glaciers+in+Norwa...rticle13540.htm

Where did the sunspots go-an ice age cometh?

Where did all the sunspots go - an ice age cometh?

Lawrence Solomon
Financial Post
Sat, 31 May 2008 15:22 UTC
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/158601-W...-ice-age-cometh


The spotless Sun, as it appeared yesterday at 12:48 p.m. The Sun's spotlessness is giving rise to speculation of another Little Ice Age.

With the debate focused on a warming Earth, the icy consequences of a cooler future have not been considered

You probably haven't heard much of Solar Cycle 24, the current cycle that our sun has entered, and I hope you don't. If Solar Cycle 24 becomes a household term, your lifestyle could be taking a dramatic turn for the worse. That of your children and their children could fare worse still, say some scientists, because Solar Cycle 24 could mark a time of profound long-term change in the climate. As put by geophysicist Philip Chapman, a former NASA astronaut-scientist and former president of the National Space Society, "It is time to put aside the global warming dogma, at least to begin contingency planning about what to do if we are moving into another little ice age." The sun, of late, is remarkably free of eruptions: It has lost its spots. By this point in the solar cycle, sunspots would ordinarily have been present in goodly numbers. Today's spotlessness - what alarms Dr. Chapman and others - may be an anomaly of some kind, and the sun may soon revert to form. But if it doesn't - and with each passing day, the speculation in the scientific community grows that it will not - we could be entering a new epoch that few would welcome.

Sunspots have been well documented throughout human history, starting in the fourth century BC, with written descriptions by Gan De, a Chinese astronomer. In 1128, an English monk, John of Worcester, was the first person known to have drawn sunspots, and after the telescope's arrival in the early 1600s, observations and drawings became commonplace, including by such luminaries as Galileo Galilei. Then, to the astonishment of astronomers, they saw the sunspots diminish and die out altogether.

This was the case during the Little Ice Age, a period starting in the 15th or 16th century and lasting centuries, says NASA's Goddard Space Centre, which links the absence of sunspots to the cold that then descended on Earth. During the coldest part of the Little Ice Age, a time known as the Maunder Minimum (named after English astronomer Edward Maunder), astronomers saw only about 50 sunspots over a 30-year period, less than one half of 1% of the sunspots that would normally have been expected. Other Minimums - times of low sunspot activity - also corresponded to times of unusual cold.

The consequences of the Little Ice Age, because they occurred in relatively recent times, have come down to us through literature and the arts as well as from historians and scientists, government and business records. When Shakespeare wrote of "lawn as white as driven snow," he had first-hand experience - Europe was bitterly cold in his day, a sharp contrast to the very warm weather that preceded his birth. During the Little Ice Age, the River Thames froze over, the Dutch developed the ice skate and the great artists of the day learned to love a new genre: the winter landscape.

In what had been a warm Europe , adaptations were not all happy: Growing seasons in England and Continental Europe generally became short and unreliable, which led to shortages and famine. These hardships were nothing compared to the more northerly countries: Glaciers advanced rapidly in Greenland, Iceland, Scandinavia and North America, making vast tracts of land uninhabitable. The Arctic pack ice extended so far south that several reports describe Eskimos landing their kayaks in Scotland. Finland's population fell by one-third, Iceland's by half, the Viking colonies in Greenland were abandoned altogether, as were many Inuit communities. The cold in North America spread so far south that, in the winter of 1780, New York Harbor froze, enabling people to walk from Manhattan to Staten Island.

In the same way that the Earth shivered when sunspots disappeared, the Earth warmed when sunspot activity became pronounced. The warm period about 1000 years ago known as the Medieval Warm Period - a time of bounty in which grapes grew in England and Greenland was colonized - also was a time of high sunspot activity, called the Medieval Maximum. Since 1900, Earth has experienced what astronomers call "the Modern Maximum" - the 20th century has again been a time of high sunspot activity.

But the 1900s are gone, along with the high temperatures that accompanied them. The last 10 years have seen no increase in temperatures - they reached a plateau and then remained there - and the last year saw a precipitous decline. How much lower and for how long the temperatures will fall, if at all, no one yet knows - the science is far from settled on what drives climate.

But many are watching the sun for answers, and for good reason. Several renowned scientists have been predicting for some time that the world could enter a period of cooling right around now, with consequences that could be dire. "The next little ice age would be much worse than the previous one and much more harmful than anything warming may do," believes Dr. Chapman. "There are many more people now and we have become dependent on a few temperate agricultural areas, especially in the U.S. and Canada. Global warming would increase agricultural output, but global cooling will decrease it."

We are now at the beginning of Solar Cycle 24, so named because it is the 24th consecutive cycle that astronomers have listed, starting with the first cycle that began in March, 1755, and ended in June, 1766. Each cycle lasts an average of approximately 11 years; each is marked by sunspots that first erupt in the mid latitudes of the sun, and then, over the course of the 11 years, erupt progressively toward the sun's equator; each is marked by a change in the polarity of the sun's hemispheres; each changes the temperature on Earth in ways that humans don't fully understand, but cannot in all honesty deny.

Sunspots, earthquakes, life on earth

Sunspots: Second least active year since 1900 – Portends Cooling

31 Dec 08 – (Excerpts) “2008 Ends Spotless and with 266 Spotless Days, the #2 Least Active Year Since 1900, Portends Cooling, says meteorologist Joseph D’Aleo

http://www.iceagenow.com/Sunspots-Second_l...nds_Cooling.htm

“This will bring the total number of sunspotless days this month to 28 and for the year to 266, clearly enough to make 2008, the second least active solar year since 1900.

“The total number of spotless days this solar minimum is now at around 510 days since the last maximum. The earliest the minimum of the sunspot cycles can be is July 2008, which would make the cycle length 12 years 3 months, longest since cycle 9 in 1848. If the sun stays quiet for a few more months we will rival the early 1800s, the Dalton Minimum which fits with the 213 year cycle which begin with the solar minimum in the late 1790s.


“Looking ahead, put that together with the flip of the PDO in the Pacific to cold and you have alarming signals that this cooling of the last 7 years will continue and accelerate.”



See entire article: http://icecap.us/



Or see:

http://www.investors.com/editorial/editori...315533893763712

Thanks to Tom Weatherby for this link


30 Dec 08 - (Excerpts) Ask yourself this question: What makes our planet green?

If you guessed CO2, you're right. CO2 is to trees and foliage and all vegetation what oxygen is to humans — they can't survive without it. It's what makes them green and healthy.

The more CO2, the greener and healthy our planet. Yet the global warming fanatics are classifying CO2 as a pollutant and blaming it for dangerously warming our (fast cooling) planet.

How stupid do they think we are?

CO2 levels have skyrocketed since 2000, and guess what's happened?

It’s gotten colder, that's what happened.

Then there's the latest panic about the alleged plight of the polar bears. According to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) polar bears face extinction — but not quite yet.

According to the WWF, "With 20-25,000 polar bears living in the wild, the species is not currently endangered, but its future is far from certain."

They go on to assure us that, "If current warming trends continue unabated, scientists believe that polar bears will be vulnerable to extinction within the next century."

To help stop that from happening, the WWF would like you to send it money.

Like all solemn pronouncements from the warmiacs, the predictions concerning polar bear extinction is based solely on computer models, not on what's happening now. Remember, the group said, “The species is not currently endangered.” And what's happening now is the swelling of the polar bear population, which grew from a low of 5,000 to 10,000 in the '50s and '60s, according to The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

Moreover, a 2002 U.S. Geological Survey of wildlife in the Arctic Refuge Coastal Plain noted that the polar bear populations “may now be near historic highs."

Asks botanist David Bellamy, a famed U.K. environmental campaigner, former lecturer at Durham University, and host of a popular U.K. TV series on wildlife: “Why scare the families of the world with tales that polar bears are heading for extinction when there is good evidence that there are now twice as many of these iconic animals, most doing well in the Arctic than there were 20 years ago?”

If you want something real to worry about, try an eruption of the Yellowstone caldera where scientists have discovered that the ground is over 70 centimeters higher than in was in 1923 — indicating a massive swelling underneath the park.

There was a swarm of 16 earthquakes in 24 hours this past weekend. The reservoir is filling with magma at a staggering rate. The volcano erupts with a calendar-like cycle of every 600,000-650,000 years.

The last eruption was more than 640,000 years ago.

Last time it erupted, 642,000 years ago, it ejected 1,000 cubic kilometers of magma into the air. If this happened in today’s world, it would kill millions and cover most of the United States in a layer of ash at least a centimeter thick. The lighter ash would rise up into the atmosphere, initiating a volcanic winter and ruining crops worldwide.

This is something genuine Al Gore could get really his teeth on. Instead of recommending carbon caps, he could suggest sacrificing a few virgins to the god Vulcan. It would be cheaper than cap and trade.

See entire article:
http://www.newsmax.com/brennan/Arctic_Warm.../30/166465.html

Thanks to Rick Fulton for this link

See more info on Yellowstone:
www.armageddononline.org/yellowstone_caldera.php

Earth on the brink of an ICE AGE

Earth on the Brink of an Ice Age

11.01.2009 Source: Pravda.Ru
http://english.pravda.ru/science/earth/106...earth_ice_age-0


The earth is now on the brink of entering another Ice Age, according to a large and compelling body of evidence from within the field of climate science. Many sources of data which provide our knowledge base of long-term climate change indicate that the warm, twelve thousand year-long Holocene period will rather soon be coming to an end, and then the earth will return to Ice Age conditions for the next 100,000 years.

Ice cores, ocean sediment cores, the geologic record, and studies of ancient plant and animal populations all demonstrate a regular cyclic pattern of Ice Age glacial maximums which each last about 100,000 years, separated by intervening warm interglacials, each lasting about 12,000 years.

Most of the long-term climate data collected from various sources also shows a strong correlation with the three astronomical cycles which are together known as the Milankovich cycles. The three Milankovich cycles include the tilt of the earth, which varies over a 41,000 year period; the shape of the earth’s orbit, which changes over a period of 100,000 years; and the Precession of the Equinoxes, also known as the earth’s ‘wobble’, which gradually rotates the direction of the earth’s axis over a period of 26,000 years. According to the Milankovich theory of Ice Age causation, these three astronomical cycles, each of which effects the amount of solar radiation which reaches the earth, act together to produce the cycle of cold Ice Age maximums and warm interglacials.

Elements of the astronomical theory of Ice Age causation were first presented by the French mathematician Joseph Adhemar in 1842, it was developed further by the English prodigy Joseph Croll in 1875, and the theory was established in its present form by the Czech mathematician Milutin Milankovich in the 1920s and 30s. In 1976 the prestigious journal “Science” published a landmark paper by John Imbrie, James Hays, and Nicholas Shackleton entitled “Variations in the Earth's orbit: Pacemaker of the Ice Ages,” which described the correlation which the trio of scientist/authors had found between the climate data obtained from ocean sediment cores and the patterns of the astronomical Milankovich cycles. Since the late 1970s, the Milankovich theory has remained the predominant theory to account for Ice Age causation among climate scientists, and hence the Milankovich theory is always described in textbooks of climatology and in encyclopaedia articles about the Ice Ages.

In their 1976 paper Imbrie, Hays, and Shackleton wrote that their own climate forecasts, which were based on sea-sediment cores and the Milankovich cycles, "… must be qualified in two ways. First, they apply only to the natural component of future climatic trends - and not to anthropogenic effects such as those due to the burning of fossil fuels. Second, they describe only the long-term trends, because they are linked to orbital variations with periods of 20,000 years and longer. Climatic oscillations at higher frequencies are not predicted... the results indicate that the long-term trend over the next 20,000 years is towards extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation and cooler climate."

During the 1970s the famous American astronomer Carl Sagan and other scientists began promoting the theory that ‘greenhouse gasses’ such as carbon dioxide, or CO2, produced by human industries could lead to catastrophic global warming. Since the 1970s the theory of ‘anthropogenic global warming’ (AGW) has gradually become accepted as fact by most of the academic establishment, and their acceptance of AGW has inspired a global movement to encourage governments to make pivotal changes to prevent the worsening of AGW.

The central piece of evidence that is cited in support of the AGW theory is the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph which was presented by Al Gore in his 2006 film “An Inconvenient Truth.” The ‘hockey stick’ graph shows an acute upward spike in global temperatures which began during the 1970s and continued through the winter of 2006/07. However, this warming trend was interrupted when the winter of 2007/8 delivered the deepest snow cover to the Northern Hemisphere since 1966 and the coldest temperatures since 2001. It now appears that the current Northern Hemisphere winter of 2008/09 will probably equal or surpass the winter of 2007/08 for both snow depth and cold temperatures.

The main flaw in the AGW theory is that its proponents focus on evidence from only the past one thousand years at most, while ignoring the evidence from the past million years -- evidence which is essential for a true understanding of climatology. The data from paleoclimatology provides us with an alternative and more credible explanation for the recent global temperature spike, based on the natural cycle of Ice Age maximums and interglacials.

In 1999 the British journal “Nature” published the results of data derived from glacial ice cores collected at the Russia ’s Vostok station in Antarctica during the 1990s. The Vostok ice core data includes a record of global atmospheric temperatures, atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gases, and airborne particulates starting from 420,000 years ago and continuing through history up to our present time.

The graph of the Vostok ice core data shows that the Ice Age maximums and the warm interglacials occur within a regular cyclic pattern, the graph-line of which is similar to the rhythm of a heartbeat on an electrocardiogram tracing. The Vostok data graph also shows that changes in global CO2 levels lag behind global temperature changes by about eight hundred years. What that indicates is that global temperatures precede or cause global CO2 changes, and not the reverse. In other words, increasing atmospheric CO2 is not causing global temperature to rise; instead the natural cyclic increase in global temperature is causing global CO2 to rise.

The reason that global CO2 levels rise and fall in response to the global temperature is because cold water is capable of retaining more CO2 than warm water. That is why carbonated beverages loose their carbonation, or CO2, when stored in a warm environment. We store our carbonated soft drinks, wine, and beer in a cool place to prevent them from loosing their ‘fizz’, which is a feature of their carbonation, or CO2 content. The earth is currently warming as a result of the natural Ice Age cycle, and as the oceans get warmer, they release increasing amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere.

Because the release of CO2 by the warming oceans lags behind the changes in the earth’s temperature, we should expect to see global CO2 levels continue to rise for another eight hundred years after the end of the earth’s current Interglacial warm period. We should already be eight hundred years into the coming Ice Age before global CO2 levels begin to drop in response to the increased chilling of the world’s oceans.

The Vostok ice core data graph reveals that global CO2 levels regularly rose and fell in a direct response to the natural cycle of Ice Age minimums and maximums during the past four hundred and twenty thousand years. Within that natural cycle, about every 110,000 years global temperatures, followed by global CO2 levels, have peaked at approximately the same levels which they are at today.

About 325,000 years ago, at the peak of a warm interglacial, global temperature and CO2 levels were higher than they are today. Today we are again at the peak, and near to the end, of a warm interglacial, and the earth is now due to enter the next Ice Age. If we are lucky, we may have a few years to prepare for it. The Ice Age will return, as it always has, in its regular and natural cycle, with or without any influence from the effects of AGW.

The AGW theory is based on data that is drawn from a ridiculously narrow span of time and it demonstrates a wanton disregard for the ‘big picture’ of long-term climate change. The data from paleoclimatology, including ice cores, sea sediments, geology, paleobotany and zoology, indicate that we are on the verge of entering another Ice Age, and the data also shows that severe and lasting climate change can occur within only a few years. While concern over the dubious threat of Anthropogenic Global Warming continues to distract the attention of people throughout the world, the very real threat of the approaching and inevitable Ice Age, which will render large parts of the Northern Hemisphere uninhabitable, is being foolishly ignored.