Like tropo--except it's AM!

[Ric Werme]

>> Cooling has started, but it may not be due to solar forcing.
 
> It has?

Never give someone an off-topic opening like that!  :-) I've tried to make
a comprenhesive list of the most important points here, there's a huge
amount of complexity that should be considered, but the links and their
homes address a lot of that.  The best overall source is
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/

Why does so little of this make it into radio news?  Or other media?

Warming appears to have peaked around 1998, and serious cooling started in
2007.  This isn't quite the graph I was looking for, but it will do.
"Poly" refers to a 3rd order polynomial fit which may overstate things at the
endpoints.  However, it's better than the "Hockey Stick" curve which is
debunked at best and fraudulent at worst:

http://www.holtlane.plus.com/images/uah_anomaly.jpg


There is a recent story about the Arctic having a 50/50 chance of melting this
year, but I wouldn't bet on it:

http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png

Antarctic sea ice is at record levels earlier this year, but all we hear
about is a small ice shelf collapse when the surrounding ice was a million
sq km above average.  That's come down some recently but is still above
average:

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.south.jpg


More on the sun, long solar cycles, and cooling:

http://www.intellicast.com/Community/Content.aspx?ref=rss&a=130
http://www.warwickhughes.com/agri/Solar_Arch_NY_Mar2_08.pdf

Ocean currents and solar output correlate with temperature better than
CO2, especially recently:
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/01/25/warming-trend-pdo-and-solar-correlate-better-than-co2/


CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but it's contributed about all it can:

http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/

It would be nice to have a few more years' data, but that would spoil the
journey.  In closing, NASA's Jim Hansen brought the risks of runaway global
warming to the US Congress in June 1988.  His data reported that the Earth was
some 0.39 degrees Celcius above the longterm average that month.  He came back
in June 2008 saying the same things.  His June 2008 anomaly was 0.26 degrees
Celcius.

   -Ric Werme
-- 
  Coming soon - which way is the climate changing?
http://WermeNH.com/climate/science.html    ric@WermeNH.com