Sigh. You're gonna make me spend half an hour typing and looking crap up, aren't you? Yeah, you are, I see it coming already.
the citations both things mention are that the sun is producing on average more sunspots than for a millenium
Except that ain't the whole story. Regarding the same scientists and the same study, but from a 3-year-newer article:
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The rise in solar activity at the beginning of the last century through the 1950s or so matches with the increase in global temperatures, Usoskin said. But the link doesn't hold up from about the 1970s to present.
"During the last few decades, the solar activity is not increasing. It has stabilized at a high level, but the Earth's climate still shows a tendency toward increasing temperatures," Usoskin explained.
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Actually, the citations both things mention are that the sun is producing on average more sunspots than for a millenium, and that sunspot activity is increasing by 0.5% per decade.
Dude, that isn't what it says. The actual article says, "Since the late 1970s, the amount of solar radiation the sun emits, during times of quiet sunspot activity, has increased by nearly .05 percent per decade, according to a NASA funded study."
Emphasis added. That's 0.05%, not 0.5% — and that's a huge difference. Hoagland himself makes the mistake, and you're just repeating Hoagland, but I just thought I'd point that out. Also, that clearly hasn't held true, since the latter part of the last decade saw the longest solar minimum since Solar Cycle 6 … in the early 19th Century.
Also, the sun's magnetic field has 'increased by 230 percent since 1901 and by 40 percent since 1964'.
However, the paper by Tett and colleagues suggests that natural effects alone cannot account for the pattern of temperature change observed over the past 50 years. They used the HadCM2 computer model to predict the Earth's global temperature during five overlapping 50-year periods (1906-56, 1916-1966, .), and then compared the results with observations. The program models both the oceans and the atmosphere, and also allows for changes in greenhouse emissions, surface albedo (i.e. reflectivity), volcanic aerosols and solar irradiance. They ran the programme with a number of different solar models, including one that matched the effects highlighted by Lockwood. The results were similar for all cases: it is not possible to distinguish between the contributions of human activity and natural variations to global warming in the first half of the century, but after 1946 increases in the concentration of man-made greenhouse gases and sulphate aerosols was the dominant effect.
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/3025
But that doesn't necessarily mean that an outside factor is affecting the sun, does it?
It means that cranks love to use developing areas of science to give their crank ideas a fake air of legitimacy. If you can show me where Hoagland or Wilcock or Dmitriev has been peer reviewed in regard to these ideas, maybe you'll change my mind. But I already know you wont' find any such peer review, because the claims are absurd and not worth the paper they would be published on.
The other one mentions a David Wilcox,
It's Wilcock, and…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Wilcock
The example given is that there was an X-18 Solar Flare in 2003, and there was apparently a significant increase in the number of tornadoes and volcanoes erupting. But I just don't see how solar activity could affect these.
Let's assume that's true (I really have no idea if it is). What about all the other X-class flares that were not accompanied by tornadoes and volcanoes and burning elephants falling from the sky?
So there's no evidence of us moving into an interstellar cloud then?
Even if we are, it doesn't matter.
It's just the Dmitriev report still bothers me; even if his interpretation is a bit, erm, crazy, the report must be based on some truth.
As I said before, Dmitriev is handled here. As I point out in that thread, we're already beyond his "ones of years," and solar activity actually plummeted after the 2001 max and stayed very quiet from 2008 until just last year, utterly contrary to his predictions.
James (guest) 25 May 2011 10:37
