Myths of global warming dispelled

Eric Berger over at Sciguy Blog has been beating the AGW drum for a while now. And while I like and respect Eric, I think he is wrong. I'll tell you why.

First off, I'm going to concede that the Earth would appear to be warming at a rate of about half a degree centigrade per decade.

Now before all you Al Gore fans start falling all over yourselves writhing in ecstasy that a conservative agreed with you, you might want to hear me out.

CO2 increases have historically lagged behind temperature increases. The reason has always been that most CO2 is sequestered in the oceans. Solubility of CO2 in water is inversely proportional to the temperature. The higher the temp, the lower the solubility. That is why a can of Coke left in the sun will expand and burst. The CO2 is boiling out of solution and taking up more space in the can. This is not news, this has been known for a century or more.

Current climatologists insist that the old paradigm of CO2 lagging temperature is no longer valid because we are generating far more CO2 into the atmosphere than the Earth has ever seen before. While I will concede that we are releasing far more CO2 than ever before, I am not yet prepared to assign a value to the heating value of the excess CO2. The reason is that there are far more variables to account for than this one.

In prehistoric times when most of the planet was covered in vegetation and animals, not only was CO2 released quite abundantly, but methane was as well. Methane is 23 times more efficient as a greenhouse gas than CO2. So strictly comparing CO2 levels then and now doesn't begin to tell the whole story. But even if it did, there is a much larger elephant in the room. The Sun.

Back in the 19th century, a man by the name of James Croll postulated that orbital harmonics would set up cycles of heating and cooling. His calculations were off, but his reasoning was sound. In the 1920's and 1930's a Serbian working in Belgrade by the name of Milutin Milankovitch recognized that there were three orbital mechanics cycles with differing periods that interacted to seriously affect the amount of and location of incoming solar radiation. At the time, his theory was dismissed by geologists, but by 1965, after new techniques in radiocarbon and isotopic dating were available, Milankovitch's ideas were no longer so easily dismissed. In 1966, one of Milankovitch's defenders, an Italian working at the University of Chicago by the name of Cesare Emiliani, launched what became the "Global Cooling" scare by postulating that the current warming trend was coming to a close soon and that within a millennia, we would be in the throws of another Ice Age. Later in 1972, he postulated that CO2 generation by humans might be able to overcome the glaciation. So in a way we can credit Emiliani with both "Global Cooling' as well as "Global Warming".

But that is far from the end of the story when it comes to extraterrestrial influences.

The sun has yet another trick up it's sleeve and it has recently been discovered by a Dane by the name of Henrick Svensmark. Nuclear Physicists have used something called a cloud chamber for nearly a century to detect particle tracks from nuclear experiments. A super-cooled, super-saturated chamber held in a state with not quite enough energy to begin nucleation of the moisture. Any charged particles passing through would trigger nucleation along the track of the particle's path. Magnetic fields are used to separate positive vs negative particles.

Dr. Svensmark has performed an experiment called SKY (which means "cloud" in danish) where he showed that the very same thing happens in the stratosphere when cosmic rays impact the upper atmosphere. This would appear to be a major driver for the formation of cloud cover.
But cosmic rays are not constant. They ebb and flow depending on two things: the level of solar activity, as well as the geomagnetic field strength. Increased solar activity not only warms the earth more due to an increase in radiation but it deflects cosmic rays away from the earth more. The geomagnetic field also deflects cosmic rays to a lesser extent but since our magnetic field is collapsing with the impending pole flip, it is not deflecting as much as it used to. The result is that while our field is collapsing, currently the sun is overwhelming the effect because it is in an active cycle. But that cycle is coming to an end. Solar activity follows approximately an 11.1 year cycle (varying from 9-14 years). Magnetic pole flips are more irregular occurring between 1 and 5 times every million years.

There is one more mechanism in play that affects cloud cover: Aerosols. These can be dust from windstorms in the Sahara, ash from volcanic eruptions, forest fires, and here is another dirty little secret, they can come from human pollution as well. Since the 1940's scientists in Norway, the US, Russia, and Israel have all noted a 15% drop in solar radiation making it to the ground. They postulate that human pollution is helping to form cloud cover. As a result of that research an experiment was done. Utilizing GPS, satellite imagery, and calibrated radiometers. scientists took simultaneous solar radiation readings in the middle of the Pacific Ocean both under the pollution plume coming off the North American continent, as well as farther north where the sky was clear of the aerosols coning off North America. They found a 20% difference in radiation making it to the surface. As the Clean Air Act has taken hold, we have put fewer and fewer aerosols into the atmosphere. This has had the ironic effect of INCREASING the amount of solar radiation reaching the earth thereby INCREASING global warming.

None of these variables are part of the current climate models. If and when they are incorporated into the models, we may find we know far less about the climate than we think we do.