10 replies to this topic

[Rogerdodger]

"The sun is behaving in an unexpected and very interesting way."
"It turns out that none of our models were totally correct,"
The sun has gone more than two years without a significant solar flare.
"we've never seen anything quite like it"

Researchers have known about the solar cycle since the mid-1800s. Graphs of sunspot numbers resemble a roller coaster, going up and down with an approximately 11-year period. At first glance, it looks like a regular pattern, but predicting the peaks and valleys has proven troublesome. Cycles vary in length from about 9 to 14 years. Some peaks are high, others low. The valleys are usually brief, lasting only a couple of years, but sometimes they stretch out much longer. In the 17th century the sun plunged into a 70-year period of spotlessness known as the Maunder Minimum that still baffles scientists.

The 1859 storm--known as the "Carrington Event" after astronomer Richard Carrington who witnessed the instigating solar flare--electrified transmission cables, set fires in telegraph offices, and produced Northern Lights so bright that people could read newspapers by their red and green glow. A recent report by the National Academy of Sciences found that if a similar storm occurred today, it could cause $1 to 2 trillion in damages to society's high-tech infrastructure and require four to ten years for complete recovery. For comparison, Hurricane Katrina caused "only" $80 to 125 billion in damage.
LINK

[Cirrus]

This will really make Global Warming "Enthusiasts" look terribly stupid over the coming decade. Actually, if you examine the (unbiased) data the earth is on a cooling trend that started several years ago. I can't believe this C02 GW stuff has gone this far. I guess no one cares about truth anymore.

[wxyzzy]

Sustainability is the story of the next 50 years. It can be viewed as either a problem or an opportunity. For us it is a problem because we are accustomed to being a wasteful society. In the great depression, we we much less so. Toyota and Honda are best positioned to take advantage of the trend. Toyota Production System is based on waste elimination, and so the step to a zero waste world is easy. In the west, we glummed on to the notion of Lean instead of waste elimination. Womack and Johnson coined the word to appeal to executives because it sounded like low cost to them. Toyota is probably still smiling about that.

[stocks]

100 Billion dollar catastrophes waiting to happen


"The companies’ models disagreed here and there, but on one point they spoke with a single voice: four natural perils had outgrown the insurers’ ability to insure them — U.S. hurricane, California earthquake, European winter storm and Japanese earthquake. The insurance industry was prepared to lose $30 billion in a single event, once every 10 years. The models showed that a sole hurricane in Florida wouldn’t have to work too hard to create $100 billion in losses. There were concentrations of wealth in the world that defied the logic of insurance. And most of them were in America."


http://www.traders-t...p;hl=earthquake

Edited by stocks, 30 May 2009 - 09:24 PM.

[shanabe]

I follow weather/climate as a personal hobby (along with investing my trading account) so I've followed this subject for about 2 decades now. Both sides make (sometimes) compelling arguments. However, from what I have read, solar cycle variation has long been noted as having an almost direct correlation to variance in earth's "avg" temperature. View a graph of sun spots (indicator of strength of solar cycle - more spots means more solar "strength / intensity" of the sun's output) alongside temperature and you see a somewhat sinusoidal characteristic in each - and they are in-phase. Which implies cause & effect. There is no other (known) cycle (including atmospheric CO2) that produces such results. Data goes back hundreds of years (first sun spot observations began w/ Monks in British Isles hundreds of years ago...and they also began recording temperature and other natural events). Which is not to say that Global Warming is complete hogwash - but there ARE significant scientific community concerns re: the AGW Theory ("A" is for "anthropogenic" meaning "man-made"). And that's just it - its Theory which hasn't withstood ALL challenges to be accepted as fact/law. At least using the Scientific Method. Using the political method, the Theory has long since been considered fact. The troubling part of a lot of Global Warming "evidence" is that it appears to be a function of the very recent past - during which time the past 2-3 solar cycles have been unusually strong. Going back to the correlation between sun/earth temp...it's not the first time "warm" effects have been seen -- but they are trotted out as evidence of GW. Some of this doesn't pass the most basic high school stupid test. Greenland was so warm at one point that the Vikings settled it...long before the industrial revolution...as a basic example. The coming and going of snowcap ontop of Mt. Kilimanjaro is another...and Antarctica is actually COOLING...though you wouldn't know it by the breathless hyperventilating over ice-berg calving... Problem here is that the world is marching down the path of making expensive decisions potentially based on faulty basis. Nothing good usually comes of such decisions and many smack of social engineering / expansion of do-gooder regulation/power/control. Reducing pollution and dependence on oil (particularly foreign sourced) are good (necessary?) objectives but some of it (cap & trade) is just plain assinine.

[Cirrus]

Great post shanabe. What do you make of some of the very long term studies that find C02 levels are an effect and not a cause of global temp moves?

[mmm]

Everyone who wants to understand the " other side " of this argument should follow these links.

http://video.google....082535546754758


http://www.ac.wwu.ed...ny/research.htm


Jim Puplava at his financial sense web site interviewed one of these Scientists a few weeks or months ago. After going over their arguments for me this anthropogenic global warming is a bunch of crap and will be a complete disaster if we go ahead and try to make laws to stop global warming from happening. John Mauldin in one of his outside the box essays had a guest on who also went through the math on the costs of trying to stop global warming for the USA. Again; it would be an economic and financial disaster for the USA to try and enact such legislation esp. when the rest of the world has no intention of handicapping their economies with such nonsense. It will cripple our economy and give a strong advantage to the emerging market economies and the rest of the world to take away our economic world dominance.

[Rogerdodger]

I didn't want to go to the GW debate. As there's no end to it.
Just wanted to show the potential for unexpected trouble from the heavens.

But it's hard to conclude that man's activities effect the Sun, although throughout history the egotist in the human spirit tends to think it's a bigger player in this enormous universe than it is.
Humans generally will offer sacrifices to their gods when nature "changes" and becomes uncomfortable.

Edited by Rogerdodger, 31 May 2009 - 10:34 AM.

[OEXCHAOS]

This will really make Global Warming "Enthusiasts" look terribly stupid over the coming decade. Actually, if you examine the (unbiased) data the earth is on a cooling trend that started several years ago. I can't believe this C02 GW stuff has gone this far. I guess no one cares about truth anymore.

This has been an area of study for me over the past couple years. I have more than my fair share of environmental concern, but I've always been a little jaded about the politics. Even so, something started smelling a bit funny about the global warming thing. Too much hysteria, way too much "certainty" about what must be done to CHANGE THE TEMPERATURE OF THE EARTH (for goodness sake!!!).

So I did a little research and there was data that seemed to show warming. In fact, some of it seemed alarming. Except that it didn't seem to jibe with anecdotal. Yellow flag. I'd look into that later.

Then, I do some more research. Seems that there are other cycles at work here too. I think it was mss who posted the solar cycle chart that caught my eye. Sure looked like a good, long term correlation there. More research and more data and to me, it sure seemed more predictive than most indicators the best of use for timing the market. It predicted cooling for the last couple years. Guess what? We got cooling for the last couple years. Hmmmm.

Meanwhile, all the AGW predictions are based upon complex, arcane, and non-transparent models...models that haven't been able to predict anything with any accuracy so far.

Analogy: What do you trade with, a "black box" model that back tested yeilds dramatic returns but in real time hasn't done diddly, or a transparent and time tested approach that is hitting all the major turns in real time?

Then, I get back to more reading on this stuff. Red flags all over the place. Bad data, bad modeling, bias all over the place. The killers for me were two fold. 1) the willful misrepresentation of the Antarctic "warming", by applying data from volcanically active areas to the rest of the continent, and 2) the utter failure of the NOAA standards for siting thermometers to be met. Is is any surprise that warming is shown when over the past 30 years, air conditioners, buildings, parking lots and grills are added near temperature stations?

Here's a cute example: http://wattsupwithth...rnhusker-state/

More and more of the studies that I originally looked at that seemed to show warming has come into question. Some of it has been the result of apparent academic fraud. Much of the original data has been withheld as have the algorithms and code used to "analyze" the data. Basically, the studies have not reproducible by anyone other than those hand selected by the original researchers. If it CAN be reproduced.

Now, maybe there is a problem with CO2 (it has NOT been proven, AT ALL), and maybe there IS some significant global warming, but the data that I've seen is not at all clear on that and frankly suggests that any warming was been trivial or statistically insignificant over longer periods of time.

At the very least, it would seem extremely prudent to carefully audit all prior studies before we enact any legislation that would cost us billions and likely yield NOTHING.

Mark

[OEXCHAOS]

Great post Shanabe. Better articulated than mine.

I'm moving this thread to the Sanity and Health Board, but I'm leaving a link. Folks with any sort of an interest in this should trot over to the board and take a gander from time to time. It's really interesting, but it doesn't belong on FF in general. That said, you guys ought to get a heads up from time to time. I'm glad Roger posted this.

Oh and for those who are interested in some of the science going on (and the problems with such), here's a link to a serious critique of the work of one of the AGW "Biggies":

http://wattsupwithth...t-al-falsified/