Text 29153, 235 rader
Skriven 2007-06-21 19:06:00 av Jeff Binkley (1:226/600)
Ärende: Global Warming
======================
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/financialpost/comment/story.html?id=5
97d0677-2a05-47b4-b34f-b84068db11f4&p=4


Read the sunspots
The mud at the bottom of B.C. fjords reveals that solar output drives 
climate change - and that we should prepare now for dangerous global 
cooling

R. TIMOTHY PATTERSON, Financial Post
Published: Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Politicians and environmentalists these days convey the impression that 
climate-change research is an exceptionally dull field with little left 
to discover. We are assured by everyone from David Suzuki to Al Gore to 
Prime Minister Stephen Harper that "the science is settled." At the 
recent G8 summit, German Chancellor Angela Merkel even attempted to 
convince world leaders to play God by restricting carbon-dioxide 
emissions to a level that would magically limit the rise in world 
temperatures to 2C.

The fact that science is many years away from properly understanding 
global climate doesn't seem to bother our leaders at all. Inviting 
testimony only from those who don't question political orthodoxy on the 
issue, parliamentarians are charging ahead with the impossible and 
expensive goal of "stopping global climate change." Liberal MP Ralph 
Goodale's June 11 House of Commons assertion that Parliament should have 
"a real good discussion about the potential for carbon capture and 
sequestration in dealing with carbon dioxide, which has tremendous 
potential for improving the climate, not only here in Canada but around 
the world," would be humorous were he, and even the current government, 
not deadly serious about devoting vast resources to this hopeless 
crusade.

Climate stability has never been a feature of planet Earth. The only 
constant about climate is change; it changes continually and, at times, 
quite rapidly. Many times in the past, temperatures were far higher than 
today, and occasionally, temperatures were colder. As recently as 6,000 
years ago, it was about 3C warmer than now. Ten thousand years ago, 
while the world was coming out of the thou-sand-year-long "Younger 
Dryas" cold episode, temperatures rose as much as 6C in a decade -- 100 
times faster than the past century's 0.6C warming that has so upset 
environmentalists.

The Deniers: The National Post's series on scientists who buck the 
conventional wisdom on climate science.
The National Post is a Canadian national newspaper. Here is the series 
so far:

Statistics needed -- The Deniers Part I
Warming is real -- and has benefits -- The Deniers Part II
The hurricane expert who stood up to UN junk science -- The Deniers Part 
III
Polar scientists on thin ice -- The Deniers Part IV
The original denier: into the cold -- The Deniers Part V
The sun moves climate change -- The Deniers Part VI
Will the sun cool us? -- The Deniers Part VII
The limits of predictability -- The Deniers Part VIII
Look to Mars for the truth on global warming -- The Deniers Part IX
Limited role for C02 -- the Deniers Part X
End the chill -- The Deniers Part XI
Clouded research -- The Deniers Part XII
Allegre's second thoughts -- The Deniers XIII
The heat's in the sun -- The Deniers XIV
Unsettled Science -- The Deniers XV
Bitten by the IPCC -- The Deniers XVI
Little ice age is still within us -- The Deniers XVII
Fighting climate 'fluff' -- The Deniers XVIII
Science, not politics -- The Deniers XIX
Gore's guru disagreed -- The Deniers XX
The ice-core man -- The Deniers XXI
Some restraint in Rome -- The Deniers XXII
Discounting logic -- The Deniers XXIII
Dire forecasts aren't new -- The Deniers XXIV
They call this a consensus? - Part XXV
NASA chief Michael Griffin silenced - Part XXVI
Forget warming - beware the new ice age - Part XXVII

Climate-change research is now literally exploding with new findings. 
Since the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the field has had more research than in 
all previous years combined and the discoveries are completely 
shattering the myths. For example, I and the first-class scientists I 
work with are consistently finding excellent correlations between the 
regular fluctuations in the brightness of the sun and earthly climate. 
This is not surprising. The sun and the stars are the ultimate source of 
all energy on the planet.

My interest in the current climate-change debate was triggered in 1998, 
when I was funded by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council 
strategic project grant to determine if there were regular cycles in 
West Coast fish productivity. As a result of wide swings in the 
populations of anchovies, herring and other commercially important West 
Coast fish stock, fisheries managers were having a very difficult time 
establishing appropriate fishing quotas. One season there would be 
abundant stock and broad harvesting would be acceptable; the very next 
year the fisheries would collapse. No one really knew why or how to 
predict the future health of this crucially important resource.


Although climate was suspected to play a significant role in marine 
productivity, only since the beginning of the 20th century have accurate 
fishing and temperature records been kept in this region of the 
northeast Pacific. We needed indicators of fish productivity over 
thousands of years to see whether there were recurring cycles in 
populations and what phenomena may be driving the changes.

My research team began to collect and analyze core samples from the 
bottom of deep Western Canadian fjords. The regions in which we chose to 
conduct our research, Effingham Inlet on the West Coast of Vancouver 
Island, and in 2001, sounds in the Belize-Seymour Inlet complex on the 
mainland coast of British Columbia, were perfect for this sort of work. 
The topography of these fjords is such that they contain deep basins 
that are subject to little water transfer from the open ocean and so 
water near the bottom is relatively stagnant and very low in oxygen 
content. As a consequence, the floors of these basins are mostly 
lifeless and sediment layers build up year after year, undisturbed over 
millennia.

Using various coring technologies, we have been able to collect more 
than 5,000 years' worth of mud in these basins, with the oldest layers 
coming from a depth of about 11 metres below the fjord floor. Clearly 
visible in our mud cores are annual changes that record the different 
seasons: corresponding to the cool, rainy winter seasons, we see dark 
layers composed mostly of dirt washed into the fjord from the land; in 
the warm summer months we see abundant fossilized fish scales and 
diatoms (the most common form of phytoplankton, or single-celled ocean 
plants) that have fallen to the fjord floor from nutrient-rich surface 
waters. In years when warm summers dominated climate in the region, we 
clearly see far thicker layers of diatoms and fish scales than we do in 
cooler years. Ours is one of the highest-quality climate records 
available anywhere today and in it we see obvious confirmation that 
natural climate change can be dramatic. For example, in the middle of a 
62-year slice of the record at about 4,400 years ago, there was a shift 
in climate in only a couple of seasons from warm, dry and sunny 
conditions to one that was mostly cold and rainy for several decades.

Using computers to conduct what is referred to as a "time series 
analysis" on the colouration and thickness of the annual layers, we have 
discovered repeated cycles in marine productivity in this, a region 
larger than Europe. Specifically, we find a very strong and consistent 
11-year cycle throughout the whole record in the sediments and diatom 
remains. This correlates closely to the well-known 11-year "Schwabe" 
sunspot cycle, during which the output of the sun varies by about 0.1%. 
Sunspots, violent storms on the surface of the sun, have the effect of 
increasing solar output, so, by counting the spots visible on the 
surface of our star, we have an indirect measure of its varying 
brightness. Such records have been kept for many centuries and match 
very well with the changes in marine productivity we are observing.


In the sediment, diatom and fish-scale records, we also see longer 
period cycles, all correlating closely with other well-known regular 
solar variations. In particular, we see marine productivity cycles that 
match well with the sun's 75-90-year "Gleissberg Cycle," the 200-500-
year "Suess Cycle" and the 1,100-1,500-year "Bond Cycle." The strength 
of these cycles is seen to vary over time, fading in and out over the 
millennia. The variation in the sun's brightness over these longer 
cycles may be many times greater in magnitude than that measured over 
the short Schwabe cycle and so are seen to impact marine productivity 
even more significantly.

Our finding of a direct correlation between variations in the brightness 
of the sun and earthly climate indicators (called "proxies") is not 
unique. Hundreds of other studies, using proxies from tree rings in 
Russia's Kola Peninsula to water levels of the Nile, show exactly the 
same thing: The sun appears to drive climate change.

However, there was a problem. Despite this clear and repeated 
correlation, the measured variations in incoming solar energy were, on 
their own, not sufficient to cause the climate changes we have observed 
in our proxies. In addition, even though the sun is brighter now than at 
any time in the past 8,000 years, the increase in direct solar input is 
not calculated to be sufficient to cause the past century's modest 
warming on its own. There had to be an amplifier of some sort for the 
sun to be a primary driver of climate change.

Indeed, that is precisely what has been discovered. In a series of 
groundbreaking scientific papers starting in 2002, Veizer, Shaviv, 
Carslaw, and most recently Svensmark et al., have collectively 
demonstrated that as the output of the sun varies, and with it, our 
star's protective solar wind, varying amounts of galactic cosmic rays 
from deep space are able to enter our solar system and penetrate the 
Earth's atmosphere. These cosmic rays enhance cloud formation which, 
overall, has a cooling effect on the planet. When the sun's energy 
output is greater, not only does the Earth warm slightly due to direct 
solar heating, but the stronger solar wind generated during these "high 
sun" periods blocks many of the cosmic rays from entering our 
atmosphere. Cloud cover decreases and the Earth warms still more.

The opposite occurs when the sun is less bright. More cosmic rays are 
able to get through to Earth's atmosphere, more clouds form, and the 
planet cools more than would otherwise be the case due to direct solar 
effects alone. This is precisely what happened from the middle of the 
17th century into the early 18th century, when the solar energy input to 
our atmosphere, as indicated by the number of sunspots, was at a minimum 
and the planet was stuck in the Little Ice Age. These new findings 
suggest that changes in the output of the sun caused the most recent 
climate change. By comparison, CO2 variations show little correlation 
with our planet's climate on long, medium and even short time scales.


In some fields the science is indeed "settled." For example, plate 
tectonics, once highly controversial, is now so well-established that we 
rarely see papers on the subject at all. But the science of global 
climate change is still in its infancy, with many thousands of papers 
published every year. In a 2003 poll conducted by German environmental 
researchers Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch, two-thirds of more than 530 
climate scientists from 27 countries surveyed did not believe that "the 
current state of scientific knowledge is developed well enough to allow 
for a reasonable assessment of the effects of greenhouse gases." About 
half of those polled stated that the science of climate change was not 
sufficiently settled to pass the issue over to policymakers at all.

Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into 
its weakest Schwabe solar cycle of the past two centuries, likely 
leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth. Beginning to plan for 
adaptation to such a cool period, one which may continue well beyond one 
11-year cycle, as did the Little Ice Age, should be a priority for 
governments. It is global cooling, not warming, that is the major 
climate threat to the world, especially Canada. As a country at the 
northern limit to agriculture in the world, it would take very little 
cooling to destroy much of our food crops, while a warming would only 
require that we adopt farming techniques practiced to the south of us.

Meantime, we need to continue research into this, the most complex field 
of science ever tackled, and immediately halt wasted expenditures on the 
King Canute-like task of "stopping climate change." 

 
R. Timothy Patterson is professor and director of the Ottawa-Carleton 
Geoscience Centre, Department of Earth Sciences, Carleton University.


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