Solar activity & climate: is the sun causing global warming? Not Lately…
The skeptic argument...
It's the sun
"Over the past few hundred years, there has been a steady increase in the numbers of sunspots, at the time when the Earth has been getting warmer. The data suggests solar activity is influencing the global climate causing the world to get warmer." (BBC)What the science says...
In the last 35 years of global warming, the Sun has shown a slight cooling trend. Sun and climate have been going in opposite directions.As supplier of almost all the energy in Earth's climate, the sun has a strong influence on climate. A comparison of sun and climate over the past 1150 years found temperatures closely match solar activity (Usoskin 2005). However, after 1975, temperatures rose while solar activity showed little to no long-term trend. This led the study to conclude, "...during these last 30 years the solar total irradiance, solar UV irradiance and cosmic ray flux has not shown any significant secular trend, so that at least this most recent warming episode must have another source."
In fact, a number of independent measurements of solar activity indicate the sun has shown a slight cooling trend since 1960, over the same period that global temperatures have been warming. Over the last 35 years of global warming, sun and climate have been moving in opposite directions. An analysis of solar trends concluded that the sun has actually contributed a slight cooling influence in recent decades (Lockwood 2008).
Figure 1: Annual global temperature change (thin light red) with 11 year moving average of temperature (thick dark red). Temperature from NASA GISS. Annual Total Solar Irradiance (thin light blue) with 11 year moving average of TSI (thick dark blue). TSI from 1880 to 1978 from Solanki. TSI from 1979 to 2009 from PMOD.
Other studies on solar influence on climate
This conclusion is confirmed by many studies finding that while the sun contributed to warming in the early 20th Century, it has had little contribution (most likely negative) in the last few decades:- Erlykin 2009: "We deduce that the maximum recent increase in the mean surface temperature of the Earth which can be ascribed to solar activity is 14% of the observed global warming."
- Benestad 2009: "Our analysis shows that the most likely contribution from solar forcing a global warming is 7 ± 1% for the 20th century and is negligible for warming since 1980."
- Lockwood 2008: "It is shown that the contribution of solar variability to the temperature trend since 1987 is small and downward; the best estimate is -1.3% and the 2? confidence level sets the uncertainty range of -0.7 to -1.9%."
- Lean 2008: "According to this analysis, solar forcing contributed negligible long-term warming in the past 25 years and 10% of the warming in the past 100 years..."
- Lockwood 2008: "The conclusions of our previous paper, that solar forcing has declined over the past 20 years while surface air temperatures have continued to rise, are shown to apply for the full range of potential time constants for the climate response to the variations in the solar forcings."
- Ammann 2007: "Although solar and volcanic effects appear to dominate most of the slow climate variations within the past thousand years, the impacts of greenhouse gases have dominated since the second half of the last century."
- Lockwood 2007: "The observed rapid rise in global mean temperatures seen after 1985 cannot be ascribed to solar variability, whichever of the mechanism is invoked and no matter how much the solar variation is amplified."
- Foukal 2006 concludes "The variations measured from spacecraft since 1978 are too small to have contributed appreciably to accelerated global warming over the past 30 years."
- Scafetta 2006 says "since 1975 global warming has occurred much faster than could be reasonably expected from the sun alone."
- Usoskin 2005 conclude "during these last 30 years the solar total irradiance, solar UV irradiance and cosmic ray flux has not shown any significant secular trend, so that at least this most recent warming episode must have another source."
- Solanki 2004 reconstructs 11,400 years of sunspot numbers using radiocarbon concentrations, finding "solar variability is unlikely to have been the dominant cause of the strong warming during the past three decades".
- Haigh 2003 says "Observational data suggest that the Sun has influenced temperatures on decadal, centennial and millennial time-scales, but radiative forcing considerations and the results of energy-balance models and general circulation models suggest that the warming during the latter part of the 20th century cannot be ascribed entirely to solar effects."
- Stott 2003 increased climate model sensitivity to solar forcing and still found "most warming over the last 50 yr is likely to have been caused by increases in greenhouse gases."
- Solanki 2003 concludes "the Sun has contributed less than 30% of the global warming since 1970."
- Lean 1999 concludes "it is unlikely that Sun–climate relationships can account for much of the warming since 1970."
- Waple 1999 finds "little evidence to suggest that changes in irradiance are having a large impact on the current warming trend."
- Frolich 1998 concludes "solar radiative output trends contributed little of the 0.2°C increase in the global mean surface temperature in the past decade."
Hotter-burning sun warming the planet?
The sun [was] burning hotter than usual, offering a possible explanation for global warming that needs to be weighed when proceeding with expensive efforts to cut emissions of greenhouse gases, Swiss and German scientists say. "The sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be affecting global temperatures," said Sami Solanki, the director of the renowned Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany, who led the research.
"The sun is in a changed state. It is brighter than it was a few hundred years ago and this brightening started relatively recently -- in the last 100 to 150 years," Mr. Solanski said.
Average global temperatures have increased by about 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.36 degrees Fahrenheit) over the past 20 years and are widely believed to be responsible for new extremes in weather patterns.
Globally, 1997, 1998 and 2002 were the hottest years since worldwide weather records were first collated in 1860.
Bill Burrows, a climatologist and a member of the Royal Meteorological Society, welcomed Mr. Solanki's research.
"It shows that there is enough happening on the solar front to merit further research. Perhaps we are devoting too many resources to correcting human effects on the climate without being sure that we are the major contributor," he said.
Mr. Solanki said that the brighter sun and higher levels of so-called "greenhouse gases" both contributed to the change in the Earth's temperature, but it was impossible to say which had the greater impact.
Most scientists agree that greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide from fossil fuels have contributed to the warming of the planet in the past few decades, but have questioned whether other factors beyond man's control are also to blame.
To determine the sun's role in global warming, Mr. Solanki's research team measured magnetic zones on the sun's surface known as sunspots, which are believed to intensify the sun's energy output.
The team studied sunspot data going back several hundred years. They found that a dearth of sunspots signaled a cold period -- which could last up to 50 years -- but that over the past century their numbers had increased as the Earth's climate grew steadily warmer.
Mr. Solanki does not know what is causing the sun to burn brighter now or how long this cycle would last.
He says that the increased solar brightness over the past 20 years has not been enough to cause the observed climate changes, but believes that the impact of intense sunshine on the ozone layer and cloud cover could be affecting the climate more than the sunlight itself.
David Viner, the senior research scientist at the University of East Anglia's climatic research unit, said the research showed that the sun did have an effect on global warming.
He added, however, that the study also showed that over the past 20 years, the number of sunspots had remained roughly constant, while the Earth's temperature had continued to increase.
This suggested that over the past 20 years, human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation had begun to dominate "the natural factors involved in climate change," he said.
Xtra Images - http://www.dcski.com/articles/view_article.php?article_id=1121&mode=rss
http://ircamera.as.arizona.edu/NatSci102/NatSci102/lectures/sun.htm
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