AHHH!!! It's a Cyborg! We're surrounded!!! This is Madness!!!

Congrats on the 300th reply.

Any indication as to what authority produced these babies or did you just do it yourself in paint?

The following is a TSI graph from NASA that looks nothing at all like the unattributed graph you produced. Also the article this graph came from is http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/27oct_eve.htm.

By the way What the heck *is* the source of your graph? http://sins.terra-net.net/ appears to be a Sins of the Solar Empire map pack site. What this has to do with TSI is pretty tenuous.

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%."
• 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"

Yeah, that was a stupid rebuttal the last time you said it.  People pointed out why it was stupid at the time, you ignored it.

Temperatures of Arctic waters are below zero around the ice, that's warmer than the ice always and warmer than the air for half the year, by around thirty degrees at the worst times.  Where the ice is melting, obviously the water is above freezing.  Water is also fluid, ice cooled water falls below the surface, ice is not fluid, temperature drops at the exterior are not absorbed beneath the surface.  Higher heat capacity, higher temperature, higher transference, lower reflectivity.

Aren't you an engineer?

However your assertion that sea water is always warmer than ice is a total fallacy. Ice can be no warmer than 0°C because otherwise it melts but ice can most certainly be colder than 0°C and does in fact do so when exposed to colder air. I will grant that the bottom of floating sea ice will pretty much stay at the same temperature as the water below it but portions of the ice in contact with the air will tend towards the temperature of the air as long as that temperature is below freezing and the gradient of temperature between the top and the bottom will be contiguous, in other words somewhere in between.

Another thing you fail to mention is an interesting property of water without which life could not exist. This is the fact that as water cools it does become more dense and therefore drops below the surface. However at 4°C water reaches it's most dense state and below 4°C water actually becomes less dense. If not for this fact then colder water would go to the bottom of the ocean/river/lake and the entire ocean/river/lake would freeze from the bottom up thereby killing all life. But instead because water get's *less* dense once below 4°C the coldest water floats to the surface and freezes there. Of course the presence of salt lowers this point just as it lowers the freezing point of water but the principle still applies.

Clearly there is a lot of difference between the earth and a glass of water. For one a glass of water is small and therefore cannot support large temperature differences between various parts of the water in the glass. But it's most definitely true that if you take a glass of water with an ice cube in it and you add heat to it the water will stay very close to the freezing point and all the added heat will go into the phase change of ice to water, which by the way is 80 times the amount of heat to raise the temperature of the same amount of water by 1°C. It's only after the ice melts that the water's temperature will begin to rise.

In the case of the planet there's certainly a lot more dynamics going on. Clearly there are significant temperature differentials that can be supported by water over the large distances involved. So certainly we can't expect that the coupling is exact. But there are well known heat transport mechanisms from the tropics to the poles and added heat to the system means that more heat gets transported to the poles where it tends to melt more ice than if there was no added heat.

The bottom line is that there is proven expansion of the oceans simply due to the extra heat being absorbed so it's not that *all* warming is at the poles only quite a bit of it. The oceans as a huge thermal sink absorb quite a lot as evidenced by the following graph . While the largest changes *are* in the arctic (while the Antarctic has marginally cooled) the oceans are obviously warming as well.

Wow Mumbles, stupid much yesterday?  Since it's the first day of spring, and to hell with the snowfall in the south calling me a liar, maybe you should read through that again and not correct me on things I didn't leave out.

The only thing you managed to argue there was on water density reducing below 4 degrees celsius, which, unless you know something the rest of the world doesn't, is irrelevant.

I double checked, salinized seawater reaches maximum density at the point right before it freezes.  Even Arctic surface water, the lowest salinity seawater on the planet, is still a few parts per thousand higher than needed to neutralize the maximum density effect.

Sub surface seawater doesn't freeze anyway, two minor details.  One is pressure, the other is that whole crust spinning on molten rock thingy. 

Now that I win, again, you can pretend global warming is still scary.

While you're pulling off one liners from the shortbus, I'll amuse myself by thinking about how funny it is that a highly educated professional with advanced physics knowledge can't figure out salt water mechanics.

When you either surrender the point gracefully or come up with something that doesn't prove me right and you to be an idiot, I'll come back off the high.

No I did not realize that the level of salt in sea water not only reduces the freezing point of water but also reduces the density maximum down to the freezing point.

As far as "advanced physics knowledge" I had 8.01 (syllabus) and 8.02 (syllabus) neither of which broached the density of salt water. It was probably covered in the undergraduate Thermodynamics course 5.60 (syllabus) but if it was I must have not been paying attention that day. I do recall azeotropes and having to add benzene to ethanol to distill it beyond 192 proof but I think that's all I retain from that course. I've also had quite a bit of Electrostatics, Electrodynamics, Frequency Domain Analysis, Energy Band device modelling, Feedback Control Theory and the like but I'm sure the effect of salinity on the density of water was not discussed there either.

In any event I took 5.60 in 1971 so please forgive me if I don't happen to remember a detail that I may or may not have encountered 39 years ago.

If that makes you somehow feel superior then I'm happy for you.

Were you even a wet spot on your parents sheet yet? If not then you don't know what you're talking about. I know what I use every day. What I don't use every day is much less important to me.

You forget that I have made no claim to any particular expertise in climatology whereas you seem to think your smarter than the best minds on the planet in the subject.

And you say *I'm* not aware of *my* shortcomings? Isn't that special!

As far as "higher" solar output I posted 16 studies that concluded "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".

So to answer your question. No.

Ahh, to have intellectual honesty just once in a thread...

So, the sun gets hotter going into the seventies, and you posted the information saying so, the arctic melts off a bit, this melting accelerates itself by warming the area with water coverage as opposed to ice, but you're going to stay in denial and pretend it's not part of the equation because you can find studies saying solar output isn't high enough to cause the temperature increase because they only measure albedo based on cloud cover.  Did you notice that those studies are all in disagreement with each other?

Since I'm bored with this one already, I'll ask a terribly amusing question.  Why is the stratosphere colder?

I love this one.  Somehow, the troposphere is warmer because it's trapping more heat that normally escapes the atmosphere, yet the atmosphere is actually colder.  My guess is magic.  Houdini isn't really dead, just like Elvis.  He's zapping all that warmth straight into space, bypassing the stratosphere!

Yes, I do think I'm smarter than the climatologists, on account of this minor, physically impossible detail.

What is the status of Michael Mann? Is he still under investigation by Penn State relating to the climategate mess?