The weather
People were saying last week that this week was going to be one of those gloriously warm and sunny summer weeks but so far, while it's been pleasant and dry there've been a lot of clouds around. Apparently it was meant to be hot and sunny all week and start cooling over the weekend. I was wondering yesterday if it's been nicer this summer than last .. it feels it but I don't know if that's just because it isn't raining at the moment!!! I just remember last summer as a grey and dismal washout .. which it was but I might feel that was worse cause of the nice summers before it .. this one is just one predicted wet and cloudy summer following another and the lovely warm ones are further back in my memory. At the moment it seems quite nice though!!!!
There's been quite a bit of discussion in the press about climate change again becaue of a TV program. It was found that the TV program had misrepresented some scientists views on global warming though it didn't pass a viewpoint on the subject itself.
The overwhelming majority view is that the problem is down to human activity releasing greenhouse gases into the air rather than to natural processes like solar activity and volcanoes. The model focusing on human activities is constant in that the more green house gasses that are released into the atmosphere the more of an effect you get while solar activity changes in regular cycles and volcanoes errupt when they do. And volcanoes would cool rather than heat because they contribute more to the haze effect than the greenhouse effect.
At the moment there's a new solar cycle beginning
http://www.spacetoday.org/SolSys/Sun/Sunspots.html
It's a bit late starting this time and there are different thoughts as to what might happen because of this. The mini ice age followed a time when there were no new sun spots on the sun for a while and the slow start with no new sun spots when they were expected is making some people wonder if the earth's temperatures will cool as that is what is said to have happened when it became very cold in the little ice age .. but this just affected the Northern hemisphere rather than the whole planet whereas climate change at the moment is affecting the whole planet. There are other reasons why the climate could have become so cold too. But during the little ice age sun spots fell by an enormous amount. A scientific model that had been 98% accurate which had predicted the strength of the last eight cycles had predicted that this latest one would be a strong one so I guess we're just going to have to sit back and watch and see if it picks up.
Since around 1975 - 1998 there hadn't been any significant changes in solar activities that were felt to influence climate change, sun spot activity was high but constant, but the temperature had still been rising and research into the connection between solar activity and climate change, the Solanki et al report noted this.
http://www.mps.mpg.de/dokumente/publikationen/solanki/c153.pdf
http://www.mps.mpg.de/projects/sun-climate
http://www.mpg.de/english/illustrationsDocumentation/documentation/pressReleases/2004/pressRelease20040802
The temperature globally has been more or less constant since 1998 .. though with the seond hightest average being recorded in a blimph in 2005 .. so what has happened .. is it something to do with the melting Arctic and glaciers or are the greenhouse gases starting to block as well as absorb the heat. It'd be interesting to now how the yearly temperatures are made up .. whether there's been fluctuations yearly in night and day temperatures would be interesting and where in the globe these fluctuations took place and during what seasons.
Another thing that has interested me during the whole debate is why when fossil fuels are gradually declining are people trying to stand in the way of developing energy technologies that don't rely on them. The major probability is that they are changing the ecosystems or so the vast majority of scientists believe but eventually they are going to run out anyway, though not before a lot of damage has been done to the planet, and different technologies need to be found to produce energy. Surely it makes sense to be developing them now!!!!
There's been quite a bit of discussion in the press about climate change again becaue of a TV program. It was found that the TV program had misrepresented some scientists views on global warming though it didn't pass a viewpoint on the subject itself.
The overwhelming majority view is that the problem is down to human activity releasing greenhouse gases into the air rather than to natural processes like solar activity and volcanoes. The model focusing on human activities is constant in that the more green house gasses that are released into the atmosphere the more of an effect you get while solar activity changes in regular cycles and volcanoes errupt when they do. And volcanoes would cool rather than heat because they contribute more to the haze effect than the greenhouse effect.
At the moment there's a new solar cycle beginning
http://www.spacetoday.org/SolSys/Sun/Sunspots.html
It's a bit late starting this time and there are different thoughts as to what might happen because of this. The mini ice age followed a time when there were no new sun spots on the sun for a while and the slow start with no new sun spots when they were expected is making some people wonder if the earth's temperatures will cool as that is what is said to have happened when it became very cold in the little ice age .. but this just affected the Northern hemisphere rather than the whole planet whereas climate change at the moment is affecting the whole planet. There are other reasons why the climate could have become so cold too. But during the little ice age sun spots fell by an enormous amount. A scientific model that had been 98% accurate which had predicted the strength of the last eight cycles had predicted that this latest one would be a strong one so I guess we're just going to have to sit back and watch and see if it picks up.
Since around 1975 - 1998 there hadn't been any significant changes in solar activities that were felt to influence climate change, sun spot activity was high but constant, but the temperature had still been rising and research into the connection between solar activity and climate change, the Solanki et al report noted this.
http://www.mps.mpg.de/dokumente/publikationen/solanki/c153.pdf
http://www.mps.mpg.de/projects/sun-climate
http://www.mpg.de/english/illustrationsDocumentation/documentation/pressReleases/2004/pressRelease20040802
The temperature globally has been more or less constant since 1998 .. though with the seond hightest average being recorded in a blimph in 2005 .. so what has happened .. is it something to do with the melting Arctic and glaciers or are the greenhouse gases starting to block as well as absorb the heat. It'd be interesting to now how the yearly temperatures are made up .. whether there's been fluctuations yearly in night and day temperatures would be interesting and where in the globe these fluctuations took place and during what seasons.
Another thing that has interested me during the whole debate is why when fossil fuels are gradually declining are people trying to stand in the way of developing energy technologies that don't rely on them. The major probability is that they are changing the ecosystems or so the vast majority of scientists believe but eventually they are going to run out anyway, though not before a lot of damage has been done to the planet, and different technologies need to be found to produce energy. Surely it makes sense to be developing them now!!!!
posted by Zeb at 12:08 AM
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