The top graph is daytime highs, and the bottom graph is nighttime lows. Can you tell me why nighttime lows are increasing nearly twice as fast as daytime highs?
Dana19812009-08-29T10:45:53Z
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Well you're asking people who hold a scientifically untenable position to consider scientific data. Does not compute. There are so many reasons the 'Sun is causing global warming' theory is wrong, as Ray Pierrehumbert put it, "That's a coffin with so many nails in it already that the hard part is finding a place to hammer in a new one." http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/07/friday-roundup/
1) As you note, the diurnal temperature range is decreasing. If the Sun were causing global warming, it would warm the planet more during the day when it's being bombarded with solar radiation.
2) The upper atmosphere is cooling, again, the exact opposite effect as would be expected from solar warming. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/11/the-sky-is-falling/
3) No scientific study has attributed more than 35% of the recent warming to solar effects, and most put it at 0-10%, and the paper by Scafetta and West had to make very unrealistic assumptions just to get the value up as high as 35%. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/03/solar-variability-statistics-vs-physics-2nd-round/
4) The clearest piece of evidence - there hasn't been any trend in solar irradiance in 60 years. Or galactic cosmic ray flux on Earth, or low cloudcover, for those espousing the GCR theory. Not to mention the fact that GCRs aren't very good at seeding clouds. http://www.ecohuddle.com/wiki/global-warming-and-climate-change-causes
5) Solar irradiance increased by about 6 times more from 1900-1940 than it did from 1980-2008. Yet the planet warmed more during the latter period. http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AqClHB4Y9QN09zibR_jmGpXsy6IX;_ylv=3?qid=20090831085849AAA4Gxr
Honestly at this point if you're still trying to blame the Sun for the recent global warming, you're in severe denial.
*edit* for those claiming UHI is to blame, can you explain why UHI would result in *more* warming at night than during the day, when the surface is being bombarded by supposedly increased solar radiation? It's all well and good to just waive your hands and shout UHI, but how about a physical explanation for your theory? For once?
I'm not even going to bother to ask for an explanation for the cooling upper atmosphere again, because I know deniers can't provide it.
"The ice age existed. Everyone agrees on that. The ice age ended. Nobody has asked how it ended... if just one day POOF everything was warm? Or, did a gradual warming cause the ice age to end? Humans could not have caused the end of the ice age." But we know what did, Keith P goes over what happened the way a skeptic would (an actual skeptic, not a claimed skeptic that just denies the fact of global warming). If you didn't understand that the basic reason is that we know when all the natural cycles occur and it just so happens that we aren't in a warming cycle (and there hasn't been any correlation with solar activity for a while either) "What real evidence is there that humans are causing global warming? Freon is heavier than air, so it sinks and never reaches the ozone." Aside from there only be a tangential relation between the hole in the ozone layer and global warming the CFCs do very much reach the stratosphere since the stratosphere is within the heterosphere where the atmospheric gases are well mixed by atmospheric turbulence (and it's enough to get things far heavier than CFCs up to the turbopause). But think what you're saying, CFCs are heavier then air, so is carbon dioxide so you'd expect CO2 to sink and form a layer of CO2 on the surface upon which is the layer of molecular oxygen and then the layer of nitrogen and then the layer of atomic oxygen. That's just not how the atmosphere is below 100 km.
The only ones, saying it is the Sun are deniers, for while the Sun has certainly played a part in previous climate changes it has certainly not contributed since the start of satellite monitoring 30 years ago. If fact the recently ended solar cycle had slightly reduced activity in a number of aspects of solar output, during a period when we have had the 10 warmest years (including 1998) in the modern temperature record, deniers can go on about this as much they want but it is a documented fact. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Solar-cycle-data.png
Come on you can do better then that. I have one showing cooling ocean temperatures from NOAA. What regional, seasonal line values would be a feather in your cap. For the most part there seems to be a large variance with no stability. Unless your strictly abiding by a linear trend, which is the basis for another argument.
It's very simple Keith, urabinzation is the answer. The amount of asphalt ,concrete, A.C. condenser units, Jet Airplanes, etc... have increased substantially around surface thermometer locations, and much of which has been entered manually by human beings. The satellite record shows no such variance, The surface readings cannot be taken seriously until better algorithms can be developed to remove the bias caused by urban surface heat sinks.