If the Sun is causing the current warming, why are temperatures rising fastest at night?

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...

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...

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...

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-c...

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=AqClH...

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...

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.

That's a simple one. UHI effect due poorly placed surface temp equipment (and a heavy dose of manipulation by Hansen, et al) provide the explanation for the biased high temps in the evening. Concrete and asphalt retain heat through the night and results in false high readings. It just gets worse as there is more and more encroachment of man's buildings, highways and parking lots continue to encroach on the measuring equipment.

Most Warming activists know this but will not admit it due to embarrassment.

Niga why u give a ****? Ur gnna die before this even matters

Post 1970 the trend in minimum and maximum temperatures looks to be the opposite with more warming during the day, so your question should be, prior to 1970, why did temperatures rise faster at night than during the day.

The answer could be any one of a number of things, maybe the post 1970 data is much more accurate, as half of the present weather stations probably weren't even built by 1970 and there were no weather satellites.

It is called humidity and it retains the heat throughout the night unless other forces cool the air sufficiently to lower the dew point to where the humidity rains out of the air. When the ocean surface has warmed enough over the last 150 years of high solar activity then it takes less daytime heat to evaporate this moisture into the atmosphere increasing the relative humidity and keeping the dew point high enough to maintain that heat through the night. This is why the primary job performed by air conditioners is to dehumidify the air so it is unable to hold as much heat.

You need to take a simple beginners course in either residential or automotive air conditioning systems. These basics are taught in the first week of the course because an understanding of this is key to fixing broken equipment and sizing new equipment for new installations.

Physics students will have a very difficult time comprehending these basics but anyone with a useful specialty will adapt quickly to real world engineering basics. This is why my house is cool and comfortable throughout the year except for high humidity times. But as the Baja ridge is increasing the humidity of the Pacific South west I guess I am going to have to fit air conditioning to my house even if it is only for dehumidifying the incoming air.

Edit

As it is very easy to see the warmers are much more concerned about political correctness than they are about scientific accuracy. And it seems political activists cannot comprehend even the simplest technical explanations that are scientifically correct. But then my family for close to 1000 years now has never managed to be politically correct at any time. Scientifically correct,yes, morally correct, yes, politically correct, never and many of my ancestors lost their heads because of their love of truth over fiction. More than a few of them got roasted at the stake as well!

Added info to clarify why humidity is the only real greenhouse gas.

Humidity is from 1% to 2% of the earth’s atmosphere. Co2 is at the most .04%. So saying humidity is 99% of the greenhouse effect might be pushing things just a little but Angstrom showed in his spectrograph experiments that dry co2 acted in his experiment no different than dry air did and that the bands that co2 blocked were so narrow and such a small portion of the spectrum that water vapor blocked that he could not see how any increase in climate temperature could ever be blamed on co2, it just does not have the capability of retaining heat that water vapor does.

So because the retaining of heat in the atmosphere through the night hours is the greenhouse effect in a nutshell then water vapor is the only atmospheric gas that can be honestly termed a greenhouse gas.

F-layer: The region of the ionosphere found approximately 90 to 400 miles above Earth and which is responsible for most long distance propagation on frequencies below 30 MHz. During the daytime (especially in summer), solar heating can cause the F-layer to split into two separate layers, the F1-layer and the F2-layer. See URL: Propagation

Think about it...