Klima2009 on-line conference

Ernst-Georg Beck (Beck is  a specialist on historical CO2 measurements, see here) and I submitted a paper for this conference. Only 100 submitted papers were accepted after a thorough peer review. Ours was among them. Its title is : “Accurate estimation of CO2 background measurements at non-mixed environments”. Basically it describes the (very simple!) CO2 versus wind speed method to estimate what would be the well mixed CO2 level if wind speed was infinite. I first introduced this method in Feb. 2007 in an on-line paper here. E-G Beck immediately noticed that the procedure could be applied to validate historic CO2 measurements (which are usually rejected because the conditions of measurements are thought unknown or non-adequate).

Today on the 2nd day of this conference, our paper counts by far the highest number of visitors (454 at 15:30 UTC), much to our surprise. The nearest “competitor” (an excellent paper on “lousy” models) has 246 hits. Maybe it helped that our paper was  mentioned for a short time on http://www.junkscience.com.

The full text is here.

07Nov09, end of conference:

Our paper has been the most read of the 103 papers presented and received the “Best Paper Award“!

Number of visitors:

20 Dec 09:   3215 visitors

Abdussamatov: The Sun defines the Climate

A paper from Dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of  the Space Research Laboratory of the Pulkovo Observatory, makes some splashes in the blogosphere.  The author predicts a coming cooling, based on a 200-year solar cycle he says having discovered, and which is caused by a slow cyclic change in the solar radius. This cycle has reached its peak during the “warm” 1990’s and is now on its decreasing phase (see REF1). Using the PMOD TSI reconstruction he detects a loss of 0.19 W/m2 of solar power during the 23rd cycle. He also stresses that the increase in solar irradiance observed during the 20th century surpassed everything observed (he probably means “reconstructed”) during the past 700 years.

Here is the forecast of solar activity, based on an assumed declining solar activity for the ongoing 24th and future 25th and 26th solar cycles :

This would give the following global temperature anomalies for the coming 50 years:

If A. is correct, this  would render obsolete the whole craze about global warming (and render superfluous the political hysteria for a Copenhagen treaty) !

Look here for a more complete description of the Astrometria project to measure the variable solar radius, including the text of the paper.
Read here on the Wattsupwiththat website some heavy (and critical) discussions on the paper; the critics mostly center on the use of the PMOD TSI satellite data, which are thought to be incorrect (or less correct), compared to the ACRIM series, preferred by many solar scientists like N. Scafetta.

I am a bit uneasy on the lack of solid foundations in the paper to document the alleged bi-centennial (de Vries?) cycle. A slightly more complete justification can be found in an older (2006) paper here.

I also found one very bad error, which is more of a cosmetic type:  A. calculates that the loss of 0.19W/m2 in TSI equals to the output of 21 million nuclear plants! This can not be true.  A loss of 0.19 W/m2 equals for the whole earth to 0.19*pi*R2 = 24 million MW (R2 is the square of the radius of the globe). Assuming a standard plant of 2000 MW capacity this would amount to the output of approx. 12000 plants; still an impressive number!

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Ref1:  A paper by I.R.G. Wilson on solar cycles (de Vries, Gleisberg, Hale) and another paper by Rospopov