| Ummm, Mike. That data only seems to tell me that the Ice in the Arctic is less in the Summer than it is in the Winter. Please reveiw the RED plot below the sine wave shaped graph in black. That shows standard deviations from that 20 year average. Assuming all things are equal, the "average" ice coverage uses the years 1979 to 2000. Now, this part is before my time, but weren't "they" crowing about an upcoming Ice-Age in the Seventies (Time Mag and all?) - so therefore, wouldn't those colder temps "skew" this "Average" by adding "extra" ice to the numbers for those years? Well at least its a period with a 500 year El Nino along with a La Nina and the cooling you note during the '70s. This is like saying that the "Average" number of TC in the Atlantic is 17, but only using the last 4 seasons (2008-2005). Once I put 2005 in there (and stop), my numbers become suspect. There are longer periods of data that have been looked at and but the trend is the same--the Arctic is melting during peak lightning by 2-3 SDs. Similar studies show no net melting in Antarctica but cooling away from the pennyslia and warming anomalies near it. This also is consistant with the fact that even though the sun is closer to the earth in its elliptical orbit during the southern hemispheric summer, climate change is not expressed because the forcing of CO2 to clouds is ELECTRICAL. 90 percent of all lightning is over land and there is less land in the southern hemisphere. Also MSU temperature data shows clearly that warming is in the northern hemisphere, again, for the same reason--the forcing is electrical and the northern hemisphere gets more lightning. Maybe a better way of looking at this would be sorta like this: - Average # of Hurricanes at Solar Max. Average at Min. - Average Ice Coverage at Solar Max, and again at Min. - Average rate of Permafrost Thawing (CH4 - much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2) at Max and Min. Basically, you would hope to (and want to) remove all of the Anomalous Years to get a True Average. I think if you do that, electrics may play more as an outlyer or indicator as opposed to a major contributor to ... what is it that you were trying to say here? Ice or Hurricanes? Tropical storms are absolutely the most significant electrical events on earth. I am not really sure what you are trying to ask me here about solar inputs. It's a complex subject. I am interested in what the earth does with inputs, and am not an expert so much in what the sun outputs. Advances there clearly will help forecasts on earth IMHO. But it's more than just the 11 year cycle that is going on, not just in terms of output by the sun but also how the earth reacts or responds to what it gets from the sun. Also on a side note, "pure water" is not conductive. It is an insulator. Therefore, dissolved CO2 making it more conductive is a foregone conclusion. Dissolving O2 into it also increases it's conductivity. Dissolving ANYTHING into pure water does that. (My Chem teacher in high school demonstrated this, quite effectively, by electrocuting himself in front of the class. What a big dummy.) This is why, for instance, SOx from volcanic activity is very interesting to me when I talk about long range tropical storm forecasts. I am also trying to figure out your "big circuit" is in this global electrics theory. What is the source? - Is it the sun? - or the Core? - or just the instantaneous difference of potential between the surface and the atmosphere? Thanks Mike. Global electrical circuit is what occurs in a simple model on earth. Solar inputs affect this circuit, of course. Dr. Tinsley at UT Dallas has a number of good papers and cites and resources on his web page--he's not interested in the tropics, but lots of good stuff here: http://www.utdallas.edu/physics/faculty/tinsley.html Only nerds need apply. |