Thursday Open Thread

Welcome to your Thursday open thread. Boy, this has been a busy week so far. How is your week going?

Ummmm….duh?

Here’s another tease from our new NBC/WSJ poll: In a straight up-or-down question on whether the debt ceiling should be increased or not, a plurality of 39 percent say it shouldn’t be raised, while 28 percent say it should.

But those numbers change when the language is altered: 46 percent say the debt ceiling SHOULD be raised when told that failing to do so would stop Social Security and military payments and would potentially hurt the economy.

Most people don’t want to go into a recession to prove some kind of ideological point. 42% seems too high to me, but that’s about the amount of core conservatives in the country I think.

You’ve probably seen the climate deniers pushing a study showing a new solar minimum. It means Ice Age, so they say. Maybe not so much.

Yes, there is a credible prediction based on independent studies that we could possibly be entering a so-called “grand minimum” in solar activity.  And yes, the last one on record, the “Maunder minimum,” which occurred between 1645 and 1715, coincided with the so-called Little Ice Age.

But the LIA wasn’t just driven by a drop in solar forcing –  it was also driven by a burst of volcanic activity (see “A detailed look at the Little Ice Age“).  And now we have human-caused greenhouse gases that have overwhelmed the much, much smaller solar forcing.
You’d never know it from the anti-science crowd, but last year Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) published a major analysis of this precise situation, “On the effect of a new grand minimum of solar activity on the future climate on Earth,” (PDF here).  That peer-reviewed study concluded that if we did see a Maunder minimum this century:

In summary, global mean temperatures in the year 2100 would most likely be diminished by about 0.1°C

That means, on our current emissions path, we would be only about 9°F to 11°F warmer than preindustrial levels in 2100, rather than, say about 9°F – 11°F warmer.  I would note that the 2010 analysis did not include major carbon cycle feedbacks like the tundra, whose impact will likely exceed that of any drop in solar irradiance this century (see NSIDC bombshell: Thawing permafrost feedback will turn Arctic from carbon sink to source in the 2020s, releasing 100 billion tons of carbon by 2100).

I wonder how warm the earth has to get before deniers admit something is happening? I won’t hold my breath.