Conclusive physical evidence for AWG?

[[email protected]]

What are the physical manifestations  of global warming that we can
actually MEASURE  and OBSERVE?

[snip]

However,  imposing taxes, building CO2 sequestration plants, creating a
cap and trade bureaucracy and demonizing oil and coal without CONCLUSIVE
physical evidence of a real problem just does not make any sense.
     Mark

Imagine that you're on a bus, having a party with beer and good looking
fellow party-goers.  The bus is hurtling down the freeway at 60 miles an
hour.

Now some egghead pulls a map out of his pocket, and on the map, printed
in big letters, is a note that the freeway ends at a brick wall.

So you have two options: pull over, stop the party, and let everything
cool down, or just keep going, possibly to drive into a brick wall at 60
miles an hour.

So which do you do?  The low-cost, extra precaution that reduces your
immediate fun but insures your survival?  Or do you just keep drinking
your beer and tell the driver to speed up, because _you_ haven't _seen_
that wall with _your own eyes_?

Enjoy your beer.

Such is the "reasoning" now driving our government... and driving us
all to ruination.

No, it is not the "reasoning". It is an analogy. It is a pretty poor
analogy, and vastly over-simplified, but it is directed at a very
unsophisticated audience who seem unwilling to find out enough about
the subject to form any kind of rational opinion.

The reasoning that is driving most governments (now including the US
government again) is the same reasoning that prompted the setting up
of the IPCC in 1988

http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/10th-anniversary/anniversary-brochure.pdf

which was find out what the world's climatologists thought was going
on in the atmosphere, and what effects any change that was going on
might have in the future.

Back then, it looked as if business as usual would evnetually lead us
all to ruination, and now - twenty years on - the mesage is still the
same. We still don't know quite how fast we are moving down the road
to ruin, but we now know that we'd better do something to revrese the
trend sooner rather than later.

 

[[email protected]]

But we CAN observe conclusive physical evidence of the benefits of
electrons and holes.  No one would build power plants or pay money to
the electric company otherwise.  I ask that we hold AGW to the same
standard.  Society should not be FORCED to pay carbon taxes or build
sequestration plants without similar conclusive physical evidence that
there is any real benefit.

And you can observe conclusive phsyical evidence that anthropogenic
global warming is real and getting worse. It isn't yet anything like
bad enough to take you by the scruff of your sceptical neck and
immerse you in the bucket of problems that we are allowing to build
up, but the evidence is available to anybody who goes to the trouble
of learning enough about the science involved to make sense of the
data available.

 

[[email protected]]

You may think that your repeated three-word responses are oh so
very clever, but the fact remains that people are asking
legitimate questions and posting legitimate objections to your
argument, and you are ducking the questions and ignoring the
objections. That's really not very clever now, is it?

People may be asking legitimate questions, but these people are
ignoring the legitimate annswers that have been around for some twenty
years, when the IPCC first started publsihing their reports.

The same people don't like the IPCC's answers - not because they can
understand the scinece involved in getting the answers and have
legitimate objections to the way those answers were worked out, but
because they fear the economic consequences of of taking the answers
seriously.

This doesn't happen to be a legitimate objection. They - and you - are
ducking the real evidence.

 

[[email protected]]

There is no brick wall anymore than Iraq had WMD.

There certainly isn't a brickwall but unrestrained global warming
seems likely to cause a population crash within a few generations, if
we let it get that far.

Note that the people who told you that there were weapons of mass
descrution in Irak were the same crew that tried to prevent US
scientists from saying that anthropogenic global warming was a real
threat.

The politicians find it convenient to promote the brick wall as they
did WMD.

Not the same politicians. The honest ones do beleive in anthropogenic
global warming. It was the lying cheats who denied it.

The IPCC is political, not scientific.

http://www.ipcc.ch/about/index.htm

/quote

The people: as United Nations body, the IPCC work aims at the
promotion of the United Nations human development goals

/end quote

If you poke global warming you find CO2 is not a significant problem
in itself. The positive feedback mechanisms are triggered by a rise in
temperature not CO2. The indirect link is that CO2 raises temperature
which then triggers the feedback. So when the temperature rises for
other reasons the same feedback should be triggered. Yet the world has
been warmer than now. With temperature driven positive feedback how
did the world ever cool down?

The carbon dioxide that caused the global warming eventually got
buried as carbonate rocks; the gain around the positive feedback loops
here was never greater than two, so as the CO2 got buried, the
temperature cooled off.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age

Look at the historical temperature CO2 graphs.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/01/30/co2-temperatures-and-ice-ages/

CO2 lags temperature by 800 years. How could temperature decrease
before CO2 if CO2 causes warming?

You've been told how stupid this argument is before. The ice ages in
the ice core record are driven by the Milankovitch Effect

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles

and carbon dioxide coming out of solution in the oceans is one of the
positve feedbacks that builds up the relatively small effect of the
change in the orientation of the earth vis--a-vis the summer sun to a
significant change in temperature. Since it takes a while - some 800
years - for the oceans to warm up, the CO2 level lags the temperature.
At the moment we are injecting CO2 into the atmosphere by burning
fossil carbon, which directly warms the earth via the greenhouse
effect.

Please stop drinking the beer and leave the party you've obviously
drunk too much. Just don't expect the rest of us to join you or pay
for your paranoia.

Since you clearly can't learn for experience, it would seem that you
have been drinkng a lot too much beer for far too much of your life,
and have lost the capacity to absorb new information.

 

[[email protected]]

I fear a massive waste of resources rather than regulation. I also
fear that most greenies are of the Pol Pot tendancy.

Pol Pot took a rather more proactive attitude than even the most rabid
of the lunatic fringe greenies.

http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2007/may/07050812.html

/quote

Watson who has unapologetically called human beings the “AIDS of the
Earth”, declared human beings must reduce the world’s population to
less than 1 billion people, dwell in communities no larger than
“20,000 people and separated from other communities by wilderness
areas,” and recognize themselves as “earthlings” dwelling in a
primitive state with other species.

/end quote

    "Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth,
social and environmental."
    -- David Foreman, Founder of Earth First!

    "We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for
capitalists and their projects... We must reclaim the roads and plowed
land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled
rivers and return to wilderness millions of tens of millions of acres
of presently settled land."
    -- David Foreman, Earth First! Confessions of an Eco-Warrior

Pretty stupid rhetoric.

Jeffrey D Sachs in his recent book "Co"mmonwealth: Economics for a
Crowded Planet" ISBN 978-0-14-311487-1 presents a slightly less rabid
version of the same story, where he suggests that we'd probably better
try to hold the human population at or below eight billion people.

Despite your demented anxieties, he does represent mainstream opinion
on the subject.

 

[Bill Sloman]

I'll bet this guy drives a car and takes a hot shower every day. From
what I have seen, these people think everyone else should sacrifice,
and then they get to enjoy a "pristine" earth.

Heck, most of these people are not religious, so what does it matter
if we totally ruin the earth anyway? It's all going to burn out
eventually anyhow.

Once we go over to sustainable energy sources - wind power, solar
power and hydro power - you can take as many hots showers as
you like, and drive everywhere in your electric car, without running
any risk of ruining the earth.

You may not have any direct interest in the state of the earth after your
death, but you would feel a bit stupid if someone worked out how to
stop the ageing process within your lifetime, and your kids - if you ever
manage to have any - would not be too pleased with your attitude.

As far as the earth burning out eventually - this doesn't look likely to
happen for another 5 billion years. If we last ten millions years as an
identifiable species we will be doing well, which is a rather shorter time.

In fact the worst we could do to the earth would be to bring on a
global extinction event. These have happened in the geological past,
and the more dramatic examples have done for every land animal
that was bigger or or more slow-breeding than a rabbit.
The smaller animals that do survive take a couple of million years
to evolve into the bigger, slower-breeding animals that can take
over the big-animal ecological niches, but thereafter it is back to
business as usual.

 

[Bill Sloman]

That's a sloppy comment. Did you intend to be vague and mislead?

The sun is a black body radiator. IR and UV intensities follow directly
from its surface temperature. Don Klipstein is a educated person and
expects other educated people to know that

No rising trend of what? UV? IR? Total insolation?

See above.

Magnetism? Sun spots? Solar cycle duration?

None of which have ever been shown to have any effect on the climate
of the earth. And I do know that various authors have claimed such
effects, but I also know that their claims all turned out to be defective.

Since you seem to believe everything that you read on denialist
web-sites, who seem to be as enthusiastic about publishing these
exploded claims as they are reluctant to publish the subsequent
corrections, your attitude is not unexpected.

It is - of course - seriously ill-informed, but that's nothing new for
you, and we can't realistically hope that you are ever going to
learn to do better.

 

[[email protected]]

Nonsense. If Jim were deeply troubled, he go an find out something
about the subject.

He obviously hasn't, otherwise he would be sharing Rich Grise's
foolish delusion that anthropogenic global warming is a religous
revelation, rather than the consequence of some fifty years of
scientiific investigation across a number of rather different
disciplines.

After 50 years of investigation, what is the conclusive physical
evidence that AGW is dangerous.

"Extraordinay claims require extraordinay evidence"... Carl Sagan

I'm not even asking for __extraordinay__ evidence, just some regular
ordinary physical evidence...

Mark

 

[Richard Henry]

What are the physical manifestations  of global warming that we can
actually MEASURE  and OBSERVE?

When it comes to making important policy decisions that effect all of
us, there needs to be a clear distinction between PREDICTIONS and
SIMULATIONS vs. physical MEASUREMENTS  and OBSERVATIONS.  To make an
analogy to electronics, are you going to make major decisions that
impact the economic health of your company based solely upon the
results of  PSPICE simulations or  are you going to build prototypes
and make real measurements?

 1) CO2 CONCENTRATION
The measured increase in CO2 concentration is well established.  The
CAUSE of the increase is not well established.  The measured increase
is within the same order of magnitude as the amount of CO2
civilization is putting into the atmosphere therefore theory that the
CO2 increase is anthropogenic is a reasonable possibility  but not a
100% certainty.  The CO2 concentration has varied widely well before
the use of fossil fuels.   The increase in CO2 concentration  is
conclusive but the cause of the increase is not conclusive.

2) GLOBAL TEMPERATURE INCREASE
The measured global temperature increase we measure today is very
small and is within the noise of normal weather variations.   There
are no conclusive measurements that can show  the cause of this small
temperature increase is due to CO2 or to sun spots or to anything
else.   Predictions that there will be dangerous climate  temperature
increases in the future are based on simulations.  The simulations
assume that the  temperature rise is caused by the C02 concentration
increase and that the CO2 increase is anthropogenic.  The cause of the
small measured global temperature increase is not conclusive.

3) SEA  LEVEL INCREASE
The measured global sea level rise today is very small also.  There
are no conclusive measurements that can show this small increase has
anything to do with CO2 or temperature or anything else.  Predictions
that there will be dangerous increases in sea level in the future are
based on simulations. The cause of the small measured sea level rise
is not conclusive.

4) POLAR ICE
The measured decrease in Arctic polar ice is well established.  The
measured increase in Antarctic polar ice is also well established.
There are no conclusive measurements or physical evidence that
indicate a dangerous trend.

If we did not have sensitive scientific instruments,   we would not
even be aware of some of the small changes that have been measured.
These observations are interesting and worthy of further study.
However,  there is no conclusive  physical evidence  that anything
dangerous is actually  happening.

Does it make sense to base a national and world energy policy on
simulations without conclusive physical evidence?

Does it make sense to levy a carbon tax or establish a cap and trade
bureaucracy,  without conclusive physical evidence?

Does it make sense to use resources to build large carbon capture
facilities to sequester  CO2 underground without conclusive physical
evidence?

Does it make sense to forgo the use of our oil and coal resources
without conclusive physical evidence?

Regardless of the validity of AGW,  we do need to address the issue of
our energy supply.   We DO need to develop alternative energy
sources.  We do need to develop renewable energy sources.  We do need
to improve energy efficiency.  We do need to consider nuclear energy.
These are all forward moving productive steps for civilization to
progress and improve the quality of life.

However,  imposing taxes, building CO2 sequestration plants, creating
a cap and trade bureaucracy and demonizing oil and coal without
CONCLUSIVE physical evidence of a real problem just does not make any
sense.

     Mark

D-

 

[Don Klipstein]

Mars Melt Hints at Solar, Not Human, Cause for Warming,
Scientist Says:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/070228-mars-warming.html

Suggestive correlations between the brightness of Neptune,
solar variability, and Earth's temperature
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2007/2006GL028764.shtml

MIT researcher finds evidence of global warming on
Neptune's largest moon (Triton):
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/1998/triton.html

Pluto is undergoing global warming, researchers find:
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2002/pluto.html

"Global warming on Mars – without SUVs!
Planet experiencing increased temperatures
despite lack of humankind
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=36049

Global warming on other planets
Mars, Jupiter, Triton, Neptune, Pluto, and others
share the fate of Earth
http://motls.blogspot.com/2006/05/global-warming-on-jupiter.html

"...levelling off is just what is expected by the
chief rival hypothesis, which says that the sun drives
climate changes more emphatically than greenhouse
gases do..."
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1363818.ece

Global Warming on Mars & Cosmic Ray Research Are Shattering
Media Driven "Consensus"
http://www.canadafreepress.com/2007/global-warming030207.htm

Chris Landsea Resigns from IPCC over bad science:
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/p...olicy_general/000318chris_landsea_leaves.html

Have a look at:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/Solar-cycle-data.png

The sun has not had trend of increase on time scale bigger than the
11 year sunspot cycle from 1975 to now.

Warming on other planets looks like selective reporting to me!

- Don Klipstein ([email protected])

 

[Don Klipstein]

That's a sloppy comment. Did you intend to be vague and mislead?

No rising trend of what? UV? IR? Total insolation? Magnetism? Sun
spots? Solar cycle duration?

Irradiance, sunspot observations, solar flare index and "10.7 radio
flux" have all lacked rising trend from 1975/1976 to now, cycle-by-cycle
of the 11 year cycle, from peak to peak, and from dip to dip:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/Solar-cycle-data.png

Iradiance has maintained lack of rising trend from 1976 to now with
annual-figure dips around 1365.4-1365.5 and annual-figure peaks around
1366.5-1366.6 watts per square meter (presumably above atmosphere at 1
A.U. from center of sun).

- Don Klipstein ([email protected])

 

[Don Klipstein]

In <18b02626-8260-4b77-8604-eb50eaf4edab@w34g2000yqm.googlegroups.com>,

After 50 years of investigation, what is the conclusive physical
evidence that AGW is dangerous.

"Extraordinay claims require extraordinay evidence"... Carl Sagan

I'm not even asking for __extraordinay__ evidence, just some regular
ordinary physical evidence...

The interglacial period almost 100,000 years ago, with height maybe 4
degrees C warmer than the 20th century was, significantly (but did not
completely) melt Greenland's icecap / "ice sheet".

Forecasts only mildly on the alarmist side of AGW projections are that
we will get that warm again or a bit worse within a couple centuries, and
urban/industrialized areas having a lot of industry and at least a couple
hundred million people will have to move inland/uphill to extent of maybe
6-7 meters uphill.

Should Antarctica thaw out (more far-fetched, likely requiring global
warming by 6 maybe 7 degrees C), sea level rises much more - something
like 180 meters.

If Greenland thaws out while Antarctica does not (or does not do so
until much later), or even if sea ice and snow cover decrease bigtime and
do so disproportionately in the Northern Hemisphere, zonal weather trend
zones especially the "intertropical convergence zone" (ITCZ) shift
northward.
In a more extreme case, summertime "monsoon" of Yucatan gets more
extreme and moves northward to late-summer position anywhere from Mexico
City latitude to Rio Grande area (and westward). South Texas in such more
extreme case becomes like northern India. Precipitation increase in
semiarid-to-desert areas in central/northern Mexico and nearby parts of SW
USA may allow new agricultural opportunities.
Canada and other northern nations stand to gain increase of agricultural
opportunities due to shorter/milder winters. Southern Europe and
similar regions of Asia could get a bit more semi-arid and/or more
heatwave-prone, and southern/western portions of USA's "breadbasket"
region could long-term become more like what befell much of central USA
around 1931-1936 or so.

I would suggest that the USA "states" of Texas and New Mexico look into
agricultural opportunities for increased rainfall and humidity in
semi-arid to arid areas farther south and southwest where weather pattern
shifts from Arctic-concentrated global warming have "some fair chance of
accomplishing such" (my words).

- Don Klipstein ([email protected])

 

[Don Klipstein]

There is no brick wall anymore than Iraq had WMD.

The politicians find it convenient to promote the brick wall as they
did WMD.

The IPCC is political, not scientific.

http://www.ipcc.ch/about/index.htm

/quote

The people: as United Nations body, the IPCC work aims at the
promotion of the United Nations human development goals

/end quote

If you poke global warming you find CO2 is not a significant problem
in itself. The positive feedback mechanisms are triggered by a rise in
temperature not CO2. The indirect link is that CO2 raises temperature
which then triggers the feedback. So when the temperature rises for
other reasons the same feedback should be triggered.

Yet the world has been warmer than now.

True, but how rercently? I have yet to find or be presented with
credible account of MWP being warmer than the past decade was.

With temperature driven positive feedback how did the world ever cool
down?

Positive feedback worked both when more-independent variables favored
cooling and when they favored warming. Historically before Industrial
Revolution that was "Milankovitch Cycles".

Look at the historical temperature CO2 graphs.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/01/30/co2-temperatures-and-ice-ages/

CO2 lags temperature by 800 years. How could temperature decrease
before CO2 if CO2 causes warming?

The presentations you mention are over multiple kilo-years (at least)
and on that time scale before "Industrial Revolution" atmospheric CO2
concentration was a positive feedback mechanism - both lagging and
reinforcing.

After the "Industrial Revolution", the game changed due to humans
transfering carbon from the "lithosphere" to the "carbon cycle". Since
the late 1800's, global temperature started lagging by a few years the
increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration past the roughly 280 ppmv
that used to be interglacial-level.

Please stop drinking the beer and leave the party you've obviously
drunk too much. Just don't expect the rest of us to join you or pay
for your paranoia.

- Don Klipstein ([email protected])

 

[Don Klipstein]

As an engineer, would you say that a system with positive feedback:

a) Stays reasonably stable (like the earth does)?

Earth has history of global temperature changing by a goodly 10 degrees
C through the past at-least 4 of the most-global of the "Milankovitch
Cycles" (the "eccentricity" one).

or

b) Drives itself to some upper or lower limit (like the earth doesn't)?

Earth does indeed have a historical uper limit - with global average
surface temperature historical estimated-upper-limits being close to 22
degreees C at times when the world was warm enough to remove most of the
positive feedback that resulted from mobility of change in coverage of
significant regions of the world by snow/ice in one form or another.

Please keep in mind what the sea level was when our planet had stable
temperature with higher presence of "Greenhouse Gases". Who pays the
bills to move from "where it was good" to "where it becomes good"?
How much or how little should taxation assist population movements from
regions becoming less-livable to regions more-livable, and where is a line
drawn (or where are lines drawn) so that individuals/families/regions
"knowing what to do" as a result of "good attitude" are only taxed to
"charitably appropriate extent" ("My Words") and that "the successful"
get hit with taxes "sufficiently short of punishing the successful for
succeess".

- Don Klipstein ([email protected])

 

[Raveninghorde]

There certainly isn't a brickwall but unrestrained global warming
seems likely to cause a population crash within a few generations, if
we let it get that far.

Note that the people who told you that there were weapons of mass
descrution in Irak were the same crew that tried to prevent US
scientists from saying that anthropogenic global warming was a real
threat.

No. Tony Bliar sent UK into Iraq because of WMD. Tony Bliar and his
successor Gordon Clown have been pushing AGW.

Not the same politicians. The honest ones do beleive in anthropogenic
global warming. It was the lying cheats who denied it.

No. Tony Bliar sent UK into Iraq because of WMD. Tony Bliar and his
successor Gordon Clown have been pushing AGW.

The carbon dioxide that caused the global warming eventually got
buried as carbonate rocks; the gain around the positive feedback loops
here was never greater than two, so as the CO2 got buried, the
temperature cooled off.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age

irrelevent link that does not discuss carbonate rocks.

You've been told how stupid this argument is before. The ice ages in
the ice core record are driven by the Milankovitch Effect

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles
and carbon dioxide coming out of solution in the oceans is one of the
positve feedbacks that builds up the relatively small effect of the
change in the orientation of the earth vis--a-vis the summer sun to a
significant change in temperature. Since it takes a while - some 800
years - for the oceans to warm up, the CO2 level lags the temperature.
At the moment we are injecting CO2 into the atmosphere by burning
fossil carbon, which directly warms the earth via the greenhouse
effect.

So? I didn't dispute that. If you can't follow the discussion don't
comment.

 

[Raveninghorde]

Not acceptable to Greenies. Wind turbines kill birds. Solar cells
are made with nasty chemicals. Greenies are trying to tear down
dams, not build more of them.

The French have the right idea. Nuclear reactors. Many, many
nuclear reactors. A breeder reactor is the ultimate in renewable
energy.

And in the UK the greenies are fighting the Severn Barrage that would
generate 20% of our electricity.

Greenies want us back in the stone age.

 

[Raveninghorde]

Pretty stupid rhetoric.

Stupid rhetoric from the greenie AGW crowd. But not just rhetoric.

http://www.nationalcenter.org/dos7129.htm

/quote

Earth First! certainly does make other groups appear moderate: In the
name of environmental protection, Earth First! members have spiked
trees (a policy Earth First! renounced several years ago), filled
bulldozer gas tanks with sand, chained themselves to heavy industrial
equipment to prevent its use and, according to some corporate
executives, threatened to kill executives' children and spouses. In
1989, David Foreman and three other members of Earth First! were
arrested by the FBI on charges of conspiracy to sabotage nuclear
facilities. He left Earth First! in 1990 and the group has floundered
ever since.

/end quote

 

[Raveninghorde]

Have a look at:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/Solar-cycle-data.png

The sun has not had trend of increase on time scale bigger than the
11 year sunspot cycle from 1975 to now.

Warming on other planets looks like selective reporting to me!

- Don Klipstein ([email protected])

Temperature is warmer during shorter cycles. It's an inverse affect.

Cycle 23 wich has just finished is something like 13 years long. Cycle
24 is off to a very slow start and may be even longer.

 

[Raveninghorde]

Irradiance, sunspot observations, solar flare index and "10.7 radio
flux" have all lacked rising trend from 1975/1976 to now, cycle-by-cycle
of the 11 year cycle, from peak to peak, and from dip to dip:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/Solar-cycle-data.png

Iradiance has maintained lack of rising trend from 1976 to now with
annual-figure dips around 1365.4-1365.5 and annual-figure peaks around
1366.5-1366.6 watts per square meter (presumably above atmosphere at 1
A.U. from center of sun).

- Don Klipstein ([email protected])

We've just been through a grand solar maximum with the sun
hyperactive. The insolation has been high and fairly constant.

The sun is now going to take a break. And it will be colder.

http://www.cdejager.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/2009-forecasting-jastp-71-239.pdf

/quote

Abstract: Solar variability is controlled by the internal dynamo which
is a nonlinear system. We develop a physical-statistical method for
forecasting solar activity that takes into account the non-linear
character of the solar dynamo. The method is based on the generally
accepted mechanisms of the dynamo and on recently found systematic
properties of the long-term solar variability. The amplitude
modulation of the Schwabe cycle in the dynamo?s magnetic field
components can be decomposed in an invariant transition level and
three types of oscillations around it. The regularities that we
observe in the behaviour of these oscillations during the last
millennium enable us to forecast solar activity. We find that the
system is presently undergoing a transition from the recent Grand
Maximum to another regime.

This transition started in 2000 and it is expected to end around the
maximum of cycle 24, foreseen for 2014, with a maximum sunspot number
Rmax = 68 plus/minus 17. At that time a period of lower solar activity
will start. That period will be one of regular oscillations, as
occurred between 1730 and 1923. The first of these oscillations may
even turn out to be as strongly negative as around 1810, in which case
a short Grand Minimum similar to the Dalton one might develop. This
moderate to low-activity episode is expected to last for at least one
Gleissberg cycle (60 - 100 years)

/end quote

 

[Greegor]

You're not going to coax me into starting another pun thread.

   They have plenty of capacity for that!

Be coercive, be a master of your magnetic domain.
Don't display your reluctance!

Here is conclusive evidence for AWG.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_wire_gauge