In answer to your question, no. A 0.1% variation in TSI is less likely to change climate than a 40% increase in carbon dioxide. You should also remember that the even without an atmosphere, the solar radiation averaged over the surface of the Earth is only 25% of the TSI, so that would knock a 1.6 mW/m^2 variation down to 0.4 mW/m^2, and it's actually still quite a bit less than that, because of the Earth's albedo.
Your comment that "...we know that CO2...only provides a small amount of the atmosphere's heat retention" is probably wrong (the only reason it is not definitely wrong is that you have never defined "heat retention" so it's ambiguous). Remove the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and in a decade or two, the Earth would turn into a giant snowball. That's been shown in multiple studies (Pierrehumbert et al, Schmidt et al, probably lots more). Carbon dioxide is an essential ingredient to the Earth's climate, get over it.
EDIT: Maxx, you just make up things when you feel like it. The increase in atmospheric CO2 is anthropogenic--it's not from ocean outgassing. Both the isotopic evidence shows that and we know how much we've emitted, which is more than enough to account for the increase. The amount in the ocean is increasing, not decreasing--we see the pH decrease associated with it. This is why you need to read textbooks, the stuff you say is all garbage.
Another EDIT: Maxx, you're a liar and idiot. If you really believe what you say, why do you feel compelled to lie about so many things? You really could use some lessons in ethics, in addition to basic chemistry and physics.
The mistake you’re making here Maxx is to look only at the numbers whilst ignoring the effects of those numbers, and also to compare the incomparable.
It’s kind of like saying “the victim drank a glass of water and was fine, later her drank two glasses of water that had some arsenic in, and then he died. It must have been the water that killed him because there was more water than arsenic”.
And so it is with the atmosphere. Whilst the volume (and mass) of greenhouse gases present in our atmosphere is tiny compared to the other gases, it’s the effect that’s important. You are aware that the presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere cause 33°C of warming and that this provides a habitable planet. Therefore, that tiny amount of gas has a massive bearing on our climates.
The other thing you’ve done is to contrast the change in TSI with the amount of greenhouse gases – not the change in greenhouse gases. In order to maintain consistency your question should be asking whether a 0.1% change in TSI is more likely to change climate than a 41% increase in greenhouse gases. So when we look at changes, the change in greenhouse gas concentrations is 400 times greater than the change in TSI.
Another thing where your argument falls down is that TSI changes on a cyclical basis. Whilst the long-term trend is highlighted in your graph, you can also see that it consists of a series of peaks and troughs, these correspond with the 11 year solar cycle – 5 ? years of increasing solar activity followed by the same period of decreasing activity.
If TSI were capable of changing the climate on the same timescale as global warming has occurred over then there would be a very clear 5? year cycle in global climates, which clearly there isn’t.
Instead, the effect of TSI fluctuation is something that manifests itself on timescales of hundreds of years. The Medieval Warm Period is a good example of this, it took 1,000 years of increasing solar activity just to warm the climate by 0.5°C, that’s about the same level of warming which has occurred in just the last 30 years.
To try to shift the focus of attention onto the Sun is really nothing more than a cop-out. It also completely ignores the small level of warming consequent to increasing TSI, it ignores the timescales involved, it ignores the laws of thermodynamics and quantum mechanics and it ignores the fact that the only mechanism Earth has for retaining heat within the atmosphere has increased by 41%.
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RE: YOUR ADDED DETAILS
Just because CO2 increases it doesn’t mean that temps have to increase, which skeptics seem to assume has to be the case. There are multiple factors that cause both warming and cooling, something that skeptics seem woefully ignorant of. CO2 could reach record high levels and the climate could still cool if the effect was overshadowed by the cooling components. At present levels of SO2 and other dimming agents are rising, this is counteracting the warming from the CO2. The problem is that SO2 remains in the atmosphere for 2-3 years, CO2 remains there for 115 years; the dimming can quickly disappear but the warming can’t.
Your comment about the ice-cores is misinformed. CO2 and temperatures are a closed coupled feedback mechanism, it makes no difference which comes first, the other will always follow. If you go back further than the ice-core records, there are plenty of occasions when CO2 rose first and temps followed.
630mya the Earth was frozen solid, the only time this is ever known to have happened. In the next few million years a series of massive volcanic eruptions released CO2 into the atmosphere which kick started the greenhouse effect. If your claim were correct then this could never have happened and planet Earth would still be frozen.
I will answer this quiestion if you tell me what your height is in miles. Kilometres, furlongs, astronomical units or light years will also do.
When I hear the concentration of a gas is X%, even if X is a very small number, I think that the gas concentration is expressed in percent, so it is not a trace gas. Trace gas concntrations are expressed in parts per million, or sometimes, parts per billion, parts per trillion or parts per quadrillion, depending on how little gas there is in the atmosphere.
The percent change of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since humans have been burning fossil fuels was
([400ppm - 270ppm] / 270ppm) * 100% = 48%
Maxx: You have to be one of the most oblivious people to actual reality than most. You are up there with Sagebrush. CO2 increase is NOT COMING FROM THE OCEANS. I have told you this numerous times. Human emissions are more than twice what the atmosphere is increasing by. The equation, known as Le Chatelier's Principal, that shows that CO2 increase follows temperature increase is the exact same equation that shows why the atmosphere is increasing at a rate only half that of human emissions while the rest is being absorbed by the oceans. Human emissions = over 33.5 billion tonnes. atmospheric increase = 15.6 billion tonnes. Quick, can you figure out which number is higher? I'll get back to you in a bit when you've figured it out. Let me provide you a link to show you exactly what is occurring in the past compared to now.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/globalwar...
I think there is a lot more to it that we don't yet know about, TSI might only change 0.01% but other changes like extra ultra violet rays (EUVA) change a lot more, and solar wind, cosmic rays, earth's magnetic field, also change with sunspot cycles.
Our sun is a variable star and we haven't been around long enough to understand it.
Well, there's no money to be made and even more importantly no people to terrify and political power to be gained if Climate Change is a result of natural unavoidable sources, so I'm going with parts per million changes in nasty old polar bear killing CO2.
0.0001% change in the sun's output can change our climate after all it is a million times bigger than earth
no the sun has nothing to do with temperature, only co2 does
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The Sun provides almost all the heat found in our atmosphere, it's what warms the planet. And the Sun's output is not constant. This graph shows Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) changing from a low of about 1360.2 to a high of about 1361.8 between the years 1611 to 2012. http://lasp.colorado.edu/lisird/tsi/historical_tsi.html
This change in TSI represents a variation in solar irradiance of slightly more than 0.1% peak-to-peak.
By contrast, we know that CO2 (all of it, not just the man-made portion), only provides a small amount of the atmosphere's heat retention. And as a side note, the man-made portion of CO2 would be much smaller still.
So which is more likely to cause temperature fluctuations over long periods, a 0.1% variation from the source of the heat, or a 0.04% trace gas in the atmosphere that is only responsible for a small amount of the atmosphere's heat retention?
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