NASA claims humans now have 50 times more influence on temperatures than the Sun, according to this report. But they don’t link to any supporting evidence so we’re back to alarmist assertions and numbers pulled out of the sky, as usual.
NASA has shut down a spacecraft that measured the amount of solar energy entering Earth’s atmosphere for 17 years, more than three times the mission’s original design life, reports Spaceflight Now.
The Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment, or SORCE, mission ended Feb. 25 after the spacecraft labored through battery problems for years until NASA could launch a replacement.
SORCE’s four science instruments monitored the amount, spectrum and fluctuations in solar energy entering Earth’s atmosphere, according to NASA. Measurements of the solar energy, called solar irradiance, helps scientists understand how much variations in the sun’s output are responsible for Earth’s changing climate.
“These measurements are important for two reasons,” said Dong Wu, project scientist for SORCE at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “Climate scientists need to know how much the sun varies, so they know how much change in the Earth’s climate is due to solar variation.
“Secondly, we’ve debated for years, is the sun getting brighter or dimmer over hundreds of years? We live only a short period, but an accurate trend will become very important,” Wu said in a statement. “If you know how the sun is varying and can extend that knowledge into the future, you can then put the anticipated future solar input into climate models together with other information, like trace gas concentrations, to estimate what our future climate will be.”
NASA says that greenhouse gas emissions coming from human activity has had more than 50 times the influence of the slight increase in solar energy in causing warming temperatures on Earth since 1750.
Built by Orbital Sciences Corp., the SORCE spacecraft flew into orbit Jan. 25, 2003, on an air-launched Pegasus XL rocket dropped over the Atlantic Ocean east of Florida.
The mission was designed to last at least five years, but SORCE accumulated 17 years of measurements before NASA ended spacecraft operations in February.
SORCE provided more accurate measurements of solar irradiance than previous space missions.
“The mission length also enabled valuable measurements during two of the sun’s 11-year cycles,” wrote Eric Moyer, deputy project manager for NASA’s Earth science mission operations. “SORCE data provide a unique understanding of how the flow of energy from the sun varies and how these variations impact Earth’s weather, climate systems, and, ultimately, all life on Earth that depends on solar irradiance.”
Eight years into the mission, SORCE suffered from battery degradation that began to impact operations. The battery issues eventually prevented SORCE from full-time measurements, and ground teams switched to a daytime-only observations.
The change effectively allowed SORCE to operate with no functioning battery, keeping the mission going until a replacement could be developed and launched. NASA’s Glory spacecraft, which would have continued SORCE’s observations, was lost in a launch failure in 2011.
Full report here.
via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
April 12, 2020 at 03:24AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 