Sunshine Up in Spain From 1985 to 2010 by 3.9W/m^2

The Hockey Schtick has found another paper showing sunshine is way up in Spain. And more sunshine means warming.

“The mean annual G series over Spain shows a tendency to increase during the 1985-2010 period, with a significant linear trend of + 3.9 Wm- 2 per decade. Similar significant increases are observed in the mean seasonal series, with the highest rate of change during summer (+ 6.5 Wm- 2 per decade) and secondly in autumn (+ 4.1 W m- 2 per decade) and spring (+ 3.2 Wm- 2 per decade). These results are in line with the widespread increase of G, also known as brightening period, reported at many worldwide observation sites.”

3.9W/m^2 is more than the effect of a doubling of CO2 (which has not happened yet)

The abstract is here.

 

I have other blog posts on the subject here.

 

 

One thought on “Sunshine Up in Spain From 1985 to 2010 by 3.9W/m^2

  1. This is interesting data, as it allows one to calculate a climate sensitivity for a small region. Thanks to some excellent work by EM Smith, the GHCN v.3 temperature data for Spain is here-

    http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/05/22/ghcn-v3-portugal-and-spain/

    The trend is 0.07 C/decade from 1985 to 2010.
    If the forcing ramps up linearly at 4 W/m^2/decade, then the average forcing anomaly is about 5 W/m^2.
    This is during peak sun. Spain receives about 5 hours of peak sun per day.
    The forcing averages out to about 5W/m^2*5hrs/24hrs = 1 W/m^2 over 25 years.
    That gives a shockingly low climate sensitivity of 0.07 C/W/m^2 over a 25 year period.

    This agrees with the very low climate sensitivity found by Idso.

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