Nature Turns Up The Sunshine

For the usual unknown reasons that are so common in my life, I got to thinking about sunshine hours.

Several people have noted that the decreased total albedo in the CERES dataset not only provides the additional energy necessary to explain a quarter-century of warming. It also gives changes in the total absorbed solar radiation (ASR, incoming solar radiation minus reflected solar radiation) that match up very nicely with the warming.

Now, a problem with the CERES data is that it only covers the last 25 years. So in place of albedo, I thought I’d look at “sunshine hours” instead. This is the percentage of the daylight hours of a day, week, month, or year during which the sun is shining. It’s not albedo, but it’s related. Some research showed that the longest dataset we have is from Oxford in the UK. Here is that record.

Hmmm, sez I … most interesting. Although this isn’t the same as ASR, it’s most definitely increasing.

Next, I looked at Europe. Copernicus has a dataset showing sunshine hours there. It’s shorter, starting only in 1983. Figure 3 shows the Copernicus data.