Layers of Earth's upper atmosphere. Credit: John Emmert/NRL.

Earth’s thermosphere collapses – film at 11: NASA releases a news report on how the thermosphere (the top 500K of Earth’s atmosphere) is affected by solar activity. This is Anthony Watts’ excuse to revive the hoary bogus claim that climate change is all driven by the sun and will swing back no matter what humans do. Also, NASA are a bunch of ‘Chicken Littles’, always worrying about things. Don’t ever listen to them!

Too bad these fluctuations (the “collapses” are the result of upper atmosphere cooling triggered by lower solar activity) don’t mirror anything that’s happening to Earth’s climate. If you want to get technical, the historical patterns suggest that last decade of declining solar activity should have been accompanied by minor global cooling, not record warming…

The paper that NASA’s summary is derived from is: Emmert, J. T., J. L. Lean, and J. M. Picone (2010), Record-low thermospheric density during the 2008 solar minimum, Geophys. Res. Lett., 37, L12102.

Of course Anthony also highlights the NASA author’s e-mail address for easy harassment.