by Judith Curry
Two new workshop reports provide insights into what we know and don’t know about the effects of solar variability on climate.
NRC Workshop Report
The National Academies Press has released a draft publication entitled The effects of solar variability on Earth’s climate: A workshop report. The Workshop was under the auspices of the Space Studies Board Committee on the Effects of Solar Variability on Earth’s Climate, chaired by Gerald North.
From the Preface:
The workshop featured presentations on a variety of topics related to solar variability and climate change, organized as follows:
- The Sun and Solar Variability: Past and Present —Overview of solar and heliospheric variability —Observations of the Sun’s variable outputs —Techniques for revealing past solar changes
- Sun-Climate Connections on Different Timescales —Evidence of solar influences in the troposphere and stratosphere —How the climate system works and how it might respond to solar influences —Indications of influence based on paleoclimate records
- Mechanisms for Sun-Climate Connections —Mechanisms connecting variations in total solar irradiance directly to the troposphere —Mechanisms that influence upper parts of the atmosphere, such as variations in solar ultraviolet radiation and possibly solar energetic particles —Mechanisms that link variations in galactic cosmic rays to climate change.
This workshop report contains no recommendations, findings, or statements of consensus. Instead, this workshop report summarizes the views expressed by individual workshop participants (invited speakers and guests). Also included is background information intended to provide context to the reader on both the solar and climate science topics presented at the workshop; however, this is not intended to be an exhaustive review of the current state of the science.
An overview is provided of the sun-climate interactions:
The changes in TSI over the solar cycle provide a good starting point for discussing these challenges. Periodic, or quasi-periodic, forcing17 provides invaluable information on climate dynamics. Other than the seasonal variability on a yearly scale and the precession of the equinoxes (the change of the season in which the minimum Sun-Earth distance occurs) with scales of 20,000 years, the only quasi- periodic forcing term is the 11-year solar cycle. Based on the climate community’s best estimates of global climate sensitivity, the solar stimuli are much smaller than would be required to dominate the temperature record on decadal timescales.18 The search for the solar cycle signal in the temperature record, albeit small, continues to motivate much of the climate research in this area, and so far two basic mechanisms have been modeled. In the first, the 11-year cycle may affect the climate system via the bottom-up total solar irradiance path through which solar cycle effects can manifest themselves at the surface and its nearby environment. In general, this bottom-up driver is strongest in the tropics, where there are feedbacks (from clouds, ocean currents, sea surface temperature, and so on) present in the climate system that strengthen the effect and even show up at higher latitudes.
A second avenue of inquiry is the top-down mechanism that makes use of the modulated absorption of ultraviolet radiation in the stratosphere. Top-down mechanisms operate through changes in the more energetic, shorter-wavelength components of the solar spectrum that influence stratospheric temperatures and winds directly and through absorption by stratospheric ozone. Early work by Karen Labitzke and Harry Van Loon on interactions of the solar cycle and the Quasi-Biennial Oscillation (QBO) of the equatorial stratosphere helped direct attention to the top-down pathway.19,20 The modulation of stratospheric temperatures is clear from observations. Climate models also take this modulation as input and have demonstrated significant perturbations on tropospheric circulations. If borne out by future studies and shown to be of sufficient magnitude, this mechanism could be an important pathway in the Sun-climate connection, particularly in terms of regional impacts. However, it is important to realize that, unlike the bottom-up mechanism, it can in itself contribute very little to global temperature variations.
The effects on climate of centennial timescale variations in TSI have been an even more difficult and contentious issue. Since the work of Jack Eddy in 1976,21 the claim that the lower temperatures of the Little Ice Age from roughly 1600 to 1850 are connected to the secular changes in the Sun, as reflected in paleoclimate data derived from cosmogenic isotopes in sediments and the observed record of sunspots, remains an unresolved research topic (Figure 1.2). Recent findings that removal of small-scale photospheric fields could dim the Sun more than previously expected increase the likelihood of such variations in secular irradiance.22 It remains to be shown whether or not the field decreased significantly below levels observed during normal 11-year activity minima. Ongoing discussion of the role of solar variations in the early 20th century has given rise to the unfounded conjecture that the observed increase in temperature in the last half century could also be due to changes in TSI rather than to anthropogenic influences. The IPCC Fourth Assessment and the recent National Research Council report on climate choices agree that there is no substantive scientific evidence that solar variability is the cause of climate change in the last 50 years. However, the mechanisms by which solar variations can affect climate over longer timescales remain an open area of research.
JC comment: This type of statement, which is endemic to the IPCC brings to mind a statement by Kerry Emanuel: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. This is another example of failure to account for ignorance in assessing our knowledge about these topics.
The report presents no conclusions, but some statements from the panel discussion are interesting, notably Gerald North’s summary statement:
At the end of the panel discussion Gerald North summarized the issues that were developed during the workshop. He made three principal points:
1. NASA has led the way in providing a model for ready access to data from many sources—the challenge is to provide better access to paleoclimate data while recognizing the effort it takes to acquire and archive those data in a form accessible to the community.
2. Coupled models, with their inherent complexity, are the future and need to be used more widely for well-designed studies. It is fortunate that climate modeling has advanced to the point that such projects can be undertaken with some confidence.
3. The directly measured record is limited and not without its issues, and so the challenge is to make sure that a means is developed to infer the time history of TSI variability and the limitations on the ability to specify that past behavior.
North also summarized other issues that he felt had been addressed during the workshop and that were particularly noteworthy. Those issues included, among others, the need to be careful in making inferences from the isotope record, which may reflect influences of atmospheric circulation; the need to understand the role galactic cosmic rays may play in cloud nucleation; and the influence of variations in geomagnetic field on the paleo-climate record. North noted that Peter Foukal’s discussion of the Sun was particularly interesting because of the unresolved issues with understanding variability and the sources of variability in TSI arising from the details of the quiet network. Also, a better understanding is needed of how solar brightness, TSI, and the spectral and spatial distribution of energy are affected by the faculae and the dynamics of the Sun.
SORCE SSI Workshop Summary
The latest issue of NASA’s Earth Observer Magazine has an article on SORCE SSI Workshop Summary (link to entire issue; see pages 17-20.) Excerpts:
The Agenda included:
- Reviewing various SSI (solar spectral irradiance) instrument observations, capabilities, and their estimated irradiance uncertainties;
- discussing how each instrument team analyzed the spectral data, to separate instrument effects (e.g. degradation) from intrinsic solar variations;
- discussing the reported SSI differences and refinement of the uncertainties, to gain a better under- standing of them; and
- planning future methods, to identify the significant differences (e.g., new studies, new calibrations, etc.) and refine uncertainties.
A critical requirement for this workshop was that participants examine the methods used to perform long-term instrument degradation corrections. The techniques used for correcting on-orbit irradiance vary from instrument to instrument, so analysis of how these corrections are performed and uncertainty estimates for those corrections are necessary.
Each instrument had its own unique challenges regarding calibration and degradation; key in-strument degradation trend challenges are listed here:
- Degradation trends are complicated because there are many variables that must be accounted for (e.g., multiple drivers, multiple parameters, differ-ent time scales).
- Most instrument calibration channels have differ-ent trend relationships with exposure time that are different from their daily channels.
- Laboratory measurements indicate that photodiodes can have significant recovery—up to 50%— after being exposed to intense levels of UV radiation if they are kept unexposed for a period of time after the UV exposure.
- Carbon deposition degradation rate has many de-pendences (e.g., pressure, temperature, contamina-tion materials), so the same optical elements can have different trends.
- Solar spectral changes at different points in a solar cycle can enhance degradation .
The relevance of solar spectral irradiance to climate is discussed in this article on the SORCE mission and in a RealClimate article entitled Solar spectral stumper.
The sun as a variable star
A relevant and very educational paper was published in the latest issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society: Understanding space weather: the sun as a variable star, by Keith Strong, Julia Saba, Therese Kucera. Excerpts related to TSI:
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, instruments on two National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) missions (Nimbus-7 and Solar Maximum Mission) began to monitor the solar output with vastly improved precision; their measurements led to the discovery that TSI was positively correlated with the sunspot cycle. Thus, the faculae predominate in determining the variation of TSI throughout the cycle. The long-term variation of the TSI is punctuated by short-lived deep dips (~0.3%) when particularly large sunspot groups transit the solar disk. The problem with looking for longer trends in TSI is that the observations have been taken by several different spacecraft and the task of making a composite to establish a longer baseline is difficult; there have been a number of attempts to do so, but there are wide discrepancies between them, and thus we have no consensus.
We now have just over 30 yr of TSI observations, but this represents only three activity cycles, and it is dangerous to put too much weight on any broad conclusions drawn from them. There are a variety of longer-term proxy data for solar activity, but many of the proxy estimates are based largely on less reliable SSN measurements and so may be adding as much noise as signal to our understanding of solar activity patterns.
The change in TSI over a solar cycle is <0.1%. However, the emission in various wavebands can vary much more substantially. For example, UV irradiance can vary by 10%–40% over a cycle. However, the change in the overall energy input to the Earth from UV variability is very small.
JC comments:
Substantial uncertainties remain in our understanding of the effects of solar variability on climate, and there is uncertainty in how to interpret the satellite observations. Some previous solar threads at Climate Etc.
So, what would it take to convince you that the sun has NOT played an important role in 20th century climate change? I am not convinced by the type of analysis done by the IPCC and also Muller’s observation-based attribution, as I have argued elsewhere. I think there is much that we don’t know about the sun’s variations and their impact on climate, and I don’t see the IPCC taking a serious look at this issue, other than to say ‘absence of evidence’.
I read somewhere that the sun’s getting hotter every year. It seems that pretty soon the earth’s going to fall into the sun–or wait a minute–it’s just the opposite–the sun’s getting colder every year.
H/t Tom B.
========================
kim, during the space age NASA hid, manipulated or blocked hundreds of new measurements that falsified 1946 propaganda on Earth’s heat source as a giant ball of Hydrogen (H):
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2012/09/27/lewandowsky-to-remove-all-blog-based-references/#comment-77598
Here’s the rest of the story:
http://omanuel.wordpress.com/about/#comment-1127
I regret that I could not connect the dots earlier.
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
Former NASA Principal
Investigator for Apollo
http://www.omatumr.com
Speaking of connecting dots, here’s an interesting recollection from A short talk about Richard Feynman:
> Well, we’d just been crawling around the floor–with help with some other people–trying to use meter rules to measure some feature of a giant printout of it. And Feynman takes me aside, rather conspiratorially, and says: “Look, I just want to ask you one thing: how did you know rule 30 would do all this crazy stuff?” “You know me,” I said. “I didn’t. I just had a computer try all the possible rules. And I found it.” “Ah,” he said, “now I feel much better. I was worried you had some way to figure it out.”
— Stephen Wolfram
http://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/recent/feynman/
Like Feynman, my research mentor (P. K. Kuroda) and I were both driven by the pure pleasure of connecting the dots, deciphering the data.
I cannot imaging a more meaningful way to live life. But connecting the dots has been difficult for historic events shaped in part by mankind’s arrogant, false, foolish and self-deceptive illusion of control.
Ultimately it benefited nobody to ignore post-1945 experimental measurements and observations that told us the creation of our elements, the birth of the solar system, and the energy source that sustains life is an ill-tempered pulsar at the core of the Sun.
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2012/09/27/lewandowsky-to-remove-all-blog-based-references/#comment-77598
Ignoring reality benefitted nobody. We were led down the wrong path in 1945 by frightened and guilt-ridden scientists and Allied leaders
a.) Clinging arrogantly and foolishly to a totally false illusion of control, instead of
b.) Humbly and gratefully seeking guidance from the benevolent Higher Power that sustains life.
> A poet once said, ‘The whole universe is in a glass of wine.’ We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe.
— Richard Feynman
Nice photo there:
http://beautywelove.blogspot.ca/2011/11/feynman.html
In addition to ignoring the influence of solar variability on climate, Steven Goddard has an interesting report on a highly successful movie that is being ignored by our news industry, “2016: Obama’s America”
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2012/09/28/the-movie-which-must-not-be-named/
Whether the destruction of research integrity and constitutional limits on government were caused by capitalists like these:
_ http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=28485.0
Or by deception about Japan’s A-bombs by Soviet communists
_ http://www.my-jia.com/The_Flight_of_the_Hog_Wild/Atlanta_Constitution.htm
_ http://omanuel.wordpress.com/about/#comment-1127
We are all threatened by government policies based on ignorance and misinformation.
That is why our first priority must be the return of
a.) Constitutional limits on government, and
b.) Integrity in government research reports
Nobody is safe when the government established to protect us is instead working to deceive us.
Perhaps communists and capitalists are one and the same under the totalitarian government George Orwell warned us about in 1948
http://www.george-orwell.org/1984
Kim,
There is actually an even bigger worry. And it could happen very quickly.
If we turn any further Left we could crash into the Sun.
Too late.
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/09/27/as-un-opens-its-general-assembly-session-it-is-already-thinking-up-new-global/
Mulled wine?
Tom,
Thanks for that. We should be seriously concerned about UN getting more powers. ‘Agenda21’ is a serious issue.
Give the UN taxing powers and the following steps are inevitable: UN laws, UN courts, UN police, UN armies to ensure we all behave as good, politically correct, socialist, Progressive, Left, Greenies.
Do you get this report: http://www.carboncapturereport.org/
It comes out every day. It has an enormous amount of information, all very well presented in dashboards, charts and tables and easily accessed. For example, today I can see ‘Climate Change’ tone is still reported more positively than negatively (only slightly) but down since yesterday. For ‘Carbon Credits’ the tone is slightly negative and down since yesterday.
I can also see who are the main people reported as commenting: On Alternative Energy Obama is most reported. On Carbon Credits the Australian Opposition Leader and Australian Prime Minister are first and second (in the whole speaking world). Barack Obama also heads the lists talking about Climate Change, Coal, Oil, Gas, Solar. But not nuclear.
Click on anyone of the fifteen categories and drill down into the info for that category. For example. Click on ‘Climate Change’ and see the chart of activity for the past 4 years. Notice the massive fall in activity after Copenhagen and again in July 2011. Public interest in Climate change is dying and this chart makes in really apparent. The chart includes activity (daily) for: news articles, news stories, blogs, twitter, You Tube Videos, and the tone of all. You can select and deselect whatever lines you want, change the scale with a slider, hover to see the daily values for each.
If enter a name in Search you can find all the articles, blogs, etc persons with that name have written in the past 5 years, and stats on them such as: tone, positivity, negativity, emotional polarity, active or passive, personalised, etc. I drilled down and found someone had extracted some comments I’d made on a JoNova thread called: “Thoughts on the Carbon Tax Package” and put them together in this way (excellent, IMO):
http://bleyzie.wordpress.com/2011/07/17/thoughts-on-the-carbon-tax-package/
FYI:
UN. “Agenda 21.DSD:: Resources – Publications – Core Publications, n.d. http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/
Pile, Ben. “Rio+20: a Tyranny of Green Do-gooders.” Commentary. Spiked, July 3, 2012. http://www.spiked-online.com/site/article/12599/
Gerald’s North’s comment on models: “Coupled models, with their inherent complexity, are the future …. Climate modeling has advanced to the point that such projects can be undertaken with some confidence”, seems very hedged.
For North’s earlier skeptical views, see here: http://www.masterresource.org/2011/11/gerald-north-on-climate-modeling-revisited-re-climategate-2-0/
I still wonder how much climate models are better than nothing if they mislead as well as lead.
Well, “nothing” is a model of sorts for policy purposes, because it implies a policy of do nothing.
It isn’t happening, we can’t do anything about it, and we can’t afford to try.
H/t Al G.
======
We observe what has or hasn’t happened. We forecast what might happen.
If you forecast, what’s your track record?
If you don’t forecast, why not?
We are cooling, folks; for how long even kim doesn’t know.
==========================
Alarmist.
Oh, yes, I am fully aware of how alarming I’d like to sound. Cooling is far more destructive, degree for degree than warming, and cooling is more likely in the near, the medium, and the long terms.
=========================
Catastrophic global cooling alarmist.
I can irritate lucia any time I like by calling myself a lukewarming cooler.
========================
Why catastrophic cooling?
Cooling now – who knows what later. Which bit of the IPCC quote below don’t they understand? Which bit of climate catastrophist (in the sense of Rene Thom) is at all ambiguous?
Kim doesn’t like cooling.
Snakes don’t like cooling. Lizards don’t like cooling.
Therefore, Kim may be covered with scales, like Lizard Boy. That’s scary !
kim
Global ocean heat content, 0 – 700m; 0 – 2000m
Global sea surface temperature
Then there’s the little problem with Arctic sea ice…
Perhaps kim is in denial?
kim,
Did you define lukecooling yet, like steven mosher define his lukewarmer?
To be complete we know where the heat came from and where it went – scepticism is a broad church and AGW space cadets a narrow cult.
No climate models can predict climate because the heat transfer physics is plain wrong, exaggerating IR absorbed in the lower atmosphere by ~5x.
The way it’s done is to claim the Earth emits IR as if it were an isolated black body in a vacuum. No professional scientist or engineer with real heat transfer experience accepts this because if it were true, there could be no radiative equilibrium.
The models then go on to use exaggerated cloud albedo [double real low level cloud optical depth for example] to purport the correct temperature. The net result is to exaggerate evaporation over sunlit oceans, the imaginary positive feedback.
Sorry folks, the heat transfer in the models loses all credibility from the very start. Ask any process engineer for confirmation….
Our hostess writes “I think there is much that we don’t know about the sun’s variations and their impact on climate, and I don’t see the IPCC taking a serious look at this issue, other than to say ‘absence of evidence’.”
I agree with you 100%. None of the proponents of CAGW are going to try and make the case that the sun has a major influence on climate. It would undermine the contention that the “science is settled”, and that adding more CO2 to the atmopshere is going to guarantee global temperatures will be “too high” in the very near future.
However, as I keep pointing out, the empirical data on global temperatures, and CO2 concentrations in the atmopshere, gives a very strong indication that the total climate sensitivity of CO2 is indistinguishable from zero. The estimates of total climate sensitivity made by the proponents of CAGW are based on highly dubious physics, and the output of non-validated models. There is absolutley no empirical data whatsoever to justify any number which the proponents of CAGW claim can be given to total climate sensitivity.
It is obvious to me that the only thing that influences the world’s climate is the sun. How it does it, no-one seems to have much idea, but it seems to be associated more with the sun’s magnetic properties, rather than the radiation of any sort that the sun emits. There is the intriguing phemenon of sudden stratospheric warming which seems to be associated with the earth’s poles, thoug it is unlcear whether this is the geographic or magnetic pole.
Unfortunately with the enormous funds that are now being wasted chasing the hoax of CAGW, there is not enough money to properly fund a study of how the sun might affect climate.
Jim Cripwell,
So you reckon that:
” None of the proponents of CAGW are going to try and make the case that the sun has a major influence on climate.” ?
For a start the IPCC use the word ‘catastrophic’ for low probability events on the upper end of the seriousness scale. Higher probability events are dangerous or harmful but are not termed catastrophic.
So as a ‘proponent’ of HAGW would I shy away from making “the case that the sun has a major effect on the climate”? I don’t think so. The Earth would be a lifeless icicle in space with a temperature of only a few K without it.
Happy now?
That would be a very important question if the situation were that we have observed an unexpected and difficult to explain warming and are looking for explanation. But that’s not the case. The warming was first predicted and then observed. Therefore the right question is:
What can we tell about the strength of the AGW?
To answer that we must look at the ways the observed warming agrees with what’s expected from AGW and how much the presence of natural variability affects the accuracy and reliability of the estimates. The possibility of solar influence has some effect on that but actually only very little, because there’s no reason to think that the solar effect would behave as the warming has behaved. Something that’s only possible but not made likely by any known argument does not affect the conclusions much.
‘The warming was first predicted and then observed.’ And then the illusion faded into the night like Aurora Borealis.
===================
Pekka, what expected warming are you referring to? According to the satellites the only warming in the last 34 years occurred in conjunction with the big 1998-2001 ENSO cycle. So there has been no expected warming, just a warming that looks pretty natural. Or are you claiming the weak surface statistical models are correct and the satellites are wrong?
Regarding the surface statistical models, what about the unexpected long periods of no warming? You appear to be saying that CO2 went up and it warmed, more or less, so that all there is to it. Surely not.
‘. So there has been no expected warming, just a warming that looks pretty natural.”
Huh?
all warming is natural. the point is this. Over a century ago we had the theoretical understanding to predict that adding C02 would warm the planet and not cool it. we added C02 and the planet has warmed.
AS EXPECTED. Totally natural. The cause of the added C02 is also natural: man.
C02 causes warming not cooling. Anthony Watts agrees. WIllis Eschenbach agrees. Spenser agrees. Lindzen Agrees. Christy Agrees.
The only people who don’t agree are conspiracy theorists and other assorted wack jobs.
“C02 causes warming not cooling. Anthony Watts agrees. WIllis Eschenbach agrees. Spenser agrees. Lindzen Agrees. Christy Agrees.
The only people who don’t agree are conspiracy theorists and other assorted wack jobs.”
We all agree.
The real question is “by how much”?
Nobody can tell. The natural variability is simply way too high and our knowlege is way too small.
The only people who say they do know are conspiracy theorists and other assorted wack jobs…
Are the the guy that finally solved the unsolved mystery of feedbacks that result from increased CO2? If not then you don’t know any more than Kim. If yes then show your work.
Sorry, the basic physics states otherwise: http://notrickszone.com/2012/08/07/epic-warmist-fail-modtran-doubling-co2-will-do-nothing-to-increase-long-wave-radiation-from-sky/
I spent decades in the metallurgical industries designing heat treatment with GHGs.
CO2 on its own in dry air enters self-absorption at ~200 ppmV. Add 10% RH [~1800 ppmV] water vapour and the water side bands swamp CO2 emission/absorption.
There can be no CO2-AGW except perhaps the driest of deserts. The real physics is quite subtle because the detector is in IR thermal equilibrium with the gas column.
These are real data from Hottell and Leckner. I knew the former..Climate science has got it completely wrong. There is no experimental proof of any CO2-AGW [forget about the PET bottle experiment – that warming is at the walls].
Since I believe CO2 causes warming, I must not be a wack job.
But as for conspiracy theorist – I’m convinced the pumping of CO2 into the atmosphere is a plot of dirty minded old men who like seeing women walking around in skimpy clothing. Want proof? The next step in the plan is to launch a campaign against obesity – under the guise of better health. (These guys are wicked smart.). Also part of phase two is to push for turning foodstuffs into alternate fuel sources. As more food is consumed in gas tanks rather than stomachs, the price goes up and people eat less. This push can be called renewable energy/green energy/energy independance. Depends on your audience.
My advice – invest in thongs, miniskirts and suntan oil. Cause it’s gonna happen. These guys are far smarter than the rest of us.
Mauna Loa is at 4 CO2 molecules per 10,000 molecules of atmosphere ( if that’s representative). Below 2 CO2 molecules per 10,000 of atmosphere life on this planet is on the edge of existence Above 6 CO2 molecules per 10,000 atmosphere life thrives. Above 3 molecules per 10,000 grant funding to justify a new tax goes up exponentially.
Your take Steven?
Steven;
Just a fool here, but do warmer oceans release more CO2 than colder oceans or not?
Global cooling has begun. Proof positive:
http://www.kvue.com/news/170537296.html
Sea levels went down 5 mm last year according to CSIRO (reported in ‘The Australian’ today)
To quote from the article by Graham Lloyd in today’s Australian (Saturday),
A paper published in Geophysical Research Letters and reported by the American Academy for the Advancement of Science yesterday claims to have found the answer to why sea levels fell, not rose.
And, according to the paper, the retreat is only temporary.
Based on Peter Lang’s omission of this follow-up sentence, I leave it to others to judge whether he’s an ideologue. At the top of his voice he’s accused almost everyone who disagrees with him of being a shrill, ignorant, and irrational ideologue. It should not be necessary to return the compliment, these attributes speak for themselves.
Although I agree about Lang – totally humourless as well. I would get used to La Nina, however, and decades more flooding in Oz and drought in the US.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=8703
CH, do you mean La Nina (and El Nino) or PDO? The former doesn’t entail “decades more flooding” as it’s on a subdecadal time frame (7 year period or so). The latter (65 year period or so) might if we were in the upswing or middle of a phase, but are we?
Since everyone here seems to have a sense of entitlement to their personal opinion, I’ll chime in with the opinion that there is a single sawtooth wave governing all the multidecadal ocean oscillations, of which the second and third harmonics are strongest. Assuming a period of 150-170 years and a zero-crossing of 1926, these two harmonics have respective periods of 75-85 and 50-57 years. HADCRUT3 suggests the shorter periods, HADCRUT4 leans towards the longer. Merely an opinion.
I think you should read the NASA page a little more clsely Vaughan. You might learn something. How long has it been?
> The only people who don’t agree are conspiracy theorists and other assorted wack jobs.
http://twitpic.com/aza976
@CH: you should read the NASA page a little more clsely
What did I overlook, Chief? (I interpreted “phase” to mean “half-cycle” if that’s what you had in mind, so a 20-30 year phase would correspond to periods in the range 40-60 years. Willis’s point that “These natural climate phenomena can sometimes hide global warming caused by human activities. Or they can have the opposite effect of accentuating it.” is at the core of the kind of analysis I’ve been doing, which was just accepted for presentation at the AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco in December. Unless I’ve overlooked something, that whole NASA page fits very well with my analysis.)
What you have missed is the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation.
‘CH, do you mean La Nina (and El Nino) or PDO? The former doesn’t entail “decades more flooding” as it’s on a subdecadal time frame (7 year period or so). The latter (65 year period or so) might if we were in the upswing or middle of a phase, but are we?’
‘This multi-year Pacific Decadal Oscillation ‘cool’ trend can intensify La Niña or diminish El Niño impacts around the Pacific basin,” said Bill Patzert, an oceanographer and climatologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “The persistence of this large-scale pattern [in 2008] tells us there is much more than an isolated La Niña occurring in the Pacific Ocean.” NASA
‘This study uses proxy climate records derived from paleoclimate data to investigate the long-term behaviour of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO). During the past 400 years, climate shifts associated with changes in the PDO are shown to have occurred with a similar frequency to those documented in the 20th Century. Importantly, phase changes in the PDO have a propensity to coincide with changes in the relative frequency of ENSO events, where the positive phase of the PDO is associated with an enhanced frequency of El Niño events, while the negative phase is shown to be more favourable for the development of La Niña events.’ http://www.agu.org/journals/abs/2006/2005GL025052.shtml
It would be very interesting to understand how a high frequency phenomenon like ENSO could influence low frequency phenomena like AMO and PDO. I have no idea what that mechanism would be.
http://ocean.eas.gatech.edu/manu/papers/PDFs/DiLorenzo_Schneider2009.pdf
Steven Mosher
Yes.
Added anthropogenic CO2 causes warming
(How much is unknown.)
But let’s go through an exercise in logic.
Increased solar activity also causes warming
(How much is unknown and by what mechanisms is only partially known.)
“Natural variability” from cyclical ocean current changes (ENSO, PDO, AO, etc.) can cause warming or cooling.
(How much is unknown).
It is also unknown of whether or to what extent “natural variability” is influenced by changes in solar activity.
It is practically certain that added anthropogenic CO2 does not have an influence on “natural variability”.
Temperature records exist, which indicate that our planet has warmed on average by around 0.7C since 1850.
These records show a cyclical pattern, with two statistically indistinguishable cycles of warming of ~30 years each in the early and late 20th century, a slightly less prominent cycle of warming in the late 19th century with ~30-year cycles of slight cooling in between, all on a tilted axis, with an underlying warming trend of 0.05C per decade. Since 1950 the record shows around 0.5C warming.
A slightly slower measured rate of increase in the troposphere by satellites since 1979 versus at the surface (despite the fact that if the warming were mostly a result of the GHE this should be just the opposite), suggests that a portion of the surface warming may actually be a spurious signal brought on by the UHI effect.
—————————————————————————————-
Ergo: It is NOT known that increases in human GHG concentrations have with greater than 90% likelihood been the cause of most of the warming observed since 1950 (as claimed by IPCC)
And that’s what the whole discussion is all about..
Max
@VP: It would be very interesting to understand how a high frequency phenomenon like ENSO could influence low frequency phenomena like AMO and PDO. I have no idea what that mechanism would be.
@curryja: http://ocean.eas.gatech.edu/manu/papers/PDFs/DiLorenzo_Schneider2009.pdf
Thanks, Judith. I looked at DiLorenzo et al’s proposed synthesis of Pacific decadal variability in section 5 and got hung up on “The oceanic adjustment to the SSHa anomalies of the PDO and NPGO radiate Rossby waves that propagate the signals into the Kuroshio-Oyashio extension region (KOE)” which seemed like a non-sequitur. How does this bear on the rest of the article?
I’m also interested in how a 7-year phenomenon like ENSO can drive phenomena that are an order of magnitude slower like AMO. Is there a simple layman’s explanation of this?
‘Stadium waves’ Vaughan – it is like watching a football game in Mexico.
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2011/04/21/guest-post-atlantic-multidecadal-oscillation-and-northern-hemisphere%E2%80%99s-climate-variability-by-marcia-glaze-wyatt-sergey-kravtsov-and-anastasios-a-tsonis/
I’d put it down to SAM the wonder dog blowin’ more or less cold water into the Humboldt Current – the thermal origin of ENSO. A similar pocess with the NAM and the Californian Current. More or less cold water feeding into the Pacific gyres and facilitating – or not – cold water upwelling in the eastern and central Pacific. All sorts of feedbacks happen then. SAM and NAM are driven in part by top down solar UV forcing.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view¤t=pacificcurrents.jpg
CH, how does that answer my question, “how could a high frequency phenomenon like ENSO influence low frequency phenomena like AMO and PDO.”? High frequency events don’t cause low frequency ones except in special circumstances where the mechanism is clear. You haven’t given a clear and convincing mechanism. Nor could I find one in DiLorenzo et al.
It is modelled as network – an expression of the underlying dynamic of the climate system. So it is a mistake to think of anything as seperate mechanisms influencing anything else. This is behaviour that is seen to emerge from the workings of the system as a whole. The spinning plant, roiling currents, winds, waves, changing patterns of sea surface temperature and pressure. Is there a simple mechanism. No. But there are control mechanisms in solar variability (both UV and sunlight) and orbital eccentricity. Pay your money an take your pick – I would put mine on UV/ozone interactions in the polar vortices in the Hale Cycle and longer term variability.
..ah spinning planet…
Equatorial Pacific oscillations in some respects has same fundamentals as the N. Atlantic Oscillation, despite different frequency and volatility.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/SOI.htm
I final analysis it has to be explained why ocean currents change and reasons for the change.
CO2 is only a minor fudge factor and poor substitute for understanding of true natural causes.
(p.s. high frequencies do cause rise of low frequencies – subharmonics)
CH: Is there a simple mechanism. No.
Thanks, just thought I’d check. Hypotheses based on simple mechanisms are more plausible than those that aren’t.
(p.s. high frequencies do cause rise of low frequencies – subharmonics)
Suppose you have a frequency f and an apparent subharmonic f/3. How do you distinguish that from f/3 = F being the real fundamental and f = 3F being its third harmonic?
Every fundamental is the n-th subharmonic of its n-th harmonic, making “subharmonic” a redundant concept when just two frequencies are involved.
Vaughan Pratt, “It would be very interesting to understand how a high frequency phenomenon like ENSO could influence low frequency phenomena like AMO and PDO. I have no idea what that mechanism would be.”
The ENSO wouldn’t have to influence a low frequency phenomenon. It is more likely influence by a low frequency phenomenon. When the ENSO is in a complementary phase with a lower frequency oscillation they are both amplified. For the past few hundred years there has been about a 2C difference between the Eastern and Western Pacific oceans. The Eastern Pacific is closing the temperature gap slowly. When the difference decreases enough, there would be a shift in circulation.
I have been looking at some of the longer term settling times of SST from various perturbations and there are quite a few interesting combinations. The Bond Events, ~1400 years appear to part of a ~4300 year settling or decay period.
http://redneckphysics.blogspot.com/2012/10/do-over-on-tropical-oceans.html
Some plots if you like.
Pekka, you write “The warming was first predicted and then observed.”
This is not sufficient evidence to go on. The match between only one prediction and what is claimed to have occurred, could easily have happened by chance. We need to see further predicitions.
I am not sure which prediction you are referring to. Smith et al Science August 2007 made a prediciton as to what would happen by 2014. The jury is still out, but all the signs are that this prediction is going to be wrong. Smith also predicted that after 2009, half the years would have a temperature in excess of that in 1998, according to the HAD/CRU 3 data. None of the years since 2009 have had temperatures in excess if the 1998 value.
So maybe one prediction has come true by chance. We are also now being told by the proponents of CAGW that decadal predictions are not reliable. So it is far from clear that your claim that what was predicted has happened on a sufficient number of occasions. Just one right prediction could have occurred by chance. We need to wait for a lot more predictions to be right, before we ought to go chasing after the hoax of CAGW.
I learned in 1980 that CO2 emissions are going to cause warming. The order of magnitude of that warming was predicted as what has later been observed. I had in mind such semiquantitative predictions.
When one mechanism is well known and makes predictions that agree even roughly on both strength and timing that’s very significant when the effect is as different from earlier well known history as the recent warming is and when no other mechanism can provide predictions. They are at best barely consistent with observations.
If solar influence would be an important factor we would almost certainly know that as it should not be difficult to figure out. Thus concluding that solar variability is a minor factor seems to be a very safe bet.
That last paragraph, Pekka, is a remarkable self indictment. You act as if we understand the sun.
===========
‘The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible. Rather the focus must be upon the prediction of the probability distribution of the system’s future possible states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions. Addressing adequately the statistical nature of climate is computationally intensive and requires the application of new methods of model diagnosis, but such statistical information is essential.’ http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/501.htm
I first became aware of decadal regimes in rainfall in 1988. The next climate shift became a test of influence. Had anthropogenic warming caused a permanent shift to El Nino in the Pacific? Although we were certainly aware of the ‘great Pacific climate shift’ of 1976/77 – open questions remained in the great consternation of global warming fears. When climate shifted back in 1998/2001 – quite obviously in biological responses documented by JISAO and others – it became clear that the current trajectory of climate was towards a cooler state. Year after year is bearing this out. The reasons for these changes in climate trajectory are deterministically chaotic in nature – something not imagined before the 1990’s.
Science moves and the new paradigm of abrupt climate change is widely accepted, is truly a paradigm shift because it demands new ways of thinking about climate – and a different understanding of the underlying physics. All leading edge climate research is going down this pathway – everything else is a regurgitation of concepts past their use by date.
Was the warming predicted in 1980 supposed to happen in a step change associated with a record-setting El Nino in 1998?
You don’t need to answer. It’s rhetorical. :-)
@kim: You act as if we understand the sun.
Speak for yourself, kim. Just because you don’t understand something doesn’t mean everyone else doesn’t.
Heh, do you think it circles the Earth?
==========
I like what Vaughan said in a past comment:
This line:
> Your contribution is gratefully acknowledged.
should get more ice time than:
> The only people who don’t agree are conspiracy theorists and other assorted wack jobs.
Cf. http://twitpic.com/aza976
kim
You should know better.
Vaughan knows it can’t circle the Earth, because the Earth is flat.
Max
Pekka
A question to you:
Was the observed 21st century cooling predicted?
If so, by whom and when?
And on what basis?
Max
Max,
You know perfectly well the answer:
There is not any cooling on relevant time scales.
I have described in this subthread what kind of agreement between prediction and observations I’m writing about. What has happened in recent years is not relevant on that level.
@manacker: Vaughan knows it can’t circle the Earth, because the Earth is flat.
1. A racetrack is flat. This doesn’t seem to stop horses from circling it.
2. A lot has been made of the observation that ships sailing out to sea disappear below the horizon. However this is merely a statistical phenomenon: the further the ship, the higher the expected height of the tallest wave in between.
Many disproofs of AGW are about as reliable.
@JC: This is not sufficient evidence to go on. The match between only one prediction and what is claimed to have occurred, could easily have happened by chance. We need to see further predicitions.
How many bits of information were in this prediction? If one bit (rising vs. falling) then I would agree as there was a 50/50 chance of getting it right. But if 10 bits (reasonably accurate prediction of the details of the climb) then we’re talking about a chance of one in 1024, which is way way more than the usual 95% criterion for statistical significance.
JC is a loaded acronym.
Vaughan, you write “How many bits of information were in this prediction?”
I think you were referring to me when you wrote JC. You are absolutely correct. That is why Pekka needs to be very specific with what he calls a prediction, and show, scientifically, that the prediction was unlikely to have occurred by chance. This is an objection I have to most of these predictions by the proponents of CAGW; they just claim to have made a prediction, but do not then give any details as to how likely any prediction could just have been a lucky guess
Pekka
You wrote- “The warming was first predicted and then observed. Therefore the right question is: What can we tell about the strength of the AGW?”
While I largely agree with you in concept, from a practical perspective it gets quite sticky. The prediction of warming was based upon a model, but that model was not particularly accurate and many other models have been developed. What do you propose comparisons to observed conditions be evaluated against to estimate the impact of changes in solar radiance?
What we understand is that there is low frequency climate variability significant on decadal scales at a very minimum. To dismiss the sun as a cause is not to dismiss the underlying reality – although it seems a little short sighted given the little understood top down processes in particular.
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/5/3/034008
The idea that simple causality applies in a system with multiple feedbacks and lags is simply nonsense.
‘…this study details the AMO-signal propagation throughout the Northern Hemisphere via a sequence of atmospheric and lagged oceanic teleconnections, which the authors term the “stadium wave”. Initial changes in the North Atlantic temperature anomaly associated with AMO culminate in an oppositely signed hemispheric signal about 30 years later.’ “Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation And Northern Hemisphere’s Climate Variability” By Marcia Glaze Wyatt, Sergey Kravtsov, and Anastasios A. Tsonis
Framing a simple narrative is astonishingly stupid and cannot advance understanding.
> Framing a simple narrative is astonishingly stupid and cannot advance understanding.
One must appreciate the complexity of this narrative.
The human condition applies to you as well.
If there’s no substantive scientific evidence that solar variation has had significant climatological effects over the last 50 years then there’s no substantive evidence. Yes, perhaps something has been missed, but it is looking increasingly unlikely.
Being ignored is different from being missed. The scientists who believe in a strong sun-climate link cite lots of evidence. Go fetch.
The scientists who believe in a strong sun-climate link have universally failed to make a convincing case.
And Wojick, mind your manners.
Universally failed in whose opinion? Yours? This debate is real. Ignoring evidence is not an argument.
No, Wojick, not in my opinion. In that of their peers. They have universally failed to make a *scientifically robust* case, if you prefer.
BBD, The THC current overturning cycle is a little confusing. There is an “average” of roughly 4.3K years for one “cycle” with roughly 1.5 ka oscillations on that “cycle” that appear to be the Bond Events. Since the THC is a layer of deep water flow, the current can drift deeper or shallower. The Abysmal depths are the stored energy or available potential heat sink depending on the depth of the THC fluctuations. That is the Hypothesis I am working from.
The bond events and D-O events are mainly northern hemisphere because that was were the majority of the work was done. Using other proxies, like Lake Tanganyike surface temperatures, I am tracking the events back to their source which appears to be the ACC.
http://redneckphysics.blogspot.com/2012/09/unforced-variations-in-climate-not.html That is just a note on the Lake Tanganyika “events”. There is less correlation of the events toward the end of the cycles because they would be more sensitive to other forcing, volcanoes mainly it seems.
Like I said, I am not referencing many studies because I am doing my own rebellious thing, starting at major perturbations and following the ripples.
David, I have yet to see a single paper that
1. establishes a connection.
2. proposes a physical theory that is testable.
3. accepts the temperature record as reliable
4. includes their data.
5. publishes their code.
So basically no science. Lots of arm waving, lots of voodoo stats.
no science. nothing reproduceable.
Steven
It is a pleasure to find real agreement with you for once. I mean this.
CH above gets at where the uncertainty may still lie with notes about solar cycle connections to internal variability.
I suspect that we are going to have the internal variability pinned down before understanding whence it originates, but maybe not.
BillC
Would that be the ‘internal variability’ that’s causing the heat content of the entire global ocean to increase?
BBD.
Well, its good that we can agree on this. I’ve been saying the same thing for years. Bottomline. There’s nothing done in this area that would stand up to the same kind of skepticism leveled at Mann. I note that now rasmus is posting code over at RC and demanding data from skeptics ( not his first time, but its a good trend )
BBD, “Would that be the ‘internal variability’ that’s causing the heat content of the entire global ocean to increase?”
No, that would be internal variability that causes the entire global to manage the energy it has differently. For example; volcanoes impacts the northern hemisphere more greatly than the southern hemisphere. More northern ocean energy is transferred to the atmosphere during the volcanic cooling phase which takes longer to replenish in the southern oceans. The energy balance of the oceans is easily as complex as the radiant energy balance. There are simply two major systems with totally different physics, radiant and radiant-less.
How does energy enter the global ocean?
How does energy leave the global ocean?
How does energy leave the TOA?
Might I politely suggest that you crack a beer or make a cup of tea, sit down and *think* about your statement above very carefully.
BBD
You don’t know the heat content of the entire global ocean. ARGO only dives to 2000 meters. That’s only half the average depth of the global ocean. Then there’s the fact they don’t measure beneath sea ice missing tens of millions of square kilometers of possibly the most interesting ocean EVAH considering the focus you boys have on Arctic sea ice. Try again.
David Springer
So are you saying that the warming from 2000m – surface is coming *up* from the abyssal depths? If such an energy exchange was happening, the abyssal deep would be cooling, yes?
But there is evidence of abyssal warming. See for example Purkey & Johnson (2010).
You do a lot of talking. Let’s have some references to back up the noise.
BBD, “How does energy leave the TOA?
Might I politely suggest that you crack a beer or make a cup of tea, sit down and *think* about your statement above very carefully.”
How does it get there? Most of it arrives at the oceans between 40N and 40S where it has to travel about 15kilometers to the ERL, as the crow flies. Depending on traffic, that trip can take a few millisecs to a millennium. Its the journey BBD, not the destination :)
capn
You remind me – you’ve previously stated that the ocean can store heat for 100ka and 5ka. You will recall that I’ve asked you for references for the first claim which you were unable to provide.
My humble understanding is that the THC has a ‘full’ overturning cycle of 1ka – 1.5ka (depending on who you believe). Moreover, most of the heat is lost from the surface layer to the atmosphere *before* it sinks to form cold deep water.
Where is this oceanic reservoir of energy? In which currents, and in which basin or basins do we locate it? Roughly how big is it (10^22 joules)?
It would help me understand your argument(s) better if you could clarify this briefly.
The sun/climate/ocean link is pretty obvious – especially when clouds keep changing.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view¤t=Wong2006figure7.gif ( http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI3838.1 )
Er, there is substantive scientific evidence that solar variation has had a significant climatological effect over the last 300 years, give there has been a change in uv output by about 15% over this time.
http://www.mps.mpg.de/dokumente/publikationen/solanki/j111.pdf
The relevant quote from the preface to the NRC Workshop, included in my comment upthread, was:
This is one of those rhetorical tricks isn’t it? Bet you even know the fancy Latin name for its use in an argument. Now something, because of the signal to noise ratio/periodocity can only be observed over a LONG time period.
You know, its like you cAGW mates who insist that warming can only be observed using a time base of 13, 17, 23 or 29 years.
Now the problem with uv solar output is that it is a bitch to measure; we have not got a 50 year record of uv output, but we can use proxies, with a high noise/signal ratio, over a longer time period of uv output.
Of course, the 300 year record INCLUDES the last 50 years. However, you fancy rhetorical is a way to get around the fact that 50 is smaller, not bigger than 300.
BBD, many of us didn’t finish High School and are desperately trying to learn from smart people like you. As a favor, next time you use one of them highfaluting rhetorical devices, and you give us the posh Latin description, in brackets.
No. Shifting the focus from the point of discussion – solar influence on climate change over the last 50 years – was the rhetorical trick you employed. I simply pointed out what you were doing.
More rhetoric. Let’s get back to the *facts* as expressed in the preface to the NCR Workshop:
‘No substantive scientific evidence’ *includes* your hand-waving about UV. It means exactly what it says. There is no substantive scientific evidence that solar variability has had any significant effect on modern climate.
Put another way, it is trivial compared to the effects of radiative forcing from an increasing atmospheric fraction of CO2.
Well, I’ll put on a denier hat, and offer an explanation.
Definitely something has been missed, and eventually it will be found. Until it’s found we will just have to keep searching, because we knows it’s there.
How do we know it’s there? Because we want it to be there. Don’t try to dash our hopes. We won’t listen.
Max, there is definitely something there and it is not well understood in the model world. Depth of absorption of shortwave varies and the stratospheric ozone varies changing atmospheric waves during solar minima especially the on the Hale Cycle. That implies some interesting stuff is going on related to geomagnetic potential. Ions are charged particles after all and we do have a magnetic field. That would be a rather weak forcing I imagine, indicating that climate has different sensitivites to different forcings, imagine that :)
Magic is never well understood. If it were, it wouldn’t be magic, and it wouldn’t be fun.
captdallas
Something I haven’t seen in your thinking is the inclusion of the calculated radiative forcing from GHGs. The reference data are here.
The expert scientific community factors this into its modelling of current and potential future climate states. In order to remain in line with the expert scientific community you will need to do the same.
Hope this helps,
D
Max_OK, you write “How do we know it’s there?”
We know that sudden stratospheric warming (SSW) exists. We know it is associated with the poles, whether geographic or magnetic. Would you care to explain what causes SSW? And if you cannot explain it, the same as everyone else, would you admit that there are significant effects in the earth’s climate that no-one can explain. And is it not possible that ultimately the solar magnetic effects might be found to explain SSW?
BBD, “The expert scientific community factors this into its modelling of current and potential future climate states. ”
There is a funny things about models. The really great ones are simple. Instead of deltaT=lambda*deltaF, which is simple but misapplied, think dT/t =F*d R/t, where you are normalizing a distance, R that T has to travel in t. CO2 increases R and changes in in the location of T changes R. R(100m)/t in the oceans is different that R(100m)/t in dry air is different than R(100m)/t in moist air. If “sensitivity” is related to R, then “sensitivity” varies. One joules worth of photons that start at 100 meters below the surface of the oceans would take longer to travel 100 meters than one joules worth of photon that start at 1micron deep. If that one joules worth of photons catches a south bound current, the time to ELR different than if it caught a north bound current.
Once all the photons get to the ERL, then it is simple, but since CO2 does not generate energy only retain energy by increasing R from the ERL to space, where, when and how much energy arrives at the ERL would depend on the internal dynamics of some system that is below the ERL, now woodenit?
captn
Are you going to include the data on RF from atmospheric CO2 in your future work or not?
I’m not going to get into fringe ‘debate’ about whether the entire scientific understanding of radiative physics is wrong.
BBD, “captn
Are you going to include the data on RF from atmospheric CO2 in your future work or not?
I’m not going to get into fringe ‘debate’ about whether the entire scientific understanding of radiative physics is wrong.”
There is nothing wrong with the radiative physics. What is wrong is the basic physics. An object cannot emit energy any faster than that energy can be transferred to the radiant surface. Since the Earth is not a neat tidy “object” but a dynamic lava lamp, where the energy is transferred is just as important as what happens when it gets to the surface. The distance a photon has to travel from the equatorial “surface” to the ERL or radiant surface is equal to the distance it would have to travel to either pole. Since the Antarctic is thermally isolated from the “surface” it has to be considered differently since it is a “short cut” for photons below the equator. The simplest way is to use a moist air envelop for the wet surface and a radiant model for the dry surface. A model in a model to separate the “radiantless” from the radiant systems.
The only problem is the THC fluctuations which is what I am looking into now.
So do I understand that you *aren’t going to use a standard radiating atmosphere? No increasing RF from GHGs to be taken into account? The reason I ask is that (as I suggested above) the radiative properties of the atmosphere will affect the rate of heat loss from the ocean – as it must, since everything is ultimately part of a radiative system. So the atmospheric model you use matters. As you know, increasing OHC is a subject of some interest to me.
It’s up to you what you do, but it will help me understand and evaluate your ideas if you are clear on this point.
Also, can you respond to the other question I asked above?
BBD, “So do I understand that you *aren’t going to use a standard radiating atmosphere? No increasing RF from GHGs to be taken into account?” When the time comes. right now finding out what should be used as “normal” is more important.
“The reason I ask is that (as I suggested above) the radiative properties of the atmosphere will affect the rate of heat loss from the ocean – as it must, since everything is ultimately part of a radiative system. So the atmospheric model you use matters. As you know, increasing OHC is a subject of some interest to me.” That is the deal with the ACC and THC. The Antarctic is more like the tropopause than the Arctic. So for my developing radiant model the Antarctic is outside of the ERL for at least 9 months of the year. BTW, the Antarctic surface data sucks so it is a very useful simplification.
If you are really concerned with OHC then you should look into the changes in sea ice volume. The rate of ice volume change annually would tend to change the mixing rate of the THC. Since the Antarctic has better surface mixing thanks to the ACC and the higher surface winds that drive it, it would have more impact on OHC than Arctic. The BEST Tmin is also a good source for regional SST changes and there are some fair deep ocean proxies.
The Herbert tropical oceans also provide a nice range of “normal”
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-NBE-HYfcrvA/UF9sllREtuI/AAAAAAAAD1A/g8jnEpBbgdI/s912/1.5%2520million%2520years%2520of%2520not%2520quite%2520matching.png
Tens years of pretty good and 60 years of sucky data won’t do you much good without having a better idea of what “normal” should be. Remember, there is a slope in this joke plot.
https://picasaweb.google.com/118214947668992946731/DrakePassage#5792541136091081506
This plot.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-1dHf8d0fkL0/UGM9eVCy4uI/AAAAAAAAD6M/eRSvSN-MWs0/s839/Cold%2520ENSO%2520or%2520Evil.png
and there is a history of fluctuations,
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/–8-Pvpa0sC0/UGDP1ybdLAI/AAAAAAAAD1Y/v8Dsn6oPAy0/s803/AMO%2520and%2520the%2520SSA%2520variability%2520with%2520hadsst2%2520sh.png
As I said, Go south young man.
Thanks for the response on the radiating atmosphere. I’m going to look at what you say in addition carefully, but the question I actually asked was this:
Presumably you have some idea, or you would not be in a position to construct hypotheses as you do?
Can you provide the specifics? It would be very helpful in evaluating your thinking here.
BBD, “Thanks for the response on the radiating atmosphere. I’m going to look at what you say in addition carefully, but the question I actually asked was this:
Where is this oceanic reservoir of energy? In which currents, and in which basin or basins do we locate it? Roughly how big is it (10^22 joules)?”
Mainly the Southern Pacific. What appears to be happening is the Atlantic with the Gulf Stream releases more energy during cooling events, volcanoes, and it takes time to replenish that energy. Since there is a pseudo cycle in the THC, the time varies. The AMO is the pseudo cycle it appears. The PDO seems to be more stable looking at North American reconstructions, which makes sense. For magnitude, the 10^22 is from ~1950, the loss from 1940 to 1950 was about 1/3 of the total gain. Since most of the gain or recovery started most recently around 1900, it is hard to say how much is recovery and how much is AW. As a guess, I would say about half, mainly due to land use.
“Presumably you have some idea, or you would not be in a position to construct hypotheses as you do?” Annual Antarctic sea ice change is on the order of 10^21 joules. Since the climate system is non-equilibrium, I would expect roughly the same order of magnitude dissipation, glacial growth, would be possible. Since most of the regions where glaciers once grew are used for other things now, particularly the high altitude Steppes and plains, I would suspect that land use impact, snow removal and water mis-management, to be a major AW factor. Note: sliding into a glacial is a gradual process unless the Earth gets whacked by something.
Can you provide the specifics? It would be very helpful in evaluating your thinking here.” That is about it. Roughly 20% of the global is no longer available for ice box duty or marshland full of happy frolicking duck and beavers (imagine the impact hats had on water conservation). That has a gradual 4,000 year impact on climate that increased exponentially for a while. CO2 doubling should add about 0.8C since water vapor is not a feed back and the Antarctic is not part of the radiant globe. Without the land use impact, we could be cooling into the next not so warm period.
captndallas
Thanks for all this. Just going back to the original question:
You suggest that it’s:
Fair enough. You continue:
This leaves me baffled. I wondered what the energetic content of the oceanic reservoir(s) you had in mind might be in Joules (10^22 J). I am none the wiser.
BBD, it is not that they have 10^22 joules laying around ready to pounce, they can easily gain or lose 10^22 over a period of time by shifting a few degrees up/down etc. They have on the order of 10^21 to 10^22 Joules per year impact on the rate of OHC.
Pahnke, K., and J.P. Sachs. 2007.
Southern Ocean Midlatitude 160KYr Alkenone SST Reconstructions.
IGBP PAGES/World Data Center for Paleoclimatology
Data Contribution Series # 2007-019.
NOAA/NCDC Paleoclimatology Program, Boulder CO, USA.
There are two main locations off New Zealand about 5 degrees apart and a 1000 meters or so difference in depth. Since the Drake Passage current is in the 140 Sverdrup range, a rather small change of 20% is like relocating the Gulf Stream. The difference in energy loss or gain would have immediate impacts, ENSO and SAM, but also much longer term THC impacts that may not be felt for hundreds to thousands of years, the Bond Events and the ~4300 year decay cycles.
BBD, here is an interesting comparison, Galapagos, Eastern Tropical Pacific and Palestina in the Western Tropical Pacific.
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-0KUyBwCzjr4/UGY6flE9rTI/AAAAAAAAD-g/lRuM0A1TZGI/s912/galapagos%2520with%2520Palestina.png
That double amplitude spike in the Galapagos is just like a rogue wave, it is a pronounced bifurcation signature. In Palestina there is an inverse response. Notice that both have roughly the same long term slope. To figure out the AGWCO2 impact you would have to tease out the natural and long term land use impacts.
captdallas
For the period 1955 – 2010, Levitus et al. (2012) finds that:
That’s what is technically described as a f*ck of a lot of energy. I cannot understand how your hypothesis accounts for this amount of energy accumulation in the 2000m layer of the world ocean since 1955. To me, what you argue is that the tail is wagging the dog.
captndallas
I know that I’ve been asking a lot of questions and not volunteering much. Let me redress the balance.
Something that troubles me is the assumption that large amounts of energy can remain in the global ocean for very long periods (>1500y).
Oceans aren’t static. They are constantly overturned by the entrained flow of surface and deep water currents. What goes down must come up, and the oceanographers are agreed that the THC overturns fully in 1500y or less.
The overturning process hinges energy loss from the ocean to the atmosphere and so to space. Warm water is less dense than cold water, and does not readily sink, but sink it must if the THC is to flow. I appreciate that it’s not called the THC for nothing and that salinity is important here, but even so, deep water formation is essentially *cold* water formation enabled by the transfer of energy to the atmosphere and so to space. This is universally supported by observations: the deep ocean is colder than the upper ocean.
So, how do a large energetic reservoirs form in the first place?
Even if such reservoirs could form, how can they *persist* in a constantly overturning ocean?
I ask because I think your wider argument is that glacial terminations are caused by internal variability.
We can look at the last glacial. Eemian warmth fades. Increasing ice albedo feedback slowly drives temperatures down for ~90ka. Brief interstadials punctuate but do not stop the gradual descent that culminated in the LGM ~21ka.
Within this context, we’ve got a constantly overturning ocean and constant energetic transfer from ocean to atmosphere wherever deep water formation occurs.
We don’t have to be Nobelists to work out that over a 90ka glacial, global OHC will slowly decrease. How could it not?
Here’s big sticking point #1. My understanding of your wider argument is that glacial terminations result from internal climate variability. But internal variability is the movement of energy around *within* the climate system.
If the amount of energy stored in the global ocean has gradually *fallen* for ~90ka, how can it suddenly trigger deglaciation?
If that’s not enough of a problem, how and why does this happen at the *coldest period* during the entire 90ka cooling?
BVD thinks we knew the average temperature of the entire global ocean to, what, the neares hundredth of a degree C in 1955. How else could he know it’s 0.09C warmer today.
That’s what I call a f*ck of a great leap of faith.
The data isn’t that good. If you had frakkin’ ARGO since 1955 it wouldn’t be good enough for that measure because it misses over half the ocean. No coverage on the bottom where the cold basins fill up from the conveyor belts and not coverage at the poles where the water cools and sinks to the bottom.
Are you stupid or dishonest or both?
Quibbling over measurement accuracy is to miss the point. Global OHC is rising. Energy is accumulating in the climate system 11.5ka into the Holocene and ~6ka after the Holocene Thermal Maximum.
What on Earth is going on?
BBD, “If the amount of energy stored in the global ocean has gradually *fallen* for ~90ka, how can it suddenly trigger deglaciation?”
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-hJKvoDXFlYI/UGW8uc1_jFI/AAAAAAAAD-I/ifb0mKFWeq4/s800/southern%2520oceans%2520versus%2520greenland%2520accumulation.png
Well, look at the exit from the last glacial maximum. Whatever the cause, the LGM appears to have been deeper than most. The blue Greenland accumulation should indicate roughly arctic sea ice extent. The Southern Ocean reconstructions should also indicate Antarctic sea extent to some degree. Warming started around 23Ka ago, first in the south then there was a large break about 7ka later when both initially pulsed warmer. With both iced in, the rate of heat loss to the atmosphere would be reduced and shifted toward the mid latitudes. The oceans reach a sea ice extent where the rate of cooling is less than the rate of warming, the oceans warm.
When the oceans warm due to increased sea ice extent, the THC sinking water would move to a higher latitude which would produce less efficient mixing at depth. The Abysmal water would be colder than normal and the upper 1000 meters or so warmer than normal than during an interglacial.
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-_FCYFVUa2lo/UGd-aRu1D3I/AAAAAAAAD_Q/BdZ9jhf-2EI/s979/martin%2520et%2520al%2520bottom%2520water.png
That is a Martin et al bottom water temperature I am not all that excited about the accuracy of the temperatures, but the anomalies should be reasonable. Again the Tropical Pacific had a blip around 26ka. The Tropical Eastern Pacific does seem to be a great location to record changes in the ACC shifting of the Drake Passage current.
The exit from the LGM appears to be a seesaw SH NH then SH event due to changing ice extents at both poles. That is not very controversial.
Now compare the Tropical Eastern Pacific SST to the bottom water temperatures.
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-pfnJ82seEtk/UGeF-CFSSBI/AAAAAAAAD_o/lVvF6pCcdYM/s915/martin%2520et%2520al%2520bottom%2520water%2520with%2520TEP%2520SST.png
Changes in the ACC tend to drive bottom water temperatures of both the Atlantic and Pacific. Some of those abrupt changes are only 2 to 4 ka with bottom water changes of a degree or more. That is a butt load of OHC change in a relatively short period of time mainly driven by changes in the ACC. Also note that the cooling for ~90ka was not for ~90ka everywhere.
In other proxies from all over the globe there are ~4300 year excursions with the ~1470 +/- 500 year Bond Event which I believe are related to the ACC changes cause by solar and/or thermal limits in the ocean temperatures.
With the Drake Passage a large player, should the southern oscillation change Antarctic sea ice growth from more eastern to more western, the THC impact could be felt a hundred years or more in the future.
We live on a bi-polar world.
BBD, Here is a good picture of the Antarctic Sea Ice Extent.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/NEWIMAGES/antarctic.seaice.color.000.png
It wouldn’t take much of a shift in the ice orientation by the southern oscillation to impact flow through the Drake Passage.
Less water in Drakes Passage would inhibit deep water formation in the NH – freezing NH and warming Antarctic.
Chief said, “Less water in Drakes Passage would inhibit deep water formation in the NH – freezing NH and warming Antarctic.” Yes,. the bi-polar NH cool SH warm is a rapid impact and a longer term impact also. You can also get an amplified ENSO which is more global and a longer term oscillation with ENSO riding. There looks to be a number of potential impacts on different time scales.
This has an inherent bias as not being able to measure heat being added to a cold reservoir makes the OHC estimation low.
I bet you can’t think of a scenario where this bias is reversed.
captdallas
It’s thought-provoking stuff, but I’m still not convinced :-)
1/ Larger ice sheets increase planetary albedo, reducing global temperature. Even if your conjecture is correct, it doesn’t account for the cooling effect of increased ice albedo on the global ocean. This would be expected to offset the effect of the latitudinal shifts in deep water formation. It is not clear that OHC would necessarily rise.
2/ I can’t find any evidence that sea ice blocked the Drake Passage during the last glacial. The flow rate of the ACC funnelling through the 800km wide seaway would seem to militate against this. Is there anything in the literature that supports the conjecture?
More fundamentally still, the increase in summer insolation at high NH latitudes under peak orbital forcing is considered robust. It is the most likely trigger for eventual deglaciation and we cannot simply ignore this.
So let’s look at the mainstream position. The mechanisms by which regional and seasonal change in NH solar forcing is transmitted and amplified into global climate change are set out in Shakun et al. (2012).
S12’s spatial/temporal reconstruction from 80 proxies suggests initial melting of the NH ice sheet 21.5 – 19ka triggering an AMOC shut-down by freshwater flux at high NH latitude. Yup, another one of those. The cessation of equator-pole heat transport in the NH caused NH cooling but warming of southern equatorial and then SH waters. The SH warms as a whole. The warming SH ocean appears to have been the source of a sustained release of carbon from ~17.5ka until ~14ka, possibly from deep water upwelling in the Southern Ocean (Schmitt et al. 2012).
The increasing fraction of atmospheric CO2 globalises warming, as it is wont to do. The NH is gradually warmed, orbital forcing at high latitude continues and the NH ice sheet collapse begins in earnest, engaging strongly positive ice albedo feedback.
Now, there’s a Razor at my throat ;-) Parsimonious reasoning requires that I find S12 more persuasive than your hypothesis because it acknowledges the robust evidence for orbital forcing that you reject and it provides a coherent explanation for the evidence it presents. Though fun, the Captdallas hypothesis is both profoundly speculative and rather less rigorously supported than S12.
BBD, I will take a look at that stuff after the game. I am not much of a “mainstreamer” when I find anomalies that require extra creativity to explain.
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-QEGJDycZGIo/UGi2BOOxkEI/AAAAAAAAEAY/2Rc7fhZ_YFA/s965/indo%2520pacific%2520Warm%2520pool%2520with%2520South%2520Australia%2520SST%2520deglaciation.png
My path to glacial enlightenment has taken me to the Indian ocean and ‘roo ville
At 36S, the Australian Deglaical pattern tends to imply 8C change oce the same period the rest of the oceans wander in the +/- 1C range. The Drake passage does not have to fully ice over to divert flow creating different Antarctic sea ice growth patterns and shifting the ACC route and heat exchange efficiency. Mainstream views are not always correct.
Cap’n, if’n you make old man Milankovitch walk the plank there’ll be a bigger splash than you wants! The crew is with ‘en! There’d be mutiny, I tell ‘ee and you have my affydavy on that!
Arr.
;-)
BBD, BTW, the tiny little, SST s.l. 5°56.25’S, 103°14.76’E, 1819m [°C] is supposed to be sea level. That is the light blue line on the graph.
ABSTRACT:
Quantifying the spatial and temporal sea surface temperature (SST) and salinity changes of the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool is essential to understand the role of this region in connection with abrupt climate changes particularly during the last deglaciation. In this study we reconstruct SST and seawater d18O of the tropical eastern Indian Ocean for the past 40,000 years from two sediment cores (GeoB 10029-4, 1°30’S, 100°08’E, and GeoB 10038-4, 5°56’S, 103°15’E) retrieved offshore Sumatra. Our results show that annual mean SSTs increased about 2-3 °C at 19,000 years ago and exhibited southern hemisphere-like timing and pattern during the last deglaciation. Our SST records together with other Mg/Ca-based SST reconstructions around Indonesia do not track the monsoon variation since the last glacial period, as recorded by terrestrial monsoon archives. However, the spatial SST heterogeneity might be a result of changing monsoon intensity that shifts either the annual mean SSTs or the seasonality of G. ruber towards the warmer or the cooler season at different locations. Seawater d18O reconstructions north of the equator suggest fresher surface conditions during the last glacial and track the northern high-latitude climate change during the last deglaciation. In contrast, seawater d18O records south of the equator do not show a significant difference between the last glacial period and the Holocene, and lack Bølling-Allerød and Younger Dryas periods suggestive of additional controls on annual mean surface hydrology in this part of the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool. ” ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/contributions_by_author/mohtadi2010/mohtadi2010.txt
Then in this chart, Greenland Ice Accumulation is used to get the timing of the opening of the Arctic sea ice, ~12ka for the main push and the blip 14ka. Open Arctic sea ice would tend to cause fresher water condition especially if there were less THC flow BEFORE, the change. So we have things happening 19ka that are very noticable and a sea level rise that appears to have started 30ka ago. Not the exact picture Shakun is painting.
BTW, the solar timing 65N is a little wonky for the timing of the events, just another hint that SH lead the way. Arr :)
Mohtadi is compatible with S12. See S12 Fig. 5 ‘onset of seesaw’ at 19ka.
BBD, “Mohtadi is compatible with S12. See S12 Fig. 5 ‘onset of seesaw’ at 19ka.” Yeah, but the Mohtadi et al has only a blip at 19ka which correlates with the Southern oceans reversal of a dip starting around 30ka. That 30ka better matches solar indicating the ACC change.
http://redneckphysics.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-indo-pacific-warm-pool-with.html
Some notes.
Nope. My pick from the stack of literature which disagrees with this is Huybers & Wunsch (2005)
BBD, “The simplest inference consistent with the test results is that the ice sheets terminated every second or third obliquity cycle at times of high obliquity, similar to the original proposal by Milankovitch.” that is what I mean by a little wonky. Prior to the my theoretical Drake Passage stabilizing flow, the period was 41ka or the second harmonic. Then it shifted to the ~100ka which is more a 40ka-60ka, second or third. There is still a 41ka with different dampening, the Drake Passage change. So in my opinion, the internal dynamics have shifted the harmonics.
captdallas
I’ll stick with Mohtadi and co-authors’ interpretation of the data. Not least because it is exactly in line with my current understanding of the deglacial process initiated by NH orbital forcing. You will notice that it is also in good agreement with the global analysis presented in S12.
Starting with the abstract:
Then:
And:
And:
This returns us to my previous comment.
I don’t think you’ve got a shred of evidence that the fast-flowing water in the DP has iced over at any point during the Pleistocene. I think everything you’ve been saying here is a mix of contrarianism and wild speculation.
Finally, please stop misrepresenting Huybers & Wunsch (2005). There’s no excuse for that.
BBD, I don’t recall mentioning Huybers & Wunsch (2005) much less misrepresenting them.
You have a misconception as to the Drake passage icing over. The flow through the Drake passage is variable. The location and extent of sea ice would tend to impact the flow and the approach to the Drake Passage impacting the distribution of flow. The ACC would swing wider or narrower with more or less total flow varying the THC. This would not be just a “glacial” variation but a continuous variation impacting climate on all time scales.
Those variations cannot remain “stuck” in any particular mode indefinitely, but can “persist” until internal and/or external conditions cause a change. The synchronization of those internal and/or external changes play an import role in the magnitude and direction of the global change. All glacial periods are not created equally.
If that is misrepresenting Huybers & Wunsch (2005), who I have not referenced or read other than just skimming just now, then so be it. I was just getting to the Heinrich events, 60ka particularly, since that happens to be an interesting period in the southern oceans.
Don’t be a prat:
BBD, “The simplest inference consistent with the test results is that the ice sheets terminated every second or third obliquity cycle at times of high obliquity, similar to the original proposal by Milankovitch.” that is what I mean by a little wonky.
The quote is from H&W05, and that’s the nth time you have made the *incorrect and misleading* claim that the correlation between orbtial forcing and deglaciation is poor or ‘wonky’.
You have a misconception about the fact that orbital forcing triggers glacial terminations. Let’s call it evens, before this gets tedious.
Yet again where is the evidence supporting this claim? The Drake Passage is *800km* wide and the ACC flows at >100 Sv. And what ‘approach’ are you referring to? It’s open ocean.
BBD, You posted that and I responded. I have not in my opinion “misrepresented” anyone in a casual discussion of the Drake Passage.
Approach. Ever used a water hose? Well, the Drake Passage is like one big ass venturi and the Antarctic ice like your car. Depending on the angle and velocity the water flow can hug the car or fly in any number of directions. The Pahnke reconstructions are at 40S and 45S plus there is an Australian reconstruction at 36S. their temperatures change at different times and at different rates. All the way on the other side of the world, the Drake Passage appears to have an impact. The Eastern Tropical Pacific gets more or less flow depending on the approach of the ACC to the Drake Passage and the volume of water that flows through the passage. It varies. The Arabian Sea and the Indo-pacific warm pool have different timings and of course the much studied Atlantic does also.
The Arabian Sea, Western Caribbean and Indo-Pacific have more Solar impact because they are less coupled to the ACC. That would allow an estimate of “global” impact of solar variation to be compared to internal variability that results from solar variability.
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-YVY2aIj7BQU/UGnHl_m0z3I/AAAAAAAAECg/CESA0CSD-Ro/s957/indo%2520pacific%2520Warm%2520pool%2520with%2520South%2520Australia%2520SST%2520deglaciation%2520with%2520solar%2520tierney%252010.png
The Tienery BTW is Lake Tanganyika which fits nicely with the Indo-Pacific from 60ka. Not a lot of variation in the tropical oceans.
BBD
See Shapiro et al (2011), Stockwell (2011), Scafetta (2010), Scafetta + West (2006), Solanki et al.(2004), Geerts + Linacre (1997), Lean et al.(1995) just to name a few.
Don’t rely on IPCC, who concedes that its “level of scientific understanding of solar (natural) forcing is low”.
Max
Here is some extra argument for the sun climate link, the 72 page chapter 5 from the 2009 NIPCC report:
http://www.nipccreport.org/reports/2009/pdf/Chapter%205.pdf
Perhaps Judith Curry can review the following two paragraphs taken from the solar section of the NIPCC report and tell us whether they are are a clear indication of deliberate dishonesty on the part of the NIPCC authors or not.
Imagine it’s a kind of climate-gate email. So we are reading more than what is literally written, we are also trying to discern intent.
“The following year, Damon and Laut (2004) reported what they described as errors made by FriisChristensen and Lassen (1991), Svensmark and FriisChristensen (1997), Svensmark (1998) and Lassen and Friis-Christensen (2000) in their presentation of solar activity data, correlated with terrestrial temperature data. The Danish scientists’ error, in the words of Damon and Laut, was “adding to a heavily smoothed (‘filtered’) curve, four additional points covering the period of global warming, which were only partially filtered or not filtered at all.” This in turn led to an apparent dramatic increase in solar activity over the last quarter of the twentieth century that closely matched the equally dramatic rise in temperature manifest by the Northern Hemispheric temperature reconstruction of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) over the same period. With the acquisition of additional solar activity data in subsequent years, however, and with what Damon and Laut called the proper handling of the numbers, the late twentieth century dramatic increase in solar activity totally disappears”
“This new result, to quote Damon and Laut, means that “the sensational agreement with the recent global warming, which drew worldwide attention, has totally disappeared.” In reality, however, it is only the agreement with the last quarter-century of the discredited Mann et al. “hockey stick” temperature history that has disappeared. This new disagreement is most welcome, for the Mann et al. temperature Solar Variability and Climate Cycles reconstruction is likely in error over this stretch of time. (See Section 3.2.) ”
Questions
1) It’s a fact that Lassen’s correlation between solar cycle length and temperature breaks down in recent decades (his solar plot goes flat while temperature rises). Does the NIPCC report convey this fact, or does it somehow convey the opposite? Would the two paragraphs educate or mislead readers?
2) Why does the NIPCC report bring the Hockey Stick into the issue when the more accurate measure of warming in recent decades are the surface and satellite records?
3) Do the two paragraphs above constitute a clear and deliberate act of dishonesty on the part of the author?
4) If so should the NIPCC author be held to account?
5) Would it harm public trust in climate skeptics if it is found the NIPCC report contains deliberate acts of dishonesty?
6) Should climate skeptics admit the NIPCC report contains deliberate act of dishonesty if it is found it does?
7) Does Judith Curry already consider climate skeptics of such high caliber as to be allowed to author NIPCC reports to be prone to deliberate acts of dishonesty?
8) If not, should Judith Curry re-evaluate her stance towards the nature of climate skeptics in general if the above two paragraphs in the NIPCC report to her mind does constitute a deliberate act of dishonesty?
Here is the annually updated TSI reconstruction
http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view¤t=tsireconstruction.png
From –
http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/data/tsi_data.htm
Did this plateau after 1980 followed by temperature after 1998? It did not in fact peak with sunspots in 1950? Other solar variables peaked after 1990?
http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view¤t=Lockwood2010.jpg
What exactly are you trying to prove? That sceptics lie as much as AGW space cadets? I don’t think space cadets lie (more than anyone else) – I think they are delusional.
Try to stick to some actual science rather than politics.
Warm surface waters produce clouds: http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2012/2012GL052700.shtml
Surely not the last word. However, there is clearly more than TSI variation that matters. A substantial change in TSI might increase the amplitude of oscillation between cool surface/clear skies and warm surface cloudy skies, while having no effect on the aggregate mean temperature.
This is another part of what people sometimes call “the physics”: how exactly might this happen?
The modulation of stratospheric temperatures is clear from observations. Climate models also take this modulation as input and have demonstrated significant perturbations on tropospheric circulations. If borne out by future studies and shown to be of sufficient magnitude, this mechanism could be an important pathway in the Sun-climate connection, particularly in terms of regional impacts. However, it is important to realize that, unlike the bottom-up mechanism, it can in itself contribute very little to global temperature variations.
There must be some bomb-proof reasoning for Gerry North to be so certain that top down influences (eg UV) cant impact on global temperature. Any ideas what it is?
– it seems very strange to be saying this at the same moment as others are suggesting that the stratosphere is able to influence the atlantic thermohaline circulation:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/09/24/evidence-that-stratopsheric-circulation-chnages-drive-ocean-changes-and-thus-climate-changes/#more-71434
Or that another Carrington event could cool the globe by ~3 C:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/09/26/new-study-finds-that-a-carrington-class-solar-event-could-cause-global-cooling-of-more-than-3c/
Woops: it look as though that Carrington event global-impact headline is something of an exageration – here is a link to the actual paper:
http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/12/8679/2012/acp-12-8679-2012.pdf
“something of an exageration” is an underexageration.
WUWT fluffed it yet again. If competent blogs such as SkS made even half as many errors on the science as WUWT they’d have no readers. Yet evidentally WUWT thrives off ignorance.
Of course you only have to see the WUWT fanboys uncritical acceptance of the result from a study based on *climate modelling* to smell something is rotten.
for the love of god
The paper is talking about 3C cooler months in specific places. It even mentions a similar thing happening in 2003 in which 2C cooler months were modeled.
Yet WUWT reports 3C global cooling as if it’s showing huge disaster and some commenters even start talking about ice ages and hundreds of years recovery times and one starts talking about bunkers. Anthony Watts even replies in the first comment that if it happened: “we probably would lose the technological capability to measure and record the cooling ”
Competent blogs never make such stupid errors. WUWT makes them again and again! But I think the excuse is that skepticalscience has a secret forum so therefore misinformation from WUWT is acceptable. or something.
I see Leif Svalgaard is offers a comment of criticism with a bit of sanity. But then Anthony rebukes him. I note Anthony doesn’t have time to rebuke the real idiocy of other commenters, only one who is shining a little valid criticism on the matter!
lolwot
The extensive journal article listings under “Solar Influence” at http://www.co2science.org/subject/s/subject_s.php is another good place to start, but only to start. A Google Scholar search on “Solar” and “global warming” finds about 100,000 articles. Do we believe the NAS folks have read them all? NAS has long made clear that they are wildly pro-AGW.
“So, what would it take to convince you that the sun has NOT played an important role in 20th century climate change?.”
Given a 100 year timeframe, a climate system that stores energy and redistributes it over timeframes that smooth/dampen brief solar fluctuations, and a Green House theory focused on energy in and out, it isn’t logical to conclude that solar cycles do not play an important role.
I guess the answer depends on the definition of “important”.
“The Maunder Minimum coincided with the middle—and coldest part—of the Little Ice Age.” Given the “Modern Maximum” in the 1900s…
I really enjoyed Dr. Curry’s Sea Ice theory which attempts to look holistically at a given occurrence.
Simplistic example but the climate system reminds me of a capacitor — a passive component used to store energy in an electric field. Capacitors store energy and bleed it off slowly in the absence of input.
Here’s an interesting twist on “Effects of solar variability on climate”.
Admittedly, Carrington events aren’t common.
New study finds that a Carrington class solar event could cause global cooling of more than 3C
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/09/26/new-study-finds-that-a-carrington-class-solar-event-could-cause-global-cooling-of-more-than-3c/
Let me suggest another “variable” affecting observed surface temperature: the reduction in sulphur dioxide emissions. SO2 Air Quality 1980 to 2010: 83% decrease in National Average http://www.epa.gov/airtrends/sulfur.html
To be sure, this is for only 121 sites in the U.S. but I am also confident that China and India are working to make up our shortfall.
Mechanism: +atmospheric aerosols -> +(SO2 & H2O) molecules -> +Cloud Condensation Nuclei -> +clouds -> +albedo -> +shade -> cooling.
Change “+” to “-” to get “warming”.
“The Maunder Minimum coincided with the middle—and coldest part—of the Little Ice Age.” Given the “Modern Maximum” in the 1900s…
In addition to underestimating carbon sinks are they also underestimating solar input?
1) Addition of missing variables.
2) Reconstruction of temperature records from raw data using proven and documented adjustments.
3) Derivation of “climate sensitivity” from physics and observations absent “consensus”.
4) Running the climate models with 1) – 3) above and getting the same result.
fan,
re this point:
2)) No well-verified physical coupling was established between global-scale climate changes and fluctuations in non-thermal solar emission (e.g., UV or charged-particle radiation), and
How does that fit in with believing “extreme climate events” are connected to global warming when “no well verified physical coupling has been identified”?
“So, what would it take to convince you that the sun has NOT played an important role in 20th century climate change?”
Evidence that 20th century climate change was extraordinary.
For example, some thing that convinced me that Mann’s hockey stick was not pseudoscience.
I imagine it requires some kind of diabolical conspiracy.
Without such evidence it seems the 20th century can be mostly described
as a warming period which followed a cooler period commonly, called the Little Ice Age.
Other things of interest would be some evidence the CO2 was causing significant warming- particularly in regards to the last 15 years.
It has not warmed in 15 years. Jones made that admission. That is almost 1/2 the modern instrument satellite record.
For the 12 months Dec through November, a record was set in 1997.9 through 1998.9. Since then that record has been exceeded 3 times.
And the sun, not for the lack of trying, was not especially helpful at lowering GMT or freezing the ice.
JCH. Is that the adjusted upwards GISS data ? or the original uncorrupted data ?
“It has not warmed in 15 years. Jones made that admission. That is almost 1/2 the modern instrument satellite record.”
It’s not warming enough to support the idea that CO2 has significant effects upon global temperature.
It’s warming enough to perhaps, support the idea that CO2 levels may have had a smaller effect- that other undefined factors are controlling it. But even a weaker effect it’s not particularly convincing, in another few years it probably will be clearer.
Here’s the bigger picture…
The green line is the sunspot number (SSN), a widely used proxy for solar activity. The correlation with global average temperature (red) is… not there.
Lags.
No, PD – that’s a century of data. The correlation is… absent.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/mean:12/trend/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1880/mean:12/normalise/scale:5/trend
BBD
1W/m2 variation in TSI over an 11-year cycle is 0.250W/m2 projected onto a sphere. If we consider the sphere an ideal grey body (you boys like that doing that with the earth well enough when it suits you) that change in forcing represents a 0.04K change in surface temperature.
I’m afraid you aren’t going to eyeball, even with eyeballs as good as mine, but it shouldn’t be a challenge for a digital signal processor to pull the signal out (if it’s there) out of millions(?) of hourly temperature readings from somewhere like Death Valley where there’s little weather to lower the signal to noise ratio.
If you don’t understand that you need to get yourself schooled on signal processing.
BBD, you write “The correlation with global average temperature (red) is… not there.”
Agreed. We know that. Now try the correlation between the value for Rz for each sunspot cycle against global temperatures.
Actually, I find anti-correlation
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/pmod/trend/offset:-66/plot/gistemp-dts/offset:%201300/from:1980/trend
The increase in TSI causes cooling!
Just kidding, that’s a rather amatuerish conclusion
Here is another one that supports Bob
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/pmod/from:1980/mean:12/offset:-1366/scale:0.5/plot/gistemp-dts/from:1980/mean:12
Everything stated in the following is observed on the WFT plot, 3 cycles over 30 years and a need for a rescaling of over 1000 (i.e. 1 / 0.1%) to see a significant variation.
steven
Alternatively…
Smoothing GAT with a five year running mean…
It’s a scale game. Anyone can play.
No steven. You were playing the misrepresentation game. Something I avoided by not fitting trends to the original graph. But thanks for owning up to what you did. It speaks well for you.
My guess is if you can change the scale to show a close to perfect correlation that using a scale that shows a poor correlation is rather meaningless. Perhaps I am wrong. Tell me how.
My guess is you have forgotten the estimated peak-to-trough warming that occurs during the Schwabe cycle. I had it in mind when selecting the scaling of the SSN curve vs GISTEMP. Do you know how small the estimated peak to trough warming is in degrees C?
Next, we need to remember something that tends to get forgotten in this silly argument. The Schwabe cycle can be looked at as a sinusoidal variation in forcing with peaks and troughs that cancel out.
So your argument isn’t that there is no correlation. Your argument is there is no correlation with known effects. Perhaps a minor difference but I’m sure the solar people out there appreciate the distinction.
I’m sure they do too. Doubtless it is what they had in mind at the NCR when they wrote, in the preface to the Workshop report:
andrew adams, have you actually checked to see if those trends are statistically significant? If not, it seems rather silly to make snide remarks like yours.
Brandon,
Phil Jones has said that the trend since 1995 is now statistically significant and I thought he was the acknowleged authority on this subject.
I haven’t checked if the trend since 1997 is statistically signficant, the point is that you will always be able to pick a number years (call it ‘n’) in the past which is just too short to produce a statistically significant trend and then say “look, we have had no significant warming for n years”. This is exactly why Jones was asked specifically about the trend since 1995.
Statistical significance cannot be properly discussed as simply as Phil Jones did. To determine, whether there’s a trend in data we need a model of the stochastic component – or actually of all other possible reasons of variability in the data both stochastic and non-stochastic. I really don’t think that the two statements of Jones can be justified by properly done statistical analysis (I refer to the lack of statistical significance at one date and presence at a later date).
I haven’t checked the full details, but I think his statements correspond to a model where we assume that the only possible factors are a linear trend and year to year variability of constant variance and no self-correlation from year to the next. We know that such a model is wrong. Thus calculating the statistical significance from that is also wrong.
I don’t think that we have any other single model that would form an essentially better basis for determining the statistical significance. I do accept that doing the calculation based on the simple model is useful in describing the strength of the apparent trend relative to other variability in the data, but it’s wrong to claim that such an analysis can tell whether there is a trend with a certainty of 95%.
Pekka Pirilä, Phil Jones was never clear on how he calculated his significance levels, so it’s hard to guess what model he may have used. For my calculation, I used monthly data with a simple Quenouille AR1 DoF adjustment. I don’t claim that’s the “right” model, but I think it’s fairly reasonable.
The main thing I find interesting is the significance of the trend hasn’t increased with additional data. Instead, it appears to have decreased. That’s not what a lot of people said we should expect back when Jones first said there was no (statistically significant) warming two years ago.
Pekka,
TBH, I’m no statistician so can’t really comment on the intricacies of the calculations – my point is more about the silliness of the claim that “Jones said no significant warming since 1995”.
I know that Jones only did the calculations because he was specifically asked the question about the significance of the trend since 1995. Given that the people who posed the question did so precisely because they knew it would just fail the statistical significance test they must have had some expectation of the method he would use.
Actually BBD I believe you presented the smaller picture. SSN and 11 yr TSI cycle are a gross oversimplification of solar variability and it’s possible effect on climate. The bigger picture begins to look a lot more like this:http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/total_solar_irradiance_plots
/tim_tsi_reconstruction_2012.jpeg
which does correlate to climate change rather dramatically. TSI alone still looks like a bit player though and may only be a proxy for other changes in soar spectrum or solar wind that contribute significantly to climate change. Still much work to be done here.
It has not warmed in 15 years. Jones made that admission.
No he didn’t. He said quite clearly that there had been a warming trend since 1995 of (IIRC) 0.12C per decade. He also explained that this period was (just) too short to establish statistical significance at the 95% level.
Things have changed bit, but that’s partly because of the whopping La Nina in 2008 and the sustained double-dip La Nina in 2011 which is very visible at the end of the graph. ‘Sceptics’ will make too much of this, no doubt. But El Nino will be back, and the effects of a run of La Nina will be ‘cancelled out’, allowing a clearer picture of the underlying warming trend to emerge. Being rational types, we will neither over- nor under-interpret the data ;-)
The current decadal trends from 1995 – present (degrees C) are:
HADCRUT3 = 0.07
GISTEMP = 0.11
UAH = 0.12
HADCRUT3, GISTEMP, UAH 1995-present; common 1981 – 2010 baseline
Sure, and I think the trend since 1995 is statistically significant now. So now it’s “no statistical significant warming since 1997” ;)
andrew adams, I have no idea what makes you think Phil Jones is any sort of “acknowledged authority” on calculating trends (and their significance levels). If anything, the opposite is true. In an e-mail to Bob Ward, Phil Jones even said he didn’t even know how to do it!
But it wouldn’t matter if he were an “acknowledged authority.” The idea that you’d take someone’s word (which was shown to be wrong) as gospel rather than put some sort of effort into verifying it before making a snide remark is bad.
Incidentally, I put about ten minutes into checking for myself, and it appears warming isn’t significant since 1995 for HADCRUT3. I might check the other two later.
By the way, sorry about my earlier comment landing in the wrong fork.
Andrew Adams,
I have no idea what makes Chewbacca think you think Phil Jones is any sort of “acknowledged authority” on calculating trends (and their significance levels).
Brandon,
My remark about Phil Jones being an “authority” on these things was a snarky reference to the skeptics’ insistence on pushing the “Phil Jones says there has been no significant warming since 1995” meme.
I wouldn’t bother checking the trend since 1997 – the whole point is that you can just keep going back in time until you find the longest period which still fails the statistical significance test and then say there has been no statistically significant warming since then. That’s how Jones was set up to give the answer he did.
andrew adams, I’m afraid your “snarky reference” was lost on me as nobody “pushing [that] meme” ever claimed Phil Jones was any sort of authority. Nobody cared about him saying it because of his ability to do calculations. They cared because he was someone who strongly supports claims of global warming.
You say you won’t “bother checking the trend since 1997,” yet I referred to the trend since 1995. You made a snide remark implying certain people were cherry picking. I responded by pointing out you had no basis for your implication. You’ve still shown no basis for it.
You can made snide remarks all you want, but the simple reality is it appears you’re just dismissing people out-of-hand.
By the way, Phil Jones was asked the questions he was asked by the BBC, and the UEA’s press office approved of all of them. It’s curious you think these people specifically set him up.
andrew adams is still correct to state that warming did not stop in 1995. Argument about whether or not this is statistically significant is, at least to my mind, somewhat besides the point since his statement was made to counter the incorrect assertion that:
Brandon,
The questions the BBC asked Jones were gathered from skeptics. The “no statistical warming since 1995” meme was already being pushed in the “skeptical” blogosphere. See here
http://deepclimate.org/2010/03/02/round-and-round-we-go-with-lindzen-motl-and-jones/
andrew adams, your response is both wrong and irrelevant. First, you blithely accept DeepClimate’s word when he says “BBC’s Roger Harrabin stated that his questions were ‘gathered from sceptics.'” Had you bothered to read the actual interview, you’d have seen this was incorrect:
There is an enormous difference between “several” questions being “gathered from sceptics” and all of his questions being gathered from them. It’s silly for such an obvious error to be propagated simply because you’re too apathetic/gullible to check the things you say.
More importantly, it is completely irrelevant who came up with the questions. You specifically said Phil Jones was “set up to give the answer he” gave by “the people who posted the question.” Skeptics had no control over what questions Phil Jones was asked. This means your description could not possibly fit them.
Either you were wrong to blame the questioners, or you’re saying Phil Jones was set up by his own university’s press office and the BBC.
BBD makes a comment that describes a view I’ve seen many times:
If we don’t have enough information to say there is a warming trend over a particular period, we cannot dismiss the possibility there is no warming trend over that period. It’s perfectly fine to say we have no reason to believe warming has stopped, but that’s radically different.
Failing to confirm a hypothesis can happen for many reasons. It could be the hypothesis is wrong. It could be the test is too weak a test to be able to confirm it. It could just be there isn’t enough data to confirm it. There’s no way to say with certainty. If you think there is, you’re saying:
Brandon Shollenberger
The temperature reconstructions speak for themselves. See previous comment here. Or are you denying the veracity of all these three different temperature reconstructions?
BBD, do you read what other people say before deciding they’re fools? Just two comments down from the one you linked me to, I said:
In another comment, I even described how I reached that conclusion.
It’s silly to tell a person to look at something they’ve already addressed.
Andrew Adams,
If you continue like this, we can predict that soon enough Chewbacca will say that what you say makes no sense:
http://neverendingaudit.tumblr.com/post/32083794151
Best of luck,
w
“But El Nino will be back, and the effects of a run of La Nina will be ‘cancelled out’, allowing a clearer picture of the underlying warming trend to emerge. Being rational types, we will neither over- nor under-interpret the data”
BBD, look at these contradictory statements you made and tell me how you as a ‘rational type’ can say you are neither over or under interpreting data… let alone interpreting data that hasn’t even happened yet. You seem awfully convinced this is what will happen. How am I supposed to interpret that?
Brandon Shollenberger
Yes.
Why am I over- or under-interpreting the data?
Do you think that ENSO will simply stick in its La Nina phase now? Why?
“Do you think that ENSO will simply stick in its La Nina phase now? Why?”
BBD, I make no predictions about what ENSO will do in the future, other than there will be more El Nino and La Nina events. What I take issue with about your comment is your certainty the next El Nino to occur will be large enough to ‘cancel’ out the string of La Nina events followed by a statement that ‘rational types’ (a category you have placed yourself into) don’t over interpret data. Seems a bit contradictory to me because you have interpreted data that hasn’t happened yet. I’m not saying it will or won’t, just saying you are not living up to your word IMO. Perhaps if you had said ‘the next El Nino may cancel the current La Nina trend which may reveal the underlying warming trend ‘ I would not have commented…. but that’s not what you said, you made a very certain statement about what data is coming next and then followed it up with ‘rational types don’t over or under interpret data’. It don’t wash.
When I wrote ‘El Nino will be back’ I didn’t mean that the *next* singular EN would cancel the effects of the recent string of LNs. I fully accept that this was not absolutely clear. I did mean that the balance between EN and LN (currently skewed in favour of LN) would be restored over the next several years.
That said, I think you are nit-picking.
Same same. Why should the ‘balance be restored’ when this is a La Nina dominant phase? Your hope is triumphing over logic, as is its wont.
=============
ENSO is an oscillation. The clue is in the name. This being so, it gradually cancels itself over time. You know, when a LN dominant phase shifts to an EN dominant phase…
Foolish, foolish kim.
Hmmm, I wonder why you said ‘next several years’ when you meant ‘next several decades’. Foolish of me to trust your words, uh hunh.
========================
Grin. By the way, BBD, you are backing into admitting it might cool for a couple of decades. Perhaps that’s why you said ‘several years’ instead of ‘several decades’? Gotta watch that unconscious bias, fella.
Note the Atlantic is moving into its cooling phase, too. Several, several, several years.
==========
curryja
Re: ” what would it take to convince you that the sun has NOT played an important role in 20th century climate change?”
One would need to disprove the numerous studies showing a significant impact of solar parameters on climate. e.g.:
1) Price of wheat since the medieval ages to modern grain prices in the USA e.g. See papers on price wheat solar cycle Herschel
2) WJR Alexander et al. showing connection between the21 year Hale cycle and Southern African precipitation and runoff (but NOT surface evaporation.)
3) Impact of solar / planetary cycles on Earth’s temperatures such as by:
Don Easterbrook, Nicola Scafetta, Craig Loehle, etc.
4) Length of the solar cycle with lagged temperature by Jan-Erik Solheim et al.
5) Phase lag between solar cycle and global temperature, and causation from integrated TSI variation and global temperature. David Stockwell
6) Henrik Svensmark‘s Cosmoclimatology
See NIPCC reports and reviews for further issues.
The failure of the IPCC to recognize or review them does not mean they do not exist! IPCC’s argument from ignorance does not prove CO2 is the explanation for most 20th century warming. Especially when it has no explanation for the current decadal global cooling but which fits the theory of Jan-Erik Solheim et al.
Solheim’s solar prediction was ridiculous and is already well on the road to such utmost failure even climate deniers will not be able to…deny it.
I mean really:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/image15.png
How nutball gullible and desperate do climate “skeptics” have to be to believe such BS? How disconnected from scientific reality do they have to be to believe that kind of BS while they simultaneously play ignorant about actual strong evidence behind the significant warming impact of CO2!
In climate skeptic world, fact is fiction and fiction is fact it seems.
And you wonder why the IPCC doesn’t review such trash?
David, if you are convinced solar cycles determine wheat prices, you might have a future in wheat futures. Lots of money can be made if you know where prices are headed.
But before investing your money you might want to consider that the linked investment group finds no correlation between solar cycles and wheat prices.
http://www.cxoadvisory.com/3642/calendar-effects/does-the-sunspot-cycle-predict-energy-and-grain-prices/
FYI (again):
Solheim, Jan-Erik, Kjell Stordahl, and Ole Humlum. “The Long Sunspot Cycle 23 Predicts a Significant Temperature Decrease in Cycle 24.” Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, no. 0 (February 16, 2012). http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364682612000417
De Jager, Cornelis, and Silvia Duhau. “Sudden Transitions and Grand Variations in the Solar Dynamo, Past and Future.” Journal of Space Weather and Space Climate 2 (June 25, 2012): A07. http://www.swsc-journal.org/index.php?option=com_article&access=doi&doi=10.1051/swsc/2012008&Itemid=129
Watts, Anthony. “Weak Solar Convection – Approximately 100 Times Slower Than Scientists Had Previously Projected.” Scientific. Watts Up With That?, July 9, 2012. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/09/weak-solar-convection-approximately-100-times-slower-than-scientists-had-previously-projected/
Referring to: Anomalously Weak Solar Convection: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1206.3173.pdf
Thanks pooh Dixie. It is great when someone posts useful and informative links.
Dr. Judith Curry Also thanks for the link to the NAS study
““The Long Sunspot Cycle 23 Predicts a Significant Temperature Decrease in Cycle 24.””
God you’d think climate skeptics would at least be a little embarrassed.
Or perhaps people don’t realize cycle 24 started almost 5 years ago.
Hows the “Significant Temperature Decrease” going?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/plot/uah/from:2008/trend
Not so well it seems.
0.1 deg C per decade cooling=>
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2004/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2004/trend
Solar cycle 24 started January 2008
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2004/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2008/trend
No cooling in sight
Not sure numbnut – I keep saying that there is a 20 to 40 year cooling influence from 1998.
Keep in mind my 2007 thoughts – although I had been working up to this for decades.
‘ENSO variation goes in both directions. The indications are that ENSO variation added to global surface temperatures between 1976 and 1998. It has been almost 10 years since temperatures peaked in1998. The planet may continue to be cooler over the next few decades as a cool La Niña phase of ENSO emerges.’ http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/11/enso_variation_and_global_warm.html
It is still the case that temps peaked early in 1998 in any monthly record – due to the El Nino – and that La Nina is more likely than not to intensify over a decade or three more.
Temps didn’t peak in 1998. Ocean Heat Content continues to rise. Smoothed temperature rises past 1998. There is no 1998 peak period.
-1 for using AmericanThinker as a source too.
Waddya bet he didn’t even click on it, just jerked his non-centrally connected knee at it.
============
This was my article from 2007. Just nailing my ‘prediction’ to the door. Keep it in mind numbnut.
Why would we use anything but monthly temps to determine ENSO peaks and troughs? Why would we bother to smooth or to trend data over such a short timeframe?
“2. Coupled models, with their inherent complexity, are the future and need to be used more widely for well-designed studies. It is fortunate that climate modeling has advanced to the point that such projects can be undertaken with some confidence.”
Pekka also takes as an article of faith that GCMs are fit for purpose.
If I recall correctly, GCMs are built upon the premise that CO2 is the driving force to climate change and if CO2 is removed from their structure, they can’t predict the future.
If I recall correctly, something Einstein said about needing only one piece of evidence to prove his theory wrong I am personally stumbling over this persistent climate sensitivity 2 to 4 C which has remained almost bedrock since @ 1979. Hasn’t budged a degree in spite of computers becoming more powerful and tuning has become more artful.
To me the GCMs are and have been shouting loud and clear “…fix me I’m broken.” Maybe GCMs should be torn apart and built with ocean temperature and currents as the climate driver. The sun’s impact upon the stratosphere may become more apparent. CO2 could then take its proper place… as a trace gas.
RiH008, “To me the GCMs are and have been shouting loud and clear “…fix me I’m broken.”” No they are screaming, ‘Wake up dumbbutt, it ain’t aerosols.”
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2012/2012JD017719.shtml
In that study, SST change was considered a factor, but in my opinion, underestimated because the models do not consider a realistic range of variability. Aerosols have been used as the forcing of choice to explain the divergences from projections and it is time to start trusting the models and looking for the real causes not the politically correct choices for the divergences. In that study for example, stratospheric temperatures started to level prior to Pinatubo and have the characteristic “step” change associated with a climate shift not gradual aerosol forcing.
http://redneckphysics.blogspot.com/2012/07/there-are-no-steps-it-is-constant.html
The models are doing what they are supposed to do, the modelers are not.
That’s freaking amazing.
This RiHo08 guy notes that climate models have persistently exhibited high climate sensitivity for decades, yet instead of taking a hint from that he instead concludes things must be changed so “CO2 could then take its proper place… as a trace gas.”
And he starts the post opining about “faith”.
lolwot, ridiculous is a touch strong. Many right feel that model “experiments” are an exercise in faith more than science. The models assume that climate suddenly reach Nirvana in 1951-1980 and that provides the models with divine insight into the future. The oceans have settling cycles of roughly 4500 years with 900 to 1900 year burps called Bond Events that have ranges of impact of around +/-1C degrees on average SST. At what point on the burp index is 1951-1980? According to current “science” an excursion of 0.7C is unprecedented thanks to the 1951-1980 Nirvana zone even though tropical and southern hemisphere reconstructions show neat little +/-1C excursions at fairly random intervals for the past few million years.
SAM the wonder dog and Elvis Nino are driven by the global ocean heat pump that never studied radiant physics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pack_ice_slow.gif
Part of the energy that pumps around is higher energy solar absorbed at depths greater than 10 meters, like UV that varies by 7 to 40% during the solar cycles. How many watts per meter squared is that second order effect again?
See Sol, feel Sol, hear Sol, touch Sol; if you handle Sol right it won’t bite.
==================
Tommy (or kim) can you here me
Capt’nDallas,
Again, silly me.
Here I was comparing the current crop of GCMs to a Yugo, that early exit in the small car wars. Instead, you tell me that they are a marvel of science & engineering, thoroughbreds, powered by a trace gas, driven by demolition derby enthusiasts, in stop and go driving.
See how much I have to learn? Thank you.
RiH008, “Here I was comparing the current crop of GCMs to a Yugo, that early exit in the small car wars. Instead, you tell me that they are a marvel of science & engineering, thoroughbreds, powered by a trace gas, driven by demolition derby enthusiasts, in stop and go driving.
See how much I have to learn? Thank you.”
More like plow horses :) There are a few modelers out there that seem to have a clue and use more realistic values for the trace gases, especially that H2O one.
TSI variation over 11-year solar cycle is ~1W/m2 peak-to-peak sine wave. If climate boffins can’t dig that signal out of any surface temperature records it suggests that climate sensitivity is indistinguishable from zero for power variations on the order of 1W/m2.
What other conclusion is possible other than incompetence in the surface temperature record?
Unfortunately, other forcings do not sit still while that forcing changes.
Also, climate sensitivity is not the instaneous response to added forcing
its not a transient measure. Slam your pedal down to the floor. The wheels spin. Would you conclude that the sensitivity ( response) to the added horse power was zero? nope. after time passed you’d have a better idea.
Now, apply that additional watt consistently over time. you’ll melt greenland. Sensitivity is measured when equillibrium is achieved.
You wont see anything by adding a periodic fluctuation of one watt to a system with huge inertia, especially when other forcings swamp that.
“Also, climate sensitivity is not the instaneous response to added forcing
its not a transient measure”
You think? Every winter it always seems to cool and ever summer it warms.
What is the response time when you change the length of a pendulum Mosher?
Winter/summer is WAY too long for change in TOA insolation to reflect in surface temperature. Try about three hours. TOA insolation peaks at noon and surface temperature peaks around 3PM. A change in power at TOA will therefore be reflected in surface temperature a few hours later.
You are talking out of your ass, Mosher. The time interval between maximum daily insolation and maximum daily temperature is a couple of hours. The stupidity that emerges from you when your preconceived notions are challenged is breathtaking.
Slam your pedal down to the floor. The wheels spin. Would you conclude that the sensitivity ( response) to the added horse power was zero? nope
Yes I would.
Heh Mosher I was amused to discover WUWT commentards have been extracting a single sentence from one of your comments:
“To put it simply. we don’t know the temperature of the past.”
They absolutely love to (ab)use it!
That is definitely abusing Mosh’s words. It should be shortened to: “To put it simply, we don’t know” Then some day, just to: “it simply don’t” which I think is very profound. Or maybe “it past”
“So, what would it take to convince you that the sun has NOT played an important role in 20th century climate change?.”
We have to show that it was not important in the past. A ‘Solar-Inquiry’ should be convened, it should examine every paper that has claimed solar-climate link, in turn.
If the Inquiry can show that the claims were the result of simple statistical errors and/or data fabrication that would go along way.
Of course if the Inquiry can get a public recantation by the authors of such papers that would be very much better.
Its may sound harsh, but there is a possibilty that humanity and the environment might suffer in purpituity unless action is taken now.
The Vatican has expertise in these matters and has helped nations around the world set up similar enquirys in the past.
Sorry, I forgot to add the sarc tags.
Here is a link to a nice collection of solar papers:
http://www.chrono.qub.ac.uk/blaauw/cds.html
J.C.
I think there is much that we don’t know about the sun’s variations and their impact on climate
I do too. We can speculate, but evidence can only be a circumstantial one, and some of it may be rather convincing. Any hypothesis not only has to a degree approximate the past, but also have some predictive power, for that reason we need to know what the sun and the Earth will do next.
The sun has cycles, so one can take a guess, as I did in 2003/4,
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/SSN.htm
by now everyone is at it, but then it was different, even with the NASA’s top experts took the opposite view.
The Earth is a different matter, no visible or even known regular internal system patterns that can be readily extrapolated from past to the future.
Time will tell.
Golly that was fun, I wonder if we could all be different facets of Judith’s multiple personality disorder?
On second thoughts no human could suffer such a torment and live.
When the question is:
So, what would it take to convince you that the sun HAS played an important role in 20th century climate change?
I’ll try to work out and write down the rest by then, so Dr. Curry take your time.
Inability to find a 1W/m2 TSI variation happening over a very well known 11-year solar cycle is very strong evidence that greenhouse effect has a ceiling temperature set by negative feedback from clouds as found by Ramanathan and Collins [Nature:1991]. This paper has over 500 citations.
http://lightning.sbs.ohio-state.edu/geo622/paper_thermostat_Ramanathan1991.pdf
“So, what would it take to convince you that the sun has NOT played an important role in 20th century climate change?”
Inability of modern signal processing to dig a 1W/m2 cyclical variation in TSI that follows the sunspot cycle like a dog on a leash out of the noise in the surface temperature record comes pretty close to convincing me. It also comes pretty close to convincing me that climate sensitivity for forcings on the order 1W/m2 are indistinguishable from zero using the best instruments and longest records we can bring to bear on it.
David Springer,
You need to be aware that 1W/m^2 variation in the TSI corresponds to a change in forcing of only 0.25W/m^2 at the Earth’s surface. There is a factor of 4 between the area of a cross section of the Earth’s diameter and its surface area.
If climate sensitivity is approximately 0.8K/W/m^2 then 0.25W/m^2 should produce a change of 0.2K between solar maxima and minima.
“How much?” is the right question. For context, let us compare the average temperatures of some cities to the expected range from doubling CO2, using 5/9 of (Fahrenheit – 32 degrees), and using a range of 1C to 1.5C for CO2 doubling. (The rest, and the CAGW problem, is feedback.)
The differences in average temperature are:
– For Boston, MA vs New York City the difference is 3F, or 1.7 times the 1C heating for low CO2 doubling and 2.5 times the 1.5 C heating for high CO2 doubling.
– For Boston, MA vs Washington, DC the difference is 6F, or 3.3 times the 1C heating for low CO2 doubling and 2.5 times the 5 C heating for high CO2 doubling.
– For New York City vs Miami, FL the difference is 21.8F, or 11.8 times the 1C heating for low CO2 doubling and 17.7 times the 1.5 C heating for high CO2 doubling.
I am under the impression that a lot of people voluntarily move or travel to the warmer cities. It does not appear to be “too much”.
Source: http://www.weatherbase.com/weather/state.php3?c=US&refer=
Please apply the same logic to glacial periods (5-6C cooler than present) to prove how another ice age would just be like moving south a bit, nothing to worry about.
Or perhaps admit your argument is disingenuous?
No, lolwot, it is not deceptive. Except for that, I have no idea what you mean.
As reads the 5C case for Boston-Washington, amend to read 1.5 C. :-( sorry.
No one should care about the opinions of climate science authoritarians who believe Mann can be right even if the math is erroneous. Even the IPCC now knows that approach is pure lunacy. Errors, misinformation, bias and distorted reporting of the data aside, the only thing the statisticians have to do is stick to the math and the truth will speak for itself.
We already know enough to model the climate. And, we can do so with astounding accuracy and not just 100s of years out but even billions of years into the future. But, what good is it when the variation in cosmic ray flux is a key independent variable?
Related to that is the sun’s solar cycle are the effects of both cosmic ray flux. The amount of cosmic rays that bathe the Earth also cannot be ignored—skittering through the spiraling arms of the Milky Way and the leftovers of busted stars is like being hit by a galactic gravestone that falls on your toe.
We also attempt to capture the effects of the variability of solar activity on the climate by factoring in some of the things we know about such as changes in the polarity and the variability of the Earth’s magnetic field.
Summary: The energy transfer processes that occur at the Earth’s surface are examined from first principles. The effect of small changes in the solar constant caused by variations in the sunspot cycles and small increases in downward long wave infrared flux due to a 100 ppm increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration on surface temperature are considered in detail. The changes in the solar constant are sufficient to change ocean temperatures and alter the Earth’s climate. The effects on surface temperature of small increases in downward LWIR flux are too small to be measured and cannot cause climate change. The assumptions underlying the use of radiative forcing in climate models are shown to be invalid. A null hypothesis for CO2 is proposed that it is impossible to show that changes in CO2 concentration have caused any climate change, at least since the current composition of the atmosphere was set by ocean photosynthesis about one billion years ago. ~R Clark, A null hypothesis for CO2. Energy & Environment. 21:4, Aug. 2010, 171-200
Gerald North mentions “mechanisms that link variations in galactic cosmic rays to climate change” in the preface. Does this mean that Heinrik Svensmark’s work be given serious consideration by the climate science community? I sure hope so.
“Does this mean that Heinrik Svensmark’s work be given serious consideration by the climate science community?”
It has. Next you’ll be telling me the IPCC report doesn’t mention cosmic rays. Such is the misinformation spread by climate skeptic blogs on the matter of the Suns influence on climate and the scientific communities work on the matter.
Hank,
Does this mean that Heinrik Svensmark’s work be given serious consideration by the climate science community? I sure hope so.
I’m sure it will – whatever way the results may show. I’m even more sure that it will only be given “serious consideration” by the climate science denier/skeptic community if the results happen to support their pre-existing position.
Judith Curry
You conclude:
There is no doubt that this is true.
IPCC has pretty much concluded that the only impact of solar variations on climate is from the measurable TSI, conceding, however, that its ”level of scientific understanding of solar forcing is low”
It appears that the workshops also limited their investigation to changes in TSI. Too bad.
You ask:
Three things.
First of all, I would like to see an explanation of why global temperature has in the past followed solar activity fairly closely, even long before there was any significant AGW signal. What was “driving” these climate changes? What impact did long periods of low solar activity (e.g. Maunder, Dalton Minima) have on our climate if any, at all?
Several independent solar studies have been made; these conclude on average that around half of the past warming can be attributed to the unusually high level of 20th century solar activity (highest in several thousand years). Around two-thirds of the solar impact appears to have occurred in the first half of the century, i.e. during the early 20th century warming cycle from around 1910 to around 1944, a warming period, which is statistically indistinguishable from the late 20th century warming period, from the early 1970s to around 2000, with only around one-third occurring in the later period. (Stockwell 2011, Shapiro et al. 2011, Scafetta 2010, Scafetta + West 2006, Solanki et al. 2004, Shaviv + Veizer 2003, Geerts + Linacre 1997)
It has been pointed out a) that “correlation does not provide evidence of causation” (a valid point) and b) that there is no presently known “mechanism” for solar variation as a significant climate forcing (this point is not valid, as there is at least one candidate of which I am aware: Henrik Svensmark’s GCR cloud nucleation hypothesis.)
Has the GCR/cloud hypothesis been falsified? No.
Have recent ISCCP observations on cloud cover changes coinciding with warming/cooling periods been explained? (Pallé et al. 2006)
How do these periods correlate with changes in GCRs?
Have there been attempts to scientifically falsify the Svensmark hypothesis? I don’t know (I haven’t seen any).
So the second thing I would need is a scientific falsification of the GCR/cloud nucleation hypothesis.
If the CLOUD experiment now going on at CERN ends up concluding that attempts to validate the Svensmark hypothesis have been unsuccessful, and that the cloud nucleation hypothesis is not corroborated by the experimental results, I would accept this as a falsification of the hypothesis.
While this might not completely “convince me that the sun has NOT played an important role in 20th century climate change”, it would certainly strengthen the case for this premise.
As you write: “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”.
But I think there is “evidence” out there for a stronger solar impact than that estimated by IPCC. This “evidence” is just not being investigated as seriously by the “climate science community” as the countless number of studies attempting to demonstrate that the primary climate driver is AGW.
Third, I’d like to see a “level playing field” in climate science research (but I seriously doubt that this will happen as long as IPCC is driving everything with its “consensus process”).
Don’t know how other CAGW skeptics will answer your question, but that’s my answer (for what it’s worth).
Max
Manaker
“First of all, I would like to see an explanation of why global temperature has in the past followed solar activity fairly closely, even long before there was any significant AGW signal. What was “driving” these climate changes? What impact did long periods of low solar activity (e.g. Maunder, Dalton Minima) have on our climate if any, at all?”
Has it?
1. First off lets put you ON THE RECORD as accepting the “global temperature” record. There are few problems here. One, its not a temperature. Two, I have all manner of sceptics arguing that the record is
bogus. So lets get you on the record. You can’t get an explanation
unless you buy the data being explained.
2. What makes you think it was colder ( globally) in the Maunder and Dalton minimum? How well do you know this? Does it rely on proxies?
Are you going to stand on the record that the proxies are good?
3. What do you mean by “followed closely”. linking to a chart, especially a chart that has no online data and no supporting methods/code does not establish you point. Follow closely better have a falsifiable mathematically meaning. Otherwise its more voodoo science.
NEXT..
“So the second thing I would need is a scientific falsification of the GCR/cloud nucleation hypothesis.”
What EXACTLY is that hypothesis? I mean numbers something I can test.
last time I looked at Forbush events I found… Nothing. no relationship
between GCR and cloudiness. Of course no skeptic would specify a hypothesis to be tested.. More arm waving..
Last
Third, I’d like to see a “level playing field” in climate science research (but I seriously doubt that this will happen as long as IPCC is driving everything with its “consensus process”).
We can agree on this. But It has nothing to do with the nonsense that people spout about the sun. They continue to spout nonsense, thankfully most of it doesnt make it past peer review.
http://www.astrophys-space-sci-trans.net/7/315/2011/astra-7-315-2011.html
Try again
Steven, you write “last time I looked at Forbush events I found… Nothing.”
Have you read http://www.astrophys-space-sci-trans.net/7/315/2011/astra-7-315-2011.html.
Max,
You’d “like to see a ‘level playing field’ in climate science research”?
How would this work exactly? Are you suggesting we could have quotas? For every paper published saying that CO2 and other GH gases were causing significant changes in the climate there would have to be one saying the opposite?
That would “level” things up quite a lot, wouldn’t it?
“So, what would it take to convince you that the sun has NOT played an important role in 20th century climate change? ”
As some others have posted, a reliable explanation for what caused the corollary to the current warming, namely LIA, and other warming events such as the medieval and roman warming that can’t be said to be in evidence over the last 40 years.
It should be presumed a great deal more that the variability in our greatest source of energy – the sun – is not affecting the climate in ways we don’t yet understand. Once they are accounted for and ruled out, then you can start to say more confidently but not with complete certainty that AGW was the cause. I think Dr Curry referred to this sort of new knowledge as “Black Swan” events. I have always thought TSI was far too simplistic metric of the suns effect on our climate.
I am not even fully 100% convinced that our contribution to CO2 levels is even relevant, in that I have yet to be really convinced that the CO2 levels would not have increased anyway due to outgassing from warming oceans, or other sources related to a warming climate.
Would it not be just as much value to have a scientific paper establish that they found nothing, even if it is nicer to be able to say that you found something?
Agnostic,
It should be presumed a great deal more that the variability in our greatest source of energy – the sun – is not affecting the climate in ways we don’t yet understand. Once they are accounted for and ruled out, then you can start to say more confidently but not with complete certainty that AGW was the cause.
but how can you ever possibly know whether all factors affecting climate have been accounted for or there are still as yet unknown factors still to be discovered? Of course if we were experiencing climate change which could not be accounted for by any currently understood mechanism then we could make that assumption, but that’s no the case – AGW provides a well established and understood physical mechanism which can easily account for the amount of warming we have seen in the last 50 years.
And the case for AGW stands in its own right, it doesn’t depend on ruling out other as yet unknown causes. In fact if we did identify some other “factor x” which could be expected to cause substantial warming over the same period that doesn’t just make AGW go away. It would actually create a problem because we would also need to look for yet another factor which has had a cooling effect to partly offset the warming from both “factor x” and CO2.
After reading number of sensible comments from both sides of the argument it is obvious that there are number of misconceptions.
Most likely reality is:
– Energy in = energy out but integrated across very long, long period of time
– Energy in is nearly constant and its variability can not account for natural variability in the Northern Hemisphere’s temperature of about 0.6 degrees during last 5-6 decades
– Amount of energy absorbed or reflected (mainly below 35-40 degree latitude) part of which is transported pole ward are the variables.
It can be shown, at least numerically in most elementary way, that synchronization of the solar and the Earth’s activity (no the Earth is not a passive bystander) can approximate natural variability (presumed by regulating oceanic absorption/radiation ratios)
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/GSC1.htm
The required energy comes from both the sun and the Earth, but it is minute in comparison what is required for the temperature change (analogue to the foot pressure on the car accelerator, or more appropriately to the grid potential or base current in electronics).The 350 year long CET record is a good example of the above reflection.
The mid-summer temperatures (nearly constant, average less than 0.1C/century) are predominantly from direct solar irradiation, while mid-winter temperatures (average rise of about 0.4C/century) are ameliorated by the SST of the nearby Atlantic.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/MidSummer-MidWinter.htm
Majority of above comment you may not agree with, but it would be unwise to dismiss the last sentence, since it is based on the most reliable data available to the climate science.
If we look at the empirical data from Livingston and Penn, then we know that the magnetic strength of sunspots is decreasing, and the contrast with the surface of the sun is also disappearing. If the linear trend continues, then the magnetic strength will get to around 1500 gauss somewhere around 2020. At about the same time the contrast will get to 1, and the sunspots will disappear. Precisley what will happen, we dont know. The only time on record that sunspots disappeared was around 1645. Sunspots did not reappear until around 1715, some 70 years later. We know that the middle of the LIA was around 1685; roughly half way through what is now called the Maunder minimum.
We also know that the number of sunspots was low during the Dalton minimum, and global tempertatures were also low. We know that in the 20th century, solar magentic effects were at a maximum, and the world seemed to be warm. We also know that correlation does not mean causation.
But it seems to me that this sort of correlation ought not to be ignored. With a complete lack of any empirical data to show that rising CO2 levels cause global temperatures to rise, the clear correlation between solar magnetic effects and global temperatures should be something the proponents of CAGW ought to acknowledge as real.
Are any of the denizens of Climate Etc. who are clearly proponents of CAGW, and who are prepared to go on the record as agreeing that there is a correlation between solar magnetic effects and global temperatures? Or are you all too much of cowards to stay silent?
If you want to go on correlation then you have to accept the solar-temperature correlation breaks down in recent decades.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/sidc-ssn/mean:132/normalise/plot/best/mean:120
20th century only to make it clearer:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/sidc-ssn/mean:132/normalise/from:1900/plot/best/mean:120/from:1900
280 ppm you gutless wonder.
JCH,
Does that comment about 280ppm, which I take to mean the pre-industrial level of atmospheric CO2, make any sense?
“Are any of the denizens of Climate Etc. who are clearly proponents of CAGW……..”
What about those of us who are proponents of potentially harmful AGW or HAGW? Are we included ?
Judith,
Interesting that you should quote Kerry Emmanuel but not on your favourite subject of uncertainty.
He largely agrees with you that the effects of climate change will be highly uncertain but also says:
“…….because of the uncertainties there is no scientific basis for the confidence expressed by some that the effects will be benign”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12kMjUkNl5Y
There’s nothing wrong, per se, in arguing the case that the scientific uncertainties are greater than the IPCC may state. I’m sure even the guys at Realclimate would acknowledge that.
The difference is the ‘spin’ which you both put on the same scientific viewpoint. Your ‘spin’ is that uncertainty strengthens the case for inaction. You’ve argued against advocacy but your choice of spin is itself advocacy. You only need to say something similar to Prof Emmanuel and, hey presto, you’re back in the mainstream. Back to consensus science. You’d have to expect to be sacked by the Republican climate team though. They wouldn’t like that kind of talk.
Apologies to Prof Emanuel for my previous mis-spelling of his name.
This is sophistry. When ‘settled’ was catastrophic, less certain is less catastrophic.
==================
thanks for warning us about the sophistry up front
“The IPCC Fourth Assessment and the recent National Research Council report on climate choices agree that there is no substantive scientific evidence that solar variability is the cause of climate change in the last 50 years”
It is indeed refreshing to find there is an area of agreement with the IPCC. But if we are looking for anthroprogenic climate change the sun’s variations are a nuisance and are best removed by an appropriate smoothing formula. Because climate studies are bedevilled by a poor signal-to-noise ratio, it helps to chose the right smoothing formula to attenuate the noise. It is not critical but it helps remove some of the uncertainties to use the 11 year central moving average. This is better than inertial smoothing (i.e. differential equations) because that process results in higher frequency phase shifts.
So we don’t need solar variability to explain the historical temperature record (see my website).
“So, what would it take to convince you that the sun has NOT played an important role in 20th century climate change?”
Like what? The Sun is around 99% mass of the Solar System, we’re 8 minutes away from its 6,000°C surface Heat, its thermal energy, which in the centre is around 16,000,000°C.
This radiant heat takes around 8 minutes to reach us somewhere on Earth, which could fit into the Sun 1.3 million times, and because this heat is transmitted in straight lines and we know well enough how we spin and wobble in our orbit around the Sun we understand our seasons and our tides and can predict real climate changes long term, such as in around another 15,000 thousand years the Sahara will be green again.
What is there to put up against that?
A trace gas that lags temperature rises and falls by around 800 years?
It would have to something a heck of a lot better than this belief in the magic molecule.
The twentieth century warming was part of the general slide down into colder temperatures since the beginning of our interglacial, which was a lot hotter, we know where we’re headed, it ain’t called an interglacial for nothing.
How the other major variables in our relationship with the Sun play into this we’re still exploring; the 11 year and other cycles, the interactions of magnetic fields, our journey around the galactic centre, our own internal dynamics, but as interesting as these details are, they do not exist outside of the already general pattern we have in our relationship with the Sun, our primary connection through gravity and primary influence on our world from its heat and light.
Pingback: Effects of solar variability on climate | Climate Etc. | Solar Flare 2012
And yet there is centennial climate variability:
http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view¤t=Vance2012-AntarticaLawDomeicecoresaltcontent.jpg ( http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI-D-12-00003.1?journalCode=clim )
And millennial climate variability in the Holocene:
http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view¤t=ENSO11000.gif ( http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v420/n6912/abs/nature01194.html )
What could it possibly be that that causes this?
The new climate paradigm Abrupt climate change: inevitable surprises suggests that it is a control variable that pushes climate past a threshold and that results in nonlinear climate responses as tremendous energies flow through multiple powerful mechanisms of negative and positive feedbacks.
It is a new paradigm because it is a new way of thinking about climate that opens up new ways of understanding the underlying physics of the system. It is widely regarded as a compelling theory and all leading edge climate science is going down this avenue.
‘The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible. Rather the focus must be upon the prediction of the probability distribution of the system’s future possible states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions. Addressing adequately the statistical nature of climate is computationally intensive and requires the application of new methods of model diagnosis, but such statistical information is essential.’ http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/501.htm
It surely is – :cool: :cool: :cool: :cool: :cool:
Interesting vid there Chief.
I think Dr. Robert Brown had a posting some months ago or last year on this topic at WUWT, I have been thinking about it since. Seeing the animation makes it much clearer, Thank You !!
Great video, Chief.
You’e occasionally useful!
It is a version of the Lorenz attractors available anywhere on the net. You are always an idiot.
…..and you’re always a grumpy old git too!
You defending Springer or having a go at me? Rat’s arse territory.
You defending Springer or having a go at me?
“having a go at” you :-)
I have an actual question, physics, and wonder if anyone has an answer or at least knows where I should look.
Has anyone measured the ratio of latent and sensible heat generated when a constant heat packet is supplied to water or saline, at different wavelengths?
I would like to know what happens to the latent and sensible heat ratio when IR, red, blue and uv light is used to illuminate water.
Woods Hole has a few papers on the depth of penetration of various wavelengths of light. I haven’t seen any specific reference to latent or sensible heat ratio as related to spectrum since that is a function of surface temperature, air temperature, saturation pressure, salinity and turbulent mixing at the surface.
The old school sensible heat ratio, is something that would change with solar as the percentage of total energy absorbed by depth changes. That impact though starts getting complicated because of critters.
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/JPO2740.1
Supposedly, with a prolonged solar minimum, the reduction in depth of average UV energy would cause critters, plankton and such, to move up or down with available energy. The critters would increase the reflected shortwave percentage by reducing path length amplifying the impact of a small reduction in solar energy. This is part of the correlation of fish stocks and “climate regime” shifts which don’t exist :)
The 1977 Global Regime Shift: A Discussion of Its Dynamics and Impacts in the Eastern Pacific Ecosystem , ALFRED M. POWELL, Jr.
You have to download the paper, but there are quite a few others similar.
I don’t think the AOGCM have an ocean critter module :)
Does changing layer of critters=changing production of cloud forming nuclei?
==============
I don’t do clouds :)
Think of all the whorlish feedbacks in that turbulent layer of critters. Maybe if I run a million X-Boxes in parallel I can model it.
============
The answer is yes. Most species of phytoplankton in the ocean excrete dimethylsulphide which escapes to the atmosphere to break down to sulphates. In La NIna there is upwelling of nutrient rich currents and the cool SST is asociated with more low level marine stratocumulous. Is the cold water or substantially increased phytoplanktom population responsible for the cloud? A bit of both I would assume.
More critters=more Watts in converted to critter parts instead of heat. As Cap’n once mentioned, if you get enough 2nd and 3rd order effects going…..
===========
And just to be carbon friendly – we can power the x-boxes with a home made nuclear reactor. How’s that for being responsible sceptics?
Judith points out that absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.
The long periods of low solar activity of the Maunder and Dalton minima are yet ter be ‘explained.’ The impacts of those low solar periods on poor crop yields and high prices brought on by scarcity are shown in the historical record. An early successful economic forecaster, Sir William Hirschel, was an astronomer, not an economist, who forecast the low price periods based on sunspots, between1798 and1813.
In 1878, British economist, William Jevons in ‘Commercial Crises and Sunspots,’ presented a statisiical survey relating business cycles with sunspots, sunspots affected weather, weather affecting crops.
This modern study finds correspondences between low solar activity crops and wheat prices, from medieval Europe up to the present.
http://arxiv.org/ftp/astro-ph/papers/0411/0411165.pdf
There’s a lovely old study correlating, correlating mind you, Nile River levels and Aurorae Boreales. Got the F-word for an author, too, but not THE F-word.
=================
We cannot forget the inestimatable Inigo Jones – long range rainfall forecaster extraordinaire.
‘Jones studied the variation in sunspot cycles that had been discovered by Edouard Bruckner, and came to the conclusion that anomalies were caused by the interaction of the planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. This became the basis of his long-range weather forecasts, although he never claimed to be able to make day-to-day predictions. Although Jones failed to have his methods recognised as soundly based, by any substantial body of accredited scientific opinion, he was widely recognised for his successes, especially by farmers,’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inigo_Owen_Jones
A hale fellow well met whose studies foreshadowed some modern – but still controversial – ideas. On what scientific basis do you think those old time meteorologists rehected the methods of Inigo Jones?
A NEW CLIMATE THEORY
How about Cosmoclimatology?
http://www.icr.org/article/4156/
In 1995, Henrik Svensmark discovered a startling connection between the cosmic ray flux from space and cloud cover. He found that when the sun is more active–more sunspots, a stronger magnetic field, larger auroras, stronger solar winds, etc.–fewer cosmic rays strike the earth and cloud cover is reduced, resulting in warmer temperatures. Figure 2 shows the relationship he found between low-level cloud amount derived from satellite data from the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project and cosmic ray counts from Climax, Colorado.
It is evident in Figure 2 that for the 22-year period from 1983 to 2005, the average amount of low-level cloud follows the flux of cosmic rays very closely. In fact, Svensmark claims that the correlation coefficient is 0.92, a very high correlation for this type of data. In addition, when looking at various longer periods of record using proxy data for these two variables, he also found good correlations and similar trends. In particular, he suggested that during the Little Ice Age when the sun was inactive, cosmic ray flux from space was high, cloud amount was greater, and global temperatures were cooler. As the sun became more active after 1750, cosmic ray flux decreased, cloud amount decreased, and global temperatures warmed. Svensmark proposed that the global warming we’ve experienced for the past 150 years is a direct result of an increase in solar activity and attendant warming.
A potential change in cloud cover of 3-4 percent caused by changes in cosmic ray flux is sufficient to explain global temperature changes of several degrees due to the change in the reflectivity of clouds. The reason the variation in direct radiation from the sun was rejected earlier is because it has been found to vary only by a few tenths of a percent. This is insufficient to explain observed global warming.
Institute of Creation Research!
By the way Svensmark only got a good correlation between low cloud and cosmic rays in that graph because he adjusted the cloud data to fit cosmic rays.
The scientists who produce the low cloud record said DONT DO THIS
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/10/taking-cosmic-rays-for-a-spin/#comment-20111
Here’s what the same unadjusted cloud record vs cosmic rays actually shows
http://www.agu.org/journals/rg/rg1004/2009RG000282/2009rg000282-o15.gif
Question for climate skeptics:
Given the above, has Svensmark tampered with scientific data and committed scientific fraud?
lolwot | September 28, 2012 at 3:17 am | Reply
“Institute of Creation Research!”
Yeah, I know. About as credible as Skeptical Science.
Hmmm, I’d say he pulled a Michael Mann and inverted his Tiljander:)
Several recent papers on cosmic rays modulating solar.
Response of Cloud Condensation Nuclei (> 50 nm) to changes in ion-nucleation
Effects of cosmic ray decreases on cloud microphysics
“The search for the solar cycle signal in the temperature record […]”
Wrong mainstream approach based on wrong mainstream assumptions.
–
“JC comment: […] Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. This is another example of failure to account for ignorance in assessing our knowledge about these topics.”
Reassuring, but my optimism is cynically cautious as I’m still locked out of the local academic mainstream.
–
“So, what would it take to convince you that the sun has NOT played an important role in 20th century climate change?”
Not even threat of death could convince me.
–
“Muller’s observation-based attribution”
Muller hasn’t got a clue about natural variations. (Diplomacy in this case is counterproductive. With friends like that, don’t need enemies.)
–
“I don’t see the IPCC taking a serious look at this issue, other than to say ‘absence of evidence’.”
I see no evidence that they could even be trained to begin looking at the problem sensibly, as they start with such foul assumptions, so maybe nevermind them.
I can suggest approaching Jean Dickey at NASA JPL for help. She published this ( http://i49.tinypic.com/2jg5tvr.png ) in a different visual format in 1997. That’s the DNA underpinning these: (a) http://i40.tinypic.com/16a368w.png (b) http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/vaughn4.png
Help me get secure longterm local funding + pension so I can help out with this.
I’m becoming more and more confident that the primary cause of climate changes in the first instance is a solar effect on the shape of the polar vortices from chemical changes in the atmosphere (more pronounced above the poles) induced by solar variability acting differentially on ozone amounts at different heights.
When the sun is active the polar vortices are strong vertically and contracted horizontally which pulls the jets and climate zones poleward allowing more energy into the oceans.
When the sun is inactive the vortices are weak vertically but flop about horizontally pushing the jets and climate zones equatorward allowing less energy into the oceans.
The consequences work through both air and ocean circulations on different timescales but overall an active sun gives less clouds and warming oceans whilst an inactive sun gives more clouds and cooling oceans.
The system response is to increase the speed of the hydrological cycle to eliminate extra warming when the sun is active and to decrease the speed of the hydrological cycle to try and preserve warmth when the sun is less active. In other words whatever happens the system response is negative and not positive as proposed by AGW theory.
As far as I can see that general mechanism covers all known observations.
I’m becoming more and more confident that the primary cause of climate changes in the first instance is a solar effect on the shape of the polar vortices from chemical changes in the atmosphere (more pronounced above the poles) induced by solar variability acting differentially on ozone amounts at different heights.When the sun is active the polar vortices are strong vertically and contracted horizontally which pulls the jets and climate zones poleward allowing more energy into the oceans.
When the sun is inactive the vortices are weak vertically but flop about horizontally pushing the jets and climate zones equatorward allowing less energy into the oceans.
The consequences work through both air and ocean circulations on different timescales but overall an active sun gives less clouds and warming oceans whilst an inactive sun gives more clouds and cooling oceans.
The system response is to increase the speed of the hydrological cycle to eliminate extra warming when the sun is active and to decrease the speed of the hydrological cycle to try and preserve warmth when the sun is less active. In other words whatever happens the system response is negative and not positive as proposed by AGW theory.
As far as I can see that general mechanism covers all known observations.
Somebody’s got to do it.
WHT giving full consideration to an opposing view
http://t1.thpservices.com/fotos/thum4/012/299/igm-19743007.jpg
You are right. I should have elaborated.
Wilde is on my list of the 40+ climate clowns that comment here with their own personal theory.
http://tinyurl.com/ClimateClowns
The point is that you can strike through 40+ of these theories because they can’t all be right. Like religions, it is vastly more likely that they are all wrong.
@WHT
Wilde has a climate hypothesis. There is no theory of climate.
Web, if this is what you really want to believe…
“Like religions, it is vastly more likely that they are all wrong.”
what do you make of your vaunted AGW science? It seems that you are one of the new breed of scientists who study by placing their text book under your pillow before you go to sleep. Read your Bible, if you want a change. I Corinthians, 15:1-4. Believe in Christ and his works.
Also, according to this book you are only off by One.
WebHubTelescope,
Seems you got outpaced:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/newborn-loses-faith-in-humanity-after-record-6-day,29588/
OK, then all 40+ of the hypotheses can’t be right. The majority of these hypotheses are stated with such certainty as well. Righties and fundies require black&white certitude, as that is part of their ideological heritage. The real clown show is when they start going after each other. But they won’t, since that is also against their ideological objectives. They will work together, by elevating the levels of FUD, to pursue their underlying agenda.
Then there is the problem with Springer. “You can tell a marine, but you can’t tell him much.”
WHT’s link ( http://tinyurl.com/ClimateClowns ) crosses a line with its misinterpretation/misrepresentation.
Tolerance of such a link on this website undermines my trust of Climate Etc.
Once again: There’s a need for a healthier climate blog where natural climate variability is discussed without the toxic politics.
WHT: Don’t ever address me again.
Paul Vaughan
I am one of WHT’s ‘climate clowns’ apparently beause I dared to mention Breughels famous paintings in connection with the LIA (as hundreds of other Historical climatologists do)
Quite what theory I am supposed to hold I don’t know (and he has never explained) but that appears to be his main criteria for including people on his unpleasant and silly website.
tonyb
Paul Vaughan,
Here’s what WebHubTelescope said of you:
> A nutty guy who keeps promising scientific revelations regarding seasonal cycles that will put all the mysteries to rest. He specializes in posting images that look like the following — no explanation, no real units displayed, nothing but a pretty picture […]
Notwithstanding the namecalling, I’m not sure what facts he got wrong there.
Would you care to clarify?
The difference is that LOD certainly has a climate connection. Whereas the webster is an electrician with no understanding of modern physics or any other relevant discipline. And seemingly no ability to progress beyond a narrow obsession with certain ideas – he revels in being crude and nasty at the same time. We have diagnodsed autism spectrum disorder – it is not something to mention lightly – to make jokes about – or to otherwise disparage. But it is the most rational explanation.
Massive amounts of psychological projection on your part. We all know what that means, Chief.
> We have diagnodsed autism spectrum disorder […]
Please beware that some might know what you are talking about, Chief.
Most so where you are not.
Nah nah – I’m not you are? Massive amounts of terminal (TO ANY RATIONAL DISCUSSION) juvenile idiocy there webnutcolonoscope.
WHT
+ 1
I blush for my fellow countryman.
Cute too.
BBD,
Giving kudos to web is akin to cheering on a pimp beating one of his girls. Show some class. Webby certainly won’t.
BBD got class?
Unpleasant and false analogies like this are the polar opposite of showing some class.
That’s seriously funny. Didn’t know you had a sense of humor.
Being ignored or insulted by WHT is a compliment.
WebHubTelescope
What is definitely wrong is the AGW camps’ claim of the global warming trend has shifted from its pre mid-20th century value of 0.06 deg C per decade to 0.2 deg C per decade.
It is wrong to assume the recent warming phase as a shift in the trend.
There is no hockey stick in the 20th century climate:
http://bit.ly/Aei4Nd
It is that simple.
Here is the IPCC climate models that ASSUME shift in the trend from 0.06 to 0.2 deg C per decade => http://orssengo.com/GlobalWarming/IpccAcceleratedWarming.PNG
Which is clearly wrong.
Girma
The only hockey stick I can find in the entire record is that between 1690 to 1730 when we climbed rapidly from the depths of the LIA to a temperature only around 0.6C cooler than today, as recorded in CET.
tonyb
I think the WEB is looking though wrong side of his telescope
M.A.Vukcevic Another iron curtain survivor, Vukcevic is mild by the standards of the other crackpots listed, and claims that all climate changes are due to natural variations from solar activities. To his credit he creates very elaborate slides, but the curve fits are in the eye of the beholder.
WEB makes me look almost normal , that ain’t good for the image of a man described by Stanford University’s most eminent scientist in his field as: the man of superior ignorance, cyclomanic in supreme and ultimately danger to society.
Wha’ happened?
I think the sun has played a role in the millennium climate. For example, the Maunder Minimum could have been 0.5 C cooler than other periods. I also don’t think solar variation stopped in the 20th century. Nothing of the Maunder Minimum scale, but possibly 0.2 C warming between 1910 and 1940 during which time sunspots tripled (and supported by other proxies), and which shows as anomalous warming that can’t all be explained by GHGs.
We jest don’t know …
Within the brazen circle of the sky’s rim,
A child sits on the splintered doorstep,
Warm still from the sun’s rays at noon.
Wondering he gazes at the oblivious stars
And the pale arc of the crescent moon.
This is another example of failure to account for ignorance in assessing our knowledge about these topics.
At what point does “ignorance” about the impact of some phenomenon become knowledge about its lack of impact?
How *should* one express such ignorance?
“Until moonbeams have been detected at 5 sigma, we cannot rule out the possibility that the increase/decrease in moonbeam flux can fully explain changes in the last 50 years’ climate.”?
Steve,
The intent is rather to explain natural variability than to deny it. Are you a denier of natural variability? That would seem to be a fairly difficult position to defend.
Anastasios Tsonis, of the Atmospheric Sciences Group at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and colleagues used a mathematical network approach to analyse abrupt climate change on decadal timescales. Ocean and atmospheric indices – in this case the El Niño Southern Oscillation, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation and the North Pacific Oscillation – can be thought of as chaotic oscillators that capture the major modes of climate variability. Tsonis and colleagues calculated the ‘distance’ between the indices. It was found that they would synchronise at certain times and then shift into a new state.
It is no coincidence that shifts in ocean and atmospheric indices occur at the same time as changes in the trajectory of global surface temperature. Our ‘interest is to understand – first the natural variability of climate – and then take it from there. So we were very excited when we realized a lot of changes in the past century from warmer to cooler and then back to warmer were all natural,’ Tsonis said.
Four multi-decadal climate shifts were identified in the last century coinciding with changes in the surface temperature trajectory. Warming from 1909 to the mid 1940’s, cooling to the late 1970’s, warming to 1998 and declining since. The shifts are punctuated by extreme El Niño Southern Oscillation events. Fluctuations between La Niña and El Niño peak at these times and climate then settles into a damped oscillation. Until the next critical climate threshold – due perhaps in a decade or two if the recent past is any indication.
It is of course the new paradigm of deterministic chaos in climate.
James Hurrell and colleagues in an article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society stated that the ‘global coupled atmosphere–ocean–land–cryosphere system exhibits a wide range of physical and dynamical phenomena with associated physical, biological, and chemical feedbacks that collectively result in a continuum of temporal and spatial variability. The traditional boundaries between weather and climate are, therefore, somewhat artificial.’
It is true of course – as demonstrated in the august Journal of the Annals of Improbable Research – that defenders of the old paradigm are known as dinosaurs. Are you a dinosaur Steve?
:cool: :cool :cool: :cool :cool:
Cheers
Chief
Surely the need is to scientifically explain not just ‘natural variability’ but often ‘extraordinary’ natural variability, all at around the 280ppm Co2 concentration level.
There appears to be climatically nothing dramatically unusual happening today that hasnt happened in mans history during the Holocene, and instead of proponents of CAGW concentrating on the past- which doesnt prove their case conclusively- they need to concentrate on the science and demonstrate that, over the last half century or so, we have perceptibly alterred the planets climate beyond ‘extraordinary natural variabilty.’
In other words prove the physics beyond doubt whilst taking into account such aspects as clouds, cosmic rays etc.
tonyb
It seems like belaboring the obvious to talk about oscillators in nature. Resonant frequency oscillators and harmonics thereof abound in nature. Like with butterflies all the way down it’s oscillators all the way down too.
Go explore below. It’s a Big Bang Acoustics page. Basically started by astrophysics guys taking COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) satellite data of inhomgeneities in the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) and moving it up in octaves until it’s audible and listening to it. CMBR for those that don’t know is the first direct observation we can make of the universe. IIRC it’s about 100,000 years after the big bang and the universe had then cooled enough for light to be able to propagate through it. Call it first light. CMBR is that light, which comes from every direction, lowered in frequency by redshift 1000x (universe has expanded 1000x as large since then). As it turns out pressure waves (really sound waves) with wavelength in millions of light years, rich in harmonics, is responsible for the clumpiness of the universe. It would be a homogenous soup otherwise.
http://www.astro.virginia.edu/~dmw8f/BBA_web/index_frames.html
The mainstream and IPCC approach to solar impact on climate is just fine. It’s the skeptic approach which fails to properly test or weigh up evidence which is hideously flawed.
The IPCC and friends take a serious look at the issue and they aren’t simply concluding “absence of evidence”. They are in fact conveying current knowledge, not trying to guess future knowledge. Current knowledge is that solar variability has only a minor influence on multi-decadal global temperature changes.
Until someone can demonstrate a workable and quantifiable mechanism for a more significant solar influence on multi-decadal climate change, on par with the excellently documented mechanism for the CO2 climate driver, current knowledge stands that:
1) It can be claimed based on evidence that there will be a strong CO2 driver of climate in the longterm span of the 20th and 21st century.
2) It cannot be claimed that solar activity has or will have any significant influence over such a time period.
As per usual actual science involves weighing up the evidence, something that seems alien to skeptics on their blogs. You can’t properly attribute any amount of climate change to something unless you can describe and quantify a mechanism for testing. If you can’t even estimate an effect in terms of numbers, let alone calculate the direction of the effect over a given period, then it’s useless for attribution.
A review and criticism of various proposed solar mechanisms can be found here:
Solar Influences on Climate
http://www.agci.org/dB/PDFs/10S1_LGray_SolarInfluencesCLimate.pdf
Indications are clear that solar influence in the 21st century will be minor compared to the massive CO2 driver. Maybe that will change if someone can provide evidence to the contrary. So far they haven’t.
‘The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible. Rather the focus must be upon the prediction of the probability distribution of the system’s future possible states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions. Addressing adequately the statistical nature of climate is computationally intensive and requires the application of new methods of model diagnosis, but such statistical information is essential.’
Do you think rhis numbnut – or are you a sceince denier?
“………prediction of future climate states is not possible”
So you’re saying that even if we knew that they’d be no change in any climate forcing factors: the sun was going to stay at the same intensity, atmospheric composition wasn’t going to change, the albedo too would remain constant, no change in Earth’s axis or orbit etc, then, even so, we still couldn’t be sure there’d be no change in climate?
Tempterrain, that is what he is saying. Climate models have no better long term predictive skill that stock market models. That doesn’t mean they can’t be useful though since there are somewhat predictable states and behaviors from various initial conditions, but every time there is a regime change or climate shift it is a new ball game. I believe I differ with Chief here because I think they can be more predictive with better ocean oscillation consideration.
The hypothetical is just that – but if no control variable changed why would the system change? But that of course is not going to happen.
And it is not me saying this but the IPCC.
You are right and wrong Capt. There is an ‘irreducible imprecision’ to models but the tighter the representation the less the divergence of solutions. We are a long way from realistic representations and precise quantification of parameters.
Chief, I probably am wrong, but the longer term recurrent patterns are a lot sexier than what the models are trying to tune into. Finding the right initial conditions should improve the situation, which appears to make a decade or three more like a century or so.
Chief,
but if no control variable changed why would the system change?
Well yes why would it? But, if one control variable does change then you’re saying changes can be highly unpredictable? And that is an argument for doing nothing to stop or reduce this change ?
Which bit of climate catastrophist (in the sense of Rene Thom) don’t you understand? All of it apparently? Not merely unpredictable but potentially catastrophic.
CO2 is not the only factor – but when did I ever say we should persist for any longer than is unavoidable? I have a plan for sequestering 500 billion tonnes of CO2 – you have a plan to fail. That’s what I object to.
lolwot you write “Current knowledge is that solar variability ”
Please define “solar variability”, and does it include magnetic variability?
The IPCC and friends take a serious look at the issue and they aren’t simply concluding “absence of evidence”. They are in fact conveying current knowledge, not trying to guess future knowledge. Current knowledge is that solar variability has only a minor influence on multi-decadal global temperature changes.
Ah yes, you mean the current knowledge of deceitfully hiding whatever conflicts with the narrative they’re pushing for their masters?
How do you manage to miss all these examples of the duplicity inherent in the IPCC reports?
Until someone can demonstrate a workable and quantifiable mechanism for a more significant solar influence on multi-decadal climate change, on par with the excellently documented mechanism for the CO2 climate driver, current knowledge stands that:
Oh please oh please, fetch this “excellently documented mechanism for the CO2 climate driver”. Just how does Carbon Dioxide raise the Earth’s temperature 33°C?
“Judithgate” was a climate denier smear fabricated by this guy:
http://climatechange.thinkaboutit.eu/think4/post/judithgate_ipcc_consensus_was_only_one_solar_physicist
His BS was taken apart in the comments.
The IPCC nailed its science fraud to the mast by bringing in Santer to destroy the true consensus of the scientists, he admitted the fraud. The true science consensus remains, there is no discernable human influence, and, no science has been produced to show carbon dioxide able to do what is claimed.
And then we had Keeling & Co running with this, but heck, maybe you think it perfectly logical to measure ‘background’ CO2 levels from the top of the world’s highest active volcano surrounded by active volcanoes and earthquakes spewing carbon dioxide around the great hot spot growing islands in the warm seas.., when man made indistinguishable from volcanic.
It took him less than two years to establish there was a warming trend from man made.
You might think that science.
So, back to my question:
Just how does Carbon Dioxide raise the Earth’s temperature 33°C?
Yeah sure, so you can then change the subject to yet another conspiracy theory when that one falls down too.
CH
The intent is rather to explain natural variability than to deny it. Are you a denier of natural variability? That would seem to be a fairly difficult position to defend.
Putting it simply:
1. If you can provide a plausible physical explanation as to why an observed effect leads to an observed cause, then that can be convincing.
2. If you can provide past observations that show variability that cannot be explained very well except by citing plausible but difficult to monitor causes (ocean currents, poorly constrained solar variability, poorly constrained variability in “natural” forcings such as stratospheric water vapour etc.), then the term “natural variability” is perhaps a reasonable term. If this past variability is similar to the current variability then that can also be convincing.
However:
2.b. the interlinked causes and effects of “natural variability” *can* be observed, explained and constrained better, and currently they *are* being observed better than they have been in the past.
So simply stating it was warmer in the past therefore warmer now is not unusual is an invalid claim, as the past period of warming could have had an easily identifiable explanation if only we’d been around to observe the causes properly.
3. So if your current observations show a trend that is exceeding previously observed “natural variability” then I do not believe it is justifiable simply to cite even more natural variability, or convergences of different sources of natural variability to explain the phenomenon without supporting evidence. This is even less justifiable if there are more plausible physical explanations (1) and if the current better observations (2b) do not support the attribution.
4. That doesn’t mean that the explanation, or part of the explanation is *not* unexplained natural variability. But “absence of evidence is not evidence” is often a more appropriate statement than “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” no matter how catchy the latter statement is.
Steve,
‘Thinking is centered around slow changes to our climate and how they will affect humans and the habitability of our planet. Yet this thinking is flawed: It ignores the well-established fact that Earth’s climate has changed rapidly in the past and could change rapidly in the future. WHOI
You don’t believe climate changes naturally? Even in the most recent times – the satellite evidence shows that there was 0.5 W/m^2 cooling in the IR and 2.1 W/m^2 in the shortwave.
‘In summary, although there is independent evidence for decadal changes in TOA radiative fluxes over the last two decades, the evidence is equivocal. Changes in the planetary and tropical TOA radiative fluxes are consistent with independent global ocean heat-storage data, and are expected to be dominated by changes in cloud radiative forcing. To the extent that they are real, they may simply reflect natural low-frequency variability of the climate system. ‘ AR4 s 3.4.4.1
Yet it is more correct to be a climate change catastrophist in the sense of René Thom. There is evidence for abrupt change everywhere.
‘Researchers first became intrigued by abrupt climate change when they discovered striking evidence of large, abrupt, and widespread changes preserved in paleoclimatic archives. Interpretation of such proxy records of climate—for example, using tree rings to judge occurrence of droughts or gas bubbles in ice cores to study the atmosphere at the time the bubbles were trapped—is a well-established science that has grown much in recent years. This chapter summarizes techniques for studying paleoclimate and highlights research results. The chapter concludes with examples of modern climate change and techniques for observing it. Modern climate records include abrupt changes that are smaller and briefer than in paleoclimate records but show that abrupt climate change is not restricted to the distant past.’ http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10136&page=R1
In principle it is because climate is a deterministically chaotic system.
‘The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible. Rather the focus must be upon the prediction of the probability distribution of the system’s future possible states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions. Addressing adequately the statistical nature of climate is computationally intensive and requires the application of new methods of model diagnosis, but such statistical information is essential.’ http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/501.htm
Let’s see if we can put abrupt climate change in a context that is less in the language of bifurcation theory and more as physical climate processes.
Chaos theory is not a theory of climate. It is a theory of complex and dynamic systems. It says that complex systems, such as climate models, exhibit certain behaviors. Chief amongst these is sensitive dependence, dragon-kings (equivalently noisy bifurcation) and slowing down. If this behavior is looked for and found in climate – as it has been quantitatively using network models with modern data for decadal climate shifts – then we can be sure that we are dealing with dynamical complexity.
Thus we can look in the right place for answers but it tells us nothing at all about the processes in play. At this stage there are a few ideas about identifying dragon-kings and slowing down but nothing that has moved much beyond the conceptual and descriptive.
Sensitive dependence happens when the value of control variables passes a critical threshold. The control variables are solar irradiation, orbital eccentricity or atmospheric composition. At some tipping point changes start propagating through the system with changes in cloud, snow, ice, biology, dust and ocean circulation. As this stage there are extreme fluctuations as the system components adjust and readjust to the rapidly changing state – this is when climate extremes happen such as the 1998 El Niño. It is followed by a period of damped oscillation as climate settles into the new state – called slowing down – until a new climate threshold is passed and climate shifts again.
We can use terms such as phase space or strange attractors but they are simply terms for climate shifting from one more or less stable state to another. The different states have different characteristics – different temperatures, different rainfall patterns, more or less ice, changes in ecosystems, etc – and different climate averages which are not predictable beforehand. The shift may be benign or it may be utterly inimical to human societies.
I am happy to contribute to your education Steve. Try reading more – and providing references to show that you are across the field and as a framework on which to build cogent arguments. Creating an overly simple narrative out of nothing at all can be very misleading. Or are you a science denier Steve.
:cool: :cool: :cool: :cool: :cool:
I see you picked up mannerisms from fan of more discourse. One of him is more than enough thank you very much.
It is so annoying – perhaps it is worth trying.
Why, by golly, they look like grinnin’ feline faculae to me.
=======================
CH
If you are still writing this:
You don’t believe climate changes naturally?
when I have written a pretty clear definition of what I consider to be “natural variability” which was clearly flagged as being a simplified explanation (not because you are simple, but because you appear to have a different definition of “natural variability” to me), then you are going to struggle to contribute to my building “a cogent argument”.
You need to remember that even in chaos theory, there is a physical cause for an underlying shift that can be detected (often only after, or during, the fact) and predicted (in a probabilistic sense). So if you can quantify the waffle that appears in the paragraph that begins as follows, I might be more willing to listen:
Sensitive dependence happens when the value of control variables passes a critical threshold…
You are a data and reference free zone Steve. The IPCC, NAS and WHOI not good enough for you? You respond with a shallow narrative and have the nerve to ask me to quantify? You are a typical cult of AGW groupthink space cadet.
Weather has been known to be chaotic since Edward Lorenz discovered the ‘butterfly effect’ in the 1960’s. Abrupt climate change on the other hand was thought to have happened only in the distant past and so climate was expected to evolve steadily over this century in response to ordered climate forcing.
More recent work is identifying abrupt climate changes working through the El Niño Southern Oscillation, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation, the Southern Annular Mode, the Artic Oscillation, the Indian Ocean Dipole and other measures of ocean and atmospheric states. These are measurements of sea surface temperature and atmospheric pressure over more than 100 years which show evidence for abrupt change to new climate conditions that persist for up to a few decades before shifting again. Global rainfall and flood records likewise show evidence for abrupt shifts and regimes that persist for decades. In Australia, less frequent flooding from early last century to the mid 1940’s, more frequent flooding to the late 1970’s and again a low rainfall regime to recent times.
Anastasios Tsonis, of the Atmospheric Sciences Group at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and colleagues used a mathematical network approach to analyse abrupt climate change on decadal timescales. Ocean and atmospheric indices – in this case the El Niño Southern Oscillation, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation and the North Pacific Oscillation – can be thought of as chaotic oscillators that capture the major modes of climate variability. Tsonis and colleagues calculated the ‘distance’ between the indices. It was found that they would synchronise at certain times and then shift into a new state.
It is no coincidence that shifts in ocean and atmospheric indices occur at the same time as changes in the trajectory of global surface temperature. Our ‘interest is to understand – first the natural variability of climate – and then take it from there. So we were very excited when we realized a lot of changes in the past century from warmer to cooler and then back to warmer were all natural,’ Tsonis said.
Four multi-decadal climate shifts were identified in the last century coinciding with changes in the surface temperature trajectory. Warming from 1909 to the mid 1940’s, cooling to the late 1970’s, warming to 1998 and declining since. The shifts are punctuated by extreme El Niño Southern Oscillation events. Fluctuations between La Niña and El Niño peak at these times and climate then settles into a damped oscillation. Until the next critical climate threshold – due perhaps in a decade or two if the recent past is any indication.
James Hurrell and colleagues in an article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society stated that the ‘global coupled atmosphere–ocean–land–cryosphere system exhibits a wide range of physical and dynamical phenomena with associated physical, biological, and chemical feedbacks that collectively result in a continuum of temporal and spatial variability. The traditional boundaries between weather and climate are, therefore, somewhat artificial.’ Somewhat artificial is somewhat of an understatement for a paradigm shift in climate science.
The weight of evidence is such that modellers are frantically revising their strategies. They are asking for an international climate computing centre and $5 billion (for 2000 times more computing power) to solve this new problem in climate forecasting. The monumental size of the task they have set themselves cannot be exaggerated.
James C. McWilliams of the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of California discussed chaos and climate in a 2007 paper titled ‘Irreducible imprecision in atmospheric and oceanic simulations’. ‘Sensitive dependence and structural instability are humbling twin properties for chaotic dynamical systems, indicating limits about which kinds of questions are theoretically answerable’. Sensitive dependence refers to qualitative shifts in climate and models that occur as a result of small changes in initial states. Structural instabilities are qualitative shifts in modelled outcomes as a result of plausible (within the limits of accuracy of measurements) changes in boundary parameters.
The bottom line of all this is that the current generation of climate forecasting models cannot be relied on as accurate representations of future climate. It will be quite some time before the new models are good enough to model ‘sensitive dependence’ in climate. I doubt their chances at all; weather models are accurate, because of chaos theory in operation, over about 7 days at best.
CH
You are attempting to paint me into an AGW space cadet corner, but in reality, I’m stood behind you looking bemused.
If you re-read Tsonis, you will see that Tsonis have searched for and found examples of similar behaviour in climate models which backs up what I’m trying to explain to you that these climate shifts are not caused by magic fairies. Just because we don’t fully understand them does not mean that they are not understandable.
So if we get back to my original comment that seemed to get your back up:
At what point does “ignorance” about the impact of some phenomenon become knowledge about its lack of impact?
Well Tsonis et all still says: “suggests an alternative hypothesis, namely that the climate shifted after the 1970s event to a different state of a warmer climate, which may be superimposed on an anthropogenic warming trend.” (my italics) which is not a lot to hang your hat on, really.
You’re ‘stood behind’ are you Steve. I will have to watch my back. But which bit of – at some tipping point changes start propagating through the system with changes in cloud, snow, ice, biology, dust and ocean circulation – don’t you understand. Because you keep talking about magic fairies. It ain’t fairies Steve.
’This paper provides an update to an earlier work that showed specific changes in the aggregate time evolution of major Northern Hemispheric atmospheric and oceanic modes of variability serve as a harbinger of climate shifts. Specifically, when the major modes of Northern Hemisphere climate variability are synchronized, or resonate, and the coupling between those modes simultaneously increases, the climate system appears to be
thrown into a new state, marked by a break in the global mean temperature trend and in the character of El Nino
Southern Oscillation variability. Here, a new and improved means to quantify the coupling between climate modes confirms that another synchronization of these modes, followed by an increase in coupling occurred in 2001/02. This suggests that a break in the global mean temperature trend from the consistent warming over the 1976/77–2001/02 period may have occurred.’ So ENSO is involved and ENSO is a major source of climate on interannual to millennial scales.
For interannual to decadal scales try – http://judithcurry.com/2011/02/09/decadal-variability-of-clouds/
For longer scales try Tsonis’ papers on ENSO bifurcation in the Holocene ad on the demise of the Minoan civilisation.
But these indices are ‘nodes’ in a global ‘network’. The patterns propagate through the climate system in a ‘stadium wave’ across the planet.
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2011/04/21/guest-post-atlantic-multidecadal-oscillation-and-northern-hemisphere%E2%80%99s-climate-variability-by-marcia-glaze-wyatt-sergey-kravtsov-and-anastasios-a-tsonis/
You must have rocks in your head if you think that a single may in a single paper – called by the way “A new dynamical mechanism for major climate shifts means anything profound at all. It is just nit picking Steve. The real question is how long these major climate shifts can be misunderstood by AGW groupthink space cadets. Why don’t you that you are not only behind me but behind the curve.
CH
But which bit of – at some tipping point changes start propagating through the system with changes in cloud, snow, ice, biology, dust and ocean circulation – don’t you understand.
Presumably you are aware that most AGW space cadets just *love* the concept of tipping points. “Natural” tipping points though are as likely to push temperatures down as well as up. So the bit I don’t understand is why you would think the hypothesis is the best explanation of all the recent observed changes in climate when the above sentence is so non-specific.
‘In experimental philosophy, propositions gathered from phenomena by induction should be considered either exactly or very nearly true notwithstanding any contrary hypotheses, until yet other phenomena make such propositions either more exact or liable to exceptions.
This rule should be followed so that arguments based on induction be not be nullified by hypotheses.’ Isaac Newton
You haven’t read much of the many links and references provide – have you?
So you’re saying that chaotic bifurcation can go in both directions – so why did it cause warming? Observation Steve – inter alia.
Most recent warming happened in ENSO dragon-kings in 1976/77 and 1998. Swanson presumes that there is an anthropogenic influence seen between 1979 and 1997 of about 0.1 degrees C/decade. The ISCCP-FD record shows a net warming of 1.9 W/m^2 – 2.4 W/m^2 in the short wave and minus 0.5 W/m^2 in infrared between the 1980’s and 1990’s. It is confirmed by ERBS in the tropics.
‘In summary, although there is independent evidence for decadal changes in TOA radiative fluxes over the last two decades, the evidence is equivocal. Changes in the planetary and tropical TOA radiative fluxes are consistent with independent global ocean heat-storage data, and are expected to be dominated by changes in cloud radiative forcing. To the extent that they are real, they may simply reflect natural low-frequency variability of the climate system. ‘ IPCC s 3.4.4.1
‘The overall slight rise (relative heating) of global total net flux at TOA between the 1980’s and 1990’s is confirmed in the tropics by the ERBS measurements and exceeds the estimated climate forcing changes (greenhouse gases and aerosols) for this period. The most obvious explanation is the associated changes in cloudiness during this period.’ http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch3s3-4-4-1.html
Those ol’ cheshire sunspots keep on comin’ an’ goin’ …
::grin::
H/t Kim
http://notrickszone.com/2010/10/04/4593/
Judith,
It is certainly linguistically and logically true that “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. ”
I guess you could apply this to all sorts of arguments. Having trouble believing in God? The priest just has to say ” Absence of evidence …….”
Sceptical that 9-11 was a CIA/Jewish conspiracy ? Again the counter to that is “Absence of evidence….”
You must realise it’s not a serious argument.
tempterrain
Your “absence of evidence” argument above is flawed.
As far as “God” is concerned, the “priest” doesn’t use that argument.
He uses an argument for defending his dogma, which is rather similar to the argument used by you in defending the CAGW premise: “it’s in the Book”. (His “Book” is the Bible. Yours are the IPCC reports.)
As to your 9-11 example, get serious, man…
Absurd analogies make you look silly, TT.
Now to our topic:
Every schoolchild knows that essentially ALL the energy that drives our planet comes from the sun.
Every schoolchild also knows that it cools off when clouds come between the sun and the surface of the Earth.
So it is common knowledge that the sun, in combination with clouds, controls the heating of our planet.
We know that cloud cover changes over time. We do not know all the reasons why this is so.
So we do not know all the natural reasons the incoming energy to our planet changes.
We have no “evidence” of a “mechanism” that these changes in cloud cover are, themselves, caused by changes in solar activity.
But, as our hostess has put it, “absence of evidence does not equal evidence of absence”. IOW we cannot rule out that changes in solar activity in some way cause changes in cloud cover.
The Svensmark hypothesis of GCR cloud nucleation provides a “mechanism:” for explaining the observed solar/climate correlation.
It is being tested now at CERN in Geneva, with early results showing promise.
Let’s wait and see what comes of this work – it may provide the scientific “evidence”, which is “absent” today.
Max
You sure like to use a lot of words. You used more than 100 words to say:
” I know it’s something I don’t know about”
But how do you know its something you don’t know about?
Max,
You seem to have no problem “knowing something” about things you know nothing about.
timg56, I know a lot of stuff, but I don’t go around peacocking my smarts like a stuffed-shirt baboon.
BTW, did you try blowing on your apples as I suggested? Apples like a little CO2.
Max_OK
You brag that I know a lot of stuff, but I don’t go around peacocking my smarts like a stuffed-shirt baboon.
Hey, man, I get just the opposite impression from your posts here.
Not much “smarts”, lots of “baboon” behavior.
Clean up your act, buddy.
Or folks will think you’re just a troll.
Max_not from OK
Max,
Every schoolchild also knows that it cools off when clouds come between the sun and the surface of the Earth.
Do they? It’s not considered good scientific writing to use phrases like “every schoolchild knows”, “it is common knowledge”, ‘it is generally known that’ etc. There’s no real substitute for referencing your assertions.
You might want to find an intelligent schoolchild and ask them what happens at night when there is cloud cover and when there isn’t. The schoolchild may well say that cloudy nights are warmer. Some climate skeptics may also say that, as the clouds are are colder than the surface, that can’t happen as it would violate the laws of thermodynamics.
It’s been a long time since I took geometry, but I am pretty sure clouds at night are not “between the sun and the surface of the Earth.”
GaryM,
I don’t think I actually said they were.
But that’s not what matters in assessing the role that clouds play in affecting the climate. They cool the surface by day and keep it warm by night. I’m not qualified to say if one is greater than the other. Maybe we could have some expert opinion on this point?
‘The overall reflectance (albedo) of planet Earth is about 30 percent, meaning that about 30 percent of the incoming shortwave solar radiation is radiated back to space. If all clouds were removed, the global albedo would decrease to about 15 percent, and the amount of shortwave energy available for warming the planet surface would increase from 239 W/m2 to 288 W/m2 (Hartmann 1994). However, the longwave radiation would also be affected, with 266 W/m2 being emitted to space, compared to the present 234 W/m2 (Hartmann 1994). The net effect of removing all clouds would therefore still be an increase in net radiation of about 17 W/m2. So the global cloud cover has a clear overall cooling effect on the planet, even though the net effect of high and low clouds are opposite (see figure above). This is not a pure theoretical consideration, but is demonstrated by observations (see diagram below).’http://www.climate4you.com/
Chief,
Thank you for putting your hand up to give us your “expert opinion”.
Nasa do say ” The overall effect of all clouds together is that the Earth’s surface is cooler than it would be if the atmosphere had no clouds.”
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Clouds/
but I can’t find any comment about whether a warmer climate will produce more clouds (which would be a negative feedback) or fewer clouds (which would be a positive feedback). Does a cooler European climate have fewer clouds than a warmer African one for instance?
I notice you aren’t waffling on about chaos theory for once. Doesn’t that apply to cloud formation?
You were asking if clouds were net cooling or warming – I simply copied the statement from Ole Humlums site for your edification I am sure you are welcome. I have just replid to yuor idiotic comments on chaos elsewhere. Please feel free to puruse them or not at your pleasure.
tempterrain
If you are unaware that clouds reflect incoming sunlight during the day and thereby cause cooling too bad for you.
Likewise, if you are unaware that there is less cooling at night when it’s cloudy than when the sky is clear too bad for you.
Max
solar activity is seen to have been relatively stable over the past 50 years. That means, that even if amplified strongly, the sun’s variations could still not explain the strong global warming that started halfway the 1970’s. Measurements of cosmic rays, a favourite candidate for a solar amplification mechanism, also show no trend since at least 50 years.
See eg http://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2010/04/11/recent-changes-in-the-sun-co2-and-global-average-temperature-little-ice-age-onwards/ and our replies to Vahrenholt (https://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2012/06/11/response-to-fritz-vahrenholt-and-sebastian-luning/ and preceding post)
Thank you Bart. Do please keep the common sense coming :-)
There is great need for it here.
Seconded.
“solar activity is seen to have been relatively stable over the past 50 years.
That means, that even if amplified strongly, the sun’s variations could still not explain the strong global warming that started halfway the 1970’s”
That is clearly wrong because stability at a high level above a point of equilibrium will lead to a continuing rise in temperature.
It is notable that the temperature rise that began in the mid 70s coincided with the fading of the effects of the relatively low cycle 20 which had held back the warming process for a while.
.
I agree. SC20 was weak (long), SC21 and SC22 were very strong (short, caused warming), SC23 weak again (long, warming stopped). SC24 seems to be very weak.
Perhaps 25 years anyway – http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/data/tsi_data.htm#plots
Well they don’t have the luxury of a deus ex machina aerosol intervention like the AGW hypothesis. Take that handwave away and AGW fails just as badly.
But Mosher says a mere 1W/m2 extra will eventually melt Greenland.
So if the sun has been putting out an extra watt for 50 years that’s long enough to melt a some Arctic sea ice isn’t it?
BBD and Bart Verheggen
Here’s some more “common sense”.
Stockwell (2011)
http://vixra.org/pdf/1108.0020v1.pdf
And
Shapiro et al. (2011)
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1102/1102.4763v1.pdf
And
Scafetta (2010), Empirical evidence for a celestial origin of the climate oscillations and its implications
http://www.fel.duke.edu/~scafetta/pdf/scafetta-JSTP2.pdf
Scafetta and West (2006))
http://www.scribd.com/doc/334163/Phenomenological-solar-contribution-to-the-19002000-global-surface-warming
And
Georgieva et al.
http://sait.oat.ts.astro.it/MSAIt760405/PDF/2005MmSAI..76..969G.pdf
Geerts and Linacre (1997)
http://www-das.uwyo.edu/~geerts/cwx/notes/chap02/sunspots.html
Lean et al. (1995)
http://www.geo.umass.edu/faculty/bradley/lean1995.pdf
Max
Once you strip away the ones that are not peer reviewed and the ones that are ancient/superceded and the nonsense ones, which one exactly is supposed to challenge Bart Verheggen’s point?
Actually keep them all in. Which ones challenge his point that “the sun’s variations could still not explain the strong global warming that started halfway the 1970’s”?
Note that Scafetta and West only manage to attribute 25-35% of the 1980-2000 global warming, and you can bet they tried real hard!
You can lead a horticulture but you cannot make him view the sunflowers.
=================
Oh you mean that strong global warming that was preceded by an inexplicable strong cooling period and succeeded by a long period of no warming.
That cooling phase had many scientists speculating about a new ice age at the time and the current no-warming phase was not even supposed to happen according to the model-based dogma that mankind was now dominating the planets climate. The post-facto explanations for the non-warming due to firstly the sun, natural variability, some nebulous weather “noise” and now that ubiquitous tuning knob – aerosols.- is just pathetic. Anything to avoid media-hungry climateers admitting that they know less about how nature works than they pretend.
Pretty much all that climate scientists are sure of is that fossil fuels cause both warming and cooling and the huge uncertainty bounds allow them to negate each other whenever convenient to explain something that was not predicted by anyone.
Actually james it’s a myth that the warming has stopped. It hasn’t.
As I have pointed out on ClimateEtc many times, the addition of data after 2000 has INCREASED the rate of warming in the satellite temperature record, not reduced it.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/plot/uah/to:2000/trend/plot/uah/trend
Lolwot
It may be a myth to you but every consensus climate scientist on the planet now tries to explain this myth away, including the most ‘out there’ scientist Hansen. There is a scientist in Hadley whose sole task is to account for this mythical pause in warming. Your denial of accepted fact is not accepted, that is why it is ignored. And furthermore, by no means could any current temperature dataset rise since 1998 be called ‘strong warming’ as you assert. Statistically insignificant warming is more accurate.
Incidentally, the Arctic temperature collection and the USA48 collection give an almost perfect match both to each other and to the solar reconstructions up to the present day. Check that out for yourself.. What is special about them? Well these two areas have the best data coverage. Most of the global temperature data is from sparse regions uncorrected for the UHI effect. That is, if you use just the quality temperature data and eschew the sparse, under-corrected, over-extrapolated data from the rest of the world (and particularly let’s ignore the arrant nonsense of the ocean dataset which causes most of the uptick) then the solar signal is ‘unequivocal’.
There is no substative evidence of AGW either. Indeed the “missing heat” remains missing (despite some peoples peurile attempts to just pull theory and data out of their backsides to prove otherwise) and the stratosphere has still not cooled since 1995 – the supposed one true fingerprint of AGW.
The entire AGW edifice rests on the facile notion that if we assume the sun cannot change our climate therefore it must be man. The assumption leads to the conclusion. But since it has been accepted that the solar feedbacks cause the start and end of ice ages the “we can’t think of anything else” consensus is obviously no more than dogma. It’s high time for the old consensus of “we don’t know but the sun correlates better than anything else” to return.
Either no effect or minimal if there is any.
Steven said http://woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/mean:12/trend/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1880/mean:12/normalise/scale:5/trend
indeed
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/wti/from:2001/trend/plot/esrl-co2/from:2001/normalise/trend
My graph was just intended to show what changing the scale can do. It has no meaning just as graphs that show poor correlation without a mechanism argument have no meaning.
This type of statement, which is endemic to the IPCC brings to mind a statement by Kerry Emanuel: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
But it’s still absence of evidence, so the onus is on those who are proposing that recent warming is due to solar activity to actually provide such evidence.
I think there is much that we don’t know about the sun’s variations and their impact on climate, and I don’t see the IPCC taking a serious look at this issue, other than to say ‘absence of evidence’.
They do look at the issue. There is a whole section on the subject of solar variability in the WGI report.
I agree that the IPCC’s statement is unsatisfactory though – it’s far too woolly and allows for this kind of nit picking. It should actually say “the current evidence suggests that solar variation was not the cause of climate change over the last 50 years”.
+ 1
Let’s hope AR5 is rather more explicit on this topic.
‘During the descent into the recent ‘exceptionally’ low solar minimum, observations have revealed a larger change in solar UV emissions than seen at the same phase of previous solar cycles. This is particularly true at wavelengths responsible for stratospheric ozone production and heating. This implies that ‘top-down’ solar modulation could be a larger factor in long-term tropospheric change than previously believed, many climate models allowing only for the ‘bottom-up’ effect of the less-variable visible and infrared solar emissions. We present evidence for long-term drift in solar UV irradiance, which is not found in its commonly used proxies. In addition, we find that both stratospheric and tropospheric winds and temperatures show stronger regional variations with those solar indices that do show long-term trends. A top-down climate effect that shows long-term drift (and may also be out of phase with the bottom-up solar forcing) would change the spatial response patterns and would mean that climate-chemistry models that have sufficient resolution in the stratosphere would become very important for making accurate regional/seasonal climate predictions. Our results also provide a potential explanation of persistent palaeoclimate results showing solar influence on regional or local climate indicators.’ http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/5/3/034008/
The top down mechanism is fairly obvious involving UV/ozone interactions in the stratophere. Especially in the polar vortices. This feeds into both the Arctic and Antarctic annular modes that are drivers of global climate variability – the AMO, PDO and ENSO especially.
Chief
Thanks for post.
I had read some references to studies demonstrating this “top down” mechanism, but would be interested in reading more if you have some links.
Thanks.
Max
I hesitate to write this, as there are people like Leif Svalgaard and vukcevic who read Climate Etc., and who have forgotten more about the magnetic effects of the sun than I know. So to those more knowledgeable than I am, my apologies. But I think the final conclusion I come to as to the relationship between climate and the magnetic effects of the sun is valid. With this in mind, here goes.
The history of how we found about the sun’s magntitc effects is well documented in Stuart Clarke’s book “The Sun Kings”, and the discovery of the 11 and 22 year solar cycles. SC 1 was in the early part of the 18th century, and we are currently in SC 24. Since WWII our ability to observe and measure what is happening with the sun has increased enormously. A pattern of how the sun behaves emerged, models were built and predictions made as to what would happen in SC 24; prediction after prediction turned out to be spectacularly wrong. Sc 24 is behaving, magnetically, in a way that we have not seen before. This is not to say that over 10’s of millions of years, the sun is behaving in a unique manner; it almost certainly is not; we simply have not observed this behaviour in any of the numbered sunspot cycles.
There is every reason to believe that the sun is about to enter phase of low magnetic effects. L&P have forecast a value for Rz of 7 for SC 25. If this occurs, such a value has never been observed in any numbered sunspot cycle. Magnetically, for the indefinite future, the sun is going to be behaving in a way we will have difficulty predicting.
Now it is absolutely true that no-one has established a mechanism whereby the sun’s magnetic effects change climate. Svensmark’s theories are far from being shown to be true. I claim that there are correlations between the sun’s magnetic effects and climate, but if these correlations are examined closely, they are by no means certain. No, there is every reason to claim that we cannot establish any good scientifc link between climate and the sun’s magnetic effects.
However, the correlations are there. I would just like to suggest that any proponents of CAGW who claim we need not consider the unknowns of what is going to happen to the sun magnetically, is putting her/his head in the sand. It is simply scientifically irresponsible to conclude that, because we do not understand the link betwen the sun’s magnetism and climate, therefore we can safely ignore it
No one brought up the faint young sun paradox yet? Tsk, tsk…
If TSI steadily rising by 30% to date over geologic time and earth in a frakkin’ ice age today to show for the increase this would seem to argue for a lot less solar influence and a lot more local thermostatic influence than most peope care to admit.
The Faint Young Sun is a paradox because they are wrong. An object cannot emit energy any faster than energy can be transferred to the radiant surface. So emissivity is variable, damn the bad luck. The rate of energy transfer in the oceans are the first order effect, water vapor a second order effect and GHG third. They have the tail wagging the dog.
Wrong about what, exactly.
Is it wrong that the sun has grown steadily brighter by about 30% over its history on the main sequence?
Or is it wrong that pressure and temperature on the earth’s surface has remained mostly in a range that allows a liquid ocean on the surface?
Or both? What?
Wrong that liquid water could not exist with a 30% less energetic sun. The lower solar insulation would still provided for warm equatorial oceans but with reduce transport of energy to the poles. There is very little change in the tropical ocean temperatures.
1.5 million years of tropical Eastern Pacific,
https://picasaweb.google.com/118214947668992946731/DrakePassage#5791467038736430818
The world is cooler now because the Drake Passage improved the ocean heat transfer and thermally isolated Antarctica. Sagen was blowing smoke out his butt.
BTW, here is an interesting snapshot of the exit from the last glacial maximum. The Blue curve is Greenland ice accumulation.
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-hJKvoDXFlYI/UGW8uc1_jFI/AAAAAAAAD-I/ifb0mKFWeq4/s800/southern%2520oceans%2520versus%2520greenland%2520accumulation.png
It appears that when the poles ice over or Circumpolar Current flow is reduced, the oceans warm. No solar peak cycle required to exit an ice age.
Straw man. No one claimed liquid water could not exist with 30% less sunlight. It’s taken as a fact that it can by dating strata that contains minerals which only form in the presence of water. The mechanism by which it remains is unknown. Not knowing is not the same as being wrong.
captdallas2 0.8 +0.2 or -0.4 | September 28, 2012 at 11:11 am |
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-hJKvoDXFlYI/UGW8uc1_jFI/AAAAAAAAD-I/ifb0mKFWeq4/s800/southern%2520oceans%2520versus%2520greenland%2520accumulation.png
It appears that when the poles ice over or Circumpolar Current flow is reduced, the oceans warm. No solar peak cycle required to exit an ice age.
—————————————————————————————-
Well yeah. That’s what I’ve been saying. Arctic sea ice is analogous to the thermostat in an automotive water cooling system. Ice is a very good insulator which is fortunate for Eskimos in igloos and sled dogs that bury themselves in the snow while sleeping to keep warm. Block the cooling path to space with ice and the water beneath it that arrives from the tropics along the oceanic conveyor belt can’t get rid of heat as fast. It’s not exactly rocket science. More like auto mechanics.
David, “Straw man. No one claimed liquid water could not exist with 30% less sunlight. It’s taken as a fact that it can by dating strata that contains minerals which only form in the presence of water. The mechanism by which it remains is unknown. Not knowing is not the same as being wrong.”
The ice cap thermostat is the mechanism. Plus during the Faint Sun period the Antarctic Circumpolar did not exist. Less solar would be required to maintain liquid water because there would have been less heat loss. A surface cannot radiate energy faster than energy can be transferred to the radiant surface. So there is no missing mechanism, just misapplied radiant physics.
Correlation compelling:
http://science.nasa.gov/media/medialibrary/2003/01/15/17jan_solcon_resources/eddy_strip.gif
This graph ends in 1900. If we extend it out the “Grand Maximum” on the extreme left circa 1100 is equaled in amplitude by the “Modern Maximum” beginning in about 1950:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sunspot_Numbers.png
Which of course makes the causal narrative even compelling.
But like all other climate hypotheses it IS still a narrative. One of the better narratives IMO. The causal mechanism is yet to be determined but Svensmark and the usual suspects at CERN are doing yeoman’s work. Not surprisingly it has little to do with TSI and everything to do with albedo. The high albedo of ice and low albedo of water are the great attractors in the climate system. They both exhibit positive feedback but the feedbacks aren’t infinite so there’s a floor and ceiling respectively. If we look at the temperature record from the Vostic cores we easily observe both floor and ceiling. The beginning of interglacials is especially interesting as it happens very quickly. Temperature shoots up like a rocket then hits a ceiling made of cast iron and slowly declines from there with some minor ringing on the way down. It is the contention of many and a very highly cited (>500 citations) paper in Nature Ramanathan and Collins [1991] that the ceiling is due to negative feedback from clouds. I consider deniers to be those who deny R&C 1991 and believe instead in the fiction of water vapor amplification.
Reblogged this on Sparks ~Engineering and Science..
Leif Svalgaard offers an interesting perspective on the debate: (No?) Century-scale Secular Variation in HMF, EUV, or TSI. Full pdf here.
From the abstract, emphasis added:
This sits very comfortably with the more cautious statement from the preface to the NCS Workshop, which simply states:
Input from solar experts to this thread would be hugely welcome :-)
That should of course be ‘NRC Workshop’.
Well, it’s two non-reviewed positions, so who are we to say?
Does anyone know how Svalgaard’s presentation went down at the Fall 2007 AGU? Was there some nodding of learned heads, or were plastic cups and limp sandwiches hurled at the podium?
AFIK vukcevic hasn’t present his argument to the AGU, but I may be wrong. If so, how well received was that presentation?
What the heck is the AFIK ?
A rather obvious typo :-)
Should be AFAIK – as should be obvious to the meanest intellect ;-)
You have just won an evasive nit-picking award! Congratulations!
But even the ‘old Svalgaard’ had a bit of unpleasant surprise when I put this on line:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/TMC.htm
You should do well to keep up with developments.
BBD | September 28, 2012 at 7:44 am |
“You do a lot of talking. Let’s have some references to back up the noise.”
Are you asking for references that ARGO dives no deeper than 2000 meters or that the average ocean depth is 4000 meters or that ARGO doesn’t operate below sea ice?
Which of these goes beyond your working knowledge such that you’d doubt it? All three perhaps?
Seriously, BVD…
Did you not know that the cold side of the oceanic conveyor belt travels along the ocean bottom, mostly out of reach of ARGO?
And yes the ocean below 2000 meters could be cooling as much as above 2000 meters is warming because that’s just how the conveyor belt rolls (literally in this case).
Are ya gonna want a reference for the conveyor belt? Great. I’ll give it to you in pictures since words seem to be giving you some trouble. Enjoy. And more importantly, learn something and integrate it into your thinking.
NASA: The Thermohaline Circulation (The Great Ocean Conveyor Belt)
Or maybe this is more BVD’s speed. Yes, I think it probably is…
Why are you responding down here instead of on the relevant sub-thread? Why are you ignoring the reference to Purkey & Johnson (2010).
Are you playing silly blog games by any chance?
The thread was already at the maximum nesting level where this reply would have gone so I decided to restart it at the top level. I also thought it important that folks who aren’t in denial like you are learn that the oceanic conveyor belt which overturns the ocean every 500 years or so has a cold side which travels along the ocean bottom well out of the reach of the ARGO network so they would then know that claims of knowing ocean heat content are bogus. Given that ARGO bouys miss about 10% of even the ocean surface because it’s frozen with ice and misses fully half of the deep ocean where the bottom of the converyor belt flows that less than 50% of the ocean’s volume has it’s temperature taken.
Cry about it.
DS
I do understand the vertical thermal structure of the THC. I also understand that since bottom waters are very cold, the most useful information about changes in OHC comes from the top 2000m, as measured by ARGO. This is why I know you are obfuscating.
First of all it is not actually a conveyor belt – far more turbulent than that. ARGO float go to 3000m – when they can. Vertical heat transport in the oceans is a delicate balance of eddy diffusion and convective upwelling. Gee whiz – warm water floats. So most of the heat in liquid oceans is in the top 100m odd metres – and 2000m will hold most of it. They used to think until Karen von Schuckmann that 700m was good enough. Obviously not. But if you think ARGO is BS – then the earlier records are absurd.
There are other measures of ocean warmth – being sea levels. This integrates full depth.
Oc ourse if you look at CERES – it is quite obvious there should be extra energy in the system – http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view¤t=CERES-BAMS-2008-with-trend-lines1.gif
This one is for David – the brain is his second favourite organ as I think we have gathered from the link he keeps posting.
BBD | September 28, 2012 at 1:27 pm | Reply
“Why are you ignoring the reference to Purkey & Johnson (2010).”
Sorry. No problem. P&J 2010 measures a single southern ocean basin. Ocean overturning by the conveyor belt takes about 500 years. Therefore in any one basin you might be getting a glimpse into the past of up to 500 years. To get an accurate measure of total ocean heat content you really have to survey the whole enchilada. Saying the bottom is warming by just one small basin survey is like saying the whole world is in exceptional drought conditions because you surveyed Texas and found an exceptional drought.
Very frustrating for you I’m sure.
Rubbish.
That would be the Southern Atlantic, Southern Pacific and Southern Ocean.
BBD
Have you actually read the pandk paper? The amount of references/data is extremely small which is not surprising for such a little known part of the ocean. It is also such a short time scale as to be meaningless.
I had this discussion with IPCC as an expert reviewer on the draft of AR5 when I asked them to supply me with the papers that supported the notion of abyssal warming. (which they said was a fact but without quoting any references)
The amount of credible papers on the subject is extremely limited,which is not to say whether it is warming or not down there, but more to say we just dont know as yet, and won’t until we have far better data collected over a much longer period and a much wider area.
tonyb.
Hansen’s aerosols and Purkey’s abyssal heat are bandaids applied to a pumping carotid artery.
================
hello tony
We sort of crossed. Yes, P&J is a tantalising glimpse. But as I just pointed out to DS above, the top 2000m is by far the most important section to consider when looking at OHC change given that abyssal waters are very cold.
kim
Not at all. We don’t need P&J (see comments above). And I linked OHC to 2000m for you some way upthread, along with a couple of other indices. Here it is again.
Now, what do we see, kim?
We see, even post Argo, great controversy over OHC.
========
Irrespective of the ‘controversy’, we see global OHC down to 2000m increasing. Climate scientists including Hansen point out that this is evidence of a planetary energy imbalance: energy is accumulating in the climate system. That is what we see.
Meh, increasing, decreasing since Argo? Flip a coin.
=================
What do you think was the point of Purkey’s bandaiding if there were enough heat accumulation in the Argo data to satisfy the Poobahs and sustain the narrative?
==================
Perhaps kim is in denial?
So they what, lied about the abyssal ocean?
Heh, I know Argo doesn’t show enough heat accumulation and that they hoped, rather than knew, about the abyss.
===========================
JCH, this is a case where ‘the whole truth’ can’t be told because it is not known. You may put whatever spin makes you happy on it. Get dizzy if you like.
=====================
Dalton Minimum (low solar activity).
No human CO2.
Cold.
Maunder minimum (again, low solar activity).
No human CO2
Again, cold.
20th century (highest solar activity in several thousand years).
Human CO2 increases
Warming up (in two 30-year cycles).
21st century (inactive solar cycle 24, so far).
Highest CO2 levels.
Starting to cool again?
Well, it might be starting to cool again if global temperature hadn’t got into the bad habit of ignoring solar cycles. The temperature is like a troublesome teenage girl who does the opposite of what you tell her, just to spite you.
kinda of like fan.
Judith Curry wrote:
“I think there is much that we don’t know about the sun’s variations and their impact on climate, and I don’t see the IPCC taking a serious look at this issue, other than to say ‘absence of evidence’.”
I don’t see what you are driving at here. The IPCC doesn’t fund research, it reports on research, and tries to draw conclusions, and report what it knows and doesn’t know, in order to inform laymen and world’s leaders about the state of the climate. In that respect, the IPCC did take a serious look at it, and provide an assessment.
“the IPCC did take a serious look at it”
What in your mind qualifies the look as “serious”?
There is ample data to show that the sun is not responsible for the recent global warming. The Skeptical Science blog quotes 13 different authors who say the current global warming over the last 40-50 years is not due to the sun. The IPCC estimates of solar forcing are described in this section of the 2007 report:
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch2s2-7.html
In addition, we know that climate change is dominated by warming at nighttime, and the effect of a warmer sun would warm the days more than the nights.
BBD | September 28, 2012 at 2:09 pm |
“We sort of crossed. Yes, P&J is a tantalising glimpse. But as I just pointed out to DS above, the top 2000m is by far the most important section to consider when looking at OHC change given that abyssal waters are very cold.”
No, the entire volume must be surveyed to obtain total OHC otherwise it rests on speculation that the lower half, which is host to as much of the conveyor belt as the top half is MIA. And as I told you ARGO misses a very important transition zone where major shrinkage and sinkage takes place – under polar sea ice which is 10% of the ocean and given how much attention you boys are showering on the Arctic sea ice you’d think it’s the most important part of the whole damn planet. The Antarctic is really missing your love as it sets a new high sea ice extent. But you sure gave it all sorts of attention when the ozone hole was acting up. LOL Confirmation bias much?
Yes, it needs to be said, it is a TRAVESTY we can’t measure the temperature of the damn oceans.
Here we pause to spare a thought for the author of one of the most misunderstood stolen emails in history. All the poor man wanted was *exactly* what ‘sceptics’ are always demanding: more and better measurements.
Talk about a travesty.
The missing heat was found. Unresponsive and possibly dead. In a sphere surrounding the earth with a diameter of 50 light years. It left a rather cryptic note, almost like a suicide note, with a sob story about how tragic it is that clouds are so misunderstood.
Kevin even admits the possibility in a famous 2008 NPR interview. On that day, I was proud of Kevin Trenberth’s integrity. But where have all the flowers gone?
===============
Integrity was gone in front of the research grants/funds.
But you correctly observed that the deep layer of the THC is very cold. You have now contradicted your own argument.
Warm water flux to the Arctic is indeed responsible for the rapidly accelerating ice melt. Warm upwelling water is also responsible for the ongoing thinning and diminution of the ice shelves along the WAIS.
The abyss is about 3C. Only the upper 10% of the ocean is appreciably warmer than that and the ocean average temperature is about 4C. Probably not coincidently the radiant emission of a 4C black body is ~344W/m2 and the average insolation at the top of the atmosphere is 342W/m2.
Since you’re so concerned about the low temperature of the ocean how do you suppose it got so low and might we have some concern that our warm climate is beholden to a thin layer of warm water floating atop a bucket of ice water? If the rate of overturning were to vary much from the ostensible 500 years to say 400 years the upper ocean temperature could drop like a stone while the other 90% only changes in temperature by 10% of mixed layer temperature change because of huge difference in volume.
So what’s your point about the temperature of the abyss again – you seem to be making noises that because it’s cold it isn’t important. How does that importance-evaluation logic work, exactly?
WAIS melting from volcanoes?
Strong coherence between solar variability and the monsoon in Oman between 9 and 6 kyr ago
Neff et al, 2001
Variations in the amount of solar radiation reaching the Earth are thought to influence climate, but the extent of this influence on timescales of millennia to decades is unclear. A number of climate records show correlations between solar cycles and climate, but the absolute changes in solar intensity over the range of decades to
millennia are small and the influence of solar flux on climate is not well established. The formation of stalagmites in northern Oman has recorded past northward shifts of the intertropical convergence zone, whose northward migration stops near the southern shoreline of Arabia in the present climate. Here we present a high-resolution record of oxygen isotope variations, for the period from 9.6 to 6.1 kyr before present, in a Th-U-dated stalagmite from Oman. The O18 record from the stalagmite, which serves as a proxy for variations in the tropical circulation and monsoon rainfall, allows us to make a direct comparison of the O18 record with the C14 record from tree rings, which largely reflects changes in solar activity. The excellent correlation between the two records suggests that one of the primary controls on centennial- to decadal-scale changes in tropical rainfall and monsoon intensity during this time are variations in solar radiation.
ftp://met.dgf.uchile.cl/pub/rgarreau/GF600_2011/NeffBurnsetal01-OmanCaved10OvsC146-9Kyr.pdf
How Oxygen-18 is used as a proxy for temperature
Much as the isotope content of a layer of sea-floor sediment does, the ratio of the heavy 0-18 isotope to the lighter 0-16 in a layer of ice indicates the temperature at the time it was formed, but with a very important difference. A large proportion of 0-18 in sea sediment indicates a colder climate, but just the opposite is true in ice. Since more heat energy is required to vaporize water molecules containing the heavier isotope, a higher proportion of 0-18 in an ice layer means that the air temperature was relatively high when that water evaporated from the ocean and later fell as snow.
Thus, snow that falls in summer has a higher 0-18 content than winter snow. On a much longer time scale, the snows of an interglacial are richer in this isotope than snows deposited during glaciation.
Ice cores have one very significant advantage for scientists trying to establish and refine the chronology of climatic shifts. The top inch or so of sea-floor sediment is frequently stirred by bottom-dwelling creatures; consequently, the layers cannot be dated with precision. But ice layers are not likely to have ever been disturbed by living creatures. Because the concentration of the 0-18 isotope generally peaks in summer, declines in winter, then peaks again, the ice between two peaks represents a single year’s snowfall. Painstaking measurements of 0-18 levels-in areas where the temperatures are so low all year that the ice layers have not been muddled by melting-have identified the ice formed each year as far back as 1000 B.C.
Ice Ages
Time-Life Books
1983
page 153
BBD | September 28, 2012 at 2:26 pm |
“Irrespective of the ‘controversy’, we see global OHC down to 2000m increasing. Climate scientists including Hansen point out that this is evidence of a planetary energy imbalance: energy is accumulating in the climate system. That is what we see.”
I don’t have a particular problem with that so long as you qualify it with saying you can “see” is less than half the whole picture and you’re totally missing what the cold side in the abyssal half of the conveyor belt is doing and pretty much the whole picture of what’s happening at the poles where warm water from the tropics cools, sinks, and becomes the abyssal flow. That’s pretty frakkin’ important bits to not see.
Less Arctic sea ice means more tropical heat is being dumped to space. So while ARGO sees more tropical heat in the top half of the ocean it cannot measure how much is lost at the poles because ARGO buoys don’t operate under ice. Moreover the cold water from the poles travels along the ocean bottom out of reach of ARGO because it only descends to half the average depth of the ocean. It takes 500 years for the ocean to overturn, we have an idea of what the warmest 40% is doing for the past decade, a mere 5% of an overturning. OHC claims don’t have enough reliability to put a sign on them much less a magnitude.
Heat accumulation per Argo isn’t enough to validate Trenberth’s cartoon(a travesty) & they know from nuttin’ about the abyss. BBD bluffs, as does mainstream climate science on this issue.
Josh Willis’s sensors are not seeing deep transport and their coverage is adequate to see it were it happening. That’s why BBD has to bluff.
=======================
Josh Willis’s sensors are not seeing deep transport and their coverage is adequate to see it were it happening. … – kim
You say that as though it is a conclusion. Is it a conclusion, or are you bluffing?
Josh told me so himself. Well, he told Pielke Pere, while Kevin squirmed in denial.
=====================
Hi Roger,
The way I would answer this is that we can probably diagnose the amount of warming between 700 and 2000 m in the Argo data for the past 5 to 7 years. Using the data to determine the cause of this, however, can be tricky. For example, if an isotherm at 1000 m is depressed in one region by 10 meters, is this caused by a simple downward advection of the isopycnal, or is it due to vertical or horizontal mixing with a nearby warm water mass?
Questions like this can be difficult to answer with the Argo data. Nevertheless, with some basic knowledge of the local oceanographic conditions and use of additional data, like salinity and horizontal advection, it might be possible to tease apart the causes of this temperature change. There are some efforts to do this for the abyssal warming signal published by Purkey & Johnson, by asking the question: how big of a reduction in bottom water formation would be needed to account for the observed warming of the abyssal waters? I’m not sure if that work is published yet, however.
Hope this helps.
Cheers,
Josh
Where in that does he say ARGO did not see it?
Keep reading, you’re close. And please link to the whole exchange among the trio, so everyone can see the context.
==============
Interesting, isn’t it? The 2000m layer is warming, and there’s a reduction in (cold) bottom water formation. This happens when water is too warm to sink far enough down to, well, form bottom water ;-)
He refers to work not yet published. He again says it will be difficult. He does not say ARGO did not see it.
Well all things being equal – there should be some ocean heat to be found.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view¤t=CERES-BAMS-2008-with-trend-lines1.gif
That would be in the short wave would it not?
No linky or context, eh JCH? The independent reader is encouraged to read the whole exchange among Roger Pielke, Sr., Josh Willis, and Kevin Trenberth on Pielke’s blog in May of 2010. It is both instructing and amusing.
====================
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2011/11/14/e-mail-exchange-with-josh-willis-on-the-ability-to-monitor-the-transfer-of-heat-in-the-oceans-to-levels-below-700m/
Thanks, DS. One wonders if JCH read on in that link which he obviously knew about, and which I actually didn’t. Seems pretty naughty of him; I’ll have to lower my opinion of him.
Better get Bob Tisdale’s book before it sells out.
====================
What you were implying is Willis told you, well really Pielke, that P&J’s result is questionable because Willis says ARGO did not see it.
Willis thinks no such thing. He said no such thing. What he is clearly saying is it would be hard, but possible, but nobody has done the work.
So you were in fact bluffing.
There is no sane reason to be found in the Pielke blog to question P&J’s paper. Pielke took the number from P&J and added it to his precious jewels. Didn’t even blink.
You are getting even more amusing, JCH. Do you suppose that if 150 research papers had found the ‘missing heat’ they would be keeping it under their hats?
===============
I see. How to game a blog ‘discussion’: keep skipping ahead of the threads where your points have been addressed and acting as though they have not been addressed.
Perhaps I should try it.
:-)
Does your precious Skeptical Science blog have nested comments?
Lemme check.
No.
Confirmation bias acting up again?
I see why you’re slumming around over here now. Not much action in the comments lately, huh? That’s what happens in a group-think when y’all get bored with patting each other on the back.
I don’t comment at SkS :-)
Oops… Did I make one comment and forget about it? Sorry :-)
Bbd
I will take your statement that you only commented once at sks at face value and hope dave will do the same.
When all is said and done our knowledge of what is happening in enough of the deep ocean over a worthwhile time scale is extremely limited and we can draw no useful conclusions from the sparse data.
Tonyb
I can’t imagine what difference it would make if I was on my 999th comment at SkS. Unless of course there was some kind of stigma attached to taking a keen interest in discussion of the science. Surely that is what brings us all here?
:-)
That’s to your credit.
Perhaps you could explain to lolwot why he should not depend on it so.
BBD
I have no problem at all with you going to sks. It was more that dave took you to task for saying you didnt comment there.
The more people there are here expressing diverse views in a civil manner the better as far as I’m concerned.
tonyb
Try it twice
Wait. You did. Try it three times!
Funny how the data is always wrong when it doesn’t support the narrative.
But here is something I have just read.
https://download.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13519
Not that solar veriability is needed to explain most recent warming. For that we have various ocean and atmospheric couplings.
Hi Chief
We are not too far apart .
You say: For that we have various ocean and atmospheric couplings.
I say: compromising integrity of the oceanic thermo-haline layers changes absorption/radiation ratios.
(my comment is further above)
Thanks for the link, just scanned the ‘Workshop Presentations’ looks useful.
Kim, thank you very much. I hadn’t read this before but it seems I just about duplicated what Trenberth admitted about ARGO lack of coverage. Plus more! My emphasis.
Dave
As I said up thread, in the draft of ar5 abyssal warming was taken as a fact despite no references at all being given to support it. Despite my asking the ipcc four times to supply the references or withdraw the claim they were not willing to do so. Unless they have had a change of heart presumably the ‘fact’ of abyssal warming will be a cornerstone of that chapter without references to support it.
Tonyb
Tonyb thanks for the rational support of science. I skip to your comments for relevance and information.
Scott
What is the paper Trenberth is referring to here? Could it be the Purkey – Johnson paper published about four months later. That paper at least gives some estimates on the uncertainties.
What else has been published on these issues since April 2010?
My instinct is to be rather skeptical on the empirical estimates of the ocean heat content and still much more skeptical on the change in the rate of ocean warming in recent decades. The data on sea level rise tells that it has been going on much longer than the AGW has been significant. As oceans react slowly and as the changes in temperature are according to all estimates very small there may well be some warming trends that have been going on for centuries. Thus it’s not enough to know what’s the present trend, we should know in addition, what the trend was before (say about 100 years ago).
There’s some curvature in this graph on sea level
http://ipcc.ch/graphics/ar4-wg1/jpg/fig-5-13.jpg
but it appears to change slope already around 1925 which is “too early”.
I don’t think that one can find evidence against main stream views on AGW from ocean data, but I’m also skeptical on the conclusions drawn to support those views from the measurements of ocean temperatures.
Bravo, my Precious.
======
The scientist in me tells that I must remember to be particularly on arguments that appear to support my overall views.
.. particulaly skeptical on arguments. .
Pekka – I think it’s probably Lyman/Loeb.
JCH,
I’m not sure what’s the paper you are referring to, but there’s a relevant later (Jan 2012) paper by Loeb, Lyman and others:
http://xa.yimg.com/kq/groups/18383638/336597800/name/ngeo1375.pdf
This seems to support the view that data is consistent with main stream estimates, but not accurate enough to provide strong evidence.
Pekka – kim has this notion that Josh Willis has concluded an analysis of ARGO data has shown that no heat was transported to the abyssal ocean that P&J’s paper finds is warming, which would cast tremendous doubt on their finding of warming. This is absolutely, imo, untrue. That has been my only point: that no such analysis has been done and no such result exists in the mind of Josh Willis.
After rereading Loeb et al, I now wonder if the “embargoed” reference was to Palmer.
It’s a travesty that the missing heat can’t be found transported to the abyss.
=============
This is the marvelous irony, and why I often feel sorry for Josh Willis. Master and Commander of a system engineered to demonstrate whether AGW is catastrophic or not, his system is trending toward the ‘no catastrophe’ scenario.
This, too, shall pass. I think Josh has a wonderful career ahead.
===========
That started out as ‘Master and Caretaker’, but I succumbed to Art. I think Josh Willis takes care.
===================
Had a good laugh reading WEB’s ‘ClimateClowns’, I am in there too.
I don’t recommend it, but he could do well in the teenage comics market.
As a tragicomic villian with a viscious wedgie?
In the past, this site had fewer commenters pushing their pet alternative theories and hypotheses. Now this site it is essentially inundated. There are last count 40+ climate clowns that form the majority of the comments on the skeptical side.
You would think that with all these differences of opinion, they would start arguing amongst themselves. They must all think that as individuals, they each have the right answer, and that is all that is needed to satisfy their delusions. Unless, of course, that they are doing this to intentionally raise the level of FUD. I am sure at least a few are pursuing that strategy.
Here’s my pet theory.
‘The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible. Rather the focus must be upon the prediction of the probability distribution of the system’s future possible states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions. Addressing adequately the statistical nature of climate is computationally intensive and requires the application of new methods of model diagnosis, but such statistical information is essential.’ :cool: :cool: :cool: :cool: :cool:
Guess where that’s from webster. Do you think you should therefore enter yourself on your own list? Although I think that would be unfair to clowns. What do you think webby? Do you understand what this means? I very much doubt it.
Why are you surprised? Most skeptics think that science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. Skeptics atack the paradigm (the dogma), because that’s where the science is crippled.
@web hub telescope
I agree. There are far too many weirdos with unread websites trying to create FUD in the general populace about ‘Peak Oil’ and the like.
@web hub telescope
For once I agree with you…sort of.
There is indeed Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. But it is in the minds of the alarmist camp. How else can we interpret the 15,000 strong petition to PBS chastising them because Anthony Watts was a
‘climate change denier and conspiracy theorist’ and ‘and recommend[ing] corrective action to ensure that such reporting never again occurs on PBS’
Nothing about him being wrong. nothing about having airtime for a right of reply, no citation of learned papers showing where he was mistaken…just a straightforward condemnation that he was allowed to speak at all.
You can almost taste the fear among the alarmists. Fear that if ‘ordinary people’ actually hear Watts’ – and others – perfectly reasonable objections to the conventional AGW narrative they might begin to wonder themselves. They no doubt saw the dreadful fate that befell Gergis et al back in the early summer…public humiliation at the hands of the sceptics and a plummet back into well-deserved obscurity…and want to make sure that no poor hardworking much put upon climatologist should ever be asked to account for their work again. Get them banned and nobody will ever know……
Doubt that if such an eventuality occurs they have any real answers beyond ‘We’re Climate Scientists – Trust Us’. Doubt that the know about anything beyond the walls of academe and the pal review system. Doubt among themselves that they can defend the indefensible if their protective walls of an adoring and supine media start to crumble ..as they are already starting to do.
And Uncertainty in spades. Uncertainty about how long they can hold the facade. How long will the public put up with ‘climate models’ that actively resist testing against reality. Uncertainty about how long the organisational joke that is the IPCC can survive at all…let alone have any remotely credible voice. And uncertainty about how long their academic careers can survive. As thy look froward five or ten years they must see naught but the fading of climatology into the wasteland of a past fad. A form of collective insanity that overtook some second and third rate ‘scientists’ and for a couple of all too brief decades held sway with governments and the media and the more gullible members of the public. But no more. It is dying.
And the best that the alarrmists can manage is
‘We’ve found a witch. Can we burn him?’
Pathetic
Linking to Monty Python, of which Vaughan spoke of recently:
I used this quote in the preface to the Climate Clown report
http://tinyurl.com/ClimateClowns
webby,
people like you without scientific mind will definitely attract more scientific minds to point you people to the right science directions.
???
I am sure Springer will come along and help decipher what you just wrote.
I’m in there too.
Apparently I ‘specialize in creating consensus’. Which will come as a BIG surprise to my nearest and dearest. And near apoplexy – brought on by collective astonishment – to the regular denizens of the Dog and Duck.
Though exactly how I achieve this by writing whimsical pieces from the perspective of, for example, Webster’s Mum ‘Wilma Hub Telescope (Mrs.)’ or the average guy in the street ‘Joe Sixpack’ remains unsaid and completely escapes me.
But perhaps – as a stickler for the truth and accuracy – he would wish me to use my real name for all postings. He, writing as ‘Web Hub Telescope’, is of course ideally morally qualified to deal out such advice on psuedonymmery
Spot on, Dad!
PS: Can I have my pocket money now?
I’m in there too. My motto is I reject your consensus and substitute my own. The great thing about being a climate catastrophist (in the sense of Rene Thom) is that whatever happens I can claim to be right.
Although I have used other sockpuppets – Captain Kangaroo the cowboy climate warrior, Diogenes in search of an honest man – frankly it was just too hard to keep the nom de guerre straight. I do miss Captain Kangaroo – cowboy on a blue horse called Shibboleth , poet, raconteur, and womaniser. A perfect alter ego. Shibboleth was a gift from a denizen. Odd that such obvious deception caused turmoil in the websters mind. What was the purpose if not deception – and then why was I so lazy as to fail to change the link. Odd also that he would think to put someone who self identified with a clown – Cecil Terwilliger – on a clowns list. Not one for subtleties, popular culture, the classics or humour is the webster.
Goes to show everyone how insane these climate skeptics are.
So much posturing and posing goes on in what really should be objective scientific discussion.
Yet, it is so cool that this commenting site has been taken over by crackpot theorists. It is a now an ecosystem featuring a strong cross-section of delusional thinkers that people interested in pop scientific psychology can observe.
Notice that no one is debating that there aren’t 40+ crazed theories out there. Instead, what you see is a few complaining that they shouldn’t be on the list.
No one gives a rat’s arse about your f_cking list . It is a joke that you don’t get. Isn’t that the story of your life webster?
@wht
I’m not complaining that I shouldn’t be on the list. Just expressing my normal bafflement at your mental processes that put me there…’creating consensus’ is not really my style at all.
I always thought that Groucho was right when he very nearly said
‘Please accept my resignation. I don’t want to belong to any consensus that would accept me as one of its members’.
The amount of diversion, transference, and projection is astonishing.
By definition, and whether it is a subconscious act on your part or not, sockpuppets are used to create the appearance of consensus, where little may in fact exist. Go look it up.
In the meantime, the fruitbat “denizens” in this “community” have to face the fact that they have some 40-odd alternative hypotheses floating around trying to challenge that of conventional science.
No alternative consensus exists for miles, yet the condoning of these theories is readily apparent by any neutral observer.
And it may appear as if I am confused by all this. Congrats, that is the high art of creating FUD, it is all in the appearances. More sockpuppets, more condoning, more artificial skeptical consensus where none actually exists.
@web hub telescope
‘By definition, and whether it is a subconscious act on your part or not, sockpuppets are used to create the appearance of consensus, where little may in fact exist. Go look it up’
You really really do not understand the concept of ‘taking the p*ss’, do you? Nor of pastiche or satire.
I do not occasionally adopt a different identity to ‘create the appearance of consensus’. I do it to make jokes and/or to make a point.
Example. I could say ‘I bet your Mum thinks you are a pain, Webster’ which is OK, but not great. But I think it is funnier – and more memorable if I write a short piece as if from your Mom where she is trying – through gritted teeth – to pretend that you are quite normal, even when it is perfectly obvious to her readers – and in her heart to her – that you are not. .
I could write ‘the British man in the street might think that climate change is used as the excuse that every government department uses to make his life a misery’. Or I can write a piece as if from ‘Joe Sixpack’ where ‘he’ can express the same sentiment in more robust and industrial language.
‘Creating a consensus’ is not part of it. Making a point in a memorable and (i hope ) amusing way is.
And I bet you’re fun at parties.
The pursed lips, the lack of a sense of humour, the oft-repeated lecture on how Peak Oil is going to bring down Western civilisation and your deep suspicions that the guy dancing with the best looking girl in the room might be a Denier..or worse – enjoying himself with no immediate thought for The Future of The Planet and Humanity. And then the crushing sense of failure when, yet again, you cannot persuade her to slip round to your place to see your website..or even your vast extendable instrument…….
Latie, It took awhile, but we were finally able to extract your self-described approach, which amounts to style at the expense of substance.
Kind of bizarre of you to point out that talking weedy science doesn’t work at parties, but that it is also off-limits at a site ostensibly catering to quantifying uncertainty.
And part of quantifying uncertainty is understanding the role of purveyors of FUD, much like yourself, and trying to remove them from the equation.
Sounds kind of rote and mechanical, but that’s me.
Webby is a teenager or a man with a science challenged teenager mind who does not make effort to understand CO2 properties.
“…As things stand, there is little doubt that the IPCC will need to be reconstituted with a limited mandate. This mess needs investigation and questions need to be answered as to why absurd claims were taken as gospel truth…”
(Sammy Benoit)
Uh Uh … a claim that a mere 1 W /m 2 extra will eventually melt
Greenland? Now that’s a recipe fer disaster!
Hmm … recipe fer disaster …
Solar Flare Cocktail:
1 1/2 oz vodka
1 1/2 oz fresh orange juice
1 teasp Palo Cortado sherry
1 teasp orgeat syrup
dash of Peychaud bitters as garnish
Ice!!
… add ginger, cover tightly, submerge in liquid hydrogen and ignite with a stick match.
I suspect half the denizens here would approve of the motto, drink irresponsibly.
BC’s Solar Flare Cocktail looks like a blend of a vodka Mai Tai, Sazerac, and Palo Cortado.
I say “looks like,” whether it tastes like it only BC knows. To be tried.
A few factors influencing climate change include changes in cosmic rays, solar activity, cosmic dust, Earthly physics (e.g., orbit, axis, rotational velocity), magnetic fields, tectonic movements and volcanic activity, ocean circulation patterns and salinity, ice-sheet extent and thickness and glacier mass balance, atmospheric water vapor and other less important greenhouse gases (e.g., CO2, methane), cloudiness and albedo, vegetation, fires, aerosols…
After 58 words, you gave up on completing the sentence.
and SkyDragons. Happy now?
===========
Walker et al. (2003) categorize the following different levels of ignorance. Total ignorance implies a deep level of uncertainty, to the extent that we do not even know that we do not know. Recognized ignorance refers to fundamental uncertainty in the mechanisms being studied and a weak scientific basis for developing scenarios. Reducible ignorance may be resolved by conducting further research, whereas irreducible ignorance implies that research cannot improve knowledge (e.g. what happened prior to the big bang). Bammer and Smithson (2008) further distinguish between conscious ignorance, where we know we don’t know what we don’t know, versus unacknowledged or meta-ignorance where we don’t even consider the possibility of error. ~J. Curry
It’s not that there’s no evidence about the sun’s variability. There is.
http://www.greenworldtrust.org.uk/Images/TPlanetSk/tsi1600-2000.gif
But the variability isn’t enough to explain the measured temperature rise. So
Variability in control variables – like TSI and UV – result in non-linear responses in climate. Here is the memo from the IPCC yet again. :???:
‘The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible. Rather the focus must be upon the prediction of the probability distribution of the system’s future possible states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions. Addressing adequately the statistical nature of climate is computationally intensive and requires the application of new methods of model diagnosis, but such statistical information is essential.’ http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/501.htm
Convenient isn’t it? As a climate catastrophist (in the sense of Rene Thom) – whatever happens I am right. :cool: :cool: :cool: :cool :cool:
Here is something almost as fascinating as watching you operate. At climate etc we obey the laws of thermodynamics.
Chief,
Most functions are non-linear. That doesn’t mean you can’t differentiate, either analytically or numerically, to find a gradient. In this case its Delta T / Delta TSI
Except the linear ones. The operational constraint however is chaotic. The equations of motion are perfectly well behaved for a 2 body problem. The moon orbiting the Earth for instance – is in isolation a problem solvable at any position anytime in the future. Add another body and something very odd happens. The equations of motion can no longer be solved. It is the simplest example of a chaotic system. ‘For n = 3, solutions exist for special cases. A general solution in terms of first integrals is known to be impossible. An exact theoretical solution for arbitrary n can be given in terms of Taylor series, but in practice such an infinite series must be truncated, giving an approximate solution. In addition, many solutions by numerical integration exist, but these too are approximate solutions.’
Climate is a chaotic system and has many degrees of freedom. It is not solvable according to the IPCC. Don’t believe the IPCC tt?
Some of us no longer live in a Newtonian universe. There is a whole series of these at youtube.
Chief,
One of the defining traits of a chaotic system is ‘sensitive dependence to initial conditions’. This means that even very small changes, a flap of a butterfly wings is the usual way of illustrating this point, in the initial state of the system can quickly and radically change the way that the system develops over time. Yes weather is chaotic, the flaps of a butterflies wings can make a difference.
But can the flap of the same wings affect the climate? I don’t think so. Do you? That’s why climate is not chaotic in the way you argue. Climate is not weather, and climate modeling is not weather forecasting.
Another way of putting this is to say , while it is generally not possible to predict a specific future state of a chaotic system, there is no telling what temperature it will be in a particular location on a particular date, it doesn’t mean that we absolutely have no idea what to expect. In the Northern Hemisphere people choose to take their holidays in July or August because that is when statistically it’s more likely that the weather will be warm and sunny. They don’t choose March. Even if they are unlucky with the weather one year they are unlikely to be unlucky every year. If they did choose March they would have to be very lucky indeed to have the sort of weather most people would like on their summer holidays.
‘Thinking is centered around slow changes to our climate and how they will affect humans and the habitability of our planet. Yet this thinking is flawed: It ignores the well-established fact that Earth’s climate has changed rapidly in the past and could change rapidly in the future.’
WHOI
Although I argue the case – it is a case that it widely accepted. Indeed it is decribed by the NAS Committee on Abrupt Climate Change as the new climate paradigm.
Let us imagine that you had such a good time on holiday – you were young and in love with a girl. You know how that works – you are young and in love with all of them. 10 years later you decide to take an anniversary trip back to the same beach only to discover that it is 20 degrees colder at the same season and newly glaciated. That is abrupt change that has happened. You did read the quote from the IPCC WG1 on future forecasts? Nothing more I can say. I have said it all before. Why is there a need to go around in circles?
It is more correct to be a climate change catastrophist in the sense of René Thom. The butterfly is generally regarded as a metaphor based on the phase sapce toplology of the Lorenz strnage attractors. But let’s see if we can this in a context that is less in the language of bifurcation theory and more as physical climate processes.
Chaos theory is not a theory of climate. It is a theory of complex and dynamic systems. It says that complex systems, such as climate models, exhibit certain behaviors. Chief amongst these is sensitive dependence, dragon-kings (equivalently noisy bifurcation) and slowing down. If this behavior is looked for and found in climate – as it has been quantitatively using network models with modern data for decadal climate shifts – then we can be sure that we are dealing with dynamical complexity.
Thus we can look in the right place for answers but it tells us nothing at all about the processes in play. At this stage there are a few ideas about identifying dragon-kings and slowing down but nothing that has moved much beyond the conceptual and descriptive.
Sensitive dependence happens when the value of control variables passes a critical threshold. The control variables are solar irradiation, orbital eccentricity or atmospheric composition. At some tipping point changes start propagating through the system with changes in cloud, snow, ice, biology, dust and ocean circulation. As this stage there are extreme fluctuations as the system components adjust and readjust to the rapidly changing state – this is when climate extremes happen such as the 1998 El Niño. It is followed by a period of damped oscillation as climate settles into the new state – called slowing down – until a new climate threshold is passed and climate shifts again.
We can use terms such as phase space or strange attractors but they are simply terms for climate shifting from one more or less stable state to another. The different states have different characteristics – different temperatures, different rainfall patterns, more or less ice, changes in ecosystems, etc – and different climate averages which are not predictable beforehand. The shift may be benign or it may be utterly inimical to human societies.
27/9 @ 2.46pm, David Wojak’s solar reference ter NIPCC Report has an overview of a paper by Mauas PJD, Flamenco E &Buccino AP, ‘Solar forcing of the stream flow of a continental scale South American River ‘ (2008) which arguess that river stream flows are excellent climate indicators, especially rivers with continental scale basis fer studying global forcing mechanisms.
An analysis of flow data collected daily since 1904 indicates that stream flow data has a better than 99% correlation with irradiance/sun spot data, strong evidence that solar variability and not GGG are responsible fer stream flow during the industrial era.
It’s not sun spots. It’s Klingon’s circling Uranus.
Beff. pluazze give us’n sum more o dat phake hick talk. It make yer look laak book learnin done sunk in. I laak mustard wid ma biskuts.
There are many, many studies of solar connections to ENSO – the link to rainfall looks good. Although I think you will find that the correlation is 0.78 and 99% is the confidence limit.
Here’s another one – http://www.geo.umass.edu/climate/papers2/asmerom2007.pdf
I think it has to do with SAM the wonder dog. Changes in polar and sub-polar pressure pushing more or less cold southern ocean water into lower latitudes.
Congrats on the science. Something that Howard is seemingly incapable of. That he seems more the nasty little snark type is a statement of the blindingly obvious.
One effing stalagmite and some canned spectral matching is not conclusive of anything. Without a physical mechanism to explain the curve-fitting, it’s pure bunko. Your sun-fetish is no different from the problems with GCMs, cloud feedbacks, ocean cycle dynamics and aerosols. Until these things can be explained with physics that match most of the field data, it’s arm-waving based on curve-fits and model-tuning.
You can have it both ways, Chief. However, don’t be surprised when people call you out as the fool you and the other deniers are. I’m sorry you have too much free time since Art Bell went off the air.
Not sure who Art Bell is? Never mind – probably as inconsequential as anything else you ever say.
Anybody that follows real skepticism, of the type popularized by Martin Gardner, Michael Shermer, and James Randi, should know who Art Bell is.
Art Bell is a conspiratorial skeptic, a fake skeptic. The real skeptics are the ones that fact-check the fake skeptics.
I am Australian – and I follow the science not the blog sites one way or the other.
captdallas2 0.8 +0.2 or -0.4 on Effects of solar variability on climate
Peter Lang on Effects of solar variability on climate
Chief Hydrologist on Effects of solar variability on climate
Beth Cooper on Effects of solar variability on climate
Chief Hydrologist on Effects of solar variability on climate
David Springer on Effects of solar variability on climate
Peter Lang on Effects of solar variability on climate
David Springer on Effects of solar variability on climate
David Springer on Effects of solar variability on climate
tempterrain on Effects of solar variability on climate
NAS on solar variability on climate – https://download.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13519 – previously linked to. Doesn’t tell us anything new.
willard on medical grass?
Max_OK on Effects of solar variability on climate
Chief Hydrologist on Effects of solar variability on climate
Peter Lang on U.S. climate change policy news
willard (@nevaudit) on Effects of solar variability on climate
willard (@nevaudit) on Effects of solar variability on climate
willard (@nevaudit) on Effects of solar variability on climate
kim on Effects of solar variability on climate
Max_OK on Effects of solar variability on climate
willard (@nevaudit) on Effects of solar variability on climate
:)
> :-)
Avast ye, Capn’!
Chief Hydrologist on Effects of solar variability on climate
kim on Effects of solar variability on climate
WebHubTelescope on Effects of solar variability on climate
Chief Hydrologist on Effects of solar variability on climate
Chief Hydrologist on Effects of solar variability on climate
WebHubTelescope on Effects of solar variability on climate
lolwot on Effects of solar variability on climate
lolwot on Effects of solar variability on climate
Herman Alexander Pope on Heartland
lolwot on Effects of solar variability on climate
No Howard, yer’ve had quite enough,,, jest drink yer vodka Solar Flare an’ be quiet!
I’m just trying to work out the essence of this discussion on solar variability. We all agree that there isn’t any real evidence of significant variability? But, whereas that leads the consensus to think that other factors must be the cause of global warming the skeptic/deniers haven’t given up on the idea that the warming could well be natural. What can be more natural than variations in that big hot object in the sky that even the most ardent “warmist” can’t deny ultimately produces all the energy?
Call me an unreconstructed scientific traditionalist, if you like, but I’d have to say that if there ain’t no evidence, then there is no reason to think that solar variations are the cause of late 20th century warming. In fact, there is no reason for this discussion at all, unless we all want to wallow in the comfort of wishful thinking.
Call me an unreconstructed scientific traditionalist, if you like, but I’d have to say that if there ain’t no evidence, then there is no reason to think that carbon dioxide variations are the cause of late 20th century warming. In fact, that’s good reason for this discussion, unless we all want to wallow in the comfort of wishful thinking.
Except there is evidence. Arrhenius was one of the first to realise what would happen over a hundred years ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius
There is no evidence. If there is, provide it.
Arrhenius got hammered at the time for his nonsense, which he came to by misreading Fourier. Arrhenius didn’t know what he was talking about. From Timothy Casey:
This is the backradiated waste heat of waste heat, it’s called waste heat because it isn’t up to doing any work.
So not only has AGWSF fisics claimed Arrhenius proves their nutty claims about carbon dioxide, while knowing full well that Arrhenius did no such thing, they have taken Fourier out of the equation altogether, that’s why you have no convection, you’ve arguing about a created atmosphere of empty space to fit in with SB radiation only – you’ve lost our atmosphere.
How could you lose such a thing? It’s that massive heavy fluid ocean of real gas around us weighing a ton on your shoulders..
Arrhenius showed nothing of what you claim. So where is your proof that carbon dioxide raises the Earth’s temperature by 33°C?
Show and tell.
Myrrh you are like an AIDS denier.
Seriously. Only nutters quote G&T and deny backradiation exists. Even Dr Curry has dismissed the SkyDragons as a waste of time.
We can single Myrrrhh out as a skeptic with delusional ideas, but there are many more wandering around here.
The analogy is like a 9-11 truther site, only much worse. It would be as if there were 40 alternate theories to gravity governing the speed of collapse of the buildings.
I don’t which is more amusing, your denial of gravity or the thought that none of you realises there is no sound in your world..
Let me know when you can hear this –
we’re still on “Arrhenius showed nothing of what you claim. So where is your proof that carbon dioxide raises the Earth’s temperature by 33°C?”
Surprise yourselves, have a crack at finding it.
“where is your proof that carbon dioxide raises the Earth’s temperature by 33°C”
33 degC is the entire GH effect. Its possible that if the concentration of CO2 were reduced to zero there might still be some residual GH effect so let’s not assume that its all due to CO2.
How do we know? We can look at the average Moon temperature which is -23 deg C or 250K. On average the Earth is the same distance away from the Sun as the Moon so should receive the same level of solar energy.
The earth’s average temperature is 288K or 38K warmer. The difference is not exactly 33K , one reason being that the two bodies don’t have the same albedo, but its pretty good evidence that the Earth’s semi -transparent to IR radiation atmosphere does cause a significant warming.
“where is your proof that carbon dioxide raises the Earth’s temperature by 33°C”
33 degC is the entire GH effect. Its possible that if the concentration of CO2 were reduced to zero there might still be some residual GH effect so let’s not assume that its all due to CO2.
Where’s the empirical evidence that carbon dioxide can raise Earth’s temperature 33°C?
How do we know? We can look at the average Moon temperature which is -23 deg C or 250K. On average the Earth is the same distance away from the Sun as the Moon so should receive the same level of solar energy.
The earth’s average temperature is 288K or 38K warmer. The difference is not exactly 33K , one reason being that the two bodies don’t have the same albedo, but its pretty good evidence that the Earth’s semi -transparent to IR radiation atmosphere does cause a significant warming.
? What? I asked you to show how carbon dioxide raised the Earth’s temperature 33°C, which in your first paragraph you say is all bar insignificance down to carbon dioxide, then you give me some blather about about semi-transparency of Earth’s atmosphere and infrared to account for it compared with the moon?
Do you actually have any idea of what you’re talking about?
How exactly is carbon dioxide warming the Earth from the starting point of no atmosphere – you’re comparing with the Moon and the comparable figure here for the Earth is -18°C (please stick to centigrade as Kelvin is meaningless gibberish for the average interested person).
So,
the Earth minus any atmosphere at all is -18°C,
the Earth with full atmosphere of mainly nitrogen and oxygen, around 98%, plus variable water, 1-5%, argon 1%, and the rest trace including carbon dioxide – 15°C
How does carbon dioxide raise Earth’s temperature from the -18°C it is without an atmosphere by 33°C to get the 15°C?
To make that easier to read:
So,
the Earth minus any atmosphere at all is: -18°C,
the Earth with full atmosphere of mainly nitrogen and oxygen, around 98%, plus variable water, 1-5%, argon 1%, and the rest trace including carbon dioxide: 15°C
How does carbon dioxide raise Earth’s temperature from the -18°C it is without an atmosphere by 33°C to get the 15°C?
Myrrh, that would be carbon dioxide and water vapor. It does it by trapping the heat in the atmosphere, resisting the cooling of the surface to space. The blanket analogy helps. The blanket doesn’t have to be warmer than the human body to keep it warm.
Myrrh, that would be carbon dioxide and water vapor. It does it by trapping the heat in the atmosphere, resisting the cooling of the surface to space. The blanket analogy helps. The blanket doesn’t have to be warmer than the human body to keep it warm.
Hmm, yet the temp of the Earth with its atmosphere of mainly nitrogen and oxygen, but without water, gives us a temp of 67°C, Think Deserts – how is this water vapour a blanket warming the Earth?
Now you are talking about a point at one time in the day, while the 255 K is the average over the sphere in a whole day as is the 288 K. Strictly we should be using the equivalent blackbody radiation in W/m2 for the averaging, but temperatures are easier to understand.
“How do we know? We can look at the average Moon temperature which is -23 deg C or 250K. On average the Earth is the same distance away from the Sun as the Moon so should receive the same level of solar energy.”
At the top of Earth’s atmosphere it receives the same amount of energy per square meter as the moon, but at Earth’s surface, Earth receives significant less energy per square meter without including the the effects of clouds [clouds reduce it further] . With inclusion of clouds, Earth’s surface receives less than 1/2 of the solar energy at surface per square meter as the Moon.
On Earth one receives the most amount sunlight when the Sun directly overhead: Noon clear skies and when the sun at 90 degree angle [perpendicular to earth surface] the sunlight is about 1000 watts per square meter. On clear skies when sun is at a significantly lower angle, such as 45 degree one receives about 800 watts per square meter. 9am to 3pm is when you receive the most solar energy.
And of course, the sun is never perpendicular unless one is in the tropics- the tropic of Cancer and Capricorn is defined by the sun being perpendicular when the sun is highest in summer.
At the equinox, when sun is perpendicular at the Equator, and in regions on above 45 degree latitude: Such as Canada, UK, And Germany; the sun at noon do not reach reach above 45 degrees at noon.
This should indicate why it’s a bad idea to harvest solar energy in UK, or Germany, though of course these regions also cloudy. And if their particular location on planet was not enough of a clue, the consistent cloudiness should have steered them in the correct direction- assuming rational thought was involved.
Max_Ok 27/09 @10.58pm:
Yer say,
Kim doesn’t like cooling.
Snakes…lizards din’t like cooling.
Therefore Kim may be…
Logical fallacy Max, which yer try ter wriggle out of with yer slipp_er_ y
‘may be.’
One conclusion we can make, given the evidence of incomparable witty comments by Kim at Climate Etc, here fer yer ter read, is that
* KIM IS COOL.*
Say, tempt, I’m callin’ yer an un-re-con-stuct-ed scien-tif-ic trad-ition-al-ist !!
Let me help you out TT – the perpetual motion act is getting a bit thin.
What we have is 0.5W/m^2 cooling in the infrared and 2.1W/m^2 warming in the shortwave.
http://isccp.giss.nasa.gov/zFD/an9090_LWup_toa.gif
http://isccp.giss.nasa.gov/zFD/an9090_SWup_toa.gif
http://isccp.giss.nasa.gov/zFD/an9090_TOTnet_toa.gif
How would a traditional scientist react to the evidence? Well we know how because Newton’s fourth rule for the study of natural philosophy states:
‘In experimental philosophy, propositions gathered from phenomena by induction should be considered either exactly or very nearly true notwithstanding any contrary hypotheses, until yet other phenomena make such propositions either more exact or liable to exceptions. This rule should be followed so that arguments based on induction be not be nullified by hypotheses.’
While it should not be doubted that there should be some impact of greenhouse gases – it will not show up directly in TOA flux because of something called thermal compensation. The atmosphere warms and the flux is restored. The significance of the data is that it quantifies low frequency climate variability that we know is there – and seems to show that cloud radiative forcing was the major factor by far in warming in the satellite era. Cloud radiative forcing changes are seen in CERES as well. So anthropogenic warming can’t be distinguished from natural variability and it remains a hypothesis.
‘The overall slight rise (relative heating) of global total net flux at TOA between the 1980’s and 1990’s is confirmed in the tropics by the ERBS measurements and exceeds the estimated climate forcing changes (greenhouse gases and aerosols) for this period. The most obvious explanation is the associated changes in cloudiness during this period.’ http://isccp.giss.nasa.gov/projects/browse_fc.html
I think I might call you a perpetuum mobile AGW groupthink space cadet. That sounds like a better bet than a scientist in the tradition of Sir Isaac Newton doesn’t it tt? :cool: :cool: :cool: :cool: :cool:
Chief,
You’ll have to do a bit better than presenting three, not very easy to understand, graphs with no real explanation of what they mean, to overturn the consensus mainstream scientific position that solar variability is not responsible for late 20th century warming.
Why? Because you refuse to look at the link to NASA/GISS beneath the NASA/GISS quote where the graphs come from? Instead complain about the perfectly adequately labelled graphs from NASA/GISS?
Odd indeed. Here is another link you might find interesting if you had a look at it – http://www.image.ucar.edu/idag/Papers/Wong_ERBEreanalysis.pdf
Here is what the IPCC says about it – http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch3s3-4-4-1.html
I can’t do better than quote the IPCC, NASA, GISS – can I tt? Don’t you believe them? Do you want to be a science denier all your life?
The data seems to show that cloud radiative forcing was the dominant (by far) cause of warming in the satellite era. What are we to make of that except to look for a solar control variable in the chaotic system that is Earth’s climate? Except you don’t really understand that do you tt? In technical terms someone who cannot comprehend a new paradigm is known as a dinosaur. Are you a dinosaur tt. :cool: :cool: :cool: :cool :cool:
Here is another in the series on the mathematics of chaos. It might help – it might not.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zslQ_HUD1k&feature=relmfu
You really don’t understand do you – you refuse to try – you are convinced of the infallibility of the groupthink – and that is the problem and not the science.
Chief,
If you knew what you were talking about you’d be able to convince NASA, that they have their own data to avoid making this kind of ‘mistake’:
“Climate models that include solar irradiance changes can’t reproduce the observed temperature trend over the past century or more without including a rise in greenhouse gases.”
http://climate.nasa.gov/causes/
There’s nothing wrong with the NASA graphs you’ve linked to but they don’t show what you claim. They are a non sequitur.
CH is trying to say “it’s clouds” but that isn’t the same as saying it’s the Sun. After-all cloud changes could be a feedback to the warming itself.
Of course maybe the Sun caused the cloud changes, but what evidence is there for that? None. And faster than someone can shout “Svensmark” I’ll point out that cosmic rays don’t correlate with recent temperature rise so we are back to square 1 there.
Some other solar impact on clouds? While possible there’s no evidence to support it. And that’s just what the IPCC say.
So why do climate-skeptic folks attack the IPCC’s position on the Sun? Because climate skeptics have a desire to over advocate the role of the Sun beyond what the evidence actually supports. So the realist position of the IPCC and the scientific consensus is attacked.
Won’t they have to sort it out internally? They certainly seem to be giving mixed massages.
The clouds are a feedback that exceed the forcing by a factor 5? Instability indeed.
What I am talking about is measurable changes in the climate system. It is nothing theoretical but real data. Data that is supported by observation – especially in the Pacific. Cloud changes in many studies are negatvely correlated with sea surface temperature. There are a couple of mechanisms involving changes in convection patterns or perhaps Dimethyl sulfide excretions from phytoplankton. The biggest changes in SST are with ENSO and the PDO – this is where the changes in low level marine stratocumulous show up in COADS observations. The clouds reflect ocean conditions. It is well understood – and a factor in Claus Wolters MEI for instance. We can see it in CERES and MODIS.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view¤t=CERES_MODIS.gif
So all these changes – and on decadal to millenial scales – are very real and observable.
It is the difference between data and BS numbnut.
“Measurable changes in the climate system” do not mean The Sun Did It. The skeptic claim is that there is evidence the Sun caused recent warming and the IPCC are hiding this.
Where is that evidence? If you are claiming cloud cover changes are caused by the Sun and those caused warming, where’s the evidence? If not, you are surely on the wrong thread.
http://www.geo.umass.edu/climate/papers2/asmerom2007.pdf
There are many studies linking ENSO and a solar signal. Just google it.
CHIEF
A powerful and informative video and narrative. I have made a tiny step.
‘The overall slight rise (relative heating) of global total net flux at TOA between the 1980′s and 1990′s is confirmed in the tropics by the ERBS measurements and exceeds the estimated climate forcing changes (greenhouse gases and aerosols) for this period. The most obvious explanation is the associated changes in cloudiness during this period.’ http://isccp.giss.nasa.gov/projects/browse_fc.html
The meaning is precisely clear and we have the difference between data and models – induction and hypothesis in the language of Isaac Newton.
The graphs show precisely what the IPCC says they show in AR4 s 3.4.4.1 – I refuse to repeat the link yet again.
‘You’ll have to do a bit better than presenting three, not very easy to understand, graphs with no real explanation of what they mean, to overturn the consensus mainstream scientific position that solar variability is not responsible for late 20th century warming.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with the NASA graphs you’ve linked to but they don’t show what you claim. They are a non sequitur.’
You are drifting off into a pathetic doublespeak. At some stage the lack of good faith pollutes the discourse terminally. We have reached that point.
Say Tempt you being unconstitute etc etc data bein’ relevant, cited above holocene climate proxy record of the monsoon region of SW US showing periods of increased solar radiation correlating with decreased rainfall and the seesaw Asian monsoon conditions suggesting a solar link through change in Walker circulation and PDO and El Nino Southern Occillation systems of tropical Pacific. P3 conclusions Tempt .. hope yer read it.
http://www.geo.umass.edu/climate/papers2/asmerom2007.pdf
One! Count ’em. One Stalagmite. Some people call it a Kaiser blade…
One sediment core – one ice core – seeing as rainfall is regional your objection to peer reviewed science is objectionable.
Myrrh ( and frankincense) i’m callin’ yer an uncon – stit – ute, scien – tific – trad – ition – alist ! Wanna make somethin’ of it, lol?
That’s the gold standard – driven by curiosity. And smelling nice.
grr “Un Con stit uteD”
J.C :
I think there is much that we don’t know about the sun’s variations and their impact on climate
Dr. Curry is right there.
This was an excellent opportunity to ascertain the extent of the ‘skeptics’ knowledge, or at least of those frequenting this blog.
She may feel let down, but there is always a hope.
Time for a new thread ?
.
Because of continued warming, solar explanations/correlations are getting progressively worse. Take this one for example:
http://ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warming/solar/overview/image
For the correlations to hold the quiet solar activity demands a sharp drop in global temperature which simply has not happened.
Updating the graph shows the correlation has now completely broken down. Solar levels are back at early 20th century levels yet temperatures show no shift downwards.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1880/compress:12/plot/gistemp/from:1880/mean:120/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1880/normalise/scale:1.4/offset:-0.5/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1880/normalise/scale:1.4/offset:-0.5/mean:120
Another case of solar-temperature correlation breakdown is with solar cycle length:
http://m.static.newsvine.com/servista/imagesizer?file=drich1376A858CB-36BC-156E-534C-FE98E55DF4FB.jpg
Note that various skeptics cite solar cycle length correlation with global temperature as evidence of a solar connection to climate. Eg the Oregon Petition cites it.
Also see this travesty of misinformation:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/01/02/do-solar-scientists-still-think-that-recent-warming-is-too-large-to-explain-by-solar-activity/
In which the Lassen correlation is defended (without providing any updated values to readers that would conclusively show it wrong), and the author even attacks and smears Lassen because Lassen (quite rightly) pointed out the correlation broke down in a 1997 paper.
The WUWT author also utters this stunning piece of stupidity:
“if post-El Nino temperatures continue to fall off the way they did in 99, we’ll be back to 1990 temperatures by mid-2011”
These climate skeptics are seriously deluded. Look at the ridiculous predictions they have made because of their solar worship:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/lagged-solar-cycle-length-and-temp-stephen-strum-frontier-weather-inc.png
‘By analyzing a lagged covariance structure of a network of climate indices, this study details the AMO-signal propagation throughout the Northern Hemisphere via a sequence of atmospheric and lagged oceanic teleconnections, which the authors term the “stadium wave”. Initial changes in the North Atlantic temperature anomaly associated with AMO culminate in an oppositely signed hemispheric signal about 30 years later. Furthermore, shorter-term, interannual-to-interdecadal climate variability alters character according to polarity of the stadium-wave-induced prevailing hemispheric climate regime. Ongoing research suggests mutual interaction between shorter-term variability and the stadium wave, with indication of ensuing modifications of multidecadal variability within the Atlantic sector.’
It is total nonsense to believe that a complex dynamical system will mutiple spatially dispersed and lagged energy pathways will respond simply to any forcing. It is the multiple and powerful negative and positive feedbacks that determine the response of climate to forcing. The scientific sophistication of these people is at the level of appalling.
Forgot to give the link – unforgivable – the study is discussed here – http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2011/04/21/guest-post-atlantic-multidecadal-oscillation-and-northern-hemisphere%E2%80%99s-climate-variability-by-marcia-glaze-wyatt-sergey-kravtsov-and-anastasios-a-tsonis/
“It is the multiple and powerful negative and positive feedbacks that determine the response of climate to forcing.”
And that response approximates as linear.
Climate models show this and they are “complex dynamical systems withl mutiple spatially dispersed and lagged energy pathways”. Exactly the type of system you insist can’t behave like it does.
I would suggest that instead of the scientific sophistication of these people being appalling, rather you are enjoying sophistication where none is warranted!
The complex, chaotic, nonlinear climate system approximates to linear as you approximate to someone with a brain.
Yes, that fairly describes “wot ?? LOL !!”
CH you claimed:
“It is total nonsense to believe that a complex dynamical system will mutiple spatially dispersed and lagged energy pathways will respond simply to any forcing.”
Yet climate models are complex dynamical systems with multiple spatially dispersed and lagged energy pathways.
And they show a simple response to any forcing.
Explain that.
Chief Hydrologist, human cells are of course “complex dynamical systems with multiple spatially dispersed and lagged energy pathways.”
In light of this dynamical complexity, it is reasonable to ask Judith Curry’s question, “What would it take to convince you that (1) smoking is a strong cause of cancer, and (2) dietary supplements are a weak means of preventing/treating/curing cancer?”
Natural Question What lessons does the 20th century’s contentious and vexatious history of cancer research have for the 21st century’s contentious and vexatious history of climate-change research?
Human cells, hearts, brains, nervous systems – are all chaotic systems in the sense of theoretical physics. As is climate. There is nothing vexatious or controversial about this. It is the new climate paradigm. Someone who doesn’t understnad the new paradigm is technically known as a dinosuar. Are you a dinosaur FOMBS?
Fan and Chief need to get a room! You two go together like peas and carrots.
What the kid heard: “Eat every carrot and pee on the plate”.
================
Here Judith’s question has been transposed from a question about causes of climate-change to a question about causes of cancer.
The scientific evidence that tobacco smoking directly causes lung cancer is so strong, that our scientific confidence in this hypothesis amounts to near-certainty.
In contrast, the reasonable hypothesis that cancer is associated to a shortage of vital nutrients, and therefore that nutrient supplements can reduce the incidence of cancer, has been confirmed only weakly (if at all) by extensive epidemiological studies.
And yet (as we all know) very many citizens — along with a rather small cohort of none-the-less high-visibility scientists — passionately advocate dietary modification as a means for the prevention/treatment/cure of cancer.
Conclusion As with nutrient supplements and cancer, so with solar fluctuations and climate-change: public interest and belief in the efficacy of nutrient supplements and solar fluctuations is hugely greater than the scientific evidence warrants.
Why is this, the world wonders? :?: :?: :?:
Why is it hard to convince people, that dietary supplements are not the royal road to cancer prevention/treatment/cure? Why is it hard to convince people, that solar variability is not the royal road to accurate climate-change modeling?
These are the questions that Judith Curry should have asked! :!: :!: :!:
Good morning FOMBS,
Here I was just talking the scientifically unsophisticed – and you show up to prove my point. :cool: :cool: :cool: :cool: :cool:
Here we have an in depth argument that dietary supplements don’t cause climate change. Should that not have been a given FOMBS? But then I am relieved that I do not have to give up low dose aspirin, fish oil, ginger root, hebal teas, garlic, multi-vitamins and an epicure diet to save the planet. Not sure about the vitamins – just insurance, But there are wide ranging benefits from most or all of the others. I am afraid that coffee is my drug of choice. You know what they say – life is too short for bad coffee. Don’t you agree FOMBS?
But you see FOMBS – accurate modelling may be a little beyond us period. As the IPCC says –
‘The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible. Rather the focus must be upon the prediction of the probability distribution of the system’s future possible states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions. Addressing adequately the statistical nature of climate is computationally intensive and requires the application of new methods of model diagnosis, but such statistical information is essential.’ http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/501.htm
You believe the IPCC FOMBS don’t you? Or are you a science denier? Shame on you.
:cool: :cool: :cool: :cool: :cool:
Here is some chaos theory in action – some of us no longer live in a Newtonian universe. It surely can’t hurt to listen FOMBS – maybe you will join us in the 21st century?
:cool: :cool: :cool: :cool: :cool:
Regarding mixing herbal teas with aspirin, check with yer doctoc, Chief!.
Regarding your faith in dietary supplements, keep in mind the practical medical maxim: “Do not demolish a patient’s illusions, unless you can offer them better illusions.” ;) ;) ;)
Oh please – peppermint and chamomile have far less risk than my coffee consumption. Omega 3’s are critical nutrients for many functions. Aspirin has recently been identified as giving protection against some cancers as well as the heart and stroke benefits. In low doses for healthy people there are no problems. Many of us are deficient or nearly so in iron, zinc, vitamin D – taking a multi-vitamin and mineral does no harm.
Because I have insulin resistance – despite not being notably overweight – I have a health plan developed with a team of experts including dieticians. So take it that I am not your patient and don’t give unwelcome advice.
I would suggest that the same goes for climate – but that is perhaps too much to hope for.
:cool: :cool: :cool: :cool: :cool:
Chief, isn’t it weirdly irrational that you have
ª entire faith in your medical “team of experts”, yet
ª near-zero faith in climate-change experts,
given that energy-balance in biology is *far* more dynamically complicated than energy-balance in climate?
Why is that, the world wonders? :?: :?: :?:
‘The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible. Rather the focus must be upon the prediction of the probability distribution of the system’s future possible states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions. Addressing adequately the statistical nature of climate is computationally intensive and requires the application of new methods of model diagnosis, but such statistical information is essential.’ http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/501.htm
But I do believe the science. I have quoted NASA, the IPCC much peer reviewed science. As a hydrologist and environmental scientist I have decades of studying these things behind me. I have studied decadal rainfall regimes since learning about them in the late 1980’s.
Does Judith Curry have less experience than you? Why do you think your expertise and experience has enabled you to reduce climate complexity, chaos and uncertainty to simple ideas when the Judith Curry or the IPCC above can’t?
Let me quote from Tim Palmer – the head of the European Centre for Mid Range Weather Forecasting – who says essentially the same thing as the IPCC above.
‘Prediction of weather and climate are necessarily uncertain: our observations of weather and climate are uncertain, the models into which we assimilate this data and predict the future are uncertain, and external effects such as volcanoes and anthropogenic greenhouse emissions are also uncertain. Fundamentally, therefore, therefore we should think of weather and climate predictions in terms of equations whose basic prognostic variables are probability densities ρ(X,t) where X denotes some climatic variable and t denoted time. In this way, ρ(X,t)dV represents the probability that, at time t, the true value of X lies in some small volume dV of state space.’ (Predicting Weather and Climate – Palmer and Hagedorn eds – 2006)
I don’t think you have the knowledge or experience to understand what that means. What the world wonders is where you get the chutzpah to be so absurdly confident that the nonequilibrium thermodynamics is less complex than cells when it combines so many biological pathways.
I think you are profoundly anti-science. That you are a AGW groupthink space cadet whose confidence comes from a faith in a group dynamic.
I think you are deeply unresponsive and merely take upagain this idiotic anti-science refrain – and to what purpose?
I think this discussion on solar variability vividly illustrates the meaning of the expression “dialogue of the deaf”.
It is impossible to have any rational discourse on the effects of solar variability until climate skeptics stop playing games with the data.
There is a widespread epidemic among climate skeptic blogs, papers and books to cherrypick and distort solar data to exaggerate the solar impact on climate while omitting inconvenient or contradicting data.
For example take this slide from the Oregon Petition:
http://www.petitionproject.org/gw_article/Slide05.png
It alleges to show a strong correlation between US temperature and solar activity.
But the pattern of global temperature doesn’t match that of US temperature, so if solar activity correlates so well with US temperature it logically means it DOESN’T correlate well with global temperature.
This inconvenient fact is glossed over by the Oregon Petition which only compares solar activity to US temperature and Arctic Temperature.
If the Oregon Petition thinks their solar activity plot is so good, why not compare it to global temperature and inform the readers of the extremely important conclusion that solar activity doesn’t correlate with the recent global warming?
Skeptics are playing games.
lolwot, we will see who is playing games if we see AR5 citing GCM results before they figure out what is causing all that non forced variability.
http://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/black-or-white
Il faut imaginer Sysyphe heureux.
— Albert Camus
C’est difficile d’imaginer Sysyphe pas heureux.
=========================
It is only a fallacy if it isn’t black or white. Sometimes things are. Lets see what you have come up with to show how they can use model results before this is resolved.
As a defense of a failed paradigm, AR5 may have a credibility life span of the Gergis paper. As an example of failed institutional curiosity, it will be immortal.
===============
longbets.org
Bet on cooling ahead. It’s more likely on almost all terms.
============
Your prophecies, your bets.
Just playing the odds. We are past the Holocene Max.
==============
You’re not playing anything until you bet, kim,
Except perhaps parlor games, which you lost, since
The first rule of parlor games is never to repeat oneself.
On the morning after, some poor slob had to sweep a couple of inches of catastrophe off the parlor floor and heave it in the ash heap.
========================
Glorifying yourself again,
Confusing parlor games with rap contests.
Might very well be suicidal
At Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai.
On Sunday, Slob Sisyphus swept the same mess up the ash heap.
=======
AR5 is irrelevant already. The U.S. election in November will determine whether the CAGW movement continues or not. If conservatives do not win sufficient power to derail the EPA decarbonization train, it will continue unabated, regardless of AR5. If conservatives do win, it will be starved of funding.
Besides, the AR5 will be exactly what it is designed to be – a political document, produced by a political agency, for a political purpose, compiled by “politicized scientists,” as directed by their political patrons.
Here’s my prediction of the future.
Headline:
“AR5 Summary for Policy Makers Declares – It’s Worse Than We Thought.”
Steven,
In that case, nothing prevents the two parties to play games.
The Greeks did not portray Sisyphus’ [1] predicament
As something cheerful, dear him, and we all know how
Auditors ought to remain cheerful, which coincides with
Camus’ take on human fate [3].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus
[2] http://neverendingaudit.tumblr.com/post/409255457
[3] http://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/00/pwillen1/lit/msysip.htm
PS: Fair translation, though it might be more natural to say something like
> Il est difficile de ne pas imaginer Sysyphe heureux.
This example should show explain my strange word orders.
Perhaps Sysyphus would have taken up rolling the rock as a hobby. Perhaps Camus had a girlfriend with leathers and whips. I have no idea if Sysyphus was happy or not. He wasn’t given an option. I must at least find it interesting or I wouldn’t be here.
Could be an honest mistake. Maybe they haven’t figured out the US is part of the globe.
Is it?
The US has almost 2% of the world’s surface area and almost 4.5% of the world’s population.
lolwot, playing games with the data is a problem. Did you know that there are a variety of Lean et al. solar TSI reconstructions? It is true, they didn’t get it right the first time around. Since then the variation has been reduced to about 1Wm-2 that can only cause 0.1 to 0.25 C of impact on global climate. That is a tiny amount of energy in the grand scheme of things. The oceans though don’t mind.
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-uZxyJ_2G8mE/UGcX7DuZjCI/AAAAAAAAD-4/sxWfZqGh6p8/s879/no%2520solar%2520impact.png
That little 0.1 to 0.25 C is just fine with them. So that is all, a tiny little 0.1 to 0.25C impact of solar, a little ripple on the energy pond.
http://redneckphysics.blogspot.com/2012/09/because-it-gets-amplified.html
Actually 1W/m2 TSI change (1366 to 1367) must be divided by four because it is projected onto a sphere. If the earth were an ideal black body that 250 milliWatts changes the temperature by 0.04C. So to even fluff up the number to 0.1C means you have to do some good ole climate science math where we multiply it by 3 for the mythical mystical water vapor amplification. The fun just never stops in climate science math.
David, the 1 Wm-2 would have to be divided by 4 to consider “global” change in forcing. Since the oceans receive most of their energy in the tropical band, dividing by 2 would be more appropriate for a oceans impact. The “global” assumption that all forcing should be treated equal is a large part of the confusion. Think about it.
Yes, global forcing is only useful when comparing with the global temperature response. For example 1 W/m2 in a typical 11 -year cycle should be divided by four and multiplied by 0.7 for global albedo, leaving about 0.2 W/m2. Now, with a variability of 0.2 C in global temperature in the 11-year cycle you get a sensitivity of 1 C per W/m2, which translated to CO2 forcing, would be 3.7 C per doubling.
JimD, the “global” cuts both ways. With the majority of the energy absorbed in the oceans the atmospheric impact is dependent on the ocean oscillations. The oceans don’t not respond to atmospheric forcing equally by latitude. That is the basic non-linear dynamics aspect we have been trying to communicate. Where matters as much as how much.
Capt. D., I am not sure where you get with that line of reasoning when the global forcing change causes a bigger response than average in the Arctic and less in the tropics, but the average response is what matters to the energy budget.
JimD, I get that crazy notion from the failure of the models to post-dict climate and their not doing a bang up job predicting climate. The northern hemisphere is much more sensitive to all forcing than the southern hemisphere and the southern hemisphere drive the “unforced variations” that impact long term climate. “Average” doesn’t seem to be cutting it :)
In the big picture of the energy balance, ‘average’ is the bottom line of the ledger. It counts more than anything.
JimD, “In the big picture of the energy balance, ‘average’ is the bottom line of the ledger. It counts more than anything.”
Probably why the books don’t balance. There is a big difference between average and uniform. A uniform forcing could be usefully averaged. An average force is meaningless without knowing where and how it is applied.
Indeed they don’t balance, because there is a debt called ocean heat content that will get paid back too, but at the moment that debt is growing with a deficit caused by fossil fuel burning minus the amount of warming we have paid with so far. In the end, to continue this analogy, we are buying our fossil fuel burning with our global warming. Is it worth it when other forms of energy don’t impose such a cost?
I might add that the positive feedback including water vapor is the interest rate that nature has imposed for this.
JimD, “I might add that the positive feedback including water vapor is the interest rate that nature has imposed for this.” You mean the positive feedback with negative impact :) I believe there has been some research on soils, wet and dry. For some reason the spectrum of dry soils is stronger in the CO2 spectrum than wet soils, something about notches. So a dry sandy soil with low carbon content emits more energy in the bandwidth absorbed by CO2. A wet surface would emit more energy in the “window” notch of the spectrum.
Since the “average” impact of concern is at the surface, not the ERL, the emission spectrum of surface materials, not the “average” albedo should be considered.
Perhaps that is why local marshland and retention pond projects are recommended to offset UHI effect. I think Dr. Curry had a post on that which most radiant only affectionadoes pooh poohed. But do you really think a green painted asphalt slab has the same thermal impact as a field of clover? The “average” albedo would be the same.
Maybe Dr. Curry should have a post on land use change again?
It is no coincidence that shifts in ocean and atmospheric indices occur at the same time as changes in the trajectory of global surface temperature. Our ‘interest is to understand – first the natural variability of climate – and then take it from there. So we were very excited when we realized a lot of changes in the past century from warmer to cooler and then back to warmer were all natural,’ Tsonis said.
Four multi-decadal climate shifts were identified in the last century coinciding with changes in the surface temperature trajectory. Warming from 1909 to the mid 1940’s, cooling to the late 1970’s, warming to 1998 and declining since. The shifts are punctuated by extreme El Niño Southern Oscillation events. Fluctuations between La Niña and El Niño peak at these times and climate then settles into a damped oscillation. Until the next critical climate threshold – due perhaps in a decade or two if the recent past is any indication.
These are of course the same periods as the US temperature trajectories, Aand those for Alaska, Canada, the Arctic, England etc. These are climate shifts and until the science deniers get up to spped with the latest thinking – there will be no progress.
Chief, ain’t it a whole lot simpler to conclude:
• Smoking causes cancer, so cut-back on smoking.,
• CO2 traps heat, so cut-back on carbon-burning.
Because whenever rational skepticism gets too complicated — in denying either the smoking-cancer link or the CO2-climate link, as examples — that’s when rational skepticism passes-over into outright denialism, eh? :!: :!: :!:
We know that climate is not that simple (minded).
There can be simple explanations of complex phenomena.
True but irrelevant unless you have a simple explanation of climate. We await.
Understanding dawns.
=================
What is relevant is that dumping CO2 into the atmostphere at the rate we do might not be a good idea, considering what we know about climate.
I’m sure you’ll mention this in your coming K-12 programs.
Unless you’ve being paid not to mention this, David?
Actually what we know of the climate (ice age, duh) suggests it might be a very good idea to dump CO2 into the atmosphere. Furthermore what we know of botany very strongly suggests dumping CO2 into the atmosphere is a good idea.
You’re irrational.
Almost certainly, some anthropogenic CO2 will still be in the atmosphere when we do exit the Holocene. There’s a good one over which to cogitate.
==================
Thank you for your invaluable contributions, kim and Dave.
If you don’t know that I describe myself as a climate catastrophist (in the sense of Rene Thom) then have been too busy posturing and too little reading. But the world isn’t warming for a decade or three more.
There is one opportunity in the smoking cycle to intervene – do not inhale. I once went looking for some Cubans in the airport duty free shop. The sign on the cigar stand said that cigars can give you mouth cancer. Although I no longer smoke at all – I did then fall about laughing and decide to take the risk.
In the carbon cycle there are many opportunities for intervention. What if we could sequester 500 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide in a decade or 2.
It is very simple. You see that’s the difference. I have a plan for success – you have a plan for stalemate.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dt8Vc2mwBfw
“What if we could sequester 500 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide in a decade or 2.”
That would be good. But what if we couldn’t? Or even if we could who would pay? That question still needs to be answered whether the proposal is for CO2 sequestration or emissions reductions.
You have asked that before – go do some research and stop pissing in my pocket.
“pissing in your pocket”?
I’m a nice guy, Chief. I’d never do anything like that. Not even if you were on fire :-)
A fan of *MORE* discourse | September 29, 2012 at 8:49 am | Reply
“• CO2 traps heat, so cut-back on carbon-burning.”
Non sequitur, dummy. The earth is in an ice age. Heat is good. CO2 is plant food. Plant food is good.
You’re irrational.
Some of these would be world conquerors just didn’t quite think the whole thing through, did they? I’m amused by the story that Bill Clinton once said that CO2 was plant food, but he only said it once.
======================
Who are you to decide the world’s climate as it has been for 10,000 years should be altered to be much warmer than it’s ever been in human history?
The last 10,000 years show millenial scale natural variation around a gradual cooling trend. I don’t see any evidence that CO2 is powerful enough to get us warmer than the long past Holocenic Maximum, even if we burn all the fossil fuels we can get our grubby little paws on.
=====================
The holocene maximum wasn’t a lot warmer than present.
If we burn through even half of the carbon available we will surpass it. But think: much much higher if we keep burning through it all.
COSMIC RAYS AND THE MILKY WAY (Global Warming)
Jan Veizer, a geologist at the University of Ottawa, reconstructed the
Earth’s temperature record for the last 500 million years, using the
calcium and magnesium isotopes in fossilized seashells. (Half a billion years is how long the Earth’s marine creatures have made seashells.) He was surprised to find a major global warming-cooling cycle every 135 million years, a time period that coincides with no earthly phenomenon.
Then, Nir Shaviv, an astrophysicist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, visited Toronto and told Veizer that cosmic rays striking the Earth cycle up and down over 135 million years as our solar system passes through one of the bright arms of the Milky Way. The Milky Way arms have intense levels of cosmic rays that tend to cool the Earth by stimulating the formation of those low-level clouds that reflect solar radiance back into space.
In a cross-disciplinary study recently published by the Geological Society of America, Veizer and Shaviv conclude that 75 percent of the Earth’s temperature variability in the past 500 million years is due to changes in the varying bombardment by cosmic rays as we pass in and out of the spiral arms of the Milky Way. They write, “Our approach, based on entirely independent studies from astrophysics and geosciences,
yields a surprisingly consistent picture of climate evolution on geological time scales. The global climate possesses a stabilizing negative feedback. A likely candidate for such a feedback is cloud cover.”
Veizer and Shaviv find little correlation between Earth’s climate and carbon dioxide (C02) over the 500 million years. They note CO2 levels have been as much as 18 times higher than today during the Veizer temperature record and were 10 times higher than today’s during the frigid Ordovician glacial period about 440 million years ago. This, to the researchers, suggests that “C02 is not likely to be the principal climate driver.”
In Veizer’s 2005 paper for Geosciences Canada, he says, “Neither atmospheric carbon dioxide nor solar variability can alone explain the magnitude of the observed temperature increase over the last century of about 0.6 deg C.” Therefore, an amplifier is required. “In the [global] climate models, the bulk of the calculated temperature increase is [assumed to be] positive water vapor feedback. In the sun-driven alternative, it may be the cosmic ray flux, energetic particles that hit the atmosphere, potentially generating cloud condensation nuclei. Clouds then cool, reflecting the solar energy back into space.”
How do we decide between the CO2 theory and the sun-climate connection? Veizer says, “Cosmic rays … also generate the [so-called “solar isotopes”] such as beryllium-l0, carbon-14, and chlorine-36. These can serve as indirect proxies for solar activity, and can be measured e.g., in ancient sediments, trees, and shells. Other proxies, such as oxygen and hydrogen isotopes, can reflect past temperatures, while stable carbon isotopes [reflect] levels of carbon dioxide.”
Veizer finds that “empirical observations on all time scales point to celestial phenomena as the principal driver of climate … with greenhouse gases acting only as potential amplifiers. … The tiny carbon cycle is piggybacking on the huge water cycle (clouds included), not driving it. He concludes, “Models and empirical observation are both indispensable tools of science, yet when discrepancies arise, observations should carry greater weight than theory.”
The Veizer-Shaviv projection roughly matches the rate of warming observed by weather satellites in the lower atmosphere since 1979-well below the rate of increase seen in surface thermometers.
Veizer and Shaviv conclude that a doubling of today’s CO2 levels would only increase global temperatures a modest 0.75 deg C. The UN’s IPCC, meanwhile, estimates two to seven times as much warming increase of 1.5 deg to 5.8 deg C from such a CO2 increase, and some modelers claim predictd warming of 11.5 deg C.
Singer & Avery
Unstopable Global Warming
Every 1500 Years
Lets audit Veizer’s paper then. Here’s figure 15.
http://journals.hil.unb.ca/journalimages/GEOCAN/2005/Vol_32/No_01/geocan32_1art01_fig15.jpg
WTF is that. Look at the lower right one. The paper claims the solid line is global temperature. BS. What global temperature record looks remotely like that?
The two graphs on the left don’t even have dates along the X-axis! and the top right one ends in 1995!
This very poor data handling and completely prevents any actual analysis of solar influence on climate in recent decades. For example such plotting hides the breakdown in correlation between these solar metrics. That’s extremely relevant, because if the correlation with cosmic rays and temperature is so great across time, but fails after 1970, that would be strong evidence that the post-1970 warming is due to something different – and we all know what’s happened recently…
Singer and Avery write: “The Veizer-Shaviv projection roughly matches the rate of warming observed by weather satellites in the lower atmosphere since 1979-well below the rate of increase seen in surface thermometers.”
Have to wonder what on Earth they are talking about:
UAH trend since 1979: 0.14C/decade
HadCRUT trend since 1979: 0.14C/decade
And no, the Veizer-Shaviv projection doesn’t at all match this rate of warming. Not remotely.
The whole skeptic approach to solar influence on climate is sloppy, very sloppy. You have to even wonder whether it is so sloppy it could be said to be deliberately dishonest. Especially considering these are the people who have the nerve to complain that the science of solar influence isn’t being done properly.
The IPCC do a far far better (professional even) job of this subject. Skeptics should clean their own house before even thinking of criticizing others.
Yo momma is sloppy and her children are imbeciles.
Jan Veizer on the other hand is a very distinguished scientist.
Really David, so what explains the sloppy graphs in his paper?
Excellent GIRMA.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Veizer#Dispute_about_Influence_of_cosmic_rays_on_Climate_Change
Veizer and Shavis had their reputations and integrity viciously attacked by the usual suspects according to the above and that attack is still ongoing today.
By all means explain figure 15d in Veizer’s paper. What global temperature record is that?
http://journals.hil.unb.ca/journalimages/GEOCAN/2005/Vol_32/No_01/geocan32_1art01_fig15.jpg
But of course we can’t ask such inconvenient questions. David Springer deems questioning of Veizer’s science to be a “vicious attack” and such vicious attacks are unwarranted when Veizer is being used by skeptics to claim recent warming is caused by the Sun.
Good stuff, Girma.
Thanks.
(Lolwot’s grumbling, notwithstanding.)
Max
PS If lolwot wants to find short-term temperature “blips” that do not match longer-term trends (and thus “falsify” the whole hypothesis), he should look at the temperature since 2001 (or 1998) versus atmospheric CO2.
It is not ‘good stuff’. It is the very opposite.
Veizer & Shaviv (2003) is fundamentally flawed. See Overholt et al. (2009).
Not a ‘clockwork’ but a ‘cloud’ universe?
6. A mass of incandescent gas that doesn’t just cause different things to be related it accounts for it.
http://evilincandescentbulb.wordpress.com/2012/08/29/scientists-finally-learn-what-caused-of-climate-change/
H/T to Girma
This is required reading. I hadn’t been aware the linkage between cosmic ray flux and global temperature was so well demonstrated over the past 500 million years.
CO2 as a primary driver of Phanerozoic climate: COMMENT ~Veizer & Shaviv (2005)
Cosmic Rays, Carbon Dioxide and Climate (Rebuttal to V&S 2003) ~Ramstorf, Schmidt, et al (2004)
Celestial driver of Phanerozoic climate? ~Veizer & Shaviv (2003)
A couple of comments on the Ramstorf rebuttal…
“The passage through the four galactic arms should be a regular process; the high variability of the age gaps is not addressed. ”
This seems to reveal a lack of knowledge about Sol’s track through the galaxy. Sol orbits the galactic center at a speed different from the galaxy as a whole which is why it periodically traverses spiral arms. This periodicity should be consistent as the authors state. But Sol also wanders above and below the galactic plane which will alter the entrance and exit times into the densest portion of the spiral arms which aligns with the galactic plane. The authors appear either ignorant of Sol’s path above and below the galactic plane or they are unwilling to state it as an explanation for the noted discrepancy.
The next red flag that popped out at me is in the conclusion where they use the legal trick of argument in the alternative. They state two major conclusions in as many paragraphs. First they conclude that cosmic ray flux and climate correlation does not hold up under scrutiny and in the second paragraph they begin it by saying that even if CRF and climate correlation holds up that Vezier & Shaviv’s estimate of CO2 sensitivity is questionable.
The resemblance to a courtroom doesn’t begin here though. This is a continuation of it. It begins here in an immediate unprofessional 2003 press release from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research denouncing the paper as “useless”, “outdated” and questioning the reputability of the researchers and their methods.
This is another legal tactic called discrediting the witness. It has no place in science.
Shaviv has more on his blog on cosmic rays and climate sensitivity, with links to his published papers:
(his site seems very slow today)
http://www.sciencebits.com/CosmicRaysClimate
http://www.sciencebits.com/OnClimateSensitivity
Obviously there are those who disagree with him, but his work makes scientific sense to me.
@numbnut
‘Yet climate models are complex dynamical systems with multiple spatially dispersed and lagged energy pathways.
And they show a simple response to any forcing.
Explain that.
The models are not spatially distributed – all of the calc’s are sequential. Nonetheless they are chaotic. Multipe diverging solutions are possible within the range of feasible input variables producing ‘irreducible imprecision’. This is part of what the IPCC quote was about.
‘AOS models are therefore to be judged by their degree of plausibility, not whether they are correct or best. This perspective extends to the component discrete algorithms, parameterizations, and coupling breadth: There are better or worse choices (some seemingly satisfactory for their purpose or others needing repair) but not correct or best ones. The bases for judging are a priori formulation, representing the relevant natural processes and choosing the discrete algorithms, and a posteriori solution behavior. Plausibility criteria are qualitative and loosely quantitative, because there are many relevant measures of plausibility that cannot all be specified or fit precisely. Results that are clearly discrepant with measurements or between different models provide a valid basis for model rejection or modification, but moderate levels of mismatch or misfit usually cannot disqualify a model. Often, a particular misfit can be tuned away by adjusting some model parameter, but this should not be viewed as certification of model correctness. ‘
Emphasis mine. By all means read the entire paper. Explain that? A posteriori solution behaviour – they pull it out of their arses.
One can scarcely imagine a more tangential approach to secular changes in surface temperatures than that embodied by these workshops. It is changes in insolation, rather than TSI or SSI, that forces them. And it is the thermal capacitance of materials that determines their values. Inasmuch as clouds control insolation and contribute a major share of the capacitance of the troposphere, research should concentrate on the variablity of global cloud cover and its measurable effects. With its miniscule thermal mass, CO2 is but a distraction.
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Top down can have the same kinds of feedbacks as bottom up. In particular, it may modulate cloud cover (Stephen Wilde’s thesis), which has more potential to drive temperature than CO2.
Thanks Alec.
For readers unfamiliar with my hypothesis I propose that the level of solar activity expands or contracts the polar vortices at the surface thereby pushing the climate zones equatorward when the sun is quiet and pulling them poleward when the sun is active.
Those latitudinal shifts alter jetstream behaviour between zonality and meridionality which significantly affects global cloudiness and the amount of solar energy able to enter the oceans to drive the climate system.
I find that to be an adequate explanation for all the observations so far noted.
If there is an observation that cannot fit such a scenario then I would appreciate an opportunity to consider it.
When looking at TSI, its variation of 1365.9 ± 0.4 W/m² i.e. ± 0.3% looks pretty small and unable to explain climate variability.
Yett TSI is far from being the only parameter characterizing solar cycles.
Looking at Solar index F10.7 (10.7 cm Radioflux that is directly correlated to Sun Spots Number) and Geomagnetic index Ap, one can observe much larger variations
On-going solar cycle 24 is here compared to previous ones, showing F10.7 about 35% lower than average and Ap about 50% lower.
http://users.telenet.be/j.janssens/SC24web/SC24.html
But F10.7 and Ap indices also have significant impact on air density in very high atmosphere (thermosphere above 120 km altitude)
Cf ISO CD-14222 (http://www.spacewx.com/Docs/ISO_CD14222_(G_withComments).pdf
– at 200 km altitude, air density varies from 1.5 to 4.4 10-10 kg/m3 i.e. factor ~3
– at 300 km altitude it varies from 5.9 10-12 to 6.2 10-11 kg/m3 i.e factor ~10
– at 400 km altitude it varies from 4.6 10-13 to 1.6 10-11 kg/m3 i.e factor ~35
– at 500 km altitude it varies from 5.5 10-14 to 5 10-12 kg/m3 i.e factor ~100
Those high scatterings have significant impact on aero-thermal loads (proportional to air density) to which space crafts (launchers and satellites) are submitted during launch phases or re-entry phases.
These variations may also have a significant impact on Earth energy balance and therefore I doubt space weather has only a negligible impact on earth climate.
The AMSU channel 5 temp is hotter than the last 12 years.
Looking back to this thread it’s strange that nobody has discussed the analysis of Lean and Rind where they do a statistical analysis to extract solar signal (as well as ENSO and volcanic components) from the temperature time series over the period 1889-2006 or the paper of Foster and Rahmstorf where they do the same for five different time series over the shorter range 1979-2010. (The pdf-links are from Google Scholar.)
The solar signal comes out clearly in both and appears to explain rather well the flatness of the temperature development over the latest full decade when combined with the shorter term variability due to ENSO. (This period is covered fully by Foster and Rahmstorf).
The analysis done in these papers is done using well known time series to represent solar activity, ENSO and volcanic influence. Both the coefficient and the lag of influence are fitted parameters. Thus the total number of free parameters related to these corrections is six. That affects certainly the reliability of the adjusted time series for making conclusions about its trend and shape over longer periods as the self-correlations in the dataseries makes the total effective number of independent data points per decade rather low, but the solar signal comes out fairly well and should not be influenced much by this uncertainty as far as the quasiperiodic (approx. 11y) solar cycle is concerned.
The clear signals related to well known phenomena mean also that the error estimates obtained from the unadjusted time series using any AR(p) or ARMA(p,q) noise process should be taken as indicative only. None of the the known processes can be described well by AR or ARMA. Therefore the error estimates are known to be based on a wrong assumption. Using the adjusted time series gives a narrower uncertainty range, but brings in it’s own problems. Thus also estimates obtained in this way should be taken with a grain of salt.
‘This paper gives an update on the observed decadal variability of the earth radiation budget (ERB) using the latest altitude-corrected Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE)/Earth Radiation Budget Satellite
(ERBS) Nonscanner Wide Field of View (WFOV) instrument Edition3 dataset. The effects of the altitude correction are to modify the original reported decadal changes in tropical mean (20°N to 20°S) longwave
(LW), shortwave (SW), and net radiation between the 1980s and the 1990s from 3.1, 2.4, and 0.7 to 1.6, 3.0, and 1.4 W m2, respectively. In addition, a small SW instrument drift over the 15-yr period was discovered during the validation of the WFOV Edition3 dataset. A correction was developed and applied to the Edition3 dataset at the data user level to produce the WFOV Edition3_Rev1 dataset. With this final correction, the ERBS Nonscanner-observed decadal changes in tropical mean LW, SW, and net radiation
between the 1980s and the 1990s now stand at 0.7, 2.1, and 1.4 / m2, respectively, which are similar to the observed decadal changes in the High-Resolution Infrared Radiometer Sounder (HIRS) Pathfinder OLR and the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP) version FD record but disagree with the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) Pathfinder ERB record. Furthermore, the observed interannual variability of near-global ERBS WFOV Edition3_Rev1 net radiation is found to be remarkably consistent with the latest ocean heat storage record for the overlapping time period of 1993 to 1999. Both datasets show variations of roughly 1.5W/m2 in planetary net heat balance during the 1990s.’
‘In summary, although there is independent evidence for decadal changes in TOA radiative fluxes over the last two decades, the evidence is equivocal. Changes in the planetary and tropical TOA radiative fluxes are consistent with independent global ocean heat-storage data, and are expected to be dominated by changes in cloud radiative forcing. To the extent that they are real, they may simply reflect natural low-frequency variability of the climate system.’
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-3-23.html
It is difficult to see why this is not ‘known’ at least as well as the other parameters. Especially wrt well known decadal and longer ENSO variaility. It certainly puts a different complexion on LR & FR. Why would that be Pekka? :cool: :cool: :cool: :cool: :cool:
Corrections in Foster & Rahmstorf paper are just plain wrong.
Removal of ENSO and Solar influences should have reduced warming rates, but adjusted data sets, using F&R corrections, surprisingly show higher rates than raw data sets…
Those guys are not scientists but green activists manipulating data to support AGW dogma.
So you know the answer. Thus it must be easy for you to pinpoint the actual error in the paper. Please, tell where it is.
All the components are visible in the paper, which of them is wrong?
Lol, SAM the wonder dog again.
Keep yer eye on them penguins!
It isn’t quite time to rule the sun as a significant driver of the modern climate. There are still questions to be answered on how changes in solar activity may affect storms and transport mechanisms. There are studies that indicate solar activity is correlated to thunderstorms. This may affect the composition of the stratosphere. There is at least one study that indicates the AMO stopped during the MM. This solar cycle should be sufficiently weak to start giving us some answers on these questions.
To rule out I meant to say.
“Two new workshop reports provide insights into what we know and don’t know about the effects of solar variability on climate.”
What exact is climate? What exact is solar variability? What are effects? What are insights into what you don’t know? Who exact is we?
There are a lot of data of chemical indicators and physical indicators about the terrestrial global temperature spectra in the frequency range of month to centuries and millennia. Analysing the magnitudes and frequencies of the well known temperature oscillations leads to the question about the cause and/or nature of the temperature frequencies.
If one assumes that the terrestrial global temperature spectra is related to solar physical processes then it is necessary to look first for geometries in the hole solar system, because the Sun is part of the geometrical motion of the energies in the solar system.
Comparing some simple synodic solar time functions with the time function of the isotope data in ice cores for 400 years, it shows that there are some geometrical correlations:
http://www.volker-doormann.org/images/svalbard_vs_ghi6.gif
This holds also for the comparison of simple synodic solar time functions with the time function of the UAH global temperature data for the last 3 years:
http://www.volker-doormann.org/images/uah_temp_vs_ghi11.gif
Additional it can be shown that the netto global sea level oscillations are phase coherent with the solar tide function of the synodic frequency of the Mercury/Earth couple:
http://www.volker-doormann.org/images/sea_level_vs_solar_tide.gif
Climate proxies contain not only temperature amplitudes of bad data quality but also temperature frequencies, and this means that there must be geometrical oscillators which create the terrestrial global heat current.
It is simple an individual work using science, not more and not less. There is no need for a workshop knowing nothing about geometries and temperature frequencies in the solar system.
V.
Wow. It sounds good, but I’ll stick to the simple non-correlation between solar activity and GAT evident since the 1970s.
BBD
Looks like you’ve fallen into the same trap as IPCC, by considering only solar irradiance.
Of course, IPCC concedes that its “level of scientific understanding of natural (solar) forcing is low” – so I suppose that’s the case for you, as well.
To improve this, check out some of the several independent solar studies that conclude that around half of the past warming (not 7%, as assumed by IPCC) can be attributed to the unusually high level of 20th century solar activity (highest in several thousand years).
Stockwell (2011), Shapiro et al. (2011), Scafetta (2010), Scafetta + West (2006), Solanki et al. (2004), Shaviv + Veizer (2003), Geerts + Linacre (1997), Lean et al. (1995).
Happy reading!
Max
If you want to believe in mystery forcings, who am I to disagree?
Here’s a boo-hiss IPCC graph of GHG forcing 10ka – present. Of course correlation does not imply causation. But then what can we make of the GAT/solar non-correlation since the 1970s? It’s all a bit of a puzzler. :-)
In this case the causation is explicit.
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-3-23.html
We are taliking about I presume the lack of increase in the TSI since the 1980’s – check the TSI (annually updated here) -http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/data/tsi_data.htm – But there is also top down UV forcing which peaked in the 90’s as well as lags in the dynamically complex system. So the argument that sun and climate parted company is either irrelvant – something else caused the cloud changes – or the sun is more subtly driving climate. Either way the simple cult of AGW groupthink space cadets meme doesn’t hold water vapour.
We know that Pacific variability causes cloud changes, we know that conditions in the Pacific varies on interannual to millenial timescales. The satellite evidence is consistent.
It feels like grounhog day again – why is that BVD? :cool; :cool: :cool: :cool: :cool:
Talk, talk.
Imagine that I am a businessman. Imagine that you were one too.
Graph 1
Graph 2
What do you buy?
;-)
In this case the causation is explicit.
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-3-23.html
Is it groundhog day again? You can ignore whatever you don’t like but it doesn’t make for a balanced picture.
http://www.image.ucar.edu/idag/Papers/Wong_ERBEreanalysis.pdf
It is all a bit of cult of AGW groupthink space cadet inability to process information anomalies. This in fact points directly to the reason why the world isn’t warming for a decade or three more. Hah hah.
Chief,
Using loosely the language of chaos theory the Earth system is at all times within some attractor that may be simple or complex. It’s location within the attractor is not predictable further to the future than days or at most weeks but the location and shape of the attractor is more predictable. We can at least predict confidently the repetition of annual seasons far to the future.
What else we can predict is more debatable but no simple principle tells that having skill in longer term projections on the location and shape of the attractor is not possible. CO2 does certainly affect the energy balance. How that happens when feedbacks are included is badly known but the basic influence is there. The natural variability is complex but past history tells something about its likely strength.
When we have rapid warming that agrees in timing rather well with expectations based on theoretical considerations before it became visible, and when no other mechanism gets close to predicting it and struggles with being consistent with it, we do have a strong case for attributing much of the warming to the theoretical explanation.
We know that there are additional external factors (solar variability and volcanic activity) and that there’s internal variability that influences the temperature time series. These effects are strong enough to make detailed estimates of the recent “quasitrend” imprecise. I use the word “quasitrend” to emphasize the fact that the slower warming cannot continue linearly over long periods. It was definitely not linear before 1979 which is the starting point of Foster – Rahmstorf paper (and shown as nonlinear in Lead – Rind). The apparent linearity visible in Foster – Rahmstorf adjusted data series is probably enhanced by end point effects in making the adjustment, but that’s a rather minor concern.
A larger concern is the role of aerosols in Lean – Rind. Being skeptical on the correctness of that component leaves more evidence for multidecadal variability. With that evidence we have more reason to think that the recent “quasitrend” may also have a significant contribution from internal variability but the earlier variability indicates that this contribution is not likely to be a major part of the whole – and that applies both to periodic variability and to non-periodic shifts.
CH
The evidence is clear and simple: it’s RF from GHGs, not solar. Your transparent dodge and topic change does not cut it.
BVD,
I have clearly not changed any subject. The IPCC graph is dervived from the Wong et al reference. You are profoundly unscientific and proceed only on the basis of the groupthink meme. You have no rational explanation for the data – and so deny it. Not much I can do for your cognitive problems space cadet.
Max,
All the evidence you refer to is in the correlations of earlier data. There’s no theory to support that. If you lose the correlation you lose all evidence – and that has happened over the most recent period of 30 years. It’s totally clear that the earlier correlations do not provide any explanation for the warming of recent decades. This is enough to kill the value of those past correlations in making forecasts.
We have another explanation. That other explanation was predicted before it was visible – not fully quantitatively but predicted anyway. The likely real solar influence helps in explaining why the warming has not been uniform and thus actually strengthens the evidence for a warming that has not stopped as shown by Lean and Rind as well as Foster and Rahmstorf.
You score zero points with your counterarguments.
Pekka
Using loosely the language of chaos theory the Earth system is at all times within some attractor that may be simple or complex. It’s location within the attractor is not predictable further to the future than days or at most weeks but the location and shape of the attractor is more predictable. We can at least predict confidently the repetition of annual seasons far to the future.
This is correct.
But then if one wants to do some physics, one has to use the language much less loosely.
First the phase space where the Earth system moves on a dynamical orbit is an infinite dimensional Hilbert space.
So it doesn’t make much sense to talk about “shapes” and “locations” (coordinates) for infinite dimensional manifolds.
There are hints that 3D Navier Stokes might have a finite dimensional attractor but as we are talking about spaces like L²(a,b), we are talking about billions of dimensions.
For a thing as complex as the Earth system there is not even a hint about a finite dimensionality even if there are hints about boundedness.
The best “simple” image I could give about the Earth system is the one of a large number (trillions) of local (fixed space coordinates) temporally chaotic oscillators. Those oscillators are spatially correlated (think f.ex ocean currents).
Now if you study 2 such local oscillators (f.ex one in Tombuktu and one in Punta Arenas) and postulate no spatial correlations, you will find much simpler and low dimensional attractors. These attractors explain then some trivial observations like “it will rain more often in PA than in T”, “The days in T will be more often warmer in T than in PA” etc.
These are testable (statistical) predictions of chaos theory and one doesn’t need to know anything about the local processes to make these predictions. Obviously knowing something about external factors like sun and clouds helps to interpret but is not strictly necessary for the predictions.
So again, being able to make some statistical local predictions is trivial and obviously can’t be used (despite some ignorant fools doing exactly that) to say “See, the chaos doesn’t exist because I can predict that it will rain more in PA than in T”
The chaos theory is not “anything goes” – on the contrary it imposes some pretty strong constraints. Yes I suppose that you know t that but not everybody does.
Now, and this part is massively misunderstood, the approximation of local non spatially correlated chaotic oscillators doesn’t allow at all to conclude anything about the dynamics of the whole system.
It doesn’t produce spatial structures like Gulf Stream, Enso etc.
There it is necessary to consider the whole spatio temporal chaotic system with all its interactions and it is here that the unpredictability plays.
Of course and just to be sure, the local statistical predictions still stay more or less valid but the PDFs are no more invariant but vary with time with generally unknown time constants.
In other words you are now for instance unable to predict the topology and dynamics of the Gulf Stream.
Etc.
Pekka, if more than one thing is going on then a correlation is not lost just because it stops happening. That it happened is still evidence of a possible connection.
As for your second para, you seem to be arguing that the sun can retard warming but cannot cause it. This makes little sense.
David,
I have no idea of what you find in my second para. I cannot see anything like that there.
“Imagine that I am a businessman. Imagine that you were one too.”
Well I am a businessman, primarily, and I wouldn’t buy either Graph 1 or Graph 2.
Graph 1 ignores the cumulative and lagged effect of the highest spell of solar activity since the Mediaeval Warm Period some 1000 years ago.
Graph 2 tags a near vertical hockey stick onto a suspect historical proxy record and hasn’t been reflected in the temperature trend of the past 15 years.
So BBD is the snake oil salesman here.
1/. Massive overstatment. See my earlier comment.
2/ ‘Suspect’? You aren’t allowed to go around saying things like that unless you have evidence. Where is it? This applies to both the calculated RF and the reliability of ice-core CO2 proxies. I’m not interested in lies from WUWT either; I want to see multiple published studies. If you don’t have this evidence, we will continue with the well-supported (by multiple published studies) CO2 reconstruction and RF as presented in AR4.
I agree with Stephen here. Nicely put.
Which reminds me.
ENSO, solar, GAT.
What else we can predict is more debatable but no simple principle tells that having skill in longer term projections on the location and shape of the attractor is not possible. CO2 does certainly affect the energy balance. How that happens when feedbacks are included is badly known but the basic influence is there. The natural variability is complex but past history tells something about its likely strength.
When we have rapid warming that agrees in timing rather well with expectations based on theoretical considerations before it became visible, and when no other mechanism gets close to predicting it and struggles with being consistent with it, we do have a strong case for attributing much of the warming to the theoretical explanation.
The natural variability includes cloud radiative forcing feedbacks that can and have been measured. In the satellite era – most of the period of recent warming – these exceed by 3 or 4 the theoretical influence of greenhouse gas increases. Is there any substantive reason to reject the data out of hand? None that are obvious – apart from the difficult history and many corrections. But as I say – it is as well known as the other factors. As for chaos – it is metatheory for the behaviour of the system but really just suggests where answers can be found and why simple causality fails.
I don’t know if these papers have been linked yet or not and since one involves solar I will link them here.
On solar variability and clouds:
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/7/4/044004/pdf/1748-9326_7_4_044004.pdf
On long term heat transport:
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v3/n6/full/ncomms1901.html?WT.ec_id=NCOMMS-20120612
Both are from this year and may be new to many.
The iopscience link says amongst much else:
“Coherence plots show that for most of the selected regions cloud type varies in phase or anti-phase with solar activity, depending on cloud
type and geographical region.”
Which is exactly what I would expect to see in light of my proposition that the effect of solar variability is to shift the latitudinal position of climate zones and jet stream tracks.
Quite obviously, some regions will become more cloudy as climate zone interfaces or jet stream tracks move towards them and other regions will become less cloudy as climate zone interfaces or jet stream tracks move away from them.
Hence the combination of in phase and out of phase plots.
I regard this as highly persuasive evidence that my diagnosis is correct.
The nature.com link says amongst much else:
“Over the last millennium, the winter NAO system has been variable, with a strongly positive NAO mode during Medieval times and a neutral to slightly negative NAO mode during the LIA. Over recent decades, the NAO system has been in strong positive mode, similar to the MCA”
Solar activity was high in the MWP, low in the LIA and high recently.
Which suggests that the NAO mode is linked to solar activity which I aver influences the global air circulation by expanding or contracting the polar vortices thereby pulling the climate zones and jet streams poleward when the sun is active and pushing them equatorward when the sun is inactive.
After a period of lag due to the thermal inertia of water the sea surface circulations such as the Gulf Stream respond to the changes in air circulation.
The NAO system is now in the process of going back to neutral or negative as a result of the quiet sun allowing the polar vortices to become less intense vertically and so flop about horizontally thereby cooling the middle latitudes.
In the process global cloudiness is increasing again so that less energy is now getting into the oceans to fuel the climate system.
More persuasive evidence that my diagnosis is correct.
Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) is not Total as defined in ANSI/ISO.
Definition: “The Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) is the full-disk (whole Sun) solar irradiance at 1 ua (AU) integrated across all wavelengths and is reported in units of W m-2 (clauses 2.1, 2.2, and 7.2). The solar constant, described in clause 2.3, is the mean value of the TSI.” (ANSI. Space environment (natural and artificial) Process for determining solar irradiances. ISO, December 12, 2005.(Draft), section 6.2 Total Solar Irradiance
http://www.spacewx.com/pdf/ISO_DIS_21348_E_revB.pdf
Graphic of measured TSI:
http://mysite.verizon.net/cache.22/SET_EM_TSI_Coverage.jpg
The observed range (“Coverage”) is 0.05 to 100,000 nanometers within an Electromagnetic Spectrum of 0.000001 to 100,000,000,000 nanometers. This implies that these instruments do not yet measure Gamma Rays, Hard X-Rays, Far Infrared, Microwave and Radio.
Emphasis is currently on Solar Spectral Irradiance (SSI), the current, instrument-based satellite observations. These began in 2001 with TIMED and continue with SORCE. (Kopp, 2007 p 6)
The range of the Solar Spectrum continues to be compared to a black body radiation curve, plus the EUV spectrum to 10 nm (Lean, et al). I suspect (but cannot demonstrate) that this is an early artifact of trying to extend surface observations and proxies with satellite data.
– Detection of long-term trends remains uncertain (Lean, Harder, Kopp)
– Climate data requirements for SSI require instruments that:
— Have absolute accuracy of 0.01%, or
— Stability of 0.001% per year and continuity (Kopp, p29)
– To identify a Maunder Minimum OR a long-term trend of 0.1% per 100 years requires:
— In TSI, detection would be marginal; accuracy would take 35 years for 1-sigma OR
— Stability of 0.001% per year for more than 1 solar cycle.
— In SSI, improvements in stability would be needed to achieve continuity.
— Absolute accuracy improvement to 0.1% is probably possible, but nevertheless would take 100 years to detect a long term trend.
It would seem that an assertion that TSI/SSI has no long-term trend or cycles would require the same instrumentation as that needed to detect a trend.
The classic image of Earth and Moon sent from 30 million miles by the NEAR spacecraft en route to Asteroid 433EROS shows clouds as a striking bright feature . Clouds not only cool us by precipitation but reflect solar radiation according to area. Bubble chambers reveal nuclear particles by water precipitation – an established fact.
Galactic cosmic rays are in reality heavy radionuclides, whose penetration into the troposphere ( cloud forming region) is believed to be inversely related to solar wind activity. Galactic nuclides result from the birth of neutron stars and black holes in supernovae. Such events are distant, and difficult for politicians and zealots to tax and regulate, let alone deploy as a rationale for repressive and and anti-human regimes!
Hence, they fall back on a modern version of Original Sin. We, the people, can and should reject this and work for a genunely hopeful and expansionary future for our descendants.
Visit http://www.spacerenaissance.org for a positive alternative to the futures offered by Malthus and Orwell, now dressed in Green garb.
My family members always say that I am wasting my time
here at web, but I know I am getting familiarity daily by reading such pleasant articles or reviews.