by Judith Curry
Climate Dialogue has a very interesting discussion What will happen during a new Maunder Minimum? This is my favorite Climate Dialogue so far.
Climate Dialogue is a remarkable blogospheric experiment. From the About page:
[Climate Dialogue is] an international blog where invited scientists discuss controversial topics in climate science. There are several blogs that facilitate discussions between climate experts but since the climate debate is highly polarized and politicized, blog discussions between experts with opposing views are rare.
ClimateDialogue.org is the result of a request by the Dutch parliament to facilitate the scientific discussions between climate experts representing the full range of views on the subject. It is funded by the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment.
The aim of ClimateDialogue.org is to establish what the discussants agree on, where disagreements remain and what the possible or likely reasons behind these disagreements are. The project by no means aims to solve controversies nor give an objective, scientific final judgment on the topics under discussion.
In case you missed it, I participated in the inaugural discussion on Arctic sea ice.
Introduction
Marcel Crok provides an introduction to the current dialogue at WUWT, excerpts:
People familiar with climate discussions know that the sun has been and still is a popular argument to explain at least part of the warming since 1750. Also the Little Ice Age coincided with the Maunder Minimum, a period with few visible sunspots. So if the sun played a role in the past, why shouldn’t it in the present?
But figuring out how the sun has varied in e.g. the past millennium isn’t easy. AR5 said that in terms of radiative forcing since 1750 the influence of the sun is almost negligible.
Meanwhile solar activity has dropped to levels last seen a century ago. Some scientists suggest the sun might go into a new Maunder Minimum in the coming decades. What influence will that have on our climate?
We have a record number of participants, namely five. Two of them – Nicola Scafetta (USA) and Jan-Erik Solheim (NOR) – believe in a large role of the sun. Mike Lockwood (GBR) – in line with AR5 – thinks the sun is only a minor player. The two other participants – Ilya Usoskin (FIN) and José Vaquero (ESP) – seem somewhere in between.
In our Introduction we asked the participants the following questions:
1) What is according to you the “best” solar reconstruction since 1600 (or even 1000) in terms of Total Solar Irradiance?
2) Was there a Grand Solar Maximum in the 20th century?
3) What is your preferred temperature reconstruction for the same period? How much colder was the Little Ice Age than the current warm period?
4) What is the evidence for a correlation between global temperature and solar activity?
5) How much of the warming since pre-industrial would you attribute to the sun?
6) Is the Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) of the sun all that matters for the Earth’s climate? If not, what amplification processes are important and what is the evidence these play a role?
7) what is the sun likely going to do in the next few decades and what influence will it have on the climate? Is there consensus on the predictability of solar variability?
The Climate Dialogue moderators have prepared a VERY GOOD Introduction that provides context and summarizes they key issues surrounding the main questions and issues under debate.
Responses
Mike Lockwood pretty much articulates a position that is consistent with the AR5 – the sun plays only a very minor role. He prefers the PMOD version of the TSI measurements. He acknowledges that there is some evidence for solar influence on regional/seasonal climates.
Nicola Scafetta argues that the Sun has a significant influence on the climate. Scafetta’s essay does a very good job outlining his overall approach and reasoning framework for his research – something that seems missing in his individual papers. His concluding paragraph:
After having noted that not even CO2 and other greenhouse gases, either of natural or of anthropogenic origin, could be the cause, let alone the primary cause, of global climate changes, Quinn (2010) wrote: “Evidence indicates that global warming is closely related to a wide range of solar-terrestrial phenomenon, from the sun’s magnetic storms and fluctuating solar wind all the way to the Earth’s core motions. Changes in the Solar and Earth magnetic fields, changes in the Earth’s orientation and rotation rate, as well as the gravitational effects associated with the relative barycenter motions of the Earth, Sun, Moon, and other planets, all play key roles. Clear one-to-one correspondence exists among these parameters and the Global Temperature Anomaly on three separate time scales.”
Jan-Erik Solheim is the most skeptical of the essays – most of the 20th century warming is due to the Sun. Solheim (and Scafetta) prefer the ACRIM data to the PMOD, and Solheim supports the Hoyt and Schatten reconstruction. He presents the arguments for a Grand Solar Maximum in the 20th century. His conclusion: Evaluating these parameters, I arrive at the conclusion that the global temperature may during the next solar deep minimum fall to a level slightly higher than around 1900 which means -0.6 ±0.2 °C relative to the last decade.
Ilya Usoskin emphasizes uncertainty. His concluding statement is: Concerning the influence on climate, I think we are unable at the moment to make a realistic assessment to what will be the consequence, since many processes are still poorly understood and modelled.
Jose Vaquero states that he is fairly skeptical about a new Maunder Minimum. My personal opinion is that we don’t have a clear definition of Grand Episodes (Maxima and Minima), including the Maunder Minimum. I am in fact pretty skeptical about the possibility of a new great episode. I think we do not know enough about how the solar dynamo works and, therefore, it is not possible to offer predictions. In fact, the studies that suggest a Grand sunspot minimum are based on observational aspects and not on the physics of the Sun.
JC reflections
For additional context, see my previous solar posts:
- IPCC: solar variations don’t matter
- Effects of solar variability on climate
- 21st century solar cooling
- Solar discussion thread
- Solar snooze discussion thread
It seems that there is a lot more uncertainty about Sun-climate connections than acknowledged by the IPCC (and incorporated into attribution and climate sensitivity analyses.) A critical issue in sorting this out is the debate about PMOD versus ACRIM observations/analyses. This is apparently not settled, and I’m not sure how this will be settled going forward.
I really like having 5 experts contribute essays – the previous Dialogues have only had 3 experts. CD has been having difficulty in getting experts to participate, particularly on the ‘consensus’ side. Most scientists aren’t accustomed to participating in the blogosphere. In the solar discussion, unfortunately there have been very few comments, especially from the experts. Maybe the discussion will pick up.
And of course I encourage dialogue on this topic here!
Nominally, it’s the sun, stupid.
JC: It seems that there is a lot more uncertainty about Sun-climate connections than acknowledged by the IPCC (and incorporated into attribution and climate sensitivity analyses.)
The error bars in use on CS studies are a joke. Except it isn’t funny the taxpayer has been fleeced billions to pay for the hype. And less funny that old folks can’t afford their energy bills due to ‘green’ taxes.
The day of reckoning is coming for those who deliberately underplayed uncertainty.
On the other side of the coin, the evidence that Solar is a major player is becoming stronger, and as our talkshop model improves and now we can accurately hindcast 4000 years of 10Be as used in Steinhilber et al’s TSI reconstruction.
https://tallbloke.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/salvador4k-fit2.png
“The day of reckoning is coming for those who deliberately underplayed uncertainty.”
I drool for that day, tallbloke. Of course the credulous, intellectually lazy, cognitively undead, mostly liberal alarmist public will say, “Don’t blame us. We were only listening to the scientists.” But that doesn’t make it. The facts…or lack thereof…are out there. If a lazy, not very bright, good for nothing like me can figure this out, just about anyone can.
Rog, the work your group has done is phenomenal to say the least. The Landscheidt minimum will end this debate.
tallbloke,
You write “The error bars in use on CS studies are a joke.” You then provide a graph with no error bars. One of the problems that I had with the study FOMD was selling (likely still is) of Hansens was that Hansen provided error bars for some things and then, if I recall correctly, none for natural causes including solar. This he did on the same graph! In this particular case I am being critical in the hopes of getting a better answer, and also that possibly you have that information someplace. I would really appreciate a further discussion of why you think that the uncertainty shown by others is incorrect, and what the actual uncertainties are.
ATAndB: Cannot uncertainty be too uncertain for error bars? With the sun climate connection are we not at the conjecture state, too early to weigh uncertainty. I take tallblokes comment as, not that the error bars in error, but that it’s a joke to even fathom the use of error bars.
A fair comment, the error bars would simply need to be to large to be displayed to not be displayed on the graph. I would like, however, further discussion of what range the error is. Given that we have a graph it would seem to me that someone has at least thought about the uncertainty and I would expect that the published source for the graph would have a discussion of it.
ATAndB commented
Here’s the surface station count for NCDC’s GSoD dataset.
http://content.science20.com/files/images/SampleSize_1.jpg
My thinking is that surface temperature error would grow inverse proportionally to the sample count.
Okay, took another look at this. If tallbloke is referring to Total Solar Irradiance During the Holocene by Steinhilber, et. al. 2009, and Figure 2 of that report, then the error is in gray for the figure. However, not sure about where the VEJ and Spin Orbit Coupling is coming from, or its error, and not sure which data is which on the graph given here, or what happened to the error (it is not obvious even if you blow up the above graph versus the graph in the report where it is). Maybe the gray makes the graph cluttered so it was eliminated?
Thanks, Professor Curry, for reminding folks of the Sun’s influence on planet Earth: See “Solar energy,” Advances in Astronomy (submitted 1 Sept 2014) https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10640850/Solar_Energy.pdf
I admire your steadfastedness, Oliver. Contemplation of your alternative view is a magnificent and continuing exercise in thinking outside of the boxes.
======================
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/522544main_missingsunspots.jpg?w=400
Thanks, Kim.
My conclusions [1] are based largely on information from the autobiographies of two great scientists that died in 2001:
1. The British astronomer, astrophysicist and cosmologist, Sir Fred Hoyle
2. The Japanese-American nuclear geo-, cosmo-chemist, Kazuo Kuroda (aka Paul K. Kuroda)
1. “Solar energy,” Advances in Astronomy (submitted 1 Sept 2014) https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10640850/Solar_Energy.pdf
All too often the most simple things are unfathomable. If we cannot believe that we will believe anything; and, we’d all be as irrelevant as the IPCC that sees the hand of man behind every change in the climate. Now we’re in a hiatus of reason because academia predicted global warming due to humanity’s release of CO2 into the atmosphere but the heat has been missing for 16, 19 or 26 years, depending on how the pause in global warming is measured. And, we have a lot of empirical evidence suggesting climate change has always happened without humanity’s help. These facts just add more questions to the many we already have for which no one has the answer –e.g.,
• What if the missing heat is just not there?
• What about temperature predictions of climatologists?
• If the lost heat simply does not exist is the AGW hypothesis false?
• And, if AGW theory is all wrong what about climate change?
• Instead of global warming could the lack of warming continue?
• Will there be a cooling trend… for decades?
• Is the Earth heading for a redux of an overdue ice age?
• What about the observational evidence about the Sun?
• Has it not been anomalously quiet?
• Was in not previously the most active in 3000 years?
• Does humanity have a rendezvous with a date made in heaven?
• Is Nature bringing more warming or cooling?
• Will Nature flirt with the likes of a snowball Earth?
• Will the next ice age be the last, for 90,000 years?
• Are we born only to pursue knowledge?
• Are we destined to act in ignorance?
• Is that Nature knocking on the door?
• What if we’ll never know?
Where are we when it comes to understanding the nature of climate change –e.g., if it ever happened before it’ll probably happen again. If David Evans says climate will change no matter what we do, then he must understand the dynamics of climate because that is what it does: it changes. “Is California,” asks Bob Tisdale, “prepared for a drought that lasts multiple decades or even centuries?” It has happened before, Pacific coast ENSO-inspired (El Nino and La Nina) periods of drought.
http://depts.washington.edu/amath/old_website/research/articles/Tung/journals/GRL-solar-07.pdf
The observed warming of the 20 th century was due to the sun.
Each solar cycle adds 0.1% of the solar constant to the earth’s climate and as energy is cumulative this gives about 1% of the solar constant for the century, which is a radiative forcing of 0.01*1361 *0.175= 2.4 W/m^2. This was stolen from the sun and given to CO2.
Here is my graph for the sun-climate link:
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/mean:60/detrend:0.45/offset:0.2/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1979/scale:0.001/plot/rss/mean:60/detrend:0.45/offset:0.201/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1979/mean:60/detrend:0.5/offset:0.05
The above result shows the global mean temperature changes in phase with the sun spot number, showing the observed warming of the 20th century was due to the sun.
Girma: Surface warming by the solar cycle as revealed by the composite mean difference projection:
http://depts.washington.edu/amath/old_website/research/articles/Tung/journals/GRL-solar-07.pdf
“Everybody” has a favorite set of solar statistical summaries, and a relationship to some part of the temperature record determined by least-squares. We shall see how this one fairs over the next 20 years’ worth of out-of-sample data. I am not judging Camp and Tung wrong, but belief that their result proves the existence of a persistent mechanism is premature.
It’s apparent the millenial scale changes have great power and range. Are they from internal processes or externally charged? I dunno.
=====================
“I dunno.”- very true, but not a popular phrase in a society wanting instant answers
And forbidden in one calling for instant change, founded on fear and guilt.
=============
“I dunno.”
Oh sweet, lovely “I dunno.” What a breath of lilac scented fresh air.
What if the perfect storm is coming and the current global warming hiatus is its herald: and, it is a solar quietus? Consider this: It’s official: Solar minimum has arrived [March 10, 2006]. Sunspots have all but vanished. Solar flares are nonexistent. The sun is utterly quiet (Science@NASA: ‘Solar Storm Warning’). Solar Cycle 23 went out with an alarming whimper. Then came Solar Cycle 24: Something is up with the sun… “I would say it is the weakest in 200 years,” said [NASA’s] David Hathaway (Robt. Lee Hotz, WSJ: ‘Strange Doings on the Sun’).
http://science.nasa.gov/media/medialibrary/2006/05/10/10may_longrange_resources/predictions3_strip.jpg?w=600
[Source of Graph: David Hathaway’s, Long Range Solar Forecast (see Science@NASA, below)]
Cycle 24 is even weaker than 20!
http://www.sidc.be/images/wolfmms.png
Even weaker than predicted… that is interesting!
https://evilincandescentbulb.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/sunspot-update.jpg?w=400
Barycentrism shows remarkable correlations which beg for explanation. If not causal, can the co-incidences be explained by a single more primal cause? What in the heck might that be?
Leif Svalgaard sneers at the tidal forces as being insignificant in the great fusion reactor in the sky. I’m reminded of the flap of a butterfly’s wing, and conjure a Van de Graaff generator as an exemplar, mindful of how inadequate the metaphor is. What is it that causes the output to be displayed here, then there, on the surface of the sphere? I dunno, but it is a butterfly wing in comparison to the powers flowing here, then there, throughout the sphere.
======================
What in the heck might that be?
Good question. Two causal factors come to mind. They’re both very simplistic examples.
When salinity spikes in the arctic during the winter, the ocean falls away from the ice cap resulting in increased fracturing which exposes the polar ice to increased transport. Deformation of the Arctic sea floor could be another example but I haven’t run across any related research (Seiche under the ice aka surfs up for seals).
The second example is actually so obvious I’m surprised it isn’t part of standard dialogue regarding solar impact on Arctic ice.
Some very large rivers enter the Arctic from Russia and Canada. In Spring, the ice melts forming ice dams. A build up of warmer water swells behind the ice dams. When these natural dams finally break, massive force and temperature difference is dumped into the Arctic ocean resulting in ice loss. Simplistic example of gravity and solar at work.
Its also interesting to note the increase in Lena River flow during warm months and the decrease during winter months. The decrease is partially due to the increased need for power generation during the winter.
See:
http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2014/03/warm-rivers-and-arctic-sea-ice-loss.html
The heat from warm river waters draining into the Arctic Ocean is contributing to the melting of Arctic sea ice each summer, a new NASA study finds.
Why do they keep finding new stuff. I thought they believed they already know 97% of everything.
NASA is the “bird in the sky” and ARTIC Great Rivers Observatory ( http://arcticgreatrivers.org/index.html ) are our sea birds on the ground.
Neither, at this point, are in agreement over anything related to “Climate” in the Arctic. They’re simply reporting findings within their scope and ability to study.
At this point, any GW conclusions are simply “educated guesses”.
footnote: Why are we so hamstrung by nits in science who avoid logical progress in favor of a parochial “bed warmer”?
“Why do they keep finding new stuff. I thought they believed they already know 97% of everything”
Because this isn’t new. It was well known back in the nineteenth century. Nordenskiöld counted on this effect when he went through the Northeast Passage in 1878-79 (see “Vegas färd kring Asien och Europa” pp. 16-17 (1880)), and Nansen selected the area north of the mouth of Lena to get as far north as possible with Fram in 1893 because he knew that the river water had melted the ice. It’s just that modern ‘climate scientists’ are incredibly ignorant about the Arctic (and practically everything else).
I believe the NASA astrophysicist, Dr. Lika Guhathakurta, knows the core of the Sun is a pulsar, but she would lose her position at NASA if she admitted that fact in public.
http://wchildblog.com/2014/10/27/nasa-revisiting-our-vulnerabiity-to-solar-flares/
Hi kim,
“I’m reminded of the flap of a butterfly’s wing…”
My understanding (which could be flawed): The Butterfly Effect was coined by Edward Lorenz relating to the flaws thrown into his weather modeling by his computers flawed math coprocessor. It was from the flawed processing that he found the broader concept. Yet, with the exception of time travel, its largely overwhelmed by natural forces.
The Chaos equation, IMO one of the most significant discoveries of the last century, relates to a normal state change periodically occurring in a physical system. Post-Normal Science is a fair example in a non-physical system but its largely flawed and therefore irrelevant.
The sun is not in a state of chaos — what is your concern?
Sorry kim,
I should have said, our sun, our earth, and our solar system are not in a state of chaos…
John
From the Wikipedia article:
“…in general, for N>2, the N-body problem is chaotic…”
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-body_problem
JustinWonder,
You’re pointing me to wikistupidia which clearly states. n-body problem is about an ancient, classical problem in classical mechanics.
Stonehenge comes to mind ; )
With respect, I’ll read the content but my point was related to interpretation of “terms” and the misuse in an insightful context.
JustinWonder,
As I’m reading over the historical fun and I do love history, I have a challenge for You to explain the true cause of the trigger in Milankovitch cycles.
Well done Justin,
N = 2 (Poincaré)
“In case the problem could not be solved, any other important contribution to classical mechanics would then be considered to be prize-worthy. The prize was awarded to Poincaré, even though he did not solve the original problem. (The first version of his contribution even contained a serious error[12]). The version finally printed contained many important ideas which led to the development of chaos theory. The problem as stated originally was finally solved by Karl Fritiof Sundman for n = 3.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-body_problem
The wing flap is fused
Deep in a steady cauldron.
Turbulent concerns.
===============
John – “Well done Justin.”
From “wikistupidia” :
“Second, in general for N > 2, the N-body problem is chaotic,[38] which means that even small errors in integration may grow exponentially in time. Third, a simulation may be over large stretches of model time (e.g., millions of years) and numerical errors accumulate as integration time increases.”
However, somehow we can get a spacecraft to Titan, which is pretty good.
The good thing about Wikipedia is that if it is wrong you can edit it.
Chaos is really a bummer, it throws a big monkey wrench in many machines, though it is beautiful. Also, chaos is not an equation.
I like the Stonehenge bifurcation – I think I’ll run with it. Some people think it was actually a burial site. Further, I have read a book that suggests that the distribution of churches and parishes ( not sure this is the correct word) near Stonehenge mirrors Neolithic cultural practices. OTOH, I had an anthro professor that called history “myths with dates”. Even so, it’s fun to read.
History’s fun ter read says Justin and
hey, context’s the thing whereby
we may unearth the problem
situation of the king (and troops.)
Situation analysis is able ter
sometimes transcend the myopia
of point of view and opacity
of time and space.
http://beththeserf.wordpress.com/2013/09/08/268/
Global-Scale Turbulent Convection and Magnetic Dynamo Action in the Solar Envelope
As Kim pointed out above, all turbulence includes chaotic processes.
Justin,
see May’s logistic map as an example
The 17 Equations That Changed The Course Of History
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/17-equations-that-changed-the-world-2014-3#ixzz3HStbHvgh
Lorenzian Waterwheel is another example:
http://www.ace.gatech.edu/experiments2/2413/lorenz/fall02/
Kudos to the Dutch parliament for funding the CD blog. This action gets a Five Wooden Shoes rating. Lots of good reading ahead.
In my book:
http://www.amazon.com/Assessing-Climate-Change-Temperatures-Environmental/dp/3319004549/ref=sr_ob_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1414420785&sr=1-2
I spend 80 pages reviewing every model I could find on estimation of total solar intensity in the past. After all this study and analysis, I concluded:
“In summary, it is clear that the appearance of the Sun has varied over the past millennium as evidenced by visual observations of sunspots and cycle duration, observations of Sun-like stars, and studies of cosmogenic isotopes. Unfortunately, it is not at all clear what these changes imply quantitatively for the range of variation of TSI.”
We dunno, a marvelous source of further fear and guilt.
===================
kim
as usual you are right
IHMO
“climate change” is mostly a cultural values fight
driven by the guilt of modern western sophisticates about their spectacular material affluence
if life is this good, Gaia must be laying in wait teach us a lesson
even modern secular liberals know that sin does not go unpunished
oops… IMHO
After both reading the Willis WUWT post, “Changes in Total Solar Irradiance” and listening to an unrelated lecture, I agree with fear. Maybe not with guilt. I wrote-
Just today finished a 36 lecture Great Courses course on the Italian Renaissance in prep for a trip to Florence. In the last lecture there are hints at a comparison-
of early 16th century Italy with its wars, disillusionment with both humanism and the experiments with republican forms of government, fear of the future and of non-conforming ideas, and an increasingly authoritarian church (Index Librorum Prohibitorum and Inquisition which put Galileo under house arrest)
and a present state of increasing darkness, our 20th century wars, depression and genocide. I couldn’t help but think of how the optimisms of the Renaissance and of Enlightenment seem similarly extinguished by wars, emerging fundamentalisms, fears (and abuses) of government, fears of global warming/climate change and abuses of elite fear-mongering scientists and their followers which result in inquisition like denunciation of critics. Willis, the heretic, and lsvalgaard, the no nonsense scientist, seem in their own way to be trying to keep the barbarians at the gates, but I’m afraid they’re already in the academy.
sigh …
so many interacting climate variables
so much historical climate variability …
Too soon fer those costly fifty year plans
based on uncertain ASSertions …
And anuther thing,
serfs find social engineering
via scientific assertion
socially unacceptable.
Serfs fer open society dot com.
also @
non-union of unconcerned serfs au
There is a lot we don’t know about past solar variability and its effect on past climate. However, if climate sensitivity for 2XCO2 is about 3.0 degC or greater, I’m not aware of any evidence that suggests that future solar forcing will significant compared to the radiative forcing from a doubling or tripling of CO2 this century. Furthermore, we have no way of knowing whether the sun will modestly increase or decrease future warming. Those who speculate that current hiatus was caused or may be extended by solar variability (or other forms of natural variability such as the AMO) are looking a few small trees in the forest of climate change.
“However, if climate sensitivity for 2XCO2 is about 3.0 degC or greater..”
And if it’s not?
Also, the “climate sensitivity” thing is an abstraction from the (failed) models. There is also no reason to think that such an abstracted number would be a constant.
And there are good reasons to think that we cannot double the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere: the sinks appear to be growing exponentially (with a lag) just as human emissions are. There may not be enough carbon to burn, or we may not be able to burn it quickly enough.
And “the climate change forest” is what? It’s not changing in any unprecedented manner, despite what is often claimed.
What the solar effects may be of the sun on ‘no significant change’ seems like a moot point.
It looks like an excellent book, but I do not want to spend $195.88 on it. Is there a way to download a pdf? Believe it or not, publishers permitted that for some technical books, such as the text “Analysis of Neural Data” by Kass, Eden and Brown (Springer), and “Principles of Uncertainty” by Kadane (Cambridge University Press.)
Last time there was a quiet sun there was endless mud in Flanders, the slowest hurricane season on record in the US (1914), the Murray River stopped flowing in Oz…after which the Arctic went all melty. The reason for all this is…
…can I get back to you?
Breaking News
Those who do not know scientific history
are condemned to repeat it
Thank you, Judith Curry, for helping to inspire Climate Etc readers — and young climate-science students — to a rational, responsible, respectful appreciation of climate-science history!
Question Will 21st century climate-scientists — or a small-but-vocal minority of them — insist upon recycling the sunspot-obsessing delusions of the 19th and 20th century?
The world wonders!
I’ve directly asked Spencer Weart when he is going to write ‘The Discovery of Global Cooling’. Crickets.
=====================
Kim’s “crickets” versus climate-warming “crikey”!
http://cybloodbane.tripod.com/pictures/comics/cfswaste.jpg
Crikey … say Quakers (among many)!
The eyes in the skies say it ain’t so, aye?
===========================
Fan
I would like you to take one step back , pause, then objectively tell me when accurate (i.e scientifically valid) GLOBAL land temperatures really date from.
Then take a few minutes off with a cup of coffee and answer the same question with regards to GLOBAL ocean temperatures. The key words here are ‘objectively.’
tonyb
• Boreholes robustly and objectively affirm the global land-temperature “hockey-stick blade” is lengthening (without pause or evident limit).
https://www.e-education.psu.edu/earth103/files/earth103/module02/Mann+Borehole.png
• Sea-levels robustly and objectively affirm the global sea-temperature/ice-melt “hockey-stick blade” is lengthening (without pause or evident limit).
http://www.skepticalscience.com/images/Reconstructed_Sea_Level_Cha.gif
• In contrast, the objective global-scale evidence for earlier “hockey-stick blades” is flimsy-to-nonexistent.
Conclusion
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWInyaMWBY8
It is a pleasure to answer your scientific questions reasonably, respectfully, and responsibly, TonyB!
Fan
As I said to you last week I have recently been in contact several times with Huang who created the borehole record and must point out again that it shows temperature rising for at least 300 years. Huang himself does not claim any degree of accuracy much earlier than this.
I asked you this question;
“Then take a few minutes off with a cup of coffee and answer the same question with regards to GLOBAL ocean temperatures. The key words here are ‘objectively.’
I will rephrase it.
Bearing in mind that much of the land surface hadn’t even been explored in 1880 how do you think we could have any sort of globally accurate picture of the ocean temperatures to that date?
tonyb
TonyB, aren’t you and James Hansen asserting the same climate-change world-view?
• There’s overwhelming evidence of a global-scale 20th-21st century “hockey-stick blade” of temperature increase.
• There is no robust evidence of any comparable global-scale “hockey-stick blade” in any previous centuries.
Indeed, the preponderance of global-scale evidence suggests a relatively flat hockey-stick handle for the last thousand years.
`Cuz “local-scale fluctuations” — as commonly inferred from local historical records — just plain *DON’T* imply “global-scale hockey-stick blades” in previous centuries.
It is a pleasure to assist your global-scale climate-change understanding, TonyB!
Fan
Let’s try again. Please answer whether you agree with statement 1 or 2
1. Yes, we know to a few fractions of a degree the global temperatures of oceans back to 1880
2 we do not know the global temperature of oceans back to 1880
Tonyb
Tony,
Fan has seen the borehole curve but is distracted; perhaps it’s the glistening spinning wheel hanging above him.
Richard
Yes, let’s keep trying, TonyB …
… let’s keep trying to ask wise questions and conceive wise courses of action.
http://i.cbc.ca/1.2460374.1386795368!/fileImage/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/16x9_620/pope-francis.jpg
“Against narrow-minded quibbling the Gods themselves contend in vain!”
Fan
I’ll just assume then that you don’t believe in the accuracy of global ocean temperatures to 1880.
Now for the more important questions. Where did Hansen get his hat?
tonyb
The borehole data doesn’t seem to capture the fluctuations that have occurred in the past century while Mann’s looks more realistic and Mann’s doesn’t show the warming in the last three hundred years. The borehole data also doesn’t seem to reflect the Little Ice Age.
The borehole data also doesn’t seem to reflect the Little Ice Age
You can look at what you like, but it might make more sense to examine Huang 2009 rather than Huang 2000.
http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/global_warming/images/borehole_3.gif
Joseph
We know about the warming over the last 300 years. I am suspicious of all proxies but having delved into the background of boreholes it might have something of merit.
Huang confirms that due to the nature of the data collected, that around 300 years or so is the limit of any sort of accuracy. The LIA was at its height in the 17th century so would not be properly ‘captured.’
Having said all that, have you actually looked at the proxies of various reconstructions that use tree rings, corals, boreholes etc? The individual temperature profiles are all over the place and you could construct whatever climate scenario you wanted by cherry picking.
tonyb
a fan of *MORE* discourse, from the “wise” article: Rapid emissions reduction is required to restore Earth’s energy balance and avoid ocean heat uptake that would practically guarantee irreversible effects. Continuation of high fossil fuel emissions, given current knowledge of the consequences, would be an act of extraordinary witting intergenerational injustice.
Think how awful it would be if, two generations hence, the climate has cooled and our descendents blame us because we did not do all in our power to increase CO2 to raise agricultural productivity and keep the Earth from cooling.
The wisest course of action is to continue to study the evolution of the climate until we can tell what actually is happening; and in the meantime to create policies and projects that will be beneficial come hot or cold, drought or flooding.
Lucifer
You have posted that before. Does it come from Scott Mandia?
Whilst we might quibble over the precise accuracy of the temperature range, the general shape and trends look realistic but they don’t show the considerable natural variability of annual and decadal temperature. The paleo proxies are a coarse sieve through which the fine grain of real world temperatures fall through.
As a general guide of the last 1000 years or so though it’s pretty good.
Have you got a link to the original work?
Tonyb
Tony B –
I had the date wrong.
Huang, Pollack, and Shen, 2008 ( not 2009 ):
http://www.earth.lsa.umich.edu/~shaopeng/2008GL034187.pdf
The borehole proxy exhibits
1.) the Holocene Climatic Optimum
2.) the Medieval Warm Period, and
3.) the ‘Lil Ice Age’
One difference from the anecdotal – no ‘Roman Warm Period’
but instead, the not-so-little Ice Age that lasted from Roman times
throughout the Dark Ages.
Lucifer
Thanks for that. It would be good if Judith could do an article on the reliability or otherwise of paleo proxy reconstructions
Tonyb
Is that Huang data saying that the Roman Warm Period was actually the Roman Ice Age. Which of these ideas is more solid?
Is that Huang data saying that the Roman Warm Period was actually the Roman Ice Age. Which of these ideas is more solid?
It appears that most of the proxys indicating a RWP are regional ( Europe, Med, Iceland ):
http://www.co2science.org/subject/r/summaries/rwpeurope.php
The borehole sites are relatively more global ( land sites ), so circulation changes of a globally colder period could still be consistent with a regionally warmer Roman Empire.
Have to live with uncertainty, though, especally with proxies.
The Dianetics of Climatology.
a fan of *MORE* discourse: Question Will 21st century climate-scientists — or a small-but-vocal minority of them — insist upon recycling the sunspot-obsessing delusions of the 19th and 20th century?
According to Mike Lockwood, it is necessary to explain all of the data. I expect solar scientists to continue to examine all hypotheses relevant to solar influences on the climate, and invent invent new hypotheses, until all of the data on climate change have been explained to an adequate degree of accuracy.
“It seemed impossible to explain that using the Sun alone, without invoking greenhouse gases.”
The full stop is four words too late.
Most of the solar climate connection revolves around the sunspot numbers, accuracy of which is uncertain, not to mention the current effort (led by Stanford university) to eliminate the high activity during last century.
I would suggest the numbers that count are those for solar magnetic field, not so much the change in intensity by 5 or 10%, but the magnetic field’s polarity sign and phase.
The Earth’s magnetic field beside its long up/down trends has small variations which have distinct spectrum, drifting in and out of phase with the more stable solar oscillations, creating the well known ~9 and ~ 60 (currently 64) years variable climate cycles.
The effect of seasonal insolation variations on the climate are much larger than any long term up/down decadal or centenary variability. Due to the ocean’s thermal capacity previous year has always an input in the next and so forth.
What matters then is not absolute value of direct or integrated sunspot numbers, but the year to year change in the combined geomagnetic (solar & earth generated) variability, where the mutual phase relationship is the critical factor.
Milivoje: Please, as simplistic as possible, what is the physical relationship of the magnetic fields to earth climate/weather? Thank you
Richard
Magnetic fields modulate the amount of ionizing particle radiation in the lower troposphere.
Ionizing particle radiation provides cloud condensation nuclei, first observed in cloud chambers:
http://housescience.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/800px-desynebelkammer.jpg
We built a cloud chamber in 8th Grade Science class. Probably warped me forever.
=============
rls, thanks for your interest.
As it happens with the CO2 or the sunspot numbers all these matters are subject of conjecture; but we can’t switch on or off one or the other to prove or disprove the point.
Hence we have to go by existence of a weaker or stronger correlation, absence of a correlation means the forcing is unlikely, but even strongest correlation is not necessarily the proof, since it could be common cause rather than direct forcing. Definition of a viable physical mechanism is a further major obstacle.
Dr. Curry had (some time ago) a preview of the details based on my ideas as presented in this graph
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/Sun-Earth.gif
but the rest of the readers may have opportunity to read more, if a paper currently being prepared is published in the forthcoming months.
The current science is not entirely certain on the extent of the sun -climate link, even less on the sun-earth magnetism.
In this article recently published
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01071375/document
( data1 link has changed to: http://sbc.oma.be/data1.html )
the sun-earth magnetic field link is posited and numerically evaluated for the first time.
Milivoje: Thank you. It is very assuring when scientists state the truth. You’ve got my attention.
Judith,
“In the solar discussion, unfortunately there have been very few comments, especially from the experts. Maybe the discussion will pick up.”
.
I really doubt it. Consensus scientists do not want to enter into any debate which acknowledges the legitimacy of any viewpoint other than “GHG are the only important drivers of global temperatures”. The UEA emails contain references to not engage in debate with ‘denier$’; the lack of participation in this case is just more of the same strategy. It is a political decision, and not surprising considering the policy advocacy of many well known climate scientists. They are not interested in convincing people, they are interested in reducing fossil fuel use, and not much else.
Surely, all of us can agree on at least one thing… that, us moderns are not responsible for, the declining activity of the sun, that astrophysicists have observed.
Since sunspots increase UV which penetrates the ocean deeply, and CO2 back radiation has no UV and is basically a skin effect – the two forcings are so different in nature they are almost different in kind. Because the sun achieves deep penetration of the ocean (to over 200 m) the feedbacks to an increase in solar activity (more SW – particularly in the UV range) would be very different to an increase in LW back radiation from CO2.
Instead of TSI, can we get information on variations in the UV/VIS ratio over a solar cycle?
Isn’t it being taken for granted that the model of how the sun works is correct? What if it the sun works quite differently? What are sunspots? How might they influence the climate on earth?
I’m not necessarily saying Electric Universe theory is correct, but if it is, the sun is primarily a plasma phenomenon and isn’t mainly powered by fusion processes; it’s a whole different ballgame and electrical/magnetic phenomena may have far greater influence than is currently being considered.
Certainly, EU theorists are highly sceptical about the importance of anthropogenic greenhouse gases, viewing their influence as tiny in relation to solar effects.
However, I suppose some AGW sceptics may hold EU theorists in the same sort of contempt that they themselves are held by many warmists (despite the fact that there are many credible people who are/have been been involved in EU; at least one with a Nobel prize).
Some aspects of the framework within which scientifically controversial issues is discussed may be accepted on all sides, but what if a number of those aspects are misconceived? I applaud what’s going on at Climate Dialogue, but just because one has experts discussing something from different sides of a controversy, that doesn’t mean that everything that might be relevant is actually being discussed. It could be analogous to two groups arguing over whether the earth is round or square without paying attention to evidence that it might be spherical.
Well…
The solar magnetic field is about 50 microgauss at earth orbit and changes 4 times (polarity changes every 3 months).
That’s about 10 times higher than the heart magnetic field and about 500 times higher than the brain magnetic field of a smart person.
If we managed to accurately measure the energy budget of the earth (incoming radiation minus outgoing radiation) and there was a deficit (more outgoing) that exceeds the 0.09 W/m2 geothermal flux… the gravitational heating/electric sun/magnetic heating people might have game.
The 21st century is a great time to test this – it isn’t like the earth is getting warmer or anything.
The solar magnetic field is about 50 microgauss at earth orbit and changes 4 times (polarity changes every 3 months). That’s about 10 times higher than the heart magnetic field […]”
Are you sure about that? I saw the Earth’s magnetic field being estimated to be 0.25 gauss to 0.65 gauss (Wikipedia: Earth’s magnetic field) at the Earth surface.
And also: “The Sun’s dipole magnetic field of 50–400 μT (at the photosphere) reduces with the inverse-cube of the distance to about 0.1 nT at the distance of Earth. However, according to spacecraft observations the interplanetary field at Earth’s location is around 5 nT, about a hundred times greater.[83] The difference is due to magnetic fields generated by electrical currents in the plasma surrounding the Sun.” (Wikipedia: Sun)
5 nT is 0.0005 gauss. That’s 1000 times smaller than the Earth’s surface magnetic field. This explains the Earth’s magnetosphere extending out, and thus shielding it from the solar winds, at a distance about 5 times the Earth diameter out, in the direction of the Sun. (Though it extends much more in the other directions. Google image: ‘magnetosphere’)
http://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/March03/Vallee2/Vallee3_2.html
“The interplanetary magnetic field strength is about 50 microGauss near the Earth (1 AU from the Sun),”
PA, correct. And this is about 1000 times smaller than the Earth surface magnetic field, right?
50 microgauss = 0.000050gauss
~0.5gauss / 0.000050gauss = ~1000.
Well, it is 0.25 to 0.65 gauss, lowest at the equator.
PN, sure 0.5 gauss is as a number as any.
As far as the math… .5/50E-6 = 10,000 or 4 orders of magnitude different – but yeah it is a lot weaker.
It is safe to say there are some magnetic interactions.
Apologies PA. I had misread you to say that it was 10 times higher than the Earth magnetic field, when in actuality you had said “…than the heart magnetic field”.
PN no apology needed.
Fact checking and clarification is always welcome.
All good.
I’d rather be accurate than be right.
Thanks for double checking things.
NASA tried to get a sun-climate research program off the ground a few years ago but failed. The USGCRP has a big carbon cycle program but no solar cycle program. A perfect example of funding induced biases in research or fibs.
The Sun’s been throwing off an astounding number of X-class flares (link will outdate itself) in the last few days, which makes shortwave bands dead, whatever else it does.
Thank you for the link. I notice that the total energy flux in this X-ray band is 0.0001 W/m2. It would need a major amplification to influence much else.
Global cooling need not be the wreck of hope. What do we do? Humanity needs more energy and we’ll need even more so we can produce more during shorter growing seasons and to last long winters when it could get cold enough to freeze the UK’s Thames river again, as it last did not long ago during the Dalton Minimum (1790–1830).
The last big chill occurred at a time corresponding with a period of reduced solar activity – measured by fewer sunspots – as also occurred before that, during the Maunder Minimum (1645–1715 ) and Spörer Minimum (1460–1550). “My opinion is that we are heading into a Maunder Minimum,” according to Mark Giampapa (solar physicist at the National Solar Observatory). “I’m seeing a continuation in the decline of the sunspots’ mean magnetic field strengths and a weakening of the polar magnetic fields and subsurface flows.”
Might there be a need in the future to grow more crops indoors using artificial sunlight, that would require lots of electricity?
… and CO2 –e.g., growers keep CO2 levels at 1,000 to 2,000 ppm in Earthly greenhouses, which is about the level you’d find in a lecture hall full of students and pretty much what has been normal over most of Earth’s 550 million year history. Plants begin to die below 150 ppm. The Sahara wasn’t always a desert. Dr. Will Happer testified before the U.S. Senate that, “the planet is currently starved of CO2, and has been so starved for several million years.”
Wagathon: Interesting. How do the greenhouses get the CO2? Also, read that some new businesses are building multi-story farming structures (probably not accurate to call them greenhouses).
Rls – google co2 for greenhouses.
Better yet, google “CO2 generators for greenhouses” and check out the ( biased of course) optimum ppm for, ahem, plants.
“check out the ( biased of course) optimum ppm for, ahem, plants.”
http://www.hydroponicist.com/pages/images/CO2-graph.gif
http://www.hydrofarm.com/resources/articles/co2.jpg
http://plantsneedco2.org/html/PlantsGrowingCO2WarmerTemps.gif
“How do the greenhouses get the CO2? “
http://campus.extension.org/pluginfile.php/45864/mod_resource/content/0/Unit-07/Module07-1.htm
“There are five common methods of generating extra amounts of CO2
Burning hydrocarbon fuels (typically natural gas)
Compressed, bottled CO2
Dry ice
Fermentation
Decomposition of organic matter”
There was a photosynthesis crisis (160-180 PP) before the current interglacial. It is pretty obvious that during the current interglacial plants have been starved for CO2 (33% of the land is desert).
Fossil fuel use by man has saved the planet from dying.
rls | October 27, 2014 at 4:33 pm |
Wagathon: Interesting. How do the greenhouses get the CO2? Also, read that some new businesses are building multi-story farming structures
(probably not accurate to call them greenhouses).
——-
Co2 for greenhouses industrial style-
http://www.omafra.gov.on.ca/english/crops/facts/00-077.htm
Prof Curry, thank you for alerting us to this dialogue. There are many good details and arguments. I’ll quote this one from Mike Lockwood: The key point is that these multiple regression detection/attribution fits all show that the influences are broadly proportional to their estimated radiative forcings, in the case of solar variability that is estimated from TSI observations (as discussed above), which leaves little room for any other solar factor or mechanism. Furthermore, any proposed mechanism must explain all – and I stress all – the data, not just the global means air surface temperature: such constraints include the latitudinal profile (why the Arctic has warmed most), coherent longitudinal variations, the altitude profile (the cooling in the stratosphere), the seasonality (why the warming is greater in winter), the lack of a diurnal variation increase. All these features are well explained by the observed rise in well-mixed greenhouse gases and so to be considered a serious alternative, any proposed mechanism must also explain all these observations.
We have discussed the problems of overfitting, and the problems of estimating one relationship if two variables are correlated (in this case, it would be something that correlated at least monotonically with the TSI changes measured at the Earth surface.) What I liked in that quote was the stress on explaining all of the data. It isn’t sufficient, imho, to “explain” the most recent warming, and to leave all of the previous warmings and coolings unexplained.
If any of the current theories survives the next 25 years or so (this last solar cycle, plus the next 2 solar cylcles) without major (post hoc) revision, I shall be surprised.
One of the interesting themes was the clash of physics-based models versus observation-based models. I am looking forward to the scientific discoveries of the next few decades that will enhance and refine the current physics-based models, and observation-based models, so that their predictions will more accurate and complete over the full set of data, as advocated by Lockwood. If the current knowledge base is not as full of “holes”, “liabilities”, “lacunae”, and “cavities” as I have maintained, then I shall have to eat more than my usual amount of humble pie.
That was a good “climate dialogue”.
As a follow-on, if the CO2 theory explains the longitudinal distribution of change, and the differential change of the Arctic and Antarctic, and the vertical distribution (lack of Equatorial tropospheric “hot spot”), and apparent pause, could someone direct my attention to the papers that contain all of those explanations?
There is a contrast with the sun, which is expected to have the largest effect in the low-latitude dark surface areas (tropical oceans) rather than high-latitude light-surface areas (polar regions). The hot spot is associated with tropical ocean warming. An IR effect like CO2 won’t necessarily be expected to correlate with albedo and latitude in this way.
Jim, you should read up.
Clouds and albedo in the tropics responds to temperature, we’d be unlikely to see much happen there.
The proposed cloud nucleation response is expected to operate in the mid-nothern latitudes, over the oceans where there are not a lot of aerosols from land.
The UV response is in the arctic and northern latitudes.
Jim D: There is a contrast with the sun, which is expected to have the largest effect in the low-latitude dark surface areas (tropical oceans) rather than high-latitude light-surface areas (polar regions).
If that was addressed to me, then I have to point out that it was non-responsive to my post. Where, for example, does the CO2 theory explain the difference between the Arctic and Antarctica over the last 30+ years?
Matthew R Marler commented
As I was reading this something popped into my head, higher latitudes have a longer path through the atmosphere before photons would hit the ground, and at the pole, it’s go straight through the atm missing ground entirely, x-rays in particular.
Don’t ask me what difference it’d make, I don’t know, but maybe someone else does.
Equatorial region is affected by solar activity between aprox + or –10 degrees latitudes, regardless of the time of the year. Equatorial ‘electro-jet’ is the electrical current powered by charged solar particles trapped by the Earths magnetic and moves from east to west, following the Earth’s magnetic equator. Its strength and latitude depends on the strength of the solar activity. In the last 2-3 years NASA observed electrical discharges from the equatorial storm clouds into the electro-jet, however reverse has not been observed, but from theoretical point of view it is just as likely. If an effect on the climate is found it would have ~22 rather than 11 year periodicity.
Would the jet theoretically influence the earth’s magnetic field?
Yes. in two ways, but to a very small extent. Electro-jet’s current creates its own magnetic field
a) which (as a vector) is added to the Earth’s field .
b) electro-jet’s field will also induce weak electric currents in the ocean and conductive parts of the crust (depth up to possibly 100 km or more) which generates magnetic field, again combining with the earths field.
Two or three years ago I illustrated short article contemplating possible climate link via ENSO.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC20.htm
No, this is very wrong. The equatorial electrojet is due to solar EUV creating the E-layer in the ionosphere. The electric conductivity is highest along magnetic field lines and near the magnetic equator the field lines are nearly horizontal, thus creating enhanced conductivity and resulting high electric current. This has nothing to do with the solar wind or particles trapped in the Earth’s field.
See e.g. http://www.earth-planets-space.com/content/66/1/146
This about sums it up:
“When scrutinised, we find that the so-called cycles in observed climate can have any cause. They may not even be robust, but may be part of a transient behaviour in a chaotic system. However, there are also some weak ‘solar signal’ (variations that seem synchronised with sunspots) in the climate data, and the most intriguing feature seems to be around the North Atlantic, as Lockwood observes (http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/3/035049/article). Apart from that, there is little evidence suggesting a strong connection between the current global warming and solar activity – there has been little long-term change in the sun since the 1950s, except for the most recent weak solar cycle (http://goo.gl/8Dtkrt).”
Is there any reliable evidence that any warming that has occured or might occur will be “net harmful” for the world or the USA?
Start with Lockwood
“The difference between global mean climate and regional-and-seasonal climates is significant. Both data and models show that there are many locations and seasons for which there can be sustained trends that are quite different from the trend in the global mean whatever the cause in the latter. Thus taking temperature data or proxies from restricted
locations and a certain time of year (or with a seasonal bias) can be misleading.”
This is the mistake that I see sun nuts making repeatedly.
1. Without exception, and in fact in many notable cases, they engage in trashing what observation records there are. They object to using one location to inform us about the state of nearby locations ( infilling). They argue that we dont have good coverage,They trash SST records. They trash SAT records. They disparage proxies when the proxies provide the “wrong” results. They disparage “stitching” records together from various instructions by applying adjustments. This is all standard issue, SOP, from the skeptical toolkit. Fine for attacking the accepted science. Fair enough.
Then, when asked to explain the climate, they turn to the sun. It’s the sun wot dunnit. And witness what happens. First off, you don’t see them make any arguments about how the climate is chaotic and cant be understood.
Second you dont see any of them make the argument that there is Nothing abnormal going on,and therefore nothing to explain. No, those arguments so vociferously made against AGW are absent. When a sun nut offers to explain that the current warming is due to the sun, you dont see anyone arguing that the current warming is not unprecedented and thus doesnt need explaining. Next, TSI. the TSI record is a mess. A short instrumental mess with two different series that can lead to opposite results. This record is connected to a spot record .The sunspot record is a mess of adjustments than is only now being corrected. Nevertheless, all the skeptical tools are dropped. There isnt a single sun nut who suggests that we ought to look at the wide variety of reconstructions to understand the uncertainty due to data selection. Nope. They pick a series and defend it to the death.
Having decided on a settled series, they proceed to hunt around the various climate records. Basically performing the operational equivalent of step wise regression. When they cant find a solr finger print is Global temps ( which they accept forgetting their previous skeptical arguments), they switch and look at air temps only. When they cant find it there they look in SST. When they cant find it there they look at CET, and when that fails, they look at proxies, lake levels, river levels, beach dunes, my aunts winning streak in bingo.
Having found a correlation, they forget to calculate statistical significance. They forget to account for all the failures their rummaging through the data produced.And they forget the arguments about correlation and causation.
When they dont find a correlation, they find refuge in data transforms. Maybe its lagged, maybe we should integrate sun spots.. maybe monkeys will fly out of my butt. Or, having failed with TSI they will turn to some other solar parameter..
Mosh: Monkeys don’t fly. That’s a tail.
Steven Mosher : You are absolutely correct in everything you say in your comment (Oct 27 aat 4:07). Unfortunately, you are addressing a very small population, as sun nuts are heavily outnumbered by rational people who understand that the sun very likely influences climate in ways that are not yet fully understood.
Steven Mosher: This is the mistake that I see sun nuts making repeatedly.
I think we agree that collectively the nuts make all of the mistakes known to science that’s a fair summary of the sun nuts, though you could probably add more. Lots of people do significance tests without even trying to justify the distribution of results given a null hypothesis, and some people eschew significance tests altogether — and that’s without their even being “nuts”.
“sun nuts”
As opposed to “CO2 nuts”.
Andrew
Mosher
Start with Lockwood
“The difference between global mean climate and regional-and-seasonal climates is significant. Both data and models show that there are many locations and seasons for which there can be sustained trends that are quite different from the trend in the global mean whatever the cause in the latter. Thus taking temperature data or proxies from restricted
locations and a certain time of year (or with a seasonal bias) can be misleading.”
OK This is pure baloney and you know it.
initial premise, true, “sustained trends that are quite different from the trend in the global mean”
conclusion “Thus taking temperature data or proxies from restricted
locations and a certain time of year (or with a seasonal bias) can be misleading.”, is rubbish.
This is your bread and butter Steve, making adjustments with your a priori knowledge, remember? Cowtan and Way do it perfectly for you, remember?
You know from your wide data base which areas run anomalously thus they cannot be misleading, correct?
They are anomalous trends, that is, you know they are occurring, right?
Not like you to pretend that anomalies can occur and need to be wiped out, I mean adjusted. Cannot have those 2 degree variations close by real in your artificial model world can we?
Though Lockwood can.
Solar nut or model nut, whats the difference when you use one argument to justify yourself then ignore that argument when it suits you.
You say, ironically,
“1. Without exception, and in fact in many notable cases, they engage in trashing what observation records there are”
You are a pot and a kettle, sir.
Sorry this is meant to be humorous but is a bit harsh.
Mosher
“Then, when asked to explain the climate, they turn to the sun. It’s the sun wot dunnit. And witness what happens. First off, you don’t see them make any arguments about how the climate is chaotic and can’t be understood.”
Please,
They know the climate is chaotic, you know it is chaotic, we all know it is chaotic. You can have an argument without repeating the understood basics every time, except when you are losing the argument and have to resort to individual , specific, meaningless, downput nitpicks like this.
Oops.
Hi Steven
Presumably the Northern Hemisphere is as big region as it can get, and yet the sun appears to be joint contributor to its temperatures natural variability.
Couple of comments I made further up the thread, may even further reinforce both, your and mine self-rightness on the matter, the ever highly sought after quality of the narrow-minded.
“Second you don’t see any of them make the argument that there is nothing abnormal going on,and therefore nothing to explain.”
English anyone?
take out one set of double negatives.
You do see them making the argument that there is nothing abnormal going on and this needs explaining???
take out another set. Rephrase.
You see some of them making the argument that something normal is going on and therefore this needs explaining??
Why not simply say, “they argue whats happening is normal”.
Ahh, that feels better.
You can of course disagree with them as some of them are nutters. That is a perfectly understandable strategy. Play the man hard and forget the science.
“they argue whats happening is normal”. skeptics , what a bunch of nutters.
” ‘Second you don’t see any of them make the argument that there is nothing abnormal going on,and therefore nothing to explain.’
English anyone?
take out one set of double negatives. […]
Why not simply say, “they argue whats happening is normal”.
Ahh, that feels better.”
Except it completely changes the meaning. That they don’t make an argument for ‘P’ doesn’t entail that they actually are making an argument for ‘not P’. Mosher isn’t criticizing them because they are arguing that ‘P’, which would be perfectly fine. He’s criticizing them for *not* making a particular critical argument, when they should be making it, for the sake of consistency.
Pierre-Normand | October 27, 2014 at 8:31 pm |
” ‘Second you don’t see any of them make the argument that there is nothing abnormal going on,and therefore nothing to explain.’
English anyone? take out one set of double negatives. […]
Except it completely changes the meaning.
Professor angech to Pierre-Normand
“English anyone? take out one set of double negatives. […]
Except it completely changes the meaning.”
Fail.
Sorry, it does not change the meaning one iota.
Even worse, try taking them out of the next bit of gobbledygook
” That they don’t make an argument for ‘P’ doesn’t entail that they actually are making an argument for ‘not P’.”
is the same as you saying,
That they make an argument for ‘P’ entails that they actually are making an argument for ‘not P’.
Fail 2
which makes your comment
” Mosher isn’t criticizing them because they are arguing that ‘P’, which would be perfectly fine. He’s criticizing them for *not* making a particular critical argument, when they should be making it, for the sake of consistency.”
become
” Mosher is criticizing them because they are arguing that ‘P’, which would be perfectly fine. He’s criticizing them for making a particular critical argument, when they should be making it, for the sake of consistency.”
Fail 3
So you want to shoot skeptics down for making critical arguments when they should be making them?
Weird logic, and understanding of English, but understandable when members of the team support each other.
Angech, the reason why you can’t cancel the double negative is because one of them is embedded in an intensional context. (Look it up). ‘Believes that …’ or ‘argues that…’ or ‘she knows that…’ are intensional contexts. You can’t replace “It is not the case that she believes that Obama was born in Japan” by “She believes Obama wasn’t born in Japan”. The first sentence can be true while the second is false. That would be the case if she doesn’t even knows who Obama is or doesn’t have a clue where he might have been born. Same thing with “They argue that…” or “They ought to be arguing that…”
“Weird logic, and understanding of English, but understandable when members of the team support each other.”
Stephen Mosher isn’t in my team. He’s a lukewarmist. I’m an apocalipticist. Ask Rob.
He likes to put words in peoples mouths. I think he is a space cadet.
‘n. A person who leads people to believe they are from a different planet or dreaming of ancestry in other areas of the universe. The person does not respond when directly spoken to, performs odd food rituals and displays complete disregard for commonsense. A space cadet is not necessarily refering to a person of low intelligence or a heavy drug user, but rather a person who typically focuses on all aspects of life except the one currently at hand.
This is sometimes portrayed by testing the properties of wooden door hinges and the current coefficient of drag, by accelerating the door into the closed position at a high rate while leaving anyroom. This will often awaken, startle or confuse normal inhabitants of the planet earth, but will appear oblivious to the cadet. When ascending or descending a staircase, a spacecadet will tend to forget that the gravitational constant of earth differs from that of their home planet and will give the impression or a much larger moving mass. The area of the voice box “pharynx” also appears to differ from that of a normal specimen, causing words to be miss pronounced such as sold-her, instead solder.
The exact origins of a space cadet are unknown but rumor has it that their home planet was destroyed due to pollution caused by poor house keeping. Following this disaster they proceeded to disperse themselves throughout the universe and litter the gene pool. Space cadets are known for their poor skills in common sense areas such as coordination, food preparation, basic cleaning and processing simultaneous coherent thoughts.’ http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=space%20cadet&defid=1504702
Pierre,
Read slowly,
We are talking double negatives in the same sentence.
One,two of them.
You are allowed to remove both, always.
Your “examples”, show only one negative.
Put another negative in the sentence please, then remove both of them and voila!
Mosher is a conundrum, I like his style, his invective and when it runs in conjunction with mine, his thinking.
I am extremely concerned that when he is supported by you and Howard that he is one of the team.
I am concerned when he defends Cowtan and Way’ execrable Kringing experiment (misspelling deliberate) he becomes one of the team.
I am concerned when he and Zeke defend altering the past to protect their modelled present temperatures he is one of the team.
And when Anthony would not mail him his latest project even with a large surety a concern might have been he was one of the team.
Nonetheless I would buy him a beer if I met him and listen to his views because he comes across as thinking not always proselytising.
“We are talking double negatives in the same sentence.
One,two of them.
You are allowed to remove both, always.”
Not always.
Your “examples”, show only one negative.”
Consider this one, then:
(1) “It is *not* the case that she believes Obama *not* to have been born in Japan.” (True, since she doesn’t even know who Obama is. Hence she can’t have any such belief).
Can’t be replaced with:
(2)”It is the case that she believes Obama to have been born in Japan.”
(False since she doesn’t even know who Obama is).
The trouble is that the second negation modifies the propositional *content* of the belief while the first one negates the *attribution* of the belief. You can only eliminate a double negation (though not in intuitionistic logic) when both negations operate on the same sub-sentential clause.
angesh wrote: “We are talking double negatives in the same sentence.
One,two of them. You are allowed to remove both, always.”
Consider also this:
“You are not Swede and you are not Chinese.”
“You are Swede and you are Chinese.”
They mean the same according to your rule. You need to modify it.
Pierre, deliberately obtuse?
Of course.
Thank you for admitting your previous example had only one negative in it.
In your current example not and not is not a double negative, the “and” means they are the same negative.
Your conclusion on your Obama example is meaningless. Both ways of saying it mean the same thing.
Truth is one concept, belief another and trying to conflate them to disprove a simple English and Mathematical rule would be laughable except for the fact that you are trying to do it.
At least I know there will be no team support for your mangling of the English language.
Oh, by the way, one can be both Chinese and Swedish at the same time but that is not an English correction, just a statement of fact.
angech
And or, nand nor
That’s fine angech,
Let us not agree not to disagree.
Pierre-Normand, OK ?
Tell me more about your aunt.
==========
Brothers and sisters have i none, but this man’s father
is my father’s son.
Beth has a step brother and many, many friends who enjoy her company! :)
NO. A half brother! This time of night is for imbibing dear Beth!
Or maybe the published temp series are completely wrong, and everyone is chasing snipes because of it?
Nah, that can’t be it.
Fair criticism. Of course that doesn’t mean it isn’t the sun buzzing elves and sprites in the ionosphere…
The explanation is the same as for the previous warmings responsible for “the current warming […] not [being] unprecedented”. The current warming isn’t unprecedented, and neither is the current behavior of the sun.
Well…
I actually don’t disagree with SM a lot… His post could have used friendlier language.
The data sets do have some issues and the current playing with the data to slant history annoys me. Historic data before the 20th century didn’t have good enough coverage to be useful (like the “Pirate Code” it is just a guideline) and we have only had good data since 2003 when Argos got decently deployed. But the 20th century temperature regardless of data set used seems to show:
1. Natural cycles
2. Some solar warming.
3. Some CO2 warming.
Not sure what the breakdown is. I like 1/3, 1/3, 1/3, but could be persuaded by future data. Some model study recently said 0.5°C for 0.1% solar increase and that seems possible.
If the CO2 component is less than 40% we will start cooling shortly.
The earth will cool, warm, or hiatus in the next 10 years. That will tell us who is mostly right.
PA commented on
True, but what’s done to them makes the results wrong.
We’re cooling, no doubt about it. Feel free to make a note of this if one likes.
Mosh
I remain ambivalent about the sun but tell me more about your aunts winning streak at bingo and these monkeys.
Tonyb
And BINGO was his name, oh.
=====================
Dear Judith: Thanks so much for your very open minded view of this very contentious issue. I’ve been writing lately regarding some of my own thoughts on climate change and related issues (such as cognitive capture and the decline of critical thinking), and want to invite you, and others reading here, to read and comment. Especially relevant to your interests are the five most recent posts: http://amoleintheground.blogspot.com/
Thanks for the link to your interesting blog
… on which I’ve posted my mole story …
“We recognize our old friend, our old mole, who knows so well how to work underground, suddenly to appear: the revolution.” Karl Marx
Judith, I just want to apologize for not mentioning your excellent work on my blog. I only became aware of it a few days ago. I’ll be keeping my eyes on you in future. Bravo!
Ah, Mosher. You belief in blanket regional expectations has now bit you. In a very sensitive place. Very hard to maintain two diametrically opposed positions for long, in an internet era that features something like the WayBack machine.
Despite my general admiration for your BEST temperature algorithmic (because has few of the distortions cited by station in GHCN or equivalents, lets do go revisit your station 166900. See footnote 25 to the essay When Data Isn’t in the new ebook Blowing Smoke, foreward by our hostess.even the ‘best’ general algorithms can fail in the specifics. QED. Regards.
Of course. IF you want a good local model, then you model locally.
For example: Our US map at 1/4 degree is better than our global map that does the US at 1 degree.
However, doing the local better doesnt change the global.
Step 1. What spatial scale are you interested in.
Step 2. Use the best method for that scale.
With a global model you must OF NECESSITY be able to find individual stations that are wrong. That’s never the question.
When enough stations are identified that have a common issue ( say they have cold air drainage effects ) then that can be added to the regression.
The problem of course with referring to a single station is that a well timed
software update can .. be fun
Fun, yes. A well timed software fix also proves that your previously settled science was no fully settled. I shall look into your new software fix of a regional expectations problem previously vehemently denied by you in other comments on other threads here, including your intemperate assertion that I was a statistical illiterate. No need to post links. i have them archived, and you can look them up since Dr. Curry does little deletion here, unlike warmunist sites.
Glad so see that we are collectively making forward science progress.
Again Rud you misunderstand. Read harder.
There isnt any software fix. I am speaking in general about trying to make a case on matters that dont matter and that can change any time.
Its like the whole effort to take down GISS by focusing on the nits.
I know cause I was one of those guys. evry time I found a nit or peter onneil found a nit.. and they fixed it.. the thing that mattered.. the global answer didnt change..
It wasnt until I realized that the better approach was to try to do a better job, rather than pick nits.. that I actually did something worthwhile.
But in general more stations come in, that will change estimates..
More regressors may be added.. that will change answers.. it will
because estimates are never settled science.
ever.
All we can do is improve and document.
It will probably pick up again in a little bit.. some other kriging work has shown the way on a couple key issues.
PROPERLY FRAMED a critique of local issues is a good thing.
properly framed… being the key.
So you are an auditor. Working with reams of data. Just curious, does any of the following overlap with what you’re doing with BEST?
“Another statistical technique with potential use as an analytical procedure is ARIMA. This method develops a model based on past data of the account under audit consideration. The model is developed by using patterns of the data within each year and patterns of the data over several years. It is generally suggested that a minimum of 50 observations be used in order to establish this pattern although limited research has indicated that use of fewer than 50 observations would still provide a useful model.”
“The X-11 model has been suggested as a potential analytical procedure for auditing theory and practice. The model statistically decomposes a time series of data into three components (trend-cyle, seasonal and irregular), each of which possesses an underlying economic interpretation.”
“Analytical procedures include any method an auditor can develop to help predict account balances which are unusual. However, analytical procedures generally fall into four groups:
1. Trend analysis
2. Reasonable tests,
3. Ratio analysis, and
4. Structural models.”
Radiative forcing change negligible but solar activity dropped to the lowest level in a century?
So what are we measuring and what are we talking about?
If we say the sun spot number has no correlation to the sun’s temperature then why the heck measure it or talk about it?
Who would care about a new Maunder Minimum?
On the other hand if these changes do occur then the sun cannot obviously have a steady state temperature, it must vary, and even a small variation over time would have a huge impact on the earth’s temperature.
Like 0.00000001 times more would fry us, so even. 0.0000000001 changes would lead to warming or cooling over a decade or two.
Now try telling me we can measure and acknowledge such small changes.
Accurately
Insofar as cloud forming nuclei are biological in origin, so would a general fertilization of the biosphere by CO2 increase clouds, thus forming a negative, and very subtle and sophisticated, feedback to increased CO2.
=================
Cloud not clockwork climate.
“CD has been having difficulty in getting experts to participate, particularly on the ‘consensus’ side. Most scientists aren’t accustomed to participating in the blogosphere.”
A forum limited to invited experts which just happens to use the internet to speed up discussion does not have to have anything in common with blogs or comments thereon.
While the Sun/climate link is very worthy area of discussion I think the heading of this dialogue is misleading. A grand minimum of Maunder type status is not due for thousands of years and the current solar grand minimum will be less severe than the Dalton.
Solar reduction will be minimal compared with the Maunder and should only last one more cycle, so perhaps we should be looking at how small the solar contribution will be this time around?
Geoff, I agree that this minimum will be short, though I think you may be surprised how cold it turns regionally through the next decade. The best heliocentric analogues for the short term planetary ordering of the solar signal, for the years 1836 to 1845 on CET, average at only 0.01°C warmer than the average of the coldest years in Dalton (1807-1817). And that was through a much larger sunspot cycle (SC8). That series of configurations repeats 179.05yrs later with little discrepancy, from late 2015 to 2024, which is right in the window where the coldest part of this minimum was expected to be anyway, i.e. between the sunspot maxima of the first two weak cycles, e.g. like 1807-1817 and 1885-1895.
There is only scant information from Silverman on Aurora in the 1836 to 1845 cold period, it does though note a lack of sightings in 1838, which had the coldest winter of the period, known as Murphy’s winter. That repeats early 2017.
On Maunder type grand minima, I am confident that I have identified a significant planetary progression*. Whereby a regular pattern breaks down for periods of 150-250 years, which coincide with the dominant cold periods in the last 6000 yrs. The interval between the Dark Ages and LIA periods is unusually long, many are around 800 yrs apart, and some around 400-500 yrs apart. In fact the variance in their frequency cycles roughly on the 4627yr grand planetary cycle. That analogue, and the next plotted break down*, indicates a LIA type sequence through the next 200 yrs, with extended and deep solar minima from the 2090’s, and from around 2200. Using the 4627yr return as a paleo’ analogue, around 2500 BC shows widespread desiccation in many regions, and around 2400 BC, widespread social collapse due to climatic deterioration. So I’m of the opinion that this solar minimum is a dress rehearsal for the really nasty ones that are following.
Surface warming by the solar cycle as revealed by the composite mean
difference projection
http://depts.washington.edu/amath/old_website/research/articles/Tung/journals/GRL-solar-07.pdf
Looking at the discussion, and conclusion of the paper, the abstract seems a bit misleading, or at least ambiguous. All the analysis is performed on a detrended temperature record (NCEP), so as to remove the anthropogenic signal, and no attempt is made to isolate a secular solar contribution to the trend over the period of analysis. The 0.2°C signal refers to the cyclical effect of the solar forcing on global surface temperature, from solar max to solar min. It is a cyclical variation and it isn’t claimed to makes a contribution to the warming from 1959 to 2004 (the period covered by the analysis). Though solar TSI may do such a contribution, they don’t estimate it, and that isn’t what the 0.2°C figure refers to.
Surface warming of 0.2 deg C is not a cyclic effect. This surface warming of 0.2 deg C every solar cycle is sequestered into the deep ocean and warms the norther hemisphere and gives the long-term warming trend of the global mean temperature. Heat is cumulative. A solar cycle surface warming at the surface of 0.2 deg C approximately means a surface warming of 2 deg C in a century, which gives the observed secular warming of 0.6 deg C when distributed over the top of about 100 m of the oceans.
Girma, the paper that you quote makes no such claim. Quite the contrary, the reason that they give for detrending the surface temperature record prior to the analysis of the solar cycle influence is to remove the greenhouse anthropogenic signal. There is a tacit assumption that all the trend is anthropogenic, though this need not affect their analysis of the cycle if it isn’t entirely true. It would be strange, also, to suppose that the climate only is sensitive to the rising half of the solar cycle. This cycle probably has been going on for millions of years. At a warming rate of 2.0°C per century, we would be in trouble now.
Pierre-Normand
Where does global (ocean) surface warming of 0.2 deg every solar cycle goes?
It gives the secular warming trend of the oceans.
It is simple logic.
Anthropogenic warming is a fabrication!
So, you really do believe that the surface has warmed 0.2°C/11-years for millions of years. Maybe you believe the cycle to be a new thing. In that case, what do you thing will happen over the few next millennia is the cycle goes on?
Girma, if it may help, think about what happens hemispherically over the seasonal cycle. Ocean surfaces warm up every summer, at least at mid-to-high latitudes. They have no trouble at all cooling back down every winter. Why can’t they react the same to a 11-year cycle as they do to a 1-year cycle?
The energy of the solar cycle is not always 0.2 deg C. During the Maunder Minumum, it was about 0. Leading to global cooling. For solar cycle 24, it may be much lower, leading to little solar warming. However, the warming inertia of the oceans of the last century continues and leads to higher global mean temperature.
Girma, in that case it’s not the solar-cycle itself that causes the warming. It’s the secular trend. Maybe you think it’s the amplitude that has an effect, but there is a big delay. But it would be strange that the delayed effect remains in phase with the cause, which isn’t even of steady periodicity. And you didn’t explain why, in your view, the diminishing part of the 11-cycle can’t have a cooling effect while half the seasonal cycle can. (hemispherically).
Pierre-Normand
It is what is called the history effect.
Take for example a projectile thrown vertically upward. Though the acceleration due to gravity is downward, the projectile moves upward due to the initial velocity. However, after some time the velocity becomes zero and the projectile reverses and start to move downwards. The time taken for a projectile thrown vertically upwards with a velocity u to reach its peak height is given by t = u/g. So depending on the initial velocity u, the time taken for the projectile (global mean temperature) to reduce varies. The history effect is encapsulated by the initial velocity (or the current global warming rate of 0.1 deg C per decade)
Girma, yes I understand the general idea. It’s the theory that when the Sun picks up some power, the increase in solar irradiance doesn’t immediately warm the ocean surface up. Rather, the shortwave radiation takes a vacation somewhere on a remote planet and only comes back to Earth several decades later to warm up the oceans. Nevertheless the delayed response is somehow modulated to remain almost perfectly in phase with the current solar cycle.
CERES products can be graphed here. The annual change is an order of magnitude greater than the Schwabe cycle change and IR and SW are out phase. Ocean heat – which has an annual cycle as well – follows SH warming in summer because that’s where most of the ocean is.
Although oceans do follow net TOA flux-
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/wong2006figure7.gif
The question of the thermal inertia of the oceans is no resolved however. In a period of sustained forcing – such as seen in last centuries grand solar max – the temperature gain in the ocean is a gradual process. One way or another – TSI alone seems enough to account for a large portion of the increase in forcing since the LIA.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/tsi-reconstruction.png
P-N doesn’t seem to realize it but he is arguing against the idea behind equilibrium climate sensitivity. With P-N It sees a matter of spectacular ignorance combined with being an irredeemable smartarse. It usually is with these guys. A groupthink psychological aberration.
Rob, since you are knowledgeable about impacts of solar forcing on surface temperature, do you agree with Girma’s interpretation of Camp and Tung (2007), that the solar forcing contribution to surface warming since 1959 is about 0.8°C (from four complete solar cycles)? Might CO2 have had a major compensating cooling effect?
From the conclusions “We obtained a globally averaged warming of almost 0.2°K during solar max as compared to solar min”. Not ambiguous, even to Girma, I would think, although it was clear that Girma must have stopped reading at the Abstract.
You don’t agree with the idea behind equilibrium climate sensitivity?
Rob, yes, I agree that it takes a very long time for an imbalance caused by a fast rate of forcing change to be reduced by the Planck response (surface warming) due the thermal inertial of the oceans and the low rate of diffusion into deeper layers. One can agree with this idea and nevertheless understand that Camp and Tung (2007) never claimed that each solar cycle account for 2°C of surface warming. This is a gross misunderstanding of the paper and it can’t be salvaged by an invocation of delayed solar effects. Camp and Tung are isolating the short term variability component attributable to the 11-year cycle and saying nothing at all about residual imbalances and secular trends. That’s not the topic of their paper.
The only misunderstanding is yours. The 0.8K was your invention. Camp and Tung gave 0.2K for the Schwabe cycle. The late 20th century saw a sustained high activity. This may translate into continued surface warming due to thermal inertia. You have just shown that you are clueless about a simple concept like ECS. I have no inclination to argue further with arrogant little twits with a very little understanding.
Rob Ellison: “The only misunderstanding is yours. The 0.8K was your invention. Camp and Tung gave 0.2K for the Schwabe cycle.”
They indeed do. I may or may not have misunderstood Girma but it is clear that Camp and Tung interpret the 0.2°K (Actually 0.16°K after analysis) as a cyclical variation up and down that remains in the surface temperature record after detrending. They explicitly say that they detrend the record in order to “*remove* the secular global-warming signal” (my emphasis) and that:
“[w]hen globally and annually averaged and detrended, but otherwise unprocessed, the surface air temperature since 1959 […] is seen in Figure 1 to have an interannual variation of about 0.2K, somewhat positively correlated with the solar cycle, although the signal also contains a higher frequency (of 3–5 year period) variation of comparable magnitude, possibly due to El Nin˜o-Southern Oscillation (ENSO).”
It is clear that they are analyzing the cyclical variability component and that there is no claim that the cycle *only* warms and *never* cools. It is responsible for both the variations up *and* down around the trend. This contrasts with Girma’s main contention that: “Surface warming of 0.2 deg C is not a cyclic effect. This surface warming of 0.2 deg C every solar cycle is sequestered into the deep ocean and warms the norther hemisphere and gives the long-term warming trend of the global mean temperature.”
I can find no support for this interpretation in the paper. If their goal really was to isolate the warming contribution of the cycle (if this makes sense at all), why would they analyse data *after* having *removed* the “secular global-warming signal” from it? They clearly are agnostic (in the paper) about the cause of the secular linear trend. The Sun may or may not have contributed to it, and may even have reduced it since 1959 (through cancelling some of the CO2 forcing or even possibly cancelling some residual imbalance from past solar forcing increase, for all we know).
More tendentious and obnoxious cr@p?
Synthesis is the art of science.
Rob Ellison: “More tendentious and obnoxious cr@p?”
Not tendentious at all. Detrended.
Tendentious – adjective – superficially in the objective idiom of science but actually pretentious cr@p that is wrongheaded but serves the purpose of circumloquaciously reaching a predetermined conclusion.
Pierre-Normand
Circumloquaciousness explained, in words of one syll a ble.
Indicate the route to my abode, For I am fatigued and desire to retire
I had some light refreshments 60 minutes ago and it went straight to my cerebellum
Wherever I may perambulate,
over land or sea or agitated ocean
You will always hear me chanting this melody
Indicate the route to my abode.
Over at the WUWT discussion, fredberple referred to something that I am very familiar with, the Extreme ultraviolent radiation (EUV) effect on radio propagation. It’s an example of one frequency band within the TSI spectrum that not only varies more than TSI, but that has readily observable effects. I wouldn’t claim anything climate wise about its variability, but I think it would be premature to rule out the possibility of sub-band TSI forcings-
<>
lsvalgaard replied-
<>
Good point, Doug. There are far greater changes in the power spectrum than in total solar irradiation. Given capacity to penetrate the atmosphere varies by wavelength the effects of changes in power distribution across the spectrum may have effects much greater than change in total power might imply.
Does it strike anyone else as odd that the IPCC (and others) dismiss the sun as irrelevant to our climate? Really???
This is a WUWT claim on behalf of the IPCC. Something could have been lost in translation.
Mark Silbert: Does it strike anyone else as odd that the IPCC (and others) dismiss the sun as irrelevant to our climate? Really???
That is not a fair summary of the IPCC or anyone else’s position. Despite much work, in the past and ongoing, reliable strong relationships between solar variation and Earth climate variation have not been found and tested against out-of-sample data. The five perspectives at the linked Climate Dialogue go into enough of the details.
OK, then let me re-characterize what I think the IPCC is saying:
…….the effect of the sun is negligible compared to the effect of CO2.
I believe this is pretty much what Dr. Yang said at the conference in Houston that Judith attended.
So five leading global experts and all it shows is that we are a long way from putting together all the pieces of the puzzle. The reason for the cluelessness is the focus on the physics of the Sun or the reconstruction of TSI. It is in fact more fruitful to look at the major modes of climate variability and explore mechanisms.
Multi-decadal variability in the Pacific is defined as the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (e.g. Folland et al,2002, Meinke et al, 2005, Parker et al, 2007, Power et al, 1999) – a proliferation of oscillations it seems. The latest Pacific Ocean climate shift in 1998/2001 is linked to increased flow in the north (Di Lorenzo et al, 2008) and the south (Roemmich et al, 2007, Qiu, Bo et al 2006) Pacific Ocean gyres. Roemmich et al (2007) suggest that mid-latitude gyres in all of the oceans are influenced by decadal variability in the Southern and Northern Annular Modes (SAM and NAM respectively) as wind driven currents in baroclinic oceans first discussed by Sverdrup (1947).
Spinning up of the sub-polar gyres in the Pacific provide the physical mechanism for a link between top down solar UV modulation of polar sea level pressure fields and upwelling in the eastern Pacific and bottom water formation in the north Atlantic. These are the major modes of interannular to millennial climate variability.
In the Pacific it provides the potential for more or less upwelling to occur as more or less cold polar water flows in the Peruvian and Californian currents. In the north Pacific it results in warm or cool sea surface temperature regimes over decades. In the central Pacific the cold upwelling is inhibited sporadically in relaxation events as warm surface warms flows eastward. The multi-decadal tendency is for enhanced frequency and intensity of cold and warm ENSO events in exactly the same periodicity as the north-east Pacific warm and cool regimes. The high resolution ENSO proxy below shows salt content in a Law Dome ice core. In a negative Southern Annular Mode (SAM) the strong westerly winds contract towards Antarctica – increasing salt deposition on the Law Dome.
‘Here, the authors report a statistically significant link between ENSO and sea salt deposition during summer from the Law Dome (LD) ice core in East Antarctica. ENSO-related atmospheric anomalies from the central-western equatorial Pacific (CWEP) propagate to the South Pacific and the circumpolar high latitudes. These anomalies modulate high-latitude zonal winds, with El Niño (La Niña) conditions causing reduced (enhanced) zonal wind speeds and subsequent reduced (enhanced) summer sea salt deposition at LD.’ http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI-D-12-00003.1?journalCode=clim
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/vance2012-antartica-law-dome-ice-core-salt-content.png
What modulates the Southern Ocean westerlies is the sea level pressure field – shifting low and high pressure in polar and sub-polar regions. In a positive SAM event (low polar pressure), the belt of strong westerly winds contracts towards Antarctica. A negative SAM (high polar pressure) event reflects an expansion of the belt of strong westerly winds towards the equator – increasing salt deposition on the Law Dome and spinning up the south Pacific gyre. There is a similar northern dynamic.
In the northern hemisphere the polar pressure field – the Northern Annular Mode – modulates sea surface temperatures (AMO) and the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC). The latter is a major driver of NH and global climate variability
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/smeed-fig-7.png
The solar dynamic suggests a long term downturn in activity – where UV changes much more than TSI – presumed driven by the chaotic orbit of the solar system barycenter about the centre of the Sun driving the solar magneto. This suggests long term changes in these patterns of ocean and atmospheric circulation that are the drivers of multi-decadal to millennial climate variability.
Di Lorenzo, E., Schneider, N., Cobb, K. M., Chhak, K., Franks, P. J. S., Miller A. J., McWilliams, J. C., Bograd S. J., Arango H., Curchister E., Powell T. M. and P. Rivere, 2008: North Pacific Gyre Oscillation links ocean climate and ecosystem change. Geophys. Res. Lett., 35, L08607, doi:10.1029/2007GL032838.
Folland, C.K., J.A. Renwick, M.J. Salinger and A.B. Mullan, 2002: Relative influences of the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation and ENSO on the South Pacific Convergence Zone. Geophys. Res. Lett., 29 (13): 10.1029/2001GL014201. Pages 21-1 – 21-4, DOI: 10.1029/2001GL014201
Meinke, H., deVoil, P., Hammer, G.L., Power, S., Allan, R., Stone, R.C., Folland, C. and Potgieter, A., 2005: Rainfall variability at decadal and longer time scales: signal or noise? J. Climate, 18, 89-96.
Parker, D.E., Folland C.K., A.A. Scaife, A. Colman, J. Knight, D. Fereday, P. Baines and D. Smith, 2007: Decadal to interdecadal climate variability and predictability and the background of climate change. JGR (Atmos), 112,.D18115 doi 10.1029/2007JD008411.
Power, S., Casey, T., Folland, C.K., Colman, A and V. Mehta, 1999: Inter-decadal modulation of the impact of ENSO on Australia. Climate Dynamics, 15, 319-323.
Qiu, Bo, Shuiming Chen, 2006: Decadal variability in the large-scale sea surface height field of the south pacific ocean: observations and causes. J. Phys. Oceanogr., 36, 1751–1762. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/JPO2943.1
Roemmich, D., Gilson, J., Davis, R., Sutton, P., Wijffels, S., Riser, S., 2007: Decadal Spinup of the South Pacific Subtropical Gyre. J. Phys. Oceanogr., 37, 162–173. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/JPO3004.1
Rob – PAY ATTENTION! The science is settled. Write that down.
Rob Ellison
“The solar dynamic suggests a long term downturn in activity – where UV changes much more than TSI – presumed driven by the chaotic orbit of the solar system barycenter about the centre of the Sun driving the solar magneto.”
Does this mean that solar output is varying according to the solar system barycenter which in turn influences our earth and its climate?
Do we understand what changes UV emissions? The idea is that it is linked to the solar magneto driven by tidal flux related to the orbits of the large outer planets especially. These latter have some regularity with chaotic wobbles of an N-body with a large central mass kind
I apologize in advance for the OT post, but this is stunning. Dennis Gartman, known as “The Commodities King” and a frequent guest on Fast Money, has predicted that the price of oil will go at least to $40-50 and perhaps as low as $10 in the next 10 to 15 years if Lockheed-Martin does have a viable fusion reactor. Even without that, the SPR has about 9 months of crude in storage. So, the whole fossil fuel industry could go down the drain without any help from the Green Blob.
From the article.
How low?
Gartman wrote that if fusion does become a reality, “oil’s true price has become $10/barrel … or less.”
Crude oil could go extinct, he added.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/102125295
Scientists capable of overcoming the obstacles that nuclear fusion present… are these coming from the same civilization that produces scientists that proclaim CO2 is a climate pollutant?
Think of it as (analogous to) phase separation:those who want to solve real-world problems migrate to fields like nuclear fusion. Those who want to use apparent global problems to impose their political-ideological agenda migrate to fields like “climate science”.
http://accelrys.com/solutions/industry/images/mesodyn.gif
AK commented on
I’ve spent my time supplying advanced tools (Electronics design tools, and now Product Lifecycle Management), I like to think of it as supplying arms to businesses. While it’s just a bit of lube to make it a little easier to build the next product model, it has a global reach, most everyone who reads this has something from someone I’ve helped.
And boy am I thinking hard about talking to Lockheed Martin to see if there’s a spot on that reactor team.
Cool picture, depending on which supercomputer did that, that too might be one of “mine”.
Jim2,
Got any links on the GS Skunk Works fusion reactor?. It made the front page of the Australian a few days ago and I’ve seen nothing more since. I looked at the WNA web site, updated October 2104). They list 12 fusion reactor concepts and list the Skunkworks concept last. It is a rather downbeat comment given that this is the nuclear industry’s site.
http://aviationweek.com/technology/skunk-works-reveals-compact-fusion-reactor-details
That is one article about it. I wonder if the the forecast of oil prices is also impacted by the Navy’s recent announcement that it can make jet fuel out of seawater.
JeffN, thank you for the fusion article and video. Interesting.
Setting aside Gartman’s prediction for a second, does it seem reasonable that given the exponential growth in technology and scientific knowledge in the last 100 years that humans will not find some breathtaking, world changing discoveries in the next 100 years?
ceresco kid commented
Back in the 80’s I read someplace there there were more Scientists, Researchers, and Engineers working around the world, than the sum of all of human history.
K. Eric Drexler, back in the 80’s predicted Atomic scale technology by 2012, Nano Assemblers over the next 10-20 years. We’ll likely have full blown nanotech by 2050 or so.
I’ve told my kids, that in their lifetime, medical technology will likely double their lifespan, and in that time will extend lifespans barring physical damage for as long as they’d like.
So Yeah, IMO the changes in technology from when my Mom was a child, Airplane, Spacecraft, Computers, Smartphones (which Star Trek completely missed with their communicators), refrigerators for gosh sakes, will pale to what will happen over the next 100 years.
If we push to become free of this rock, there will be no resource limits, asteroids of iron, precious metals, ices of most of the lighter elements, oceans of hydrocarbons, all we need is to extend our reach. But if we don’t, humans are doomed to be snuffed out by one of those same asteroids just waiting to fall on us.
For those wedded to the Ehrlich/Club of Rome worldview, CAGW is a race to prevent the development of inexpensive and abundant energy. For those of the Joe Romm/Paul Krugman worldview it is a race to force people to accept their political construct.
Abundant, inexpensive energy without CO2 emissions means wealth and the primacy of free(er) markets- a catastrophe in their eyes.
This is why they cannot accept a lower forecast of CO2-driven warming and they must pretend urgency (even though they’ve demonstrated for 20 years a willingness to wait around for their preferred political approach.)
http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/03-26-climatechange.pdf
Through 2009 the US blew $99 billion on global warming.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obama-blew-120-billion-on-global-warming/
Obama has blown $120 billion on global warming.
Thats $220 billion.
The amount blown this year will be over $22 billion.
If these wasted funds were spent on space and incentivizing private sector space efforts – we would be on Mars by now.
PA commented on
IMO, I’m not so much against spending on the science of climate (ignoring the debate on whether what’s being done is science or not), Spending on advance energy research, and tax incentives for advanced energy implementation.
Maybe half the amount spent and basing that on the precautionary principle. I am very much against no strings loans to fund alternate energy implementation.
The inflation calculator puts the cost of the Hoover Dam — construction began in 1931 and the cost was upwards of $175M — at $2,740,488,486.84 in 2014 dollars. Compared to that the Left today are practitioners of government Stonkernomics: they can spend $2T without leaving a trace.
When almost every person on the planet has access to any education and information via a personal device then the rate of innovation will explode. Not too long ago almost all technological innovation was coming from Europe and the Engish speaking world. Russia and the former USSR and China were constrained by politics. Now China, India, and South Korea are in the game.
Our greatest untapped resource is the human imagination.
JustinWonder commented
Basically almost everything in our imagination that isn’t physically impossible, has either been made, is in some stage of development, or abandoned because of costs.
And we have vivid imaginations……..
Sorry Justin, when everybody has access to a play station and I pad who would be bothered to do any further innovation?
Think about it.
angech commented
I help companies manage their new product data, I think we have ~1,000 customers, with probably more than 100,000 users.
There is tons of innovation being done, there are people who can’t help but think up new things. I love going places and seeing the cool, clever things these people think up, I love it.
There are people who’ve taken PS3’s, clustered them into a super computer.
While I appreciate why you made your comment, I think it’s simplistic at best.
Jim2, the post proves only that your ‘commodities King’ does not not know very much about oil. IF Lockheed has a viable fusion reactor, they saynit will be small, on the order of 100MW. They did not say whether that was thermal or electrical output. Relates to grid electricity.
Globally, about 75% of crude is made into transportation fuel (gas, diesel, jet kerosene). Some 8 percent is petrochemicals (plastics mostly) and about 4-5 percent is lubricants (motor oil, grease…). Depending on crude quality, 4+% ends up as asphalt (road tar). Globally, only about 4 percent ‘heavy oil/bunker fuel’ is used for electricity generation.
There is literally no way a fusion power source has a major impact in any significant fashion on crude oil consumption. His projection is bunkum.
Rud, read the articles. The alleged unique thing about what they’ve got is it’s size- it’s small. This is the reason Aviation Week wrote about it- it’s reviving the idea of nuclear shipping and even airplanes.
I’ve not doubt he’s playing fast and loose with the “what if” for his forecast, but if you assume a day where aviation and shipping consume no oil, it will have an impact on your price forecast. One that i believe will just be gobbled up by cars in China, but that’s another story.
PA – screw Mars, give me a CDC that has any interest in Ebola and other infectious diseases.
Not to be a broken record, but by “Celestial driver of phanerozoic climate?”, 2003 Shaviv & Veizer, incident galactic cosmic ray flux is apparently responsible for over a 6C peak to peak *ocean* temperature variation over geologic time, with all those pesky solar cycles and Milankovich signal noise integrated out.
It’s been clear to me for years (not that I’m all that quick; I first read it in early 2007) that the solar-gcr link is very poorly understood, at least by climate modelers, and stronger than they want to believe.
(Re-posted here because threading is whacked on the Week in Review thread.)
Dr. Curry,
The FEC wants to regulate speech on Climate Etc., and your speech as a public figure.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/10/27/FEC-Chairman-DEM-FEC-Proposal-Would-Regulate-Public-Figures
“The Federal Election Commission Chairman, Lee Goodman, told Sirius-XM Patriot Channel’s David Webb recently that not only would every free political website posting be government regulated under fellow commissioner Amanda Ravel’s proposal, but public figures who give their opinions would also fall under the FEC’s purview.”
As a blog dedicated to discussing “climate science and the science-policy interface,” you and your blog apparently need the guiding hand of government. Or so say the progressives/Democrats on the FEC.
Maybe you should start making political contributions to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi.
“Nice blog ya got here. Be a shame anything happened to it.”
Not to worry. We can always host our free speech blogs in Russia.
Let ’em try!
Try again……..Over at the WUWT discussion, fredberple referred to something that I am very familiar with, the Extreme ultraviolent radiation (EUV) effect on radio propagation. It’s an example of one frequency band within the TSI spectrum that not only varies more than TSI, but that has readily observable effects. I wouldn’t claim anything climate wise about its variability, but I think it would be premature to rule out the possibility of sub-band TSI forcings-
I wrote-
Extreme ultraviolent radiation (EUV) below 121 nm is an ionizing radiation completely absorbed by the atmosphere and responsible for the ionizing F layer region in the 90 to 200 mile region of the ionosphere mainly responsible for long distance (shortwave radio) communications. As ferdberple states, there are very significant differences from the top to the bottom of the 11 year sun spot cycles. The maximum usable frequency (MUF) refracted by the F layer various over a frequency of at least 14 MHz to over 30 MHz (20 meters to 10 meters amateur radio bands) from sunspot peak to sunspot trough based on east-west paths such as the US to Europe.
Here’s what makes this interesting. This is also a similar change in the MUF that occurs during the 24 hour cycle during most of the sunspot cycle. I do not know the w/m2 differences of EUV radiation during the 11 year sunspot cycle or how sensitive the F layer is to quantitative differences in EUV radiation, but the similarity of the 24 hour cycle (which includes many hours of zero EUV radiation) with the 11 year cycle suggests a much greater change in EUV than for TSI.
The above illustrates the hypothesis that greater changes in some frequency bands of TSI than TSI itself have observable effects and may contribute to cycles of climate.
And Leif Svalgaard knowledgeably replied-
TSI changes over a solar cycle from 1360.6 W/m2 [min] to 1361.8 [max], while EUV changes from 0.0057 to 0.0070 W/m2, so even though that change is large in percentage it is negligible in terms of energy. Since the change in temperature due to the solar cycle change of 1.2 W/m2 in TSI is lost in the noise [it is of order 0.07 K] it is hard to see that that the change of 0.0013 W/m2 of EUV [which is already contained within the 1.2 W/m2 of TSI] should have any effect.
Well, near UV and violet warm the deep ocean and far UV warms the upper atmosphere.
PA commented on
It also impacts the density/height of the atmosphere, no possibly of an effect on climate there. /sarc (for the tone deaf)
http://phys.org/news196366845.html
http://cdn.phys.org/newman/gfx/news/hires/teamobserves.jpg
Fun graph I found:
http://www.americantraditions.org/Articles/The%20Ma3.gif
So… mostly a UV increase since 1600.
Doug, you are spoiling the narrative; solar output is constant to three decimal places and there is NO difference in the conversion of an energy packet of photons at 200 nm, 400 nm, 800 nm and 12000 nm in terms of heating. Shining uv and ir on the ocean or atmosphere gives you EXACTLY the same effects; ask Pekka.
DocMartyn commented
When the flux is expressed as W/m^2 it would be approximately the same (differences in conversion efficiency), the Photon count would vary based on wavelength since shorter wavelengths have higher energy than longer wavelengths.
Mi Cro, I was being very sarcastic
There is no reason to suppose the sun will do anything unusual in the near future. So id there were a proposal to lower earth’s temperature by some international action, it would be unnecessary and a waste of money.
Alexander Biggs, Indeed, and the red line on this chart shows how much money it would cost the global economy per 5 years: https://www.masterresource.org/carbon-tax/world-not-agree-pricing-carbon-ii/
http://chumpville.com/index_files/image016.jpg
So no one wants to consider the CME effect? Magnetosphere breaches? Magnetic reconnection happened regularly during the grand solar max and the amount of energy penetrating to the earth can only be given an extremely rough estimate. A lot of money is currently being spent to try and better understand this magnetic reconnection phenomenon – new spacecrafts being launched. I believe these spacecrafts are now gong to be useless until the CME reaching earth once again has significant penetration of the magnetosphere. How can anyone look at the chart I’ve posted and not understand that the sun has went below a threshold when it comes to delivering energy to the earth? This is reality…..not some drummed up fabricated hoopla..reality. What do you think happens when bursts of high energy CME stops hitting the earth’s atmosphere like it has for the past 100 years? My common sense tells me that in combination of lower TSI and no significant CME,
1) The earth will receive significantly less energy.
2) the planet will cool rapidly in the upper atmosphere.
3) air temperatures in the troposphere will, in the coming 5 years become increasing colder than ocean temperatures and we will get more precipitation (this has already begun) and more cloud formation.
4) …… shall I continue?
You can explain all of Lockwoods list with solar driven ocean heat transport except for the stratospheric cooling part perhaps. Has the stratosphere been cooling? I thought that stopped about 20 years ago.
The Sun influences all climate, and its natural cycles are governed by planetary orbits, according to the compelling correlation between 934 year and 60 year cycles observed in both the climate and the inverted plot of the scalar sum of the angular momentum of the Sun and all the planets.
If the Earth had no greenhouse gases in its atmosphere and thus no water, no vegetation, in fact nothing but rocks which would probably have mean emissivity of about 0.80, guess what its surface temperature would be.
The surface would receive all the solar radiation, there being no reflection by clouds or oceans and no absorption of incident solar radiation in the atmosphere.
Approximating the Earth to a flat disc receiving a quarter of the solar radiation 24 hours a day (as the IPCC guys do) we get about 315W/m^2 and using our trusty Stefan Boltzmann calculator, we get about 288.7K which is slightly hotter than the existing assumed mean temperature with all that water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane and their “polluting” colleagues.
Solar cycle warming at the Earth’s surface in NCEP and ERA-40
data: A linear discriminant analysis
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2007JD009164/pdf
That’s interesting Girma. Let me just note that this is a different paper than the one discussed earlier. This new paper was published by the same authors 8 months later and it reaches further conclusions.
Don’t tell Jimmy D.
He thinks the solar varience is only supposed to affect the tropics. I think he’s on the verge of a meltdown.
It makes sense that the continents warm faster. We see that as spring turns to summer each year, and that is solar forcing too. The continents warm faster because they have less thermal inertia. This also happens in response to CO2 forcing that has been growing particularly in the last 40 years.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1900/mean:240/mean:120/plot/crutem4vgl/from:1900/mean:240/mean:120
Jim D commented on
There is some evidence in my work that the rate of warming has changed a little.
There’s no evidence of this (other than what I mention above).
Woodfortrees is based on worthless temp series, they are wrong and are not based on actual measurements.
I don’t think the further conclusions about observed positive feedbacks and the confirmations of the accuracy of GCMs will trouble Jim D. This paper also is the basis for a followup paper where they derive an observational estimate of climate sensitivity in the 2.3°C to 4.1°C range.
http://depts.washington.edu/amath/old_website/research/articles/Tung/journals/solar-jgr.pdf
“…Since the equilibrium response should be larger than the periodic response measured, the periodic solar-cycle response measurements yields a lower bound on the equilibrium climate sensitivity that is equivalent to a global warming of 2.3 °K at doubled CO2. A 95% confidence interval is
estimated to be 2.3-4.1 °K. This range is established independent of models.”
“if it is due to TSI heating at the surface”
The skeptics are, or should be, very concerned by the transient response to the 11-year solar cycle which is near 1 K per W/m2. This is double the value that the IPCC says is likely for CO2, so if skeptics don’t like the CO2 one, they surely have major problems with the way the earth’s surface temperature responds to solar cycles. However, I think it is more likely they haven’t noticed, because this piece of observational information rarely makes it to skeptical blogs.
Jim, why would that concern skeptics? I can think of almost as many reasons for why it warmed as I can for why it hasn’t warmed and none of them involve the argument solar doesn’t do anything so therefor CO2 doesn’t do anything.
steven, yes, on the other hand they may have accepted that the transient response to some forcings can be as high as 1 K per W/m2, as long as it is not CO2 forcing, and as long as they don’t have to explain why.
‘Since irradiance variations are apparently minimal, changes in the Earth’s climate that seem to be associated with changes in the level of solar activity—the Maunder Minimum and the Little Ice age for example— would then seem to be due to terrestrial responses to more subtle changes in the Sun’s spectrum of radiative output. This
leads naturally to a linkage with terrestrial reflectance, the second component of the net sunlight, as the carrier of the
terrestrial amplification of the Sun’s varying output. Much progress has also been made in determining this difficult to
measure, and not-so-well-known quantity. We review our understanding of these two closely linked, fundamental drivers of climate.’ http://bbso.njit.edu/Research/EarthShine/literature/Goode_Palle_2007_JASTP.pdf
Of course we are looking for a terrestrial amplifier.
Jim, logically I see no reason to accept that the efficacy of long wave radiation is the same as that of short wave. Why you have decided to accept that assumption is a mystery to me. Perhaps you can explain why? Do you assume they have the same feedback mechanisms? How is that even possible when one penetrates water and the other doesn’t?
Specifically it points to strong positive feedbacks going on in response to relatively small solar cyclical changes.
No – there is no equivalence.
steven, a forcing is a forcing. The earth has to respond to positive forcing with a temperature change, whether that forcing comes from longwave or shortwave changes. If you can think of why it only responds to shortwave forcing with a longwave change and vice versa, go for it.
Rob, yes, the skeptics hope that the evident positive feedback to solar variations does not extend to other forcing changes.
Jim, of course it is. Since it can be shown from observations that the transient sensitvity to solar of short fluctuating periods is a minimum of 2.3 C, it should be really really easy to show the transient sensitivity to a persistent forcing such as CO2 is at least that. What’s the problem?
steven, yes, it is warming consistently with 2 C per doubling, so no problem with that at all.
Jim, so why all the studies that argue observations indicate considerably less?
steven, you can get less if you choose some starting and ending dates, more if you choose others. If you fit the whole CO2 change period, you get 2 C per doubling as Shaun Lovejoy and Vaughan Pratt did from slightly different perspectives. For example, Lewis and Curry wanted to use 1940 as a starting point because it is a local peak, but they didn’t use it as an ending date because it would have given a completely different result. Better to smooth out these variations and use the whole period.
The solar variability extends to top down forcing by solar UV of the polar annular modes. These influence ocean and atmospheric circulation in the major modes of global climate variability.
It leads to warming and cooling regimes in the 20th century – 1944 to 1998 being the last 2 complete regimes. We are currently in a cool regime that is likely to persist for decades. The next shift seems quite likely to be a shift to yet cooler as the Sun cools. The warming between 1944 and 1998 was 0.4K – at a rate of 0.07K/decade. It is quite unlikely that all this was CO2.
The only one denying science here is Jimmy Dee.
Jim, there is more than one study. But lets go with your prefered estimates for the moment. What are the error bars on those estimations? Remember we are comparing to a solar study that claims the minimum is 2.3 C transient sensitivity, not that the central estimate is.
Rob E, it doesn’t seem to faze you that we are having the warmest decades on record in a so-called “cool” period. That’s the CO2 doing that.
steven, the solar TCR may be closer to the ECS because it is more efficient at increasing the tropical moisture. This is something that CO2 can’t do so quickly. It is a matter of rate differences, not the final result.
Jim, so now you are argue they have different feedbacks. I close my case.
steven, they have different ways of getting to the same final ECS, as I mentioned somewhere way above. The sun heats the tropics more effectively than CO2. The fact that the sun’s TCR is over 2 C and probably nearer 3 C, means that its ECS is even higher, which tells you about CO2’s potential ECS too.
Jim, your argument is that observations are the way they are because the feedbacks behave differently. That was my argument. You then go on to say that it will all even out in the year 2525 if man is still alive. That’s great but hardly supported by the observations since they haven’t happened yet. The main point is you agree the forcings behave differently regardless of if you believe they eventually balance out or not.
The forcings and responses tell you about the feedbacks. We learn a lot by seeing what the sun can do in even a short cycle. It’s Nature’s way of telling us, if we listen.
Jim, wonder what that sun could do if it were a 300 year persistent forcing instead of a bouncing ball ;)
‘As for your question: at the end of the century we were sitting on the highest global temperature value of the modern record. Since then we have leveled off and we may in fact be cooling. “We have reached the top of the mountain”, therefore it’s not surprising that the last decade is one of the warmest on record. Think about it! The important aspect is that the warming of the 80s and 90s has stopped and the models missed it completely! The important issue is that we have entered a new regime in global temperature tendency. In fact, I find it very misleading that scientists will present “the warmest decade” argument to justify their beliefs (or failures).’ Anastasios Tsonis
Thankfully, the sun takes 100 million years to change by a 1%. However, CO2 is doing an equivalent thing to the forcing in just a century.
Well then, should be warming up any second now (tapping watch that seems to have stopped).
I wonder if he still thinks we are cooling when 2014 could be the warmest year, beating El Nino years even with no El Nino. This is only consistent with a background upward trend.
Yeah right.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_September_2014_v5.png
steven, some skeptics have dismissed in their minds that this could just be natural decadal variability or related to a long solar minimum and weakest max in a century. Despite this, the long-term 30-year rise rate remains nearly 0.2 C per decade (0.3 C for land) and has not decreased, so you may be asking yourself why that is.
Jim, we are heading for another solar minimum and have an AMO that will have a negative tendency for another 20 years. I don’t doubt there is natural variaibility, I just doubt there is only the variability that explains the current lack of warming which is what some people seem to wish to believe.
Rob E, I think Tsonis was talking about surface measurements, not satellite troposphere algorithms.
The rate post the 1998/2001 climate shift is negative. Get used to it.
Surface temps are an anachronism – totally unsuited for measuring climate. Especially when there is short term variability due to NH drought. Clutching at straws notwithstanding.
Rob, tell that to Tsonis. He has whole papers about surface temperatures, and you seem to be his biggest fan.
He has a paper about 20th century warming – all 0.07K/decade of it.
It doesn’t make surface records any less of an anachronism for monitoring climate.
“The rate post the 1998/2001 climate shift is negative. Get used to it.”
It’s positive, and even larger for UAH than any surface temperature record.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1997/mean:6/plot/uah/from:1999/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1997/mean:12/offset:-0.3/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1999/trend:6/offset:-0.3
Do you have any freaking clue at all?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:2002/trend/plot/rss/plot/gistemp/from:2002/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2002/trend/plot/uah/from:2002/trend
Rob Ellison: “Do you have any freaking clue at all?”
Ah, sorry. I had misread that as “post-1998 climate shift”.
Jim, you need to think harder about the implications. And also consider the assumptions.
The supposed responses to warming, assuming they are due TSI change in radiant heat at the surface, should be even greater with CO2 since it affects the poles more. Warming should be faster and greater if the change was a response only to heat amount of heat.
As usual, the implications are the opposite of what you think.
See my comment above regarding your “tropic” warming belief. And read the paper you linked…
“1) What is according to you the “best” solar reconstruction since 1600 (or even 1000) in terms of Total Solar Irradiance?”
Make a list of EVERY solar parameter that we KNOW varies with time.
Then contemplate whether the above list is exhaustive; are we really AWARE of every solar variable?
Now convince yourself that TSI (over the bandwidth which we measure) is the ONLY solar variable that significantly influences the ‘Climate of the Earth’ (whatever that is) and that solar variability can safely be ignored when analyzing historical climate variations and predicting future climate.
And if you are willing to get up early one morning and put in a full, exhausting day, convince yourself that the ‘Temperature of the Earth (TOE)’ is a function of the CO2 content of the atmosphere and that the TOE can be set and maintained by adjusting the amount of CO2 that we inject into the atmosphere as a byproduct of producing the energy required to maintain our civilization.
“6) Is the Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) of the sun all that matters for the Earth’s climate?”
No, ENSO and the AMO both act as negative feedbacks to variations in solar plasma speed/pressure.
“7) what is the sun likely going to do in the next few decades and what influence will it have on the climate?”
In the same pattern as the Gleissberg (late 1800’s) and Dalton minima, the coldest years for the mid latitudes will run roughly between the sunspot maxima of the first two weak solar cycles, ~2015-2025. The occurrence and duration of solar minima can be mapped with precision from a very specific heliocentric planetary progression, and shows the current minimum will be short like the Gleissberg and Dalton minima.
The effects will be a sharp rise in negative NAO/AO episodes, increased El Nino episodes, increased positive Indian dipole events, and a renewed warming of the AMO through the next decade. That spells drought for the US great plains, Australia, and India-Indonesia, and increased precipitation for regions like NW Europe, and the African Sahel. The short term planetary ordering of the solar signal can map with certainty when most of the dominant negative NAO/AO episodes will occur.
Pingback: Climate And The Sun | Transterrestrial Musings
If not for ideological reasons – i.e., Left vs. right politics – why would government scientists purposefully reject observational evidence, like the obvious role of the Sun, and instead adopt climate change beliefs based solely upon unverifiable models?
There is some evidence that periods of warming are associated with several high activity, relatively frequent solar cycles while periods of cooling relate to a number of consecutive cycles with low solar activity and longer cycle duration.
This suggests that a cumulative effect or a build up is needed and single cycles of whatever activity do not register in our climate. This may explain the difficulty in finding a clear cut relationship between the sun and our climate.
The obsession with radiative warming has focussed attention on TSI, but as pointed out, the change in TSI is very low. However TSI is just one variable associated with the solar cycle amongst many. Some of the others may well influence cloud formation in our atmosphere. Even very small changes in cloud formation could explain extreme changes in climate.
Sometimes I think that climate scientists see the world through the prism of a GHG warmed atmosphere. As a non-climate scientist, I see the sea as a huge heat sink and the sea warms our atmosphere, not the other way around. Solar radiation is the main source of ocean heat and cloud coverage is the main control knob for solar radiation. The sea provides a massive buffer, which implies the relevance of a cumulative effect as well as time lags in observable changes.
It could be that the cloud coverage is affected by changes in the magnetic field, the solar wind, cosmic radiation or the UV content. The changes could be subtle, but integrated over several solar cycles, the result in terms of sea surface temperatures could be significant.
Schrodinger’s Cat | October 28, 2014 at 2:18 pm | Reply
“There is some evidence that periods of warming are associated with several high activity, relatively frequent solar cycles while periods of cooling relate to a number of consecutive cycles with low solar activity and longer cycle duration…. The changes could be subtle, but integrated over several solar cycles, the result in terms of sea surface temperatures could be significant.”
Nicely articulated analysis. The problem of course is that the solar cycle “evidence” consists of data showing correlation with insufficient physics to prove causation. Those who champion AGW have the opposite problem: they claim physics, which is known to be incomplete (e.g. water vapor, ocean interface, carbon cycle, etc.), showing causation with no supporting data. An interesting academic exercise in an immature field of science that is far from ready for the world stage.
I agree this is plausible but the consensus scientists are forced to contradict their earlier assertions which is why they sound so muddled in explaining the pause.
While it is often falsely repeated that CO2 was required to fill the gap between 20th century obs. and models, the actual IPCC argument (or logical fallacy) was that they couldn’t think of anything else because they had already postulated that the natural cycles such as PDO and AMO etc. were unimportant and that the suns effect was 1/13 of CO2 and declining after 1960. That circular assumption of declining natural variation therefore drove the conclusion of dominant manmade warming after 1960 but carried with it the obvious conclusion that warming would not pause beyond minor enso fluctuations. This is why it took so long for them to stop denying the pause – it just should not have happened according to their assumptions.
However, now they have to bring back these natural cycles into the warming/cooling mix which logically leads to the conclusion that there is nothing unusual or inexplicable about global temperatures since 1960 which leaves just a long-term warming trend which the IPCC had previously conceded was likely natural. To keep the idea that CO2 is dangerous they now have to attribute that long term trend to CO2.
+1
Jose gets my vote (I know we’re not voting). Anyone who can say “we don’t know” is a climate hero for the simple reason, we don’t know. Give that man a grant!
Wagathon – an excellent example of different solar cycle variables and their effect on different aspects of our atmosphere and no mention of TSI in sight.
As PMHinSC (above) observed, this is an immature field of science. Unfortunately it will remain immature if mainstream scientists continue to reject a solar influence based on TSI while closing their minds to other possibilities. There is a tendency to reject anything that may detract from GHG induced warming.
SUN-CLIMATE CONNECTIONS
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/292/5515/234.full
Earth’s climate cycles correlate compellingly with the 934-year and superimposed 60-year cycles in the inverted plot of the scalar sum of the angular momentum of the Sun and all the planets.
There is no measurable net trapping of thermal energy at TOA, where the difference in flux rarely varies ±0.5%. Carbon dioxide does not act like a blanket, and nor does water vapour which keeps the world cooler.
And it’s about time all “Lukes” realised that water vapour cools in the real world, as real world temperature data confirms. You could do your own study in less than a day.
As you add more water vapour more of it congregates below the “radiating altitude” (as does more carbon dioxide) because of the density gradient. So that altitude is lowered (not raised) and furthermore we all know that water vapour reduces the temperature gradient and thus the supported surface temperature.
You Lukes have produced no empirical evidence to support the GH conjecture. You have not proved water vapour warms or produced any valid SBL calculations that gel with the observed surface temperatures on Earth or Venus and so you don’t come anywhere near qualifying for the $5,000 reward I’ve offered, because the first requirement is a study with similar methodology to mine but showing water vapour warms, and warms to the huge extent that would be necessary if it were in fact causing most of the claimed “33 degrees” of warming as in IPCC documentation on their website.
Critical to the IPCC “explanation” is the addition of back radiative flux to solar flux when doing SBL calculations for Earth’s surface temperature. The combined requirement for 288K (using emissivity 0.95) would be a mean of 370W/m^2 of thermal energy transferring out of the base of the atmosphere and into the surface. But, after 30% of solar radiation is reflected by the atmosphere, the mean solar radiation entering the atmosphere is about (0.7 x 1360)/4 = 238W/m^2. So how does the atmosphere add 55% to the incident energy and deliver more into the surface?
double CO2 raises our green house constant from .78 to potentially .80, with a resultant 1.5C rise in surface temperatures. A 1.5% decrease in solar output would counteract this. We have seen .2 % solar output changes over the last 30 years, and there seems evidence that other cycles are much deeper in the past. The arrogance seems to come from believing modeling co2 is accurate, Total cloud patterns impact the constant far more, and total cloud patterns could be a chaotic output of many other factors.
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