Bob Kendall

REPLY: Thanks Bob, here is one I can recommend for you done by a friend, Warren Meyer.

http://www.climate-skeptic.com/2008/01/my-best-skeptic.html

http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/03/30/evidence-of-a-significant-solar-imprint-in-annual-globally-averaged-temperature-trends-part-2/

Effectively, solar irradiance only accumulates for a period of between 30 days to about 80 days.

The peak of the seasons always lags the equinox/solstice by about 30 to 40 days.

- The peak of the summer on land is about July 25th versus the solstice on June 20th.
- The peak of polar ice extents lag the solstice by about 80 to 85 days.
- The peak of ocean temperatures in each hemisphere is about 80 to 85 days after the solstice.

Therefore, the planet only “accumulates” solar irradiance over a 35 day to 80 day period.

REPLY: TCO. Griping about it won’t change things. The plan was to release both; one after the other. After part 1 was posted and we received comments I argued for a review by some others to be sure the part 2 work was readable, understandable for the layman, and well vetted with others that can spot errors. It’s taken a little time. Put simply, as a career complainer, you’d complain about if from your phantom harping position of anonymous no-risk comfort no matter what or how it was brought about. So I have nothing to lose and everything to gain by waiting a bit for the last reviewer to finish. And that is exactly what I will do.

Getting to the post:

1. Smoothing should be done for display purposes. Smoothed data should not be used for hypothesis testing, instead the raw data should be. This is something that we would correct the AGWers for doing, so it’s fascinating that we are making the same mistake.

2. The claimed correspondances in sun cycle with temp are not shown graphically nor is any math done to verify some correspondance of turning points in temp with the cycles. Also the turning points seem to vary in direction (flat, up, down, etc.) in the temp. Does this theory account for that?

3. Based on the previous Basil posts and his failure to address criticism, I doubt that we will learn much or have good discussion. Basil can snow you fine, AW, but you’re….light.

4. The whole thing with the qualtitative statements, the grasping for various cycles (not listing all possible, etc.) just comes accross as entrail looking at. It’s really a real mess. If an AGWer did work like this, we would rip it to shreds.

REPLY: “before you even knew that post 2 made sense…” Hey newsflash TCO, Part 1 and 2 were done at the same time, the difference is that part2 has been sent out for review.

REPLY: The part 2 is done. But I’m circulating it for some peer review to several specialists to check it’s accuracy and catch any mistakes. If that’s “bizarre, rinky dink crap” to you then so be it.

http://www.box.net/shared/8xn81l7y8s

The command to do this graph is:

$ ./climate hadcrut3 mean 132 derivative mean 132 hadcrut3.mean132-d.out

In other words: Read HADCRUT3 format data, do 132 month running mean, then take first derivative, then do 132 month running mean again. What this means in detail I’m not competent to judge, but it does generate a nice graph!

The new package is at: http://www.box.net/shared/jan0st3wgc along with all the graphs I’ve done so far.

There are now switchable input formats, so if anyone wants another format added and can point me at the spec and an example data file, let me know here. I’ll find a more sensible place to store and maintain this soon!

Paul

I don’t know if this is useful, but I’m a much better programmer than statistician or climate scientist, so I thought I’d try to help out in that way… I’ve written a little C++ utility which will read the raw HADCRUT3 data and generate data suitable for gnuplot. It will also do some basic running means of different lengths (at least, as far as I understand it, which isn’t very far). The interesting thing is that an 11-year (132 month) running mean generates something very like the graph in the main article above.

Some example output graphs and a tarball of the code are at:

http://www.box.net/shared/c58tdkccgs

I’ve included the latest HADCRUT3V global mean data but you should be able to substitute any of their averaged files.

The basic code should run on any GNU-based system (e.g. Linux): Just type ‘make’. If you want the plots you need the gnuplot package, and if you want to display them easily (using ‘make display’), you need imagemagick.

Let me know if there’s anything else I could usefully make it do.

Enjoy!

Paul

REPLY: Thank you Paul, your effort is appreciated.