Clearly most of the AGW debate should be about how much effect it has on top of natural (Milanovich & others?) cycles. What is the percentage effect and how important that is relative to other changes.

So what is the direct effect? Is the sun’s irradiance fluctuating in general with sun-spot activity and how much effect does that have on the earth’s temperature and climate, ignoring other effects?

Has the sun been getting hotter and now it’s cooling down?

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Whether large or small solar forcing cannot imply greater or lesser import to AGW.
Nonsense, as you well know.

Obviously not. What delightfully embarrassing trap have I walked into now? Tendentious, contradictory and oh, so tiresome, but a snare carefully laid, ‘eh.

Whether large or small solar forcing cannot imply greater or lesser import to AGW. Nought plus or times nought, is nought.

The point is covered meticulously in the paper that I sent you. It may also be downloaded at:http://www.happs.com.au/downloaders/The%20ENSO%20mechanism.pdf

See in particular figures 9 through 14.

It’s actually the central thesis of the paper. Strange you missed it.

Perhaps Pancho can right you in the saddle once again.

Not my utterance, Sir. If I maintained the obsessive concern with minutiae that some are prone to I might have edited the quote but I have an interest in encouraging others when the are conceptually accurate rather than nit-picking every detail.

I am seldom, if ever, the smartest man in the room, why bother?

“reductio ad absurdum is a process of refutation on grounds that absurd – and patently untenable consequences would ensue from accepting the item at issue”, to the effect that increased consequence of “solar forcing is support for AGW”.

And you, dear Watson, are deluded regarding you’re facility with logic. If all crucial facts were effectively in hand, deduction, vis a vis, induction, might be sufficient to decide a point.

In fact, setting aside the very many crucial issues remaining to be decided, we disagree on very many facts, particularly anything to do with AGW. Yes, you are in command of very many facts, but skill with their use, particulary in AGW, is not granted perforce.

Moreover, you’ve inverted the customary relation (where by “sensitivty”, I acknowledged admits exception): decreased consequence of “solar forcing implies support for AGW”.

So, I hear you fancy yourself a reader of Wittgenstein? Tell us more.

Perhaps you can accept that there is an overlap between ozone and water vapor in the upper regions of the tropical troposphere where temperatures are driven in large part by the sun?

There is a problem in logic and it is this. Wind is a response to temperature and density variation. Except in exceptional circumstances, i.e. close to the surface where mountains interrupt the flow of air, density variations do not spontaneously arise and cause temperature differences.

Its one thing to name a phenomenon, plot its variations and generate models that fail to predict its performance (thus demonstrating a true failure of understanding) and it’s another thing entirely to work out the force that is driving the phenomena.

The stratosphere owes its temperature in the main to short wave radiation from the sun. The seasonal maximum in lower stratospheric temperature occurs when ozone is excited by outgoing long wave radiation in August. That is a function of the distribution of land and sea. That peak disappears at 30hPa. Ozone itself is the product of incoming short wave radiation splitting O2. Without the ozone that maximum would disappear. We are discussing twin maxima at 1hPa (45km) in March and September, maxima that clearly overwhelm the almost 7% swing in irradiance due to orbital considerations. In the upper stratosphere we don’t have a temperature record by the month. The study you cite is based on a couple of years data. We do have a temperature record by the month at 20hPa and 30hPa in the lower and middle stratosphere that starts in 1948. Looking at that record we find that the greatest variability is in September.

The upper stratospheric temperature maxima at 1hPa occur at the equinoxes when the sun is vertically over the equator. It is known that the solar wind couples with the Earths magnetosphere at that time resulting in peaks in geomagnetic indices as measured at the surface of the Earth. The peak in March tends to morph with the irradiance peak due to the orbital factor in January. The September peak can however be easily differentiated in data for the southern hemisphere which is cool at that time. September is the month of the greatest variation at 30hPa and also at 200hPa over the equator and also between 20° and 40°south latitude.

Recently, temperature spikes at 100hPa (tropopause) have been found to align with the 28 day rotation period of the sun. Is that dynamical? Obviously not. It’s radiative in origin. The study you cite finds that temperature variations increase with altitude. The migrating diurnal tide shows the highest temperature in March and September with a strong variation from year to year.

Let’s face it, we don’t know enough about ionospheric flows to work out what is happening in the atmosphere / ionospherere mix that begins above the tropopause. (lets caution about hard boundaries in a gaseous medium). We do know that when the ion count is weak due to low levels of sunspot activity (short wave radiation) radio signals do not bounce from one hemisphere to another. We also know that a well populated ionosphere reacts to geomagnetic forces because radio signals are immediately disrupted by solar wind/geomagnetic activity. Ion count is related to short wave radiation and geomagnetic activity. You seem very willing to maintain that the mass of the atmospheric column over the tropics on the dayside is invariable? What I see is an atmosphere above the tropopause that contains very little material, highly mobile, loosely held and very reactive.

Your assertion as to the cause of these temperature variations or the nature of the atmosphere above the tropopause is not important. It is actually irrelevant to my thesis. Any reasonable observer would allow that extreme variability in temperature at the top of the stratosphere in September, that is felt with gradually diminishing amplitude down to 200hPa, would be most likely due to some factor related to the sun and its radiation rather than the Earth or ‘autonomously generated dynamical process’ that just happens to have a strongly annual periodicy.

That same extreme in variability is present at 200hPa. So, it is also evident in the troposphere. If the variations above that level are due to ‘dynamical processes’ they begin in the troposphere where the air is sufficiently dense to create a wave when heat is applied. But that is really drawing the long bow.

At 200hpa there is water vapour. The rest I should be able to leave to your imagination. But if not, I have a paper at http://www.happs.com.au/downloaders/The%20ENSO%20mechanism.pdf
devoted to tracing the origins of atmospheric warmth and the implications for cloud cover and climate change.

The long and the short of it is that ENSO is driven by the sun. ENSO is demonstrably responsible for global temperature change. Energy gain in the tropics exceeds energy loss and the size of the surplus determines winter temperatures at high latitudes. It is at high latitudes in winter time that we have seen strong warming since 1978, in both hemispheres. Prior to that, between 1948 (when the NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis record starts) and 1978 there was cooling. In mid latitudes there is no change. In low latitudes there has been a small increase in surface temperatures in summer.

From 2006 we are seeing cooling at high latitudes, particularly north of the 50th parallel but extending southwards into subtropical China and the Great Plains areas in 2007-8.

This is normal, natural change related to solar activity and consequent change in the Earths atmospheric albedo.

But, there are a large number of people who do not want to hear this. They prefer to think there is a malaise in human affairs that is due to man himself. This is an old story used by witch doctors over time immemorial.