This is one of the more useful reads I have had today….

A longer view than 2003-2008 is revealing. Charts follow from 1947 to present.

http://www.climateaudit.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=556

Can you comment on this paper and explain how it relates to your research:

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2008/2008GL035333.shtml

It appears they are coming to exactly opposition conclusions based on the same satellite data.

On your point about homeopathy I’d agree. I only point out that all such arguments apply equally – or perhaps even moreso – to CO2
And there is CO2 rearing its ugly head again. The CO2 controversy has nothing to do with whether the is a Sun-climate relationship.

At least this will be about a real period of time to look at climate rather than concentrating on the past 100 or 50 or 30 or 10 years.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-10/ddoe-doe102308.php

I guess this is to increase the IPCC confidence level from 99 to 100%…

On sunspots I think you are being controversial are you not? There are good sunspot correlations shown on Sami Solanki’s site and a pretty good fit is made to the Armagh instrument measurements. If you’re out of step with other solar scientists and astronomers then it’s customary to acknowledge that before declaring your own standpoint as being the absolute truth. Or have you convinced them all? I’d remind you that Willie Soon still sees solar activity as showing excellent correlation in the Arctic – where, crucially ,post-hoc adjustments to the temperature data have been minimal.

On your point about homeopathy I’d agree. I only point out that all such arguments apply equally – or perhaps even moreso – to CO2, where complete guesswork is ritually presented as fact and a relatively tiny increase in CO2 in the atmosphere is presented as highly important without any other guide than a) an extremely poor correlation of rising CO2 to rising temperature, b) some overly simplistic physics and c) a ridiculous assumption that climate somehow acts just like an electric circuit.

http://ams.confex.com/ams/15isa14m/techprogram/paper_125889.htm

This strikes me as a rather signicant data point since the modellers always insist that straspheric cooling is the “signature” of GHGs.

I was wondering if Dr. Spencer could comment on whether this data actually re-enforces his argument that CO2 sensitivity has been over estimated.

Don’t trust the NOAA-15 AMSU data for channel 6 or “LT”…channel 6 has a calibration drift, and LT is also affected by that.

At some point I would like to replace the NOAA-15 data on that web page with AMSU data from NASAs Aqua satellite. The biggest problem with these sensors is that the calibration changes slightly with instrument temperature, and the NOAA polar-orbiters are not maintained in a sun-synchronous orbit.

The Aqua satellite has fuel that is used to maintain it in a constant orbit, so there are no year-to-year changes in instrument temperature, and we believe it’s calibration stability to be the best of any MSU/AMSU instrument yet.

You are quite right and normally I would. I’ve gotten close to a political leader in the last 2 years and because of this I must hide my ID for the time being ( for respect of those whom I associate with), I am actively fighting the AGW left from the inside.

I do read your blog on a daily bases and I’m a firm believer of Cosmoclimatology and hopefully more public funding will go in that direction.

I see a time line of two to five years before before the tide of public opinion can turn the media in its output. It is my firm belief that global poverty is the real issue of the 21st century.

Therefore I apologize for my use of my internet game name on this forum and I will not post again till my position in the political sphere is more secure.

Gor.

Do you agree that there is/was some/any historical significant correlation of sun (not TSI) with climate?

I know from your cloud-cover and albedo plots that you don’t believe there is any 11 year cycle in those. But I’m not convinced that the influence has to be that direct. As one small factor among many, in a complex system with many positive and negative feedbacks, I’m not sure that the lack of a ’smoking gun’ proves that there was no crime. I like Barry Saltzman’s wording in “Dynamical Paleoclimatology”, “The record of temperature and ice change [...] may indeed be viewed as a response to the external forcing of the system, but it may bear little similarity in phase, frequency, or amplitude of this forcing. It should be clear, considering all of the factors involved, that the task of accounting for and predicting the climate is bound to be very difficult.” That the sun could change the clouds a bit would be far easier to show than that the sun could change the climate.

To me, the fun is in finding out how it really works. I’m not here to save the world.

evan jones,
Oort (1010-1050)
Wolf (1280-1340) (230)
Spörer (1415-1534) (75)
Maunder (1645-1715) (111)
Dalton (1790-1840) (75)
Modern (2007 – ) (167)

The number in brackets is the time between the end of the previous and the start of the actual. I don’t really see a cyclic trend here. Perhaps more data points going back through the Holocene could reveal something.

Looks like a rough 200-250 year cycle to me.

1. Isn’t it all a question of scaling, ie how much effect you attribute to even a small change?
One should not a priori attribute something to something [although it seems that people do that all the time]. The issue is if one can demonstrate that a small change has a large effect. It is almost like homeopathy where it is claimed that the smaller the concentration of the causative agent, the greater the curative effect :-)

2. Since sunspots historically show very good correlation with temperature and these are magnetic signatures isn’t TSI a red herring in the first place? Shouldn’t we look for a magnetic mechanism?
There is no such good correlation. For example, solar activity in the 20th century was not markedly different from that in the 19th, while temperatures seem to have been. Central to the truth of that statement is the realization that the sunspot number record does not have constant [or correct] calibration over time. We have had lots of discussion on this blog of the ‘tiny Tims’, so I’ll not elaborate further now.
Sunspots are magnetic, but for every magnetic north pole there is a corresponding magnetic south pole so overall there is no magnetic effect. And the variation of TSI is purely of magnetic origin [and tracks sunspots very well], so TSI is a good proxy for solar magnetism. There was also the notion that since TSI is a measure of the light and heat that we get from the Sun, that that in itself was important. If TSI increases 4%, the temperature increase from that alone would be 1% or 3 degrees.

our own magnetosphere has reduced in strength by a good deal and that in turn should lessen our protection from the solar wind.
The Earth’s magnetic field has indeed decreased 10% over the last 150 years and that has increased magnetic activity by a small amount [on the border of being measurable]. It is, however, an issue under debate. There is a school of thought [which I do not subscribe to] that a smaller magnetosphere would mean smaller geomagnetic effects, because the so-called reconnection line would be shorter. The argument for this goes like this: geomagnetic activity is due to reconnection between the Sun’s and the Earth’s fields. Reconnection creates an electric field and the total potential drop is that electric field times the length of the reconnection line. I’m not sure that it is that simple.

I have not seen anyone point out that from the data provided on that page we have at present record low temperatures (since 1998) in the upper troposphere at both the 250mb and 400mb bands. For just about the whole of this year the area between 7.5km and 11km above the surface has been at its coldest since 1998.

The data for the lower troposphere at 600mb and 900mb show temperatures below those last year, but not exceptionally so. Is there an explanation of why the temperatures in the upper troposphere are so very low this year?