Guest post by Alec Rawls
Solar physicist Sami Solanki and his colleagues at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research helped pioneer the use of cosmogenic isotopes from ice cores to create a proxy record for solar activity going back hundreds and thousands of years. Together with a group led by Ilya Usoskin at University of Oulu in Finland, Solanki describes “grand maximum” levels of solar activity from 1920 to 2000, with the sun being especially active since the 1940’s.
Comparing this solar record to temperature, these scientists find a strong correlation between solar activity and temperature persisting until quite recently. For example, over the period of the instrumental temperature record, a 2004 paper by Solanki and Krivova finds that the correlation is quite close, “however”:
However, it is also clear that since about 1980, while the total solar radiation, its ultraviolet component, and the cosmic ray intensity all exhibit the 11-year solar periodicity, there has otherwise been no significant increase in their values. In contrast, the Earth has warmed up considerably within this time period. This means that the Sun is not the cause of the present global warming.
But does this conclusion follow? Their own evidence says that until 1980 the dominant driver of climate was solar activity (and their longer-term temperature-proxy comparisons say the same thing). So how can they assert that two decades of the highest solar activity on record can’t be the cause of concurrent warming?
I suggested to Solanki and his colleagues that they must be implicitly assuming that by 1980 ocean temperatures had already equilibrated to whatever forcing effect the high level of solar activity was having. Otherwise warming would continue until equilibrium had been reached. Yet equilibration is never mentioned in any of their analyses.
Many thanks to Sami Solani and Manfred Schuessler for their important reply, finally making the implicit explicit. Here is the main part of their answer:
Dear Mr. Rawls,
You have raised an interesting question. Correlations between solar activity indices and climate assume that there is a constant lag between solar and climate variability (this is implicit in the nature of correlations). In some cases authors even implicitely or explicitely assume that this lag is zero, i.e. that the relationship is instantaneous. If we consider the period of time up to ca. 1970, then this lag lies roughly between 0 and 12 years (e.g., Solanki and Krivova 2003). Newer reconstructions, such as that of Krivova et al. (2007) tend to favour the lower lag. If we consider the period since 1970 alone, then the solar irradiance hasn’t shown an increasing trend, but rather a decreasing one, in contrast to global temperature, which has increased substantially. If this increase is due to the hypothetical influence of the oceans, as you suggest, then of course these short lag times would not be realistic. This, however, would mean that the relatively good correlation between solar and climate variability prior to 1970 would also have to be discarded as due to chance and would cease to be of relevance. Lags cannot be changed at will, certainly not without a good physical reason, i.e. one based on computations, that at least approximately model the Earth system’s behaviour.
To clarify, I did not quite suggest that post-1970 warming might be due to the influence of the oceans. I suggested that it could be due to the sun. The hypothesis isn’t that the oceans were giving up stored heat content but that they were continuing to absorb solar-driven heat. (Under the GCR-cloud theory, high solar wind blows the clouds away, increasing the amount of solar shortwave that pours into the oceans.)
Since Solanki and Schuessler see this slow-ocean-equilibration story as incompatible with short correlation lags, they are clearly identifying short lags with rapid equilibration. The question is whether this identification makes sense. If the equilibration process is not rapid, does it really mean that the short correlation lag between solar activity and temperature that these folks discovered must be mere chance? A simple counter-example shows the answer to be no.
Day vs. season
If you map the diurnal correlation between the strength of the sun’s rays on your back porch and temperature in the shade, you will find that the maximum correlation occurs with only a few hours lag. At noon, sun strength is no longer increasing, while the rate of temperature increase is near its maximum, with temperatures continuing to rise until sometime mid-afternoon.
So you find this very strong and rapid correlation between sunlight and backyard temperature. You’ve been plotting it for a few months, and now it’s June. There is no significant change day by day in the strength of the sun’s rays, or their duration, yet somehow peak backyard temperatures keep going up. The end of June is hotter than the beginning of June. Do you say that this can’t be explained by the sun because solar forcing has not been rising and you know that the temperature response to the sun is only a few hours?
This is exactly what Solanki et al. are doing. Instead of day vs. season they are finding temperature signals within the solar cycle and from one solar cycle to the next and assuming that these same response times apply to longer term changes in solar activity. But climate systems don’t just respond on one time scale.
This is what came out of the previous post, where Mike Lockwood cited the rapid response time that was estimated by Stephen Schwartz on the assumption that the planet can be represented by the simplest possible energy balance model with only one heat sink. Make the model one step more realistic by giving it two heat sinks, so that the sun and the atmosphere do not warm the entire ocean at once, but warm an upper layer which in turn, over time, transfers heat to a deeper ocean layer, and everything changes. Time to equilibrium from a step-up in forcing could be centuries, but as Daniel Kirk-Davidoff’s analysis of the two heat-sink model shows, a correlation study that does not span several times the period of any long term fluctuation in forcing will only pick up the relatively rapid response time of the upper ocean layer, revealing next to nothing about time-to-equilibrium for the full climate system.
The one thing we can say from the observed rapid temperature response to short term fluctuations in solar activity is that solar activity clearly does drive temperature. Add that the sun does not warm the ocean all at once—that the deeper ocean is warmed over time by the upper ocean as the two heat-sink model describes—and we can expect that the demonstrated warming effect of solar activity will cause long-period deeper ocean warming when there is a longer period rise in solar activity.
That is, the short time-lag correlation actually implies that longer period responses should also be taking place, once the most obvious steps to model realism are incorporated. Thus no, the finding of a short correlation lag does not contradict a solar explanation for late 20th century warming but supports it, just as the suns’ warming of the day supports a solar explanation for seasonal change.
This is why it is so important that widespread but unstated assumptions of rapid equilibration be made explicit. The assumption does not stand up to scrutiny, yet it has been allowed to escape scrutiny even as it does the heavy lifting in many scientists’ dismissal of a solar explanation for late 20th century warming. So again, many thanks to Doctors Solanki and Schuessler for making this assumption explicit.
GCM equilibration time
Here is the rest of the Solanki-Schuessler response:
You can rightly argue that a simple linear analysis, such as that carried out by Solanki and Krivova 2003, does not fully reflect the complex behaviour of the Earth system. Indeed, such an analysis does not replace introducing the solar irradiance record into a GCM (General Circulation Model), which includes the coupling between the oceans and the atmosphere, and computing the influence of the Sun’s behaviour. Such studies have not, to our knowledge, reached conclusions that differ significantly from those reached by the simple correlation analysis. If anything, they tend to indicate that the influence of the Sun is even smaller than the correlation studies suggest. The attached review paper gives a good and up-to-date overview of the state of research on Sun-climate relations. Figs. 27 and 28 (pp. 36 and 37) of this paper show that GCM models support the assumption of a short time lag, i.e., quasi-instantaneous reaction of the global temperatures on changes in forcing (as is well known to be the case for major volcanic eruptions, for instance). We think that this is due to the fact that only the mixed layer of the oceans is involved in climate variations due to short-term (decadal to centennial) variations of the forcing, so that the global equilibrium time of the oceans is irrelevant – but you may want to contact a climatologist if you wish to obtain more detailed information.
We hope to have been of help.
Sincerely yours,
Sami Solanki and Manfred Schuessler
What I have been able to glean about equilibration time in the IPCC GCMs is rather different from what Solanki and Schuessler assert. This came up in Part 2, where Schwartz’ short estimated time constant implied a low climate sensitivity, prompting a vigorous response from Gavin Schmidt and other “consensus” GCM compilers. Foster, Schmidt et al. said that in contrast to Schwartz’ 4-6 year time constant, the AR4 model “takes a number of decades to equilibrate after a change in external forcing.”
In a later RealClimate post, Schmidt suggests that:
Oceans have such a large heat capacity that it takes decades to hundreds of years for them to equilibrate to a new forcing.
The review paper that Solanki and Schuessler cite is Solar Influences on Climate, by Gray et al. 2010. S&S cite Gray’s Figures 27 and 28 as support for quasi-instantaneous temperature adjustment in response to a change in forcing, but it is hard to see the connection. The figures are from AR4 and just show the amount of recent warming that is attributed to CO2 in the AR4 models. That would be all of it, post 1955:
Figure 27 [Gray]. Global mean temperature anomalies, as observed (black line) and as modelled by thirteen climate models when the simulations include (a) both anthropogenic and natural forcings and (b) natural forcings only. The multi-model ensemble mean is shown in grey, and individual simulations are shown in colour, with curves of the same colour indicating different ensemble members for the same model.
Are S&S interpreting Figure 27a as showing a fit between forcings and temperature (in which case the close fit to observed temperatures would indeed indicate a rapid response to forcing)? But this isn’t what the graph shows at all. It compares observed temperatures to the temperatures that the AR4 model predicts in response to 20th century forcings. Equilibration speed (or lapse time) is one of the variables that modelers tweak to achieve a fit between predicted and actual temperatures.
It is not surprising that modelers manage to achieve a reasonably close fit over their calibration period (the 20th century). Every detail of their very complex model is tailored to achieve this. They presumably could achieve this level of fit in many ways. The fact that they do achieve it doesn’t say anything about how they achieve it. The equilibration speed could be anything.
Of course we do know a few fun facts about how the AR4 models are fit to the data. In particular, we know that the IPCC engages in blatant question begging by including only one solar variable in its AR4 models: Total Solar Irradiance, which is parameterized by the IPCC as having 1/14 the warming effect of CO2 (0.12 vs 1.66 W/m2).
Gray’s Figure 27 makes the impact of this assumption graphic. When total solar effects are fixed on the input side of the model to have 1/14th the warming power of CO2, the model output “shows” CO2 to be the dominant climate driver. It’s called “garbage in, garbage out.”
Data vs. assumption
The question is why Solanki and Schuessler are satisfied with the IPCC’s TSI-only characterization of solar effects when their own data screams out so strongly against it. They look at how little solar effect on climate is built into the AR4 model and say:
If anything [these models] tend to indicate that the influence of the Sun is even smaller than the correlation studies suggest.
The discrepancy between their correlation studies and the AR4 model can be seen in the glaring difference between 1955-1980 in Figure 27 above and in Figure 2b from Solanki and Krivova:
The black line is instrumental temperature. Dotted lines are inverted GCR (reconstructed, and as measured in Climax Colorado since 1953). Close correlation between solar activity and temperature continues to 1980.
Henrik Svensmark finds a still longer correlation. After controlling for PDO, he finds that the short term correlation between solar activity and temperature continues to the present day:
FIG. 2 [Svensmark]: … The upper panel shows observations of temperatures (blue) and cosmic rays (red). The lower panel shows the match achieved by removing El Nino, the North Atlantic Oscillation, volcanic aerosols, and also a linear trend (0.14 ± 0.4 K/Decade).
There is no way that the high degree of short term correlation between solar activity and temperature observed by Solanki and Schuessler pre-1980 can be explained by the tiny variations in Total Solar Insolation (about a tenth of a percent over the solar cycle). Yet when they see how the IPCC’s TSI-only model under-predicts their own observations, they don’t question the IPCC’s fixing of total solar effects at 1/14th the strength of CO2, but count this garbage-in model as evidence against their own data. That’s not right guys. Data is supposed to trump theory/assumption. That’s the definition of the scientific method.
Solanki, Schuessler and their colleagues have done some of the most important climate research of the last decade, creating several of the paleo-reconstructions of solar activity that make extended solar-climate studies possible. Unfortunately, they are misinterpreting the correlation between solar activity and temperature. Short correlation lags do not imply rapid equilibration. They just reflect the rapid temperature response of the upper ocean layer, leaving the equilibration speed of deeper ocean layers an open question. Thus short correlation lags provide no grounds for dismissing a solar explanation for late 20th century warming. Scientists who have been presuming otherwise should be willing to reconsider.
Great solar article!
And I still say that small residual remaining of the temperature trend can be best explained simply by UHI as Dr. Roy Spencer so clearly (well.. not the best chart so I re-made it using his data as a log plot) in his population-density to decadal trend. Just extrapolate the slope to the y-axis for the true warming trend… about 0.45 degrees C per century if the population density is one person per square kilometer, in the U.S. at least. With over 10,000 tempearture station pairs it is hard to ignore.
http://i55.tinypic.com/35bv7es.png
Appropriate songtext coming to my mind:
How many times has the weatherman told you stories that made you laugh?
You know its not upto the Politicians and leaders, when they do things by halves.
Who gets the job?
Of pushing the knob.
Thats what responsibility you draw straws for if your mad enough.
There’s always the sun.
mmmm
There’s always the sun.
Always, always, always the sun.
(Stranglers – Always the Sun )
Btw, when does Svensmark finally gets his Nobel prize?
Very interesting analysis, Alec.
You note: “The question is why Solanki and Schuessler are satisfied with the IPCC’s TSI-only characterization of solar effects when their own data screams out so strongly against it”.
I hope you pass on this analysis to them and ask them that specific question. They responded to your earlier question, so they may well answer this one.
It would seem to me that the entire solar crowd is approaching the solar-temperature relationship completely wrong.
I personally would not expect a direct correlation between solar input and temperature, but would expect a change in the rate of warming or cooling within the limits of the system. As has been noted many times by others, [and in my own kitchen], a burner on low will eventually boil water, but a burner on high will boil it faster. It is a matter of the rate of input. Provided that the climate system has a variation in rate of change within defined limits, one would expect that when solar input is high, the rate of warming would increase towards the upper limit, or the rate of cooling would decrease, depending on what other factors are at work, such as oceans, length of day, etc. In contrast, when solar input is low, the rate of warming would slow towards it’s lower limit, or the rate of cooling would increase. The reality of our sun-climate system is that the “burner” is never turned off. It is adjusted from high to low and low to high.
When I look at the temp reconstructions and solar parameters, the above is what I see. Even today, with solar input lower, we do not see the global temperature continueing to warm, but rather, we see it flattening, or maybe even cooling a tad, likely an expression of the longer term equlibration characteristics of the climate that go beyond the “simple model” of using only the upper level of ocean water. If 24 stays low and 25 remains low, I think you will see the cooling off of the pot that one would expect, as it is without doubt, CO2 does not generate any heat, it only re-emits the heat it has absorbed.
Great post Alec…..so now that we are in a possible Solar Grand Minimum and the atmosphere cools , but the oceans lag with a great storage of heat , does this cause massive snow fall such as this last winter and lead us into another ice age ???
The sun is in a grand maximum and plateaued in 1980. We already knew that. This is encyclopedic knowledge. The author concludes that because the sun hasn’t been growing even more active since 1980 that no warming since then can be attributed to it. Non sequitur. Reaching that conclusion would require far more knowledge about how much extra insolation is reaching the surface due to the ostensible change in cloud cover (Svensmark, GCR/cloud hypothesis), what the new equilibrium temperature of the ocean would be, and how long it would take to approach the new equilibrium point.
Climate boffins sure can make some hasty ill-formed conclusions. You’d think they’d be bright enough to not write such foolish things.
High solar activity seems to favor La Nina conditions. Thus, on short term it might even seem that high solar activity causes lower temperatures. This is one of the main reasons why the correlation between sun and temperature is misunderstood as non-existent or low by many scientists.
After a quick read it looks like (to me) that the problem is that when they changed from thermometers to satellite, tree rings, sloth dung and Pachauri’s hot girlfriend for the temp record.
Basically we can equate this to a pot of water sitting on the stove with a low flame under it. The flame, after being constant for some time, will heat the water just so much and no more. When the water temperature is neither rising nor falling it’s in equilibrium. Now we turn the flame up a little bit. The water won’t instantly reach a new equilibrium temperature. Depending on how big the pot is and how much we turned up the flame it’ll take some time to reach a new equilibrium point.
So the sun is our flame and the global ocean is our pot of water. If Svensmark’s GCR/cloud hypothesis is correct then the flame got turned up by a small amount. The ocean is one friggin’ BIG pot of water. It might decades or even centuries to reach equilibrium! We don’t have even close to enough knowledge to know how long it takes or how fast it proceeds because of a large number of factors that influence how fast or slow the thin warm surface layer of the ocean mixes with the vast frigid depths. In the short term the average surface temperature is driven by the temperature of the shallow surface layer but in the long term it’s driven by the temperature of the deep waters. The deep waters are 3C which is undoubtedly the average surface temperature over the course of a full glacial/interglacial cycle of roughly 100,000 years. Glaciers rule the world for 90,000 years then there’s a melt which lasts for 10,000 years. In the long term those deep frigid ocean waters will dominate and the glaciers will return. In the short term the shallow surface layer is much warmer and the interglacial will persist so long as it stays warm. Basically we’re in a precarious situation where we’re living within a thin veneer of surface warmth floating on a bucket of icewater. The only thing preventing a rapid return to a glacial age is the integrity of the ocean thermocline which prevents rapid mixing of the warm surface layer with the frigid depths. Ninety percent of the ocean’s mass lies below the thermocline. The average temperature of the ocean if the surface layer became well mixed with the deep waters would be about 4C. Air temperature would quickly follow and civilization would be in a world of hurt.
The report reads “the sun is not the cause of present global warming”. They agree with the IPCC. To me, it is just another way to keep their funding. Money talks and when you have little- it really talks mockingly loud at you.
Excellent article but…
1. How do you explain their 10 year time lag?
2. The departure between cosmic ray counts and temperature anomaly is very high from 1980 and only for this time period. If there were “other” equilibration issues, why do we only see one departure in the past 100+ years, and that departure shows a rapidly warming earth only since 1980? Reminds me of the divergence problem in tree proxies.
3. The Svensmark reconstruction Fig.2 above is impressive but why the +0.14 K/Decade linear trend removal? This seems arbitrarily done just to improve the data fit. I can see the other “corrections” such as PDO, el Nino etc. If you left that trend in it would show a departure toward a warming world.
And just because the mistake is made so often when I bring up the temperature of the deep ocean… saltwater reaches maximum density below 0c. The deep ocean isn’t 3c because that it’s maximum density temperature. Fresh water reaches its maximum density at around 3C but not saltwater. A lot of scientifically literate people know that fresh water begins decreasing in density before it freezes but few of them happen to know that seawater keeps increasing in density well below the freezing point of fresh water.
This should be taught on day 1 of Climate Science 101: For Climate, lag time is a function of the exciting frequency.
I believe that there are several open issues that Solanki does not address such as for example: 1) ACRIM vs. PMOD TSI composite controversy; frequency dependency of the climate sensitivity to radiative forcing; 3) frequency dependency of the time lag; 4) the existence of at least 2 independent characteristic climatic time responses one short and one long.
Most of these issues are discussed in my paper:
N. Scafetta, “Empirical analysis of the solar contribution to global mean air surface temperature change,” Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics 71 1916–1923 (2009).
http://www.fel.duke.edu/~scafetta/pdf/ATP2998.pdf
Abstract:
The solar contribution to global mean air surface temperature change is analyzed by using an empirical bi-scale climate model characterized by both fast and slow characteristic time responses to solar forcing: t1=0.4 +/- 0.1 yr and t2 = 8 +/- 2 yr or t2 = 12 +/- 3 yr. Since 1980 the solar contribution to climate change is uncertain because of the severe uncertainty of the total solar irradiance satellite composites.
The sun may have caused from a slight cooling, if PMOD TSI composite is used, to a significant warming (up to 65% of the total observed warming) if ACRIM, or other TSI composites are used. The model is calibrated only on the empirical 11-year solar cycle signature on the instrumental global surface temperature since 1980. The model reconstructs the major temperature patterns covering 400 years of solar induced temperature changes, as shown in recent paleoclimate global temperature records.
Very interesting!
That’s what I found 2 years ago, see here please:
http://www.umweltluege.de/images/curious1.png
Everything runs in perfect harmony. until ~1988…
Has anyone ever mentioned to overlay the “extended” Briffa data over this graph?
When did they cut off the Briffa data that shows decreasing?
Oh, almost just the same year? 😉
A similar decrease behaviour can also be observed in PDO and many other data.
So I suggest that all “increasing” temperature after the knee could be fudged, wrong or at least false measurement (see also the recent UHI article!).
If you put a pot of water on a stove element and the element reaches red heat in 2 minutes and then you turn it off, the water continues to heat up after the temp max of the element has passed and begins dropping. If you plot the temp of the element and that of the pot of water, the water obviously responds later and the curves can be seen to be lagged. If you don’t know they are lagged and you assume they are not, you will get a good “fit” by sliding the water pot T curve back to coincide with the element curve (need t0 adjust scales of course). Now if you know, or assume, they should be lagged, you would have the curves coinciding for a stretch in the middle portion with the temp of the pot below the element line for the first part and then projecting above the element line beyond the point were the element temp declines.
Am I to understand this is the nature of the critique of Solanki et al paper?
What an incredibly good article. The reasoning is crystal clear. For an article of this length, relevant detail is given where needed. What a joy it would be if everyone in the debates about climate science would use this article as their model.
Sooooooooooo…..solar guys say short time lag/oceans do not store heat.
Trenbeth says ‘wheres the missing heat’?
Hanson says ‘its stored in the deep oceans’
Someone is wrong methinks?
Good article Alec. Useful response from Nicola Scafetta too.
I suggest that in addition to Nicola’s two lag periods there is a third; around 55-75 years in length. This is due to longer term oceanic overturning in turn due to changes in rotation rate of the Earth.
STANDARD WARMIST ARGUMENT:
“That’s right the effects on which my paper speak are instantaneous in their effects on global temperatures, so the time-corresponding temperatures measured mean exactly what you think. This is all just as the theory says they should be. However, the buildup of CO2 is not instantaneous in its effects on temperature, and represents a long-term threat that will cause tremendous warming in the future. Just you wait and see, CO2 will doom us all. But of course remember to ignore the influences of the effect I have just investigated because historically they just don’t track instantaneously with temperature. ”
…
It is just so ridiculous.
Quote: “However, it is also clear that since about 1980, while the total solar radiation, its ultraviolet component, and the cosmic ray intensity all exhibit the 11-year solar periodicity, there has otherwise been no significant increase in their values. In contrast, the Earth has warmed up considerably within this time period. This means that the Sun is not the cause of the present global warming.”
They are absolutely correct: the sun is not the cause of this warming because the warming that starts in 1980 is totally bogus. Officially this fake warming is called the “late twentieth century warming.” Satellites simply cannot see it as I have pointed out in my book “What Warming?” I keep saying it but nobody pays any attention on this Web site. The temperature curves from NASA, NOAA, and the Met Office all show this fake warming. It is essential to the cause of global warming because right in the middle of it, in 1988, Hansen testified to the Senate that global warming had started and that carbon dioxide was the cause. If you now deny the existence of this warming Hansen’s testimony becomes false, perhaps even a perjury since it was given under oath. Satellite data show that instead of warming temperature oscillated, up and down by half a degree, for twenty years but there was no rise until the 1998 super El Nino showed up. These oscillations are real and trace out the El Nino peaks that are part of the ENSO system in the Pacific. There were five El Nino peaks in this time slot, with cool La Nina valleys in between. To find out what is going on I plotted the official temperature curves on the same axes with the satellite values. To my surprise I found that both NASA and the Met Office show the same El Nino peaks that satellites show. But where they differ is in the valleys in between. These have all been made much shallower and this gives their curves an upward slope which they claim is warming. NOAA is even more outrageous, starts by following peaks but completely wipes out any trace of La Nina valleys and also raises the right side of the curve some more to get really high warming. This is not what a climate scientist should do. The whole thing started in the late seventies and is still going on. The collusion could have started by a simply message like “stay with the peaks and adjust the low values as needed.” They sure did that but after 1990 the real temperature curve became complicated and this did not work any more. But they were already deeply into it and each of them did it differently after that. The real temperature curve from satellites goes back 31 years. The only global warming during this period was a short stretch that started in 1998, raised global temperature by a third of a degree anf then stopped. It was oceanic, not carboniferous in origin. There was no warming either before or after it which makes it a step warming initiated by the super El Nino. The only real warming today is Arctic warming but it is neither global nor anthropogenic. It has been going on for more than a century and started when a rearrangement of the North Atlantic current system at the turn of the twentieth century began to direct warm waters from the Gulf Stream north. The extraordinary warmth of Atlantic currents reaching the Arctic today is described by Spielhagen et al. (Science, 31st January) thusly: “…temperature mean of the modern period exceeds all individual values from the preceding 2000 years … The modern warm Atlantic inflow … is anomalous and unique in the past 2000 years and not just the latest in a series of natural multidecadal oscillations.” While the Arctic is warming the rest of the globe is not. The climate oscillations that were inyterrupted by the super El Nino returned when the 2008 La Nina arrived. It was followed by the 2010 El Nino and we are half way into the next La Nina that followed it. Such ENSO oscillations and not a monotonic temperature rise that IPCC computers spew out is our climate future.
1988? Wasn’t that about the time “scientists” discovered that global warming could be a cash cow?
A very clear expository essay. It’s clarity is a model for other scientists; even non-scientists such as me can follow it with understanding, even if some of us (including me) don’t have the science education to have any idea if the processes described will act in the ways the author states. Before becoming a regular reader at WUWT, I would not have been able to read this article with even a glimmer of comprehension; the science education here is marvellous, but I have a long way to travel yet. Many of us ‘out here’ on the blogosphere owe Anthony and the crew a huge debt for our continuing education.
The claim that the sun was especially active since the 1940’s causing warming, but the sun had nothing to do with warming after 1980, simply does not make sense.
The earth cooled from the 1940s to the late 1970s, then warmed to 1998 then cooled slightly again. That doesn’t match the solar record from the 1940s onwards.
Models. Always the models. Tweak to agenda, get answer, get funding. What if we could confiscate the models and ‘force’ some real data usage?
I think they are right–solar activity cannot account for the spike in the records from 1980 to 2000. I think the overwhelming evidence is that those record were spiked–fudged, falsified.
Solar activity better accounts for the rise than AGW, much better. The shape of the curve and considering the rise out of the LIA, simply does not correlate to fossil fuel use.
But the Danish scientist who found that all the coldest records were being deleted from the records, your graph of number of stations versus temperatures–now that is a plausible explanation that truly fits the data.
I think the pot of water on the stove creates an unwarranted acceptance of linearity in the climate response. In fact the environment responds with significant phase changes in the water component. Water vapor and clouds. To bring the pot of water into a better kind of representative example it would be necessary to consider the affect of steam being released and the impact it has on the effective heating of the water in the pot – but because the experiment is so unlike the global environment, that connection cannot be made.
Recommend finding a better candidate for a climate simile.
I will say that there is not an equilibrium in the oceans or the athmosphere. This word should not be used. I just confuses the issue.
jack morrow says:
April 7, 2011 at 6:41 am
Sir Thomas More: Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world… but for Wales?
Further to my post at 9.14am.
The climate system is continously variable. I the cognescenti cant deal with it as such they should not insist.
The example of the pot put on the boil is an excellent example of the mistake in trying to correlate temperature with forcings.
Forcings control the rate of change in temperature, not the absolute temperature. If you turn the heat up on a pot of water, it will come to a boil faster. If you lower the heat, it will come to a boil slower. In both case the temperature goes up.
This is where Climate Science has got it wrong. They are looking at the temperature of the water in the pot, and saying that since the temperature of the water is going up, the forcings must be going up.
But as the pot of water shows, the temperature can increase even if the heat is turned down. Thus, there should be little of no correlation between absolute temperature and forcings, but there should be good correlation between the rate of change in temperature and forcings.
TWENTY YEARS.
http://lch.web.psi.ch/files/Publikationen/analytic/Eichleretal_GRL2009.pdf
Top down forcing from the sun regulates the NAO and IPO phase. Negative NAO and La Nina ENSO domination result from a solar decline which in turn takes twenty years to regulate global temperatures. Arctic sea ice volume also builds. Group sunspot number began the decline in 1990 and now twenty years later global temps have begun to decline. The modulation is caused by the sun’s solar wind and magnetic field and not TSI and is an intersolar cycle process.
The idea that the temperature of the earth will reach equilibrium in a few years is nonsense. We know that the ice caps of the earth will take many thousands of years to melt even if the temperature went up to 22C, which is the upper limit reached in the past 600 million years. While this melting is on-going, the earth has not reached equilibrium. It is possible that the earth has not reached equilibrium since the end of the last ice age, as the land masses are still rebounding from the weight of ice.
“In contrast, the Earth has warmed up considerably within this time period. This means that the Sun is not the cause of the present global warming.”
Yeah, this is incredibly dumb. Let’s say that you put a kettle of water on the oven. Then you turn the oven to a certain level. The water doesn’t reach that level instantly. It continues to heat even though the source reached its maximum almost instantly. Now all you have to do is consider the oceans as a very big kettle of water with a corespondingly big lag time.
Here is a chart of the sunspot trend. It’s a couple years out of date, but the idea still applies.
http://reallyrealclimate.blogspot.com/2008/07/20th-century-sunspot-trend.html
So, even though we topped out around 1960, the levels still remained fairly high. Up through about 2000, ocean heat was likely busy catching up to that high level. The leveling out since 2000 is an indication that the dropping solar level is finally having an effect.
And by the way, the correlation between sunspots and temperature has been very good for as long as we have had a sunspot count. To suggest that it was suddenly failing because transitions show a lag time is just absurd.
I agree with Solanki’s concern regards lag effects of the ocean, but much of the problem is due to inhomogeneities of how we measure temperatures and how past proxies measured temperatures thus our reconstructions. Many of the climate indices such as tree rings, intensity of glacial retreat and upper-limits of tree-line, migrations of cod, as well as high arctic temperatures all show higher activity in the 1930’s and 40’s. Many if not most of the average annual maximum temperatures show peaks between the 30’ s and 60’s followed by a cooling that parallels solar activity. The climatologists’ tree ring divergence problem where the tree rings suggest 50 years of cooling also follows the recent decline in solar. This is likely due to the fact the tree rings will be more sensitive to summer and maximum temperatures, while the current instrumental warming is driven by minimum and winter temperatures. Finally not only do winter temperatures over the south pole show declining temperature but temperatures over the North pole also show a decline as described In “Absence of evidence for greenhouse warming over the Arctic Ocean in the past 40 years” by JONATHAN D. KAHL*, DONNA J. CHARLEVOIX*, NINA A. ZAFTSEVA†, RUSSELL C. SCHNELL‡ & MARK C. SERREZE§. As the surface of oceans cool with the approach of winter the underlying stored temperatures come into greater play and thus most oscillations like the PDO and NAO are most influential during the winters.
The positive Pacific Decadal Oscillation PDO generates wind patterns that more frequently oppose the trade winds thus promoting more frequent El Ninos and fewer La Ninas. The switch between the El Nino and La Nina in the late 90’s generated average global temperature change of over .8 C that matches the entire century change. It has been demonstrated the positive PDO correlates with wind patterns that raised winter surface temperatures in Alaska due to both disrupting the winter and night time cold inversions and advecting warmer more southerly air into the Arctic. And Rigor 2002 has shown winds coming from the coldest part of Siberia created open water in the Arctic ocean during the winter and spring. Rigor suggested warming was caused by winds reducing ice that exposed warmer ocean water. Winter water is about -2C compared to air the is less than -25 C. Just the opposite of the belief that CO2 warmth was increasing reduced ice. Scott also demonstrated winds were reducing ice in the Hudson Bay.
Dormant trees will not be sensitive to those observed winter temperature increases, explaining the divergence problem between biological proxies and instrumental records. The trees are in better agreement with the sun. It is our method of measuring current temperatures that disagree. Briffa and other CO2 advocates, instead of questioning their own methods, have even argued and pubiished that trees are now less sensitive due to CO2, despite the fact that tree line has extended much further towards the north pole over the last 9000 years than at present. Somehow wanting us to believe the tree rings were representative during warmer earlier times but not now during slightly cooler times?
If we used a top down model that simply adds sunspots to a scaled PDO index, with a 20 year running average, that model generates a temperature curve that matches observed temperatures. This works because the PDO is a generalized proxy that incorporates changes in El Nino and wind patterns over the Arctic as well as teleconnections to the Atlantic. The diurnal and seasonal distribution of heat modified by ocean and wind circulation changes has created observed instrumental warming despite a general decrease in heat input from the sun. Such a top down model also suggests that with decreased solar and PDO going negative, that the next 20 years will be much colder.
Lady: “But the Danish scientist who found that all the coldest records were being deleted from the records, your graph of number of stations versus temperatures–now that is a plausible explanation that truly fits the data.”
Right. And in addition to that, the proxy records are simply not showing the kind of temperature increases for the last 50 years that the instrument records are showing.
“That doesn’t match the solar record from the 1940s onwards.”
Actually, it still does. Just think of the solar influence being modulated by ENSO.
Anthony, May I use your blog to tell a story I have wanted to put on the record for about 40 years; relating to the difference between getting the “right” answer, and getting the “correct” answer (terms which I will define). I was involved in an interntional project with the acronym MBFR – Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions. This was the idea that, at the height of the cold war, it would be an good idea to reduce the NATO and Warsaw Pact forces which faced each other across the border between East and West Germany. I am a Canadian, and worked for our Department of National Defence. Our Canadian politicians were very much in favor of this idea.
The miltary establishment was given the job of assessing how much risk would be involved if reductions were made. This was the same as asking the fox to guard the chicken house. The “right” answer was that any reductions would significantly increase the risk to NATO. The “correct” answer was that any reductions would significantly decrease the risk to NATO. One study was done by a sister organization in the UK, to the one I worked for. This study got the “right” answer; that there was a big increase in risk if reductions were made. I knew their methodology, and I knew where they had made a fatal and fundamental error. I went to talk to them about it.
Analyst to analyst, it took about half an hour for me to identify precisely where the error had been made. It then took about another half hour to convince my fellow analyst that I was right. Reluctantly he agreed that, indeed, their methodology could not solve the problem; that a fatal and fundamental error had, indeed, been made. But then came something I will never forget.
The Brit looked me in the eye, and said, very accusingly, “What the hell are you worried about? We got the right answer”.
Surely this is what is happening here. Solanki and Schuessler did a study and got the “right ” answer; the sun has had no effect on climate during the period when CAGW is supposed to be happening. They did not dig too deeply, but got their study published. Now Alex Rawls has queried their conclusions. There is a discussion going on, on Judith Curry’s blog, Climate Etc. about Qui custodios custodiat (If I have got this right). It seems to me that when it comes to CAGW, the scientific establishment has a lot ot answer for. Sarc on. As long as someone gets the “right ” answer, there is no need to ask whether they have got the “correct” answer. Sarc off.
FIG. 2 [Svensmark]: … The upper panel shows observations of temperatures (blue) and cosmic rays (red). The lower panel shows the match achieved by removing El Nino, the North Atlantic Oscillation, volcanic aerosols, and also a linear trend (0.14 ± 0.4 K/Decade).
Have I read this right. It seems Svensmark has found a correlation by removing the linear trend … as well as ENSO, NAO etc.
Isn’t the linear trend the thing we’re interested in? The fact that GCRs can explain everything apart ENSO, NAO, volacanic aerosols and the linear trend is interesting but it’s hardly a show stopper for AGW.
Part of the solar energy absorbed in the oceans is radiated back from surface layers, in the short term of days and months. It is the huge amount of energy stored further down which is in medium (years) or longer (decades) terms relatively stable and does not respond readily to solar cycles whatever mechanism may be considered.
To understand periods 1910-1945 (warming), 1945-1975 (cooling), 1980 – 2000 (warming) and 2000 – 2010 (cooling) it is important consider the sync and upwelling ocean regions. Important ones are located in the Pacific and Atlantic; as a consequence polar and subtropical jet streams will respond. Any change in the major ocean currents would result in climatic oscillations. These changes therefore are ‘drivers of the natural multi-decadal climate change’, as it is clearly demonstrated by correlation with the major climatic indices.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/PDO-ENSO-AMO.htm
If a long-term lag in equilibrium exists which is equivalent to the length of the Little Ice Age, then the global mean temp is about to roll over with a 300 hundred year long downslope. That would make the 20th Century Solar Max riding on top of the last of the crest from the time preceeding the Little Ice Age.
Nothing is settled.
@jim Cripwell.
Interesting story but the Solanki and Schuessler does not prove the sun had no effect during the period that CAGW is supposed to be happening. In fact, if anything, it negatively affects CAGW science, which talks about warming from the 1880s to present.
This paper does prove 3 things:
1. The sun does have an effect on climate (kind of seems obvious doesn’t it but the two graphs have excellent correlation – until the 1980s).
2. The effect of the sun on climate is greater than the CAGW crowd assumes (because it almost fully matches the temperature anomaly until the 1980s and if CO2 was a growing problem the graphs should diverge).
3. Something strange has happened to the temperature record (real or otherwise) since the 1980s.
I’m really interested to know why tree proxies and now sun effect diverge from the measured temperature record – both in the same direction – since the 1980s.
Further to my comment above, i.e.
John Finn says:
April 7, 2011 at 9:58 am
Svensmark’s FIG 2 simply seems to show the temperature fluctuations due to the solar cycle which are, as Leif Svalgaard has posted many times on this blog, ~0.1K (min to max). However, as we can see, there is no trend so that’s not the reasom n for the warming.
If you look at tree data the major period of northward or upward recruitment was not during recent times but during when solar activity was at it height. After that period trees growing within the shelter of the newly established recruits then show varying degrees of growth as the recruits altered the micro-climate. The major climatic change was in the early-mid 1900’s followed by the “divergence problem” suggesting cooling.
From Esper 2004 “Large-scale treeline changes recorded in Siberia”
Analysis of a multi-species network of western Siberian ecotone sites revealed pulses of tree invasion into genuine treeless tundra environments in the 1940s and 1950s and after the early 1970s… For western Siberia, the presence of relict stumps, nevertheless, indicates that this present colonization is reoccupying sites that had tree cover earlier in the last millennium.
A mid 20th century recruitment period, synchronous with the advance shown from the western Siberian network, is reported from central Sweden (1946–55) [Kullmann, 1981], northern Finland (1945–47) [Kallio, 1975], northern Quebec (1938–63) [Morin and Payette, 1984], and the Polar Urals (1940–55) [Shiyatov, 1992].
George Steiner says:
April 7, 2011 at 9:14 am
“I will say that there is not an equilibrium in the oceans or the athmosphere. This word should not be used. I just confuses the issue.”
You can’t talk about thermodynamics without using the word equilibrium. Don’t be silly.
Alec Rawls posted, “Under the GCR-cloud theory, high solar wind blows the clouds away…”.
No, it doesn’t, there is no direct action of the solar wind with clouds. A strong heliosphere could be said to ‘sweep more galactic cosmic rays away’ from the Earth. Fewer GCR means a small but significant reduction of cloud condensation nuclei and this reduces low altitude cloud cover a small but significant amount.
I suspect Rawls knows this but likes the shorthand reference, but it is both literally incorrect and misleading.
Dave Springer says:
April 7, 2011 at 6:11 am
The sun is in a grand maximum and plateaued in 1980. We already knew that. This is encyclopedic knowledge.
As Mark Twain said: ““It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
Solar activity in the mid 1800s and late 1700s was just as high. There is no “modern grand maximum”. http://www.leif.org/research/Eddy-Symp-Poster-1.pdf
Nicola Scafetta says:
April 7, 2011 at 7:04 am
I believe that there are several open issues that Solanki does not address such as for example: 1) ACRIM vs. PMOD TSI composite controversy
PMOD is affected by calibration problems [ACRIM has its own – different – problems]. There is no good evidence that TSI was any lower this minimum than during past ones. http://www.leif.org/research/PMOD%20TSI-SOHO%20keyhole%20effect-degradation%20over%20time.pdf
Steve from Rockwood and John Finn both note how Svensmark’s fitting of solar activity to temperature involves removing the trend. I take this as an indication that the high solar activity over the period he is looking at (from the late 50s to the present) caused an upwards temperature trend. If the temperature trend were not taken out, the ups and downs of the solar record would fall progressively below the ups and downs of the temperature record.
The implication seems to be that more heat was being poured into the oceans during the up-phases of the solar cycle than was lost during the down-phases, with no sign that this process stopped before the downturn in solar activity. That is, the ocean’s never did attain an equilibrium response to grand maximum levels of solar activity.
Alec Rawls says:
April 7, 2011 at 11:33 am
That is, the ocean’s never did attain an equilibrium response to grand maximum levels of solar activity.
There was no modern grand maximum.
Nicola Scafetta says:
April 7, 2011 at 7:04 am
ACRIM vs. PMOD TSI composite controversy
The degradation of PMOD has continued. Here is the latest data:
http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-Diff-PMOD-SORCE.png
The solar heating of the oceans is much more complex than most people realize. The solar radiation can penetrate to a depth of about 100 m for a ‘pristine’ ocean. The attenuation with depth follows Beer’s law. The sunlight is attenuated exponentially along the optical path, depending on the local attenuation coefficients and the wavelength. There are 5 major ocean gyres that re-circulate ocean water between the equatorial regions and higher latitudes. Near the equator, the diurnal mixing layer is quite shallow (nominally 50 m) and the solar heat gets trapped below these depths. As the water is transported through the equatorial parts of the gyres it gets ‘cooked’ by the sun. It can take about 6 months for the ocean water to cross the Pacific. This produces the warm ocean pools. These are huge thermal reservoirs – ~30 C surface temperatures and 25 C temperatures to depths of 100 or 150 m. Part of the warm water from these pools is transported to the Arctic where it provides heat for the ice melt/ice extent etc. The water transported south ends up in the Southern Ocean and re-circulates around all three S. ocean gyres (Pacific, Atlantic Indian).
There is no equilibrium on any time scale. The heating and cooling has to be described dynamically in terms of coupled rate equations. Each gyre has its own unique characteristics. Every few years, the subsurface heat stored in the Pacific ‘pops up’ and gives rise to the characteristic ENSO oscillations.
Small variations in the solar flux accumulate in the oceans. A 1 W.m-2 flux accumulated into a 100 m column of water over 1 year produces a temperature rise of 0.07 C. The ‘grand maximum’ produced an average increase in (top of atmosphere) solar flux of ~0.3 W.m-2 for 50 years. This long term change is hidden below the ENSO, PDO, AMO etc. oscillations.
Instead of arguing over correlations and equilibrium assumptions, run the real numbers. Solve the rate equations! At minimum determine six heat contents for the solar heating and coupling of 5 major ocean gyres and the S. Ocean. Anything less is just meaningless speculation. Also, a 100 ppm increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration can have no effect on ocean temperatures. The penetration depth of the long wave IR (LWIR) radiation from CO2 into the oceans is less than 100 micron. This change in LWIR flux is just lost in the noise of the wind driven surface evaporation. Sun, wind and water need no help from CO2 to set the Earth’s climate. The devil is in the details.
Alec Rawls says:
April 7, 2011 at 11:33 am
Steve from Rockwood and John Finn both note how Svensmark’s fitting of solar activity to temperature involves removing the trend. I take this as an indication that the high solar activity over the period he is looking at (from the late 50s to the present) caused an upwards temperature trend. If the temperature trend were not taken out, the ups and downs of the solar record would fall progressively below the ups and downs of the temperature record.
Right. The temperature trend and GCR trend (zero) have been diverging – for 50 odd years. I could just about accept your hypothesis if there had been some divergence early on followed by a decrease in the later years. But the opposite happened. Also, in one of their replies, Solanki and Schuessler, say
This is a point I’ve tried to make before. Either there is a close (and relatively immediate) correlation or there isn’t. You can’t use the correlation when it suits and then introduce lags when it doesn’t. Also, Leif Svalgaard in another post says
The recent high activity is not unusual. Why should things be different in the late 20th century.
Roy Clark says:
April 7, 2011 at 12:35 pm
The devil is in the details.
And the details say that during the latter half of the 1700s, solar activity was comparable to that of the later part of the 1900s, yet temperatures were very different.
Leif
What other 80 year period shows as high average level as 1930-2010?
Leif,
I am not sure what is implied by arguing there is no grand maximum and its relation to climate. As you said “Solar activity in the mid 1800s and late 1700s was just as high. There is no “modern grand maximum””
However from your reconstructed peaks ( It wasn’t clear from your poster, but I assume your reconstructions is best represented by the Rz number), your mid 1800’s peaks do coincide with a time most would suggest is the end to the Little Ice Age and that makes sense. I think too often people think of the LIA as a prolonged cold snap when it was actually a cooler period that was also punctuated with warmings that coincide with the general time periods you suggest, and the coldest of all is 1645-1710 coinciding with the Maunder minimum followed a warming from 1710-40. So my impression is without evoking a grand maximum there is still a good climate correlation with sunspots but it is often modified by ocean regimes that are oscillating between energy absorbing vs heat venting. I always was troubled that while most biological and ice activity was peaking in the 1940’s the sunspots peaked more than a decade later. I suggest that the difference is caused because during a negative PDO, the ocean is in a heat absorbing mode, as winds concentrate the warm pool allowing cooler upwelled waters to absorb more insolation, so that in the 60’s the higher solar component is masked. However after the 70’s with a positive PDO, with a dispersed warm pool and incoming insolation leads to rapid evaporation , the oceans are in a venting mode accentuating the high solar activity.
Where your sunspot reconstruction intrigues me is the high sunspots around 1740-60 when there are numerous records of advancing glaciers. However if the PDO was in a heat absorbing mode along with being preconditioned by cooler oceans from the Maunder minimum, it could explain the perceived solar cold snap paradox. That all being said I suspect the arguments for a recent grand solar maximum are attempts to reconcile the a paradox of advancing late 1700 glaciers by supposing much lower sunspots during that time.
There are a lot of different lags. When large heat capacity is involved (ocean) the response lags 1/4 period of the driving cycle (driver being the derivative of the response), so looking at the diurnal cycle temperature peaks 24/4 hours after the solar peak. The last long solar cycle is 80 years, so SST peaks 20 years after solar peak, and then there is the ENSO ‘modulation’ of course. http://virakkraft.com/sst-solar.png
Dave Springer says:
April 7, 2011 at 6:41 am
Basically we can equate this to a pot of water sitting on the stove with a low flame under it. The flame, after being constant for some time, will heat the water just so much and no more. When the water temperature is neither rising nor falling it’s in equilibrium. Now we turn the flame up a little bit. The water won’t instantly reach a new equilibrium temperature. Depending on how big the pot is and how much we turned up the flame it’ll take some time to reach a new equilibrium point.
++++++++
There is an additional way to look at this. If you measure the SURFACE temperature of the underside of the pot, you will get some value for the low heat equilibrium temperature. Turn up the heat and the surface temperature rises very quickly, reaching equilibrium after a few minutes at the most.
The whole pot of course takes much longer to change temperature, the water near the pot getting warmer faster than the centre until a toroidial thermo-syphon takes over to equalise it.
This is a clear example of two different lag times responding to a single change in input power: the surface temperature of the pot changes rapidly and the water temperature changes slowly, and in ‘surface’ positions before ‘deep’ positons.
When cooling (when the power is reduced) the thermo-induced circulation in the pot continues, resulting in a rapid change in heat far beyond what was initially found on the way up, and there is ‘extra’ warming of the inside surface of the bottom of the pot. There is water inertia involved as well as heat transfer to the lid (akin to the floor of the ocean, in this example). Because of these factors, if you measure the temperature of the bottom of the pot you will see a delay in cooling in the ‘rapid response’ element and an accelerated cooling in the ‘slow response’ element.
It seems we are in exactly this position now: dropping solar input, stable to lowering temperatures, maintained extra-long by the heated ocean which is cooling faster than the change in TSI. Perhaps an ice age begins when the ocean inertia(s) over-cools the oceans following a rapid drop in EUV/UV/TSI power.
lgl says:
April 7, 2011 at 1:00 pm
What other 80 year period shows as high average level as 1930-2010?
Since 1945 the sunspot number has been 20% too high due to calibration problems.
Jim Steele says:
April 7, 2011 at 1:22 pm
I am not sure what is implied by arguing there is no grand maximum and its relation to climate.
what is implied is that the climate now should be the same as just after the 1780s and 1870s, which it isn’t.
lgl says:
April 7, 2011 at 1:40 pm
There are a lot of different lags.
Put in enough lags [of varying length and reasons] you can explain anything [actually nothing at all]. To have value, the lags must be specified and explained beforehand.
Leif Svalgaard says: what is implied is that the climate now should be the same as just after the 1780s and 1870s, which it isn’t.
Yes but only if your analysis of solar input is not coupled to oceanic processes and heat re-distribution, and the pre-conditioning of the LIA maximum 1650-1700.
We get it, the models can predict the past with impeccable accuracy. But do we need them? Is there a fear of reterograde global temperature amnesia?
Leif Svalgaard says:
what is implied is that the climate now should be the same as just after the 1780s and 1870s, which it isn’t.
————————
What the climate ‘should be’? Seriously?
Well, looks like the ‘solar devotees’ are close, but never there. I do not habitually agree with the ‘Helios Artis Magnus’, but in this case, some time ago I decided that ‘the sun drives but does not modulate’ either local or ‘so called global’ temperatures, beyond to what is due to the forms of the Earth’s rotation and revolution.
It is time to abandon ideas that can’t be proved, it is the time for the fresh idea with data, power, correlation and proven and daily observed and mapped mechanism!
Only available here http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CET-NAP.htm
Leif says “And the details say that during the latter half of the 1700s, solar activity was comparable to that of the later part of the 1900s, yet temperatures were very different.
I don’t know how you can say that. The people back then counting sunspots counted far fewer of them.
Jim Steele says:
April 7, 2011 at 2:21 pm
Yes but only if your analysis of solar input is not coupled to oceanic processes and heat re-distribution, and the pre-conditioning of the LIA maximum 1650-1700.
If you can quantify that, model it, and explain the process, we can continue.
Magnus says:
April 7, 2011 at 2:33 pm
“what is implied is that the climate now should be the same as just after the 1780s and 1870s, which it isn’t.”
What the climate ‘should be’? Seriously?
Under the assumption that the Sun is a the MAJOR driver, similar solar conditions over decades should produce similar effect. Now, if the sun is just a small player, then all kinds of other things come into play (oceans, preconditioning a la Steele, what have you), but that is not the issue.
Leif Svalgaard says:
what is implied is that the climate now should be the same as just after the 1780s and 1870s, which it isn’t.
You might find it surprising to also to check out a community data base for flowering times throughout England extended back to 1750 in the paper by Amano 2010 “A 250-year index of first flowering dates and its response to temperature changes”
There are 2 periods with flowering times earlier than the present and they are centered about 1770 and 1870.
kramer says:
April 7, 2011 at 3:03 pm
I don’t know how you can say that. The people back then counting sunspots counted far fewer of them.
Perhaps not: http://www.leif.org/research/SIDC-Seminar-14-Sept.pdf
http://www.leif.org/research/SIDC-Seminar-12-Jan.pdf
http://www.leif.org/research/SOHO23.pdf
Jim Steele says:
April 7, 2011 at 3:12 pm
There are 2 periods with flowering times earlier than the present and they are centered about 1770 and 1870.
Compare with Central England Temperatures: http://www.leif.org/research/CET2.png
Leif Svalgaard says:
Compare with Central England Temperatures: http://www.leif.org/research/CET2.png
I am curious what you think about just what the CET says. Looking at the graph I can’t help but notice when the CET started incorporating minimum temperatures in ~1878. Most of the instrumental trends have been biased by the averaging with minimum temperatures, and looking a lot of temperature data I see big differences in trends between max and min. I would suggest max temperatures better reflect solar inputs, especially because convective mixing makes the max a better sample.
Leif Svalgaard says:
And the details say that during the latter half of the 1700s, solar activity was comparable to that of the later part of the 1900s, yet temperatures were very different.
Exactly Leif. Look at this graph of CET
http://i49.tinypic.com/rc93fa.jpg
Notice that the rate of change in temperature in Central England in 1700 was equally as great as the rate of change in 1900. Solar activity doesn’t determine the absolute temperature of the atmosphere, it determines the rate of change of temperature.
Thus, if the earth is cold, and solar activity goes up, the temperature will go up, but overall the temperature will still be low because it started low. Which is what happened in 1700. Then in 1900 the solar activity again went up but this time the earth was starting from a warmer temperature so it ended up higher.
Don’t look at absolute temperatures for a correlation with solar activity, because that assumes that the earth must always start warming from the same temperature, which is clearly untrue. Only look at the rate of change in temperature for a correlation with solar activity, because that is the only effect a change in solar activity can have.
Leif, at 1:51 PM says:
It is necessary to account the different starting point. The question here is whether solar activity can induce long term warming of deeper ocean layers.
Suppose the sun was as active in the 1700’s the 1900’s. That would cause similar upper ocean warming, but if deeper ocean layers had cooled substantially during the Maunder Minimum/ Little Ice Age, then in the 1700s these deeper layers would have been sucking the heat out of the warmed up upper layer, moderating its warming. By the time we get to the second half of the 20th century, our hypothetical solar warming would have brought the temperature of deeper ocean layers up substantially, allowing the upper ocean layer to retain more of its heat.
By Craig Loehle’s temperature reconstruction, temperature rose .5°C during the 1700’s. HadCRUT3 claims about 1°C rise over the 20th century, where high solar activity was elevated for longer than in the 1700s, and by pretty much everyone’s reckoning but Leif’s, maintained substantially higher levels. Are not these two episodes of solar activity and warming roughly comparable as to the amounts of each?
ferd berple says:
April 7, 2011 at 4:25 pm
Solar activity doesn’t determine the absolute temperature of the atmosphere, it determines the rate of change of temperature.
Now we are on this note. The traditional view is the ‘obvious’ correlation between solar activity and temperature. When that begins to falter, we change the tune; even using words as ‘Exactly’ as if this was understood all along.
Alec Rawls says:
April 7, 2011 at 4:35 pm
then in the 1700s these deeper layers would have been sucking the heat out of the warmed up upper layer, moderating its warming. By the time we get to the second half of the 20th century, our hypothetical solar warming would have brought the temperature of deeper ocean layers up substantially
You assume that when solar activity is rising, heat is being ‘sucked’ up without being lost when solar activity is declining. If every upturn of solar activity is followed by an equal downturn, one would expect temps to do the same. I smell some desperation here.
Ken Hall says on April 7, 2011 at 8:19 am:
“The claim that the sun was especially active since the 1940′s causing warming, but the sun had nothing to do with warming after 1980, simply does not make sense. The earth cooled from the 1940s to the late 1970s, then warmed to 1998 …”
This makes me mad. You are wrong, Ken, about the earth warming from the late seventies to 1998. This warming did not happen and temperature curves showing it are cooked. As in falsified. Download satellite temperature curves if you don’t believe me, or better yet, read my book that shows them all. You did not read my post carefully enough because I explained how these fake temperature curves were constructed. To show warming in the eighties and nineties is extremely important to the global warming establishment because Hansen’s testimony to the Senate in 1988 falls right in the middle of this period. Since the warming did not happen Hansen lied about warming and the extrapolated warming curves he showed to the Senate are totally wrong. And it is these warming curves or “scenarios” upon which the global warming argument was built by the IPCC that was established that same year. Ask yourself: why is it that none of these three organizations I mentioned either use or mention satellite measurements of temperatures that have been available for the last 31 years? Muller likewise who just testified to Congress did not even mention satellites and showed the same three curves we are talking about. Satellite measurements cover both hemispheres and the ocean uniformly which cannot be said of any other temperature source, and are more accurate. The collusion that produced the imaginary warming of the eighties and nineties started in the late seventies and is still going on. This is far worse than anything that Climategate has revealed. Compared to this long term climate falsification Climategate is only the tip of the iceberg. The BEST group that Muller is connected with is supposed to verify the accuracy of raw climate data. They are doing no such thing – they are working with data that have already been falsified and the originals thrown out as Phil Jones admitted. Going after the urban heat island correction will tell you nothing about what the original data were like. Hansen has a new way of doing that correction anyway by using satellite night light intensity measurements and I actually believe that it will be better than looking at billions of thermometer readings. But it is an activity that does not get anywhere near the root of the problem which is this: how did these fake warming curves get started in the late seventies, who was responsible for planning it, and how was it coordinated? It is impossible to get any information about this from Google who has spent a hundred million dollars supporting climate research groups and is covering up any information unfavorable to the global warming cause. Compare this to the paltry ten million or so that ExxonMobile has given to a few foundations and anti-warmist groups. Based on my examination of these warming curves I have no doubt that they are cooked. They should simply be discarded and replaced by satellite temperature measurements which these people so far have been unable to fix
Somewhat divergent from the main discussion here, but has this argument from Arno Arrak been discussed on this board? If what he says is true, that the satellite temperature record (when cyclic events and the ‘super El Nino’ of 1998 are taken into account) shows no late-20th-century warming, and that the land temperature records are therefore spurious, then the CAGW speculation can be simply laid to rest. Then the question of the way the sun affects the climate can be investigated free of the CO2 bugaboo and any need to adjust ‘lags’ to keep it in the picture.
/Mr Lynn
Leif, at 5:42:
Absolutely not. I have been quite explicit that under the solar warming hypothesis, low solar activity causes the upper ocean layer would cool quickly, in turn causing deeper ocean layers to become cooler than they would otherwise be. Where do I ever assume anything different? Where do the arguments I am making ever require anything different?
Alec Rawls says:
April 7, 2011 at 7:14 pm
Where do I ever assume anything different? Where do the arguments I am making ever require anything different?
Say SSN mean over cycle goes up from 40 to 150 over several cycles, you assume a warming, let’s say for the sake of the argument 1 degree. Then I would expect a cooling of 1 degree if the SSN in the following same number of cycles goes down from 150 to 40. Agree? If so, your argument fails, because the climate would then just revert to what it was.
Leif Svalgaard says:
And the details say that during the latter half of the 1700s, solar activity was comparable to that of the later part of the 1900s, yet temperatures were very different.
You have it right Leif. Look at this graph of CET
http://i49.tinypic.com/rc93fa.jpg
Notice that the rate of change in temperature in Central England in 1700 was equally as great as the rate of change in 1900. Solar activity doesn’t determine the absolute temperature of the atmosphere, it determines the rate of change of temperature.
The reason the temperature is different in 1700 versus 1900 is because they had different starting points. The mistake is in trying to correlate average temperature with solar activity, which is meaningless, because of the different initial conditions.
A change in solar activity can only affect the rate of temperature change. The average temperature depends on many other factors, such as accumulated heat in the oceans and polar ice caps, which occurs over many thousands of years.
This is the lesson of the pot of water on the stove. Like solar activity, turning up the stove makes the pot of water heat faster.
However, you cannot tell how high the stove is turned simply by measuring the water temperature. You might have started with cold water in one case, and warm water in the other, and even then it would depend on how long the stove had been turned on.
Leif Svalgaard says:
April 7, 2011 at 5:42 pm
If every upturn of solar activity is followed by an equal downturn, one would expect temps to do the same.
Only if:
1) solar activity is the only driver of temperature. It isn’t. We have orbital irregularities which for 90% of the past million years covered much of the world with ice. We are in one of the 10% times where this is not the case, howerver we still have huge accumulation of ice at the poles as well as very cold deep oceans.
2)each upturn is followed by an equal downturn. The sun is not well enough understood to say if this is true or. It seems unlikely that the length of upturn and downturn would be exactly equal, except perhaps over very long timescales of many thousands of years.
ferd berple says:
April 7, 2011 at 8:04 pm
Solar activity doesn’t determine the absolute temperature of the atmosphere, it determines the rate of change of temperature.
If the climate heats up when solar activity increases, it cools down just the same when solar activity is decreasing.
Leif Svalgaard says:
Say SSN mean over cycle goes up from 40 to 150 over several cycles, you assume a warming, let’s say for the sake of the argument 1 degree. Then I would expect a cooling of 1 degree if the SSN in the following same number of cycles goes down from 150 to 40. Agree? If so, your argument fails, because the climate would then just revert to what it was.
Leif your argument assumes that the oceans will equally absorb or release heat, and that is far from the case. Ocean warm pools plateau at about 32 C due to the Clausius–Clapeyron relation. After that temperature additional input is more likely returned to space via evaporation and convection. In La Nina periods, the Walker circulation is enhanced and more cold water is brought to the surface in the eastern and central Pacific. (The thermocline is very shallow at the equator) while the warm pool is more concentrated and restricted in the western Pacific as is the cloud cover which reflects insolation. Likewise transport of warm waters to the subtropical gyres is enhanced along the western boundary currents. Under those conditions the ocean is has maximum potential to both absorb heat and store heat.
During El Nino phases the warm pool is extended eastwards as is the cloud cover reflecting heat. The warm water layer is extended thus deepening the thermocline so less cold water is brought to the surface to be heated. This in turn also lessens the Bjerknes feedback and slows the Walker circulation as well. These conditions minimize heat absorption of insolation and enhance venting the warm pool as well as slowing down transport and storage of warm waters to the subtropical gyres.
The PDO is some what of an extension of the El Nino phenomenon but also acts to enhance or disrupt the Walker circulation with help from its impact on circulation and monsoons and thus impacts El Nino/La Ninas. Winds in positive PDO favors more El Ninos fewer La Ninas. While negative PDOs favor La Ninas and fewer El Ninos. For that reason I suggest changes in the PDO are a good proxy for periods of maximum heat absorption versus ventilation.
The rise in temperatures in the 30’s and 40’s coincided with a positive PDO. temperature in the Arctic were higher than they are now. When the PDO went negative in the 1940’s it had a cooling effect and dampened the effects of the remaining increases in solar activity peaking in the 50’s as measured by surface temperatures, but it was maximizing absorption of that peak insolation and raised ocean temperatures. When The PDO went positive in the late 70’s it generated more El Ninos raising temperatures, it altered wind patters that have been demonstrated by many to be the major cause of loss of Arctic ice (not temperature) which then also vented more ocean heat so higher temperatures were measured . At the same time solar activity rebounded higher in the 80’s and 90’s but not as high as the late 50’s. However the stored ocean heat, the positive PDO and high solar activity of the 80’s and 90’s conspired to make warmer global surface temperatures. But because the PDO was venting and not absorbing at the time the ocean warming ‘stalled” as evidenced in Argo data. The 90’s was a period of no a Ninas or some say perpetual El Ninos
If this scenario holds true, then the current negative trend for the PDO not only suggests more La Ninas and near term cooling but because oceans are also in the maximum heat absorbing condition, but the solar activity has plummeted, it suggests the oceans will not warm further and likely cool. Unless the solar activity increase then I think we will be on a bigger cooling trend with only a minimum bump in temperatures when the PDO goes positive again.
And just I looked at a paper from D’Arrigo on PDO and Asian monsoons where the PDO is extrapolated back to the 1740-60’s glacial advance and there is a strong suggestion of a negative PDO or NPI that could have dampened the increased solar activity during that time.
Leif Svalgaard says:
If the climate heats up when solar activity increases, it cools down just the same when solar activity is decreasing.
Over millions of years this may well be statistically true, but not on shorter time scales, say 100k years.
Heating and cooling is not symetric over timescales less than thousands (millions) of years, as it influences other factors such as the turnover rate in the deep oceans.
A pan of ice water put on a stove does not heat up or cool off symetrically when you turn the heat up and down. Planet earth has huge quantities of ice floating in the oceans, as well as large amounts of cold water in the deep oceans, and a fantastically large block of ice at the south pole, quite possibly a remnant of the past ice ages.
ferd berple says:
April 7, 2011 at 8:11 pm
1) solar activity is the only driver of temperature.
Exactly, the Sun is but a minor player.
2)each upturn is followed by an equal downturn. The sun is not well enough understood to say if this is true or.
We have direct observations over 400 years and indirect data for the past 11,000 years and the Sun does return to near zero at each solar minimum.
Jim Steele says:
April 7, 2011 at 8:40 pm
Leif Svalgaard says:
The rise in temperatures in the 30′s and 40′s coincided with a positive PDO.
Now you invoke the oceans and not the Sun.
Both of you are grasping for straws, and invoking second order effects. The issue is if the Sun is the MAJOR driver of climate and it seems clear from your convoluted arguments that it is not.
I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating.
Anyone my age or older who grew up in Europe (and its true to a lesser extent of Australia and perhaps N America) will remember the reason why winter minimum temperatures have risen since the 1960s. Which is most of the anomaly referred to.
It was a morning ritual to light a coal fire in winter. And for anyone who has not seen this, it is an incredibly smoky operation. A large amount of smoke was generated for 5 to 15 minutes until the coal lit.
Daily minimum temperatures occur a short while after dawn at the point solar heating exceeds radiant cooling. The smoke from millions of coal fires created a near horizon smoke haze and reduced the amount of sunlight reaching the ground early in the day.
Remove the coal fire smoke = remove the haze = earlier and higher minimum temperatures especially in winter
I doubt there is a climate scientist working today who has ever seen a coal fire being lit.
Leif Svalgaard says:
April 7, 2011 at 10:48 pm
Both of you are grasping for straws, and invoking second order effects. The issue is if the Sun is the MAJOR driver of climate and it seems clear from your convoluted arguments that it is not.
It’s quite straightforward realy. There is a clear and undeniable relationship between solar activity and climate – except when there’s not. In these cases there are all sots of complicated lags and effects. The current favourite lag time is ~20 years. This has increased from the 4-8 years proposed by Theodor Landscheidt in ~2000. No doubt it will increase further as the expected cooling fails to materialise.
Leif Svalgaard says:
April 7, 2011 at 10:48 pm
Exactly, the Sun is but a minor player.
That explains why the heating we observe on earth is also observed on other planets. The sun is a minor player and the CO2 heating of the earth is radiating out, warming the other planets as well. Not.
The problem comes from a mathematical mistake. Trying to correlate solar activity with average temperature, rather than the rate of change in temperature. Some planets are hotter than earth, some are cooler. This tells us very little about solar activity. What is important is the observed rate of warming on earth and the other planets.
Solar activity is like the gas pedal on your car. When you press the gas pedal down, the car will tend to speed up. When you let the pedal back up, the car will tend to slow down.
However, you cannot tell by looking at just the speed of the car how hard you are pressing on the pedal. You need to look at the acceleration. In climate science, average temperature is the speed of the car; a misleading value. The rate of change in temperature is the acceleration; the correct indicator.
A secondary problem comes in assuming that the car is traveling on level ground. That 1 unit of acceleration or deceleration will always result in the exact same change in speed. The earth is not a simple homogeneous structure that heats and cools evenly. Nor is the energy from the sun a simple gas pedal. It is a spectrum with a significant frequency shift, which requires one to consider the photoelectric effect.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoelectric_effect
By 1905 it was known that the energy of photoelectrons increases with increasing frequency of incident light and is independent of the intensity of the light. However, the manner of the increase was not experimentally determined until 1915 when Robert Andrews Millikan showed that Einstein’s prediction was correct.
“Anyone my age or older who grew up in Europe (and its true to a lesser extent of Australia and perhaps N America) will remember the reason why winter minimum temperatures have risen since the 1960s. Which is most of the anomaly referred to.”
North American used coal widely for household heating as well. Our house had a coal chute and bin in the basement, but the furnace was eventually converted to oil. Listen to “The Shadow”, the old radio plays. They advertised the advantages of “Blue Coal” for heating your house. Given current prices, it might be time to convert back.
Leif Svalgaard says:
April 7, 2011 at 10:48 pm
ferd berple says:
April 7, 2011 at 8:11 pm
1) solar activity is the only driver of temperature.
Exactly, the Sun is but a minor player.
2)each upturn is followed by an equal downturn. The sun is not well enough understood to say if this is true or.
We have direct observations over 400 years and indirect data for the past 11,000 years and the Sun does return to near zero at each solar minimum.
Jim Steele says:
April 7, 2011 at 8:40 pm
Leif Svalgaard says:
The rise in temperatures in the 30′s and 40′s coincided with a positive PDO.
Now you invoke the oceans and not the Sun.
Both of you are grasping for straws, and invoking second order effects. The issue is if the Sun is the MAJOR driver of climate and it seems clear from your convoluted arguments that it is not.
———————————–
I think that Ferd and Jim have put forward good arguments most of which you have chosen to ignore. Your main argument seems to be that if the sun was the main driver the surface temperature should correlate with it. Not only do Jim and Ferd give good reasons why this is not true but anyone who has ever tried to control a complex thermal load would know it is not true; the load temperature rarely correlates with the power. If it did proportional control is all that would be needed and not PID.
You say that the sun is not the major determinant of climate. However the sun is the only source of energy. We also know that there have been huge fluctuations in the earth’s climate that are correlated to the effective irradiance at the earth’s surface (Milankovitch cycles). These changes in climate are larger than one would expect from a simple energy balance equation so the reason for the quasi harmonic fluctuations are not clear except that huge energy reservoirs are likely to be involved. Ice build clearly prevents excessive surface cooling (by releasing latent heat and possibly reducing radiation )and Jim, Ferd, I and others believe that the oceans prevent excessive warming at the surface by melting ice and building warm pools at lower depths. The fact that large volumes of energy might move between these energy sources/sinks with only a small solar trigger would not be a surprise to anyone who is used to resonant systems. In this context the related tiny change in atmospheric energy is not a surprise either. What exactly is your alternative explanation of the Milankovitch cycles?
The fact is that the energy stored in the climate sphere including the oceans the icecaps and all the atmosphere below the tropopause is about the same as would be contained in the mass of the oceans at 3C and this is probably now at the maximum it will ever be, having had 14000 years of interglacial warming. The long term average must be below this. I for one find that a very worrying thought. Looking at the evidence from previous epochs we can be reasonably sure that there are negative feedback mechanisms that prevent overheating but the feedbacks to prevent cooling are not so powerful. We are always on a knifes edge; that is why ice ages are triggered so easily. It is not warming that we should be worried about.
Can we stop with the metaphors? As written here, they smack of dodges, not solar science.
ferd berple says:
April 8, 2011 at 5:47 am
That explains why the heating we observe on earth is also observed on other planets.
This is an oft repeated myth. There is no evidence for this.
Nor is the energy from the sun a simple gas pedal. It is a spectrum with a significant frequency shift, which requires one to consider the photoelectric effect.
Has nothing to do with anything.
Jim Steele says:
April 7, 2011 at 8:40 pm
I think that Ferd and Jim have put forward good arguments most of which you have chosen to ignore.
No, I have carefully explained why they fail.
Your main argument seems to be that if the sun was the main driver the surface temperature should correlate with it. Not only do Jim and Ferd give good reasons why this is not true
No, they claim that heating accumulated during high solar activity is not lost during low solar activity. E.g. that the period after the Maunder Minimum started out with low temperatures and that high solar activity is struggling to overcome that deficit, but they forget that before the Maunder Minimum solar activity was high, so the low activity during the MM would have to overcome the precondition of the previous high in order to cool down as much. This does not make sense. But, people are, of course, entitled to believe what does not make sense. Many do.
What exactly is your alternative explanation of the Milankovitch cycles?
As Milankovitch himself pointed out the solar insolation [not irradiance, which has not changed] at high Northern latitudes [where the land masses are] varies with the tilt of the Earth’s axis and changes in orbital parameters. So from simple energy balance arguments the variations follow.
We are always on a knifes edge; that is why ice ages are triggered so easily
No, the END of glaciations are sudden. The decent into a glaciation is, well, glacial and takes tens of thousands of year.
Leif Svalgaard says:
April 8, 2011 at 7:58 am
Jim Steele says:
April 7, 2011 at 8:40 pm
In reply to my statement that “your main argument seems to be that if the sun was the main driver the surface temperature should correlate with it. Not only do Jim and Ferd give good reasons why this is not true…
No, they claim that heating accumulated during high solar activity is not lost during low solar activity. E.g. that the period after the Maunder Minimum started out with low temperatures and that high solar activity is struggling to overcome that deficit, but they forget that before the Maunder Minimum solar activity was high, so the low activity during the MM would have to overcome the precondition of the previous high in order to cool down as much. This does not make sense. But, people are, of course, entitled to believe what does not make sense. Many do.
I do read them as saying this. What I hear is that the temperature per se is not enough to define the forcing. Their belief is that the rate of temperature increase is a better measure. I personally happen to believe that the truth is somewhere in between since heat losses are temperature dependent. But if temperature rise is the better variable then for a given forcing change the end temperature is dependent on the start temperature. You may not agree but I can’t see why it “does not make sense”. They clearly accept that the heat gained during warm periods is lost during cold ones otherwise the the world would gradually warm or cool. The argument is over what timescales that equilibrium is reached.
What exactly is your alternative explanation of the Milankovitch cycles?
As Milankovitch himself pointed out the solar insolation [not irradiance, which has not changed] at high Northern latitudes [where the land masses are] varies with the tilt of the Earth’s axis and changes in orbital parameters. So from simple energy balance arguments the variations follow.
My point was that the simple energy balance calculations do not give this result. The change in insolation is not enough to cause the sudden warming associated with the interglacial. In my mind there has to be some slow accumulation of energy which takes place without surface warming such that the small input energy increase is not balanced by increased radiation to space.
Incidentally irradiance when applied to the sun is called insolation so I do not know what your comment above was supposed to mean. If you mean the sun’s output did not change then I might agree with you. If you are saying that the spectral irradiance did not change then I might agree with you. However in both cases I do not know.
We are always on a knifes edge; that is why ice ages are triggered so easily
No, the END of glaciations are sudden. The decent into a glaciation is, well, glacial and takes tens of thousands of year.
Here again you are denying something I did not say. I did not say the ice ages were sudden I said the ice ages were triggered easily. By that I mean that the huge input of energy capable of melting millions of cubic kilometres of ice and balancing the radiation losses associated with 10C higher surface temperatures has to be on full power to stop the world slipping back into the freezer. It is not a quick decline but it is difficult to stop it. The world’s normal state is unacceptably cold.
Sorry in the above post first line of comment I meant to say I do not read them saying this.
Leif Svalgaard says:
The rise in temperatures in the 30′s and 40′s coincided with a positive PDO.
Now you invoke the oceans and not the Sun.
Leif please. I have argued all along that the sun is the driver but oceans hold a memory of that input and determines where and how the heat is redistributed. And it becomes a ridiculous argument to analyze climate without taking that interaction into account. And it has been one of the major flaws in most studies that examine solar effects on climate. Milankovitch cycles by themselves can not explain the rapid changes in temperatures during the ice age where average temperatures fluctuate by 5-10C in 5-100 year periods – Dansgaard Oeschger events. Some oceanographers argue the ice ages’ closing of the Bering Strait generated deeper stratification of cold and warm layers that when finally vented due to increasing instabilities then generated these sudden temperature changes. Wunsch has suggested those cycles are not that statistically significant. And the glacial-interglacial cycles have changed from periodicities of 40,000 years to 100, 000 years. Clearly there is room for discussion, without insulting dismissal of vewpoints you fail or are unwilling to grasp.
The poles are in heat deficit fluxing more heat to the atmosphere than they absorb. The tropics absorb more heat than they release. This is simple basic science. Changes in the Arctic are greatly effected by oceanic and atmospheric heat distribution. Warm Gulf Stream waters sit below colder Arctic surface waters, and even below warm Pacific waters because of differences in salinity. Due to heavy evaporation warm water becomes more saline and dense sinking below colder less saline water. Oceanographers note the great salinity anomaly during the 70’s and others lesser events where fresher colder arctic water moved south ad circulated on the surface of the north Atlantic for a decade bringing colder surface temperatures. Several studies by very respected researchers like Hurrell have demonstrated how changes in sea level pressure in part due to changes in ocean heat content redirect winds such as the North Atlantic Oscillation, and he maintains that almost all of Europe’s recent warming can be accounted for by changes in the NAO and its effect on winds and ocean heat distribution. At the same latitude of the Antarctic peninsula, the western half is about 10 degrees warmer lacking ice while the eastern side houses the densest most persistent ice pack in the Antarctic. And I am only touching the tip of the ocean’s climate iceberg.
As you requested I laid out a case for the solar ocean interaction causing asymmetries in heat storage and distribution. In return you dismiss it, not with scientific arguments specific to what was stated, but again with insulting remarks.
You obviously have your head only in holes of the sunspots, and lack any understanding of oceanographic mechanisms. Inspite of much evidence you, you cling to the simplistic and completely unsupported notion that the ocean heat absorption and release simply parallels changes in solar input. To do so requires that you demonstrate that there are no periodic changes in ocean heat content, but even models designed before the PDO was ever named and that strictly look at natural variation demonstrated that global heat can fluctuate by .5 C over 50 years time. I demonstrated how changes in frequency of El Ninos and La Ninas can impact absorption and release of solar input. You failed to show why those arguments were not valid. So instead of arguing the science once again you resort to arrogant dismal of well documented science with comments like “people are entitled to believe the wrong thing they do it all the time”. Perhaps a mirror would be useful. You repeated use of insulting arrogance has lost all my respect for your ability to discuss issues in an objective manner.
The hypothesis that some are putting forward is that some special set of initial conditions has resulted in sea surface temperatures to continue to rise for several decades AFTER solar activity has peaked.
This means the oceans had not yet reach equilibrium, the same (or slightly falling) amount of incoming energy was still causing the oceans to warm. The problem this raises is what IS the new equilibrium temperature for this level of solar irradience ?
The fact that sea temperatures continued to rise in the 90s after falling briefly when major volcanic eruptions dimmed the solar input shows that they had not reached a new equilibrium temperature despite no further increase in the solar maximum or change in GCR flux.
If you assume that 2010 was the year the system did reach equilibrium with the past 3 decades of solar activity then the present equilibrium temperature must be higher than in the past for the same solar input.
Otherwise sea temperatures, sea level and ice mass would show similar exceptional levels when the solar output was similar in the past.
Add a small refinement, Dave, and the parallels get more exact and complex:
The flame is ABOVE the pot, directing its heat onto the surface of the water (unevenly across the diameter(s) of the pot). Various slow and quick circulation currents are induced in the pot, which is, btw, hanging off a hook and swinging gently back and forth.
There is a lot of ‘threshing of empty straw’ in the above posts.
Sun provides energy for but doesn’t modulate climate. That is done by the Earth’s rotation, revolution and anything beyond that by the heat capacity of the oceans deeper layers. Long term oceanic indices like PDO, ENSO, AMO, etc. are major climatic factors and have no solar cycle component. They are indicators to what climate is doing, so to understand what drives climate it is essential to know what drives PDO, ENSO and AMO.
The answer is in data, and the data is here:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/PDO-ENSO-AMO.htm
izen says:
Actually, one of the main pieces of evidence that the oceans never did reach equilibrium in response to high 20th century solar activity is that temperatures seem to have been signficantly warmer during the Medieval Warm Period, when solar activity did not reach as high a level. Unless someone can come up with some other MWP cause than the sun, it seems that continued high solar activity would have driven current temperatures higher still, if history is our guide.
Jim Steele says: “The rise in temperatures in the 30′s and 40′s coincided with a positive PDO. ”
The PDO is an abstract form of the Sea Surface Temperatures of the North Pacific north of 20N. The SST anomalies for that area of the North Pacific are actually inversely related to the PDO.
(Sorry for the delay in responding to your comment.)
Alec Rawls says: April 8, 2011 at 1:50 pm
Unless someone can come up with some other MWP cause than the sun, it seems that continued high solar activity would have driven current temperatures higher still, if history is our guide.
Yes there is, North Atlantic Precursor (NAP), which is nothing to do with sun and in no way related to solar activity. Data pre 1650 are sparse but for post 1650 there are accurate records.
Here is NAP 1650- 2010
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CET-NAP.htm
and NAP 1100-1600
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/NAP11-16.htm
compared to tree ring data from California, not exact match but close enough (CA is long way of N. Atlantic after all)
@- Alec Rawls says:
April 8, 2011 at 1:50 pm
“Actually, one of the main pieces of evidence that the oceans never did reach equilibrium in response to high 20th century solar activity is that temperatures seem to have been signficantly warmer during the Medieval Warm Period, when solar activity did not reach as high a level.”
I don’t think that any paleoclimate reconstruction is sufficiently certain to establish with certainty that the MWP was globally warmer in terms of ocean temperatures than the present.
This link –
http://pages.science-skeptical.de/MWP/MedievalWarmPeriod.html
Has a rather neat collection of the various data for the climate over that period in map form showing the independent measurements using differing methods all over the globe. It is certainly possible to find a peak in the medieval period. Much more difficult to show it was synchronous between the northern and southern hemispheres. A case can be made that it was a north-south antiphase cycle where one hemisphere warms, then the other. Try it on the link, its like a tile matching game trying to find two peaks that match, especially between the N/S polar regions.
” Unless someone can come up with some other MWP cause than the sun, it seems that continued high solar activity would have driven current temperatures higher still, if history is our guide.”
If your assumption is correct that ocean temperatures were higher with a lower solar input during a global MWP it seems that continued high solar activity WILL drive current temperatures higher still, if history is our guide.
Then any fall in solar activity at present will have little effect just as the last few decades of stasis/reduction has still seen temperatures rising. The equilibrium temperature will be even higher than 2010. Because it was higher with lower TSI in the MWP.
Unless there was some other MWP cause than the sun we are going to get a lot hotter because there must be much more warming in the pipeline given the greater energy input in the present.
Or there is some other cause for the warming observed at present than the sun.
Consider this thought experiment. Take any temperature forcing, call it F. Don’t worry if is the sun, CO2, or the man in the moon.
Now turn the forcing on and off in a regular interval, so that you get a square wave:
_|¯|_|¯|_|¯|_|¯|_|¯|_|¯|_
Now, assuming all things remain equal, the acceleration (rate of increase) in temperature (in a simple object) will show the following behavior.
_|¯|_|¯|_|¯|_|¯|_|¯|_|¯|_
But average temperature itself will show the following behavior:
_ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \
Forgive the crude graphics. What I’m trying to show is that while forcings and acceleration are a square wave, temperature is a saw tooth pattern.
This is the problem in using average temperature when looking for a correlation with solar activity. It is the wrong “grain” in information processing / data warehousing terminology. As soon as you add noise and complex graphs, the difference in grain will mask the correlation.
This is a classic data mining mistake when looking for correlations in data. In the simplest terms, that is what climate models are. They are time series data mining models that seek to correlate forcings with temperature, to predict future behavior. Data mining 101. We do it all the time in marketing to predict customer behavior.
Before you rule out correlations, you need to make sure the data you are correlating is at the same grain. Solar activity needs to be correlated with the rate of change of temperature before any reliable conclusions can be drawn.
izen says:
Warmth in the deeper oceans is not necessarily “in the pipeline” in the sense you are using it here. It need not cause ANY surface warming. Remember that the upper ocean layer responds quickly to any change in forcing. With the sun having gone quiet, this means, under the solar warming hypothesis, that the upper ocean layer should be cooling, and this is what drives surface temperatures, or GMAST. The effect of the stored heat in the deeper ocean would be to slow down this cooling. So there is “heat in the pipeline,” but it shows up not as rising surface temperatures, but as slowed down cooling.
One of the issues to sort out here is the difference between a long period response and a lag. There is no obvious reason why there should be any lag at all between the end of grand maximum levels of solar activity and the beginning of global cooling. That doesn’t mean there aren’t lags, but lags and equilibration time are very different things.
@- Alec Rawls says:
April 8, 2011 at 8:30 pm
“Warmth in the deeper oceans is not necessarily “in the pipeline” in the sense you are using it here. It need not cause ANY surface warming. Remember that the upper ocean layer responds quickly to any change in forcing. With the sun having gone quiet, this means, under the solar warming hypothesis, that the upper ocean layer should be cooling,…”
But it is not sufficient to sustain cooling unless you have a new ‘Maunder minimum’. After each solar minimum in the previous cycles since the 60s – cycle 19 – the oceans have continued to warm despite the reduction in solar activity since cycle 19. The temperature averaged over a solar cycle has been increasing with each cycle while the solar activity has shown a small reduction.
This would indicate that the system is still well below the equilibrium temperature as any increase of the solar output above the zero sunspot baseline has driven cumulative warming.
“One of the issues to sort out here is the difference between a long period response and a lag. There is no obvious reason why there should be any lag at all between the end of grand maximum levels of solar activity and the beginning of global cooling. That doesn’t mean there aren’t lags, but lags and equilibration time are very different things.”
No, lags and equilibrium time are the SAME thing.
Otherwise you would be breaking the 1LoT.
And you can’t break that, its the LAW! (J.D)
ferd berple I like your graphics and it suggests similar experimental results explaining the difficulty of correlating solar input with global temperatures.
If I put a pot of water on the stove and at point zero I turn on the burner, when the water boils I turn it off so the graph of heat input looks like this |¯|_
Concurrently the temperature change of the water take this shape / \
A simple statistical correlation would clearly prove there is no relationship of heat input and changes in water temperatures so we can conclude the stove had no effect.
Bob Tisdale
I am not sure what point you are trying to make or what question you are trying to respond to
Jim Steele says:
April 8, 2011 at 10:14 pm
ferd berple I like your graphics and it suggests similar experimental results explaining the difficulty of correlating solar input with global temperatures.
To illustrate how absurd these ideas are consider this little graph showing 5 idealized solar cycles of different size forming a longer cycle much like the real thing. You claim that the size of the cycle [‘the amount of solar activity’] determines the rate of change of temperature, so I have assigned change of +0.3, +0.6, +1.2, +0.6, +0.3 degrees to each of the cycles being proportional to the size of the cycle. Since cycle 1 and cycle 5 have the same size, the rate of change is the same +0.3 degrees. The same proportion for cycles 2 and 4: +0.6 degrees, and +1.2 degrees for cycle 3. All these changes according to your argument is positive, so the temperature is always rising, never falling.
Leif please. I have argued all along that the sun is the driver but oceans hold a memory of that input and determines where and how the heat is redistributed.
The difference between us is that in my view the oceans alone determines where and how that heat in redistributed even for a constant sun. You want to diminish the role of the oceans, at your peril.
Leif Svalgaard says:
April 9, 2011 at 12:12 am
To illustrate how absurd these ideas are consider this little graph showing 5″
http://www.leif.org/research/absurd.png
Here is the math. Look at the units of the items you are trying to correlate, and place them all at the same scale:
Solar Variance = Watts / square-meter * Irradiated Area
= n1 * Watts
= n2 * foot-pounds /second
Rate of Change of temperature = Degrees / century
= n3 * Degrees / second
Average Temperature = Degrees.
The problem is that when you compare solar variance to temperature, you are comparing work/time to degrees. However, degrees says nothing about time, so the correlation will be at best weak and hard to find if there is noise.
However, when you compare solar variance to temperature change, you are comparing work/time to degrees/time. Both items are in terms of time, so if there is a correlation you have a much better chance of finding it.
ferd berple says:
April 9, 2011 at 7:36 am
Here is the math.
Then do the math with real data and show us the result…
Leif Svalgaard says:
The difference between us is that in my view the oceans alone determines where and how that heat in redistributed even for a constant sun. You want to diminish the role of the oceans, at your peril.
Wow. How to twist it without addressing any specifics and now you make yourself the defender of the ocean’s role. You certainly have a creative gift. My whole argument has been from the very start that oceans modulate the patterns of heat distribution. Milankovitch cycles suggest we are in a cooling trend as do GISP2 reconstructed temperatures over the past 10,000 years. However that descent is punctuated with warming pulses. During the Little Ice Age numerous tree ring analyses and analyses of Alaskan glaciers and others show a strong correlation with sunspot minimums and ocean oscillations such as the Arctic Oscillation and Pacific Decadal Oscillation. What I have maintained all along is a top down model that combines effects of the solar change proxied by susnpots with changes in PDO as a proxy for ocean/atmospheric dynamics and that model generates the exact warming trend we see today. The trend is superimposed on the Milankovitch cooling trends that would best explain the observations of the cooling trends, that have been measured and published,over both the south and north poles. That top down model also suggests we are about to see some cooling.
What appears ridiculous to you, is your own continued misinterpretation of everything I have written.
Leif to illustrate my point:
You last wrote: All these changes according to your argument is positive, so the temperature is always rising, never falling.
How was that ever my arguments?
The concluding paragraph of my first post:
If we used a top down model that simply adds sunspots to a scaled PDO index, with a 20 year running average, that model generates a temperature curve that matches observed temperatures. This works because the PDO is a generalized proxy that incorporates changes in El Nino and wind patterns over the Arctic as well as teleconnections to the Atlantic. The diurnal and seasonal distribution of heat modified by ocean and wind circulation changes has created observed instrumental warming despite a general decrease in heat input from the sun. Such a top down model also suggests that with decreased solar and PDO going negative, that the next 20 years will be much colder.
Leif, How do you justify such a blatant disconnect between your attribution of what I said and I really said?
Jim Steele says:
April 9, 2011 at 8:30 am
now you make yourself the defender of the ocean’s role.
Always said that.
My whole argument has been from the very start that oceans modulate the patterns of heat distribution.
No, that was not the WHOLE argument, but only a part of it. The rest was something about the Sun.
without addressing any specifics
I have very specific, even given you a graph to ponder and to respond to [which you neglected]: http://www.leif.org/research/absurd.png
Jim Steele says:
April 9, 2011 at 8:53 am
You last wrote: All these changes according to your argument is positive, so the temperature is always rising, never falling.
How was that ever my arguments?
Jim Steele says:
April 7, 2011 at 8:40 pm
“I think that Ferd and Jim have put forward good arguments most of which you have chosen to ignore.”
Perhaps I was wrong in believing that you were a supporter of those ‘good arguments’ and that you really are not. If that be the case, accept my apologies.
Leif Svalgaard says:
April 9, 2011 at 8:08 am
Then do the math with real data and show us the result…
Let:
Solar Variance = SV
Average Temperature = AT
Rate of Temperature Change = RT
a, b, c, d, e, … = constants
Then
(1) RT = a(SV) + b
(2) RT = derivative (AT)
(3) RT = derivative (SQRT(AT)^2)
(4) RT = 2 SQRT(AT)
by substitution
(5) SV = 2a(SQRT(AT)) + b
Best practices say when looking for correlations, you use (1) the linear relationship. You can (5), but then you need to use non-linear methods, which are a weak area in mathematics, so it is not best practice.
From what I’ve read, Climate Science has used neither. Climate science has assumed that:
(6) SV = a(AT) + b
After having found this does not correlate, CS has pronounced that Solar Variability is not a driver of Climate. What they have not considered is that their assumptions are wrong.
(7) SV != a(AT) + b
(5) SV = 2a(SQRT(AT)) + b
correction to above
(1) SV = a(RT) + b
Lets look further at this
(5) SV = 2a(SQRT(AT)) + b
Therefore
AT = c(SV^2) + d
What this tells me is that average temperature should vary as the square power of the solar variability. By assuming that average temperature should vary linearly with solar variability, climate science has significantly under estimated the effects of solar variability.
ferd berple says:
April 9, 2011 at 7:36 am
Solar Variance = Watts / square-meter * Irradiated Area
Since the area [the Earth] is the same [assuming constant albedo] your SV is just TSI.
ferd berple says:
April 9, 2011 at 10:59 am
Therefore
AT = c(SV^2) + d
What this tells me is that average temperature should vary as the square power of the solar variability. By assuming that average temperature should vary linearly with solar variability, climate science has significantly under estimated the effects of solar variability.
Your math is a bit fuzzy.
Climate science assume that AT = k TSI^(1/4), not the linear relationship you ascribe to them. New both for your formula and the correct one, when changes are small [which they are] they become linear:
Yours: dAT/T = c*2 dTSI/TSI, or for dAT,dTSI small : dAT ~ dTSI*2
correct: dAT/AT = k/4 dTSI/TSI, or for dAT, dTSI small: dAT ~ dTSI/4
Leif Svalgaard says:
April 7, 2011 at 12:52 pm
Roy Clark says:
April 7, 2011 at 12:35 pm
The devil is in the details.
And the details say that during the latter half of the 1700s, solar activity was comparable to that of the later part of the 1900s, yet temperatures were very different.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I take a pot of water out of the fridge, it’s about 4DegC. I put it on a stove element and turn it up to max.
At the same time, I take a pot of similar size with room temperature water in it, say 18DegC. I put that on another element and turn it up to max.
After 5 mins of heating I observe that the two pots are of different temperature. How could that be? Both the stove elements were at grand maximum.
Initial conditions would be important, isn’t that so Leif?
Baa Humbug says:
April 9, 2011 at 12:11 pm
Initial conditions would be important, isn’t that so Leif?
Not really if the initial conditions are the result of the very process itself. Perhaps you would like to try to comment on http://www.leif.org/research/absurd.png. You may assume that the Figure is repeatedly endlessly on both sides.
It is pointless arguing the ‘solar effect’ unless you can show it correlates to the real temperature. CET the longest and most accurate temperature record has no significant 11 or 22 year component. Further more I would advise a good look at period 1700-1710 and compare to the solar sunspot record at the time.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CET1.htm
Neither direct irradiance increase or the oceans stored energy (from previous 50 years, Maunder Minimum!) was available to provide sudden uplift of temperatures, only equalled to that at 1985-1995. Temperatures may be different but the rate of change is similar, the fist still under Maunder minimum conditions and the last under so called ‘modern grand maximum’.
It is fine to have a hypothesis or even better a theory , but it has to match reality.
Leif Svalgaard says:
April 9, 2011 at 12:15 pm
I don’t see how the graph in your link is relevant to global climate. However I do see you giving me the middle finger. Having re-read my post I realise I should have worded it differently. No offence meant.
Your post at 12:52PM said “yet temperatures were very different.”
Why shouldn’t they be different? An active sun immediately after the end of an ice age may not manifest the same global Ts as an active sun during an already warmer interglacial.
I personally would not assume “initial conditions are the result of the very same processs.”
regards
Baa Humbug says:
April 9, 2011 at 1:30 pm
I don’t see how the graph in your link is relevant to global climate.
It is not, and that is the point [note the name of the link]. However, some posters here claim that it is relevant, that solar activity [they call it ‘solar variance’] determines only the rate of temperature change.
Why shouldn’t they be different? An active sun immediately after the end of an ice age may not manifest the same global Ts as an active sun during an already warmer interglacial.
The ‘ice age’ ended some 12 ,000 years ago. We are not discussing that.
Leif
I think it’s more like this: http://virakkraft.com/absurd2.xlsx The +1.2 is above average so some of the input is stored below the mixed layer and perhaps only 2/3 is released when the input is back to zero. +0.3 is below average, so there is a net loss over the cycle, perhaps 0.5 is released. The result is that SV = a(RT) + b so ferd berple is right.
lgl says:
April 9, 2011 at 2:02 pm
I think it’s more like this: http://virakkraft.com/absurd2.xlsx The +1.2 is above average so some of the input is stored below the mixed layer and perhaps only 2/3 is released when the input is back to zero. +0.3 is below average, so there is a net loss over the cycle, perhaps 0.5 is released. The result is that SV = a(RT) + b so ferd berple is right.
You are so vague that it is hard to figure out what you are saying. If a and b are constants then there is no effect from pre-existing conditions. If a and b are allowed to vary according to circumstances [to make it fit], it is not science. We can rewrite the equation: SV – b = a(RT), meaning that for RT = 0, SV = b, so as SV varies up and down oscillating above and below b, so should the sign of RT alternate between positive and negative, and when SV is below b, T will lose what it gained when SV was above T. hence T will go up and down following SV. If the Sun is the major driver, equal SVs will then correspond to equal T. “The climate is what it should be for solar activity”.
Leif
No, T will go up and down following SV with 1/4 period lag.
lgl says:
April 9, 2011 at 2:43 pm
No, T will go up and down following SV with 1/4 period lag.
Even if you want a lag, it does not change anything, namely that similar solar activity results in similar T [if any]. The two curves will then just be shifted a 1/4 period. This is not what has been pushed here and not what the record shows.
Leif
(1) SV = a(RT) + b has been pushed here, leading to AT = c(SV^2) + d and according to you dAT ~ dTSI*2 What’s wrong with his calculation?
Dave Springer says:
April 7, 2011 at 10:51 am
“You can’t talk about thermodynamics without using the word equilibrium. Don’t be silly.”
There’s a whole journal devoted to non-equilibrium thermodynamics, in which complex problems most germane to real-world situations are solved. Only those with but a rudimentary comprehension of thermodynamics make the silly assumption that equilbrium conditions characterize the ever-changing state of Earth’s climate system. If we had more than just local therrmodynamic equilibrium, we’d have a system with NO temperature changes.
More realistically, we have a system that responds differently to various frequencies of forcing. The characteristic frequency response function is a continuum that cannot be reduced to just one or two or N lags. Nothing misleads the analysis more than simplistic models that assume otherwise and confuse true forcing (i.e., not TSI, but insolation) with changes in heat capacitance or content . Sadly, that’s commonplace in “climate science,” which scarcely realizes that the “equilibration lag” deep-ocean temperatures is irrelevant to surface climate.
lgl says:
April 9, 2011 at 3:39 pm
(1) SV = a(RT) + b has been pushed here, leading to AT = c(SV^2) + d and according to you dAT ~ dTSI*2 What’s wrong with his calculation?
Several things, the most glaring being:
(2) RT = derivative (AT)
(3) RT = derivative (SQRT(AT)^2)
The square of the SQRT(AT) is always positive. Hence RT is always positive.
Leif Svalgaard says:
April 9, 2011 at 6:54 pm
Several things, the most glaring being:
(2) RT = derivative (AT)
(3) RT = derivative (SQRT(AT)^2)
The square of the SQRT(AT) is always positive. Hence RT is always positive.
I guess his fuzzy math got to me too 🙂
We need one more step:
(2) RT = derivative (AT)
(3) RT = derivative (SQRT(AT)^2)
(4) RT = 2 SQRT(AT)
The SQRT of the positive number AT [in Kelvin] is always positive, hence RT is always positive. Now. mathematically SQRT(4) could be either +2 or -2, but his formula does not specify which sign to use, so is defective. And the numbers are not right, let AT be 289K, then RT is 19K…
izen says:
As the example I gave makes clear, the “lags” I am talking about are lags between solar activity and GMAST (surface temperatures), not lags between solar activity and rising or falling heat content of the oceans. Go back and look at the example and you’ll see the disjoint between equilibration time and lag time. Even with a centuries long equilibration to long period forcing, there needn’t be any substantial lag between a drop off in forcing and the surface temperature peak. The heat stored in deeper ocean layers could just have the effect of slowing down surface cooling.
Leif Svalgaard says:
April 9, 2011 at 7:35 pm
And the numbers are not right, let AT be 289K, then RT is 19K…
Jeez, once fuzzy math enters, there is no end to it. RT=2*19=38K. now is the per year, per cycle, per century, per what? no matter, wrong it is.
Tsonis’ “synchronized chaos” is looking more plausible all the time.
Leif
Thanks, agree, but SV = a(RT) + b is right, so there is a lag, and your “equal SVs will then correspond to equal T” is inaccurate because when SV crosses zero on the way down T is at max, and when SV crosses zero on the way up T is at min. And SV isn’t a fixed cycle so the lag will also vary, giving a very poor correlation between SV and T.
lgl says:
April 10, 2011 at 2:55 am
Thanks, agree, but SV = a(RT) + b is right, so there is a lag
No evidence for that and theoretical it doesn’t make any sense.
And SV isn’t a fixed cycle so the lag will also vary, giving a very poor correlation between SV and T.
The whole point of this article [see Figure 2, http://i191.photobucket.com/albums/z36/AlecRawls/Environment%20and%20climate/SvensmarkreplytoLFFig2.png ] is that there is a correlation SV, T and with no lag. That correlation yields a small variation of T to SV as expected. The other figure http://i191.photobucket.com/albums/z36/AlecRawls/Environment%20and%20climate/Solanki-Krivova2004Fig2b.png also shows no lag and a purported SC, T correlation, although there is a problem with the calibration of the Climax reconstruction.
50 years ago a generation of baby boomers were taught that Milankovitch was wrong. We were told that solar scientists had calculated the changes in solar radiation resulting from the earth’s orbit, and the variation in energy was not enough to explain the ice ages. The solar scientists of the time were certain of this. There theories could not be wrong. We were taught this in school, 50 years ago.
50 years later, we know how that prediction turned out. Milankovitch is now recognized as having been right. What the solar scientists didn’t stop to consider that just maybe their theories were wrong. That nature is not as predictable as they believed.
Today, having forgotten the lessons of the past, a new generation of solar scientists is just as convinced that variations in solar energy are not enough to explain climate change. Children are being taught that CO2, not the sun is the primary driver of earth’s climate. 50 years ago solar science was wrong, but today they are certain they are right.
Who is more likely to be right? The person whose advice turned out to be right in the past or the person whose advice turned out to be wrong in the past? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
A much more likely explanation is that climate is much less predictable than scientists believe — that small changes in solar radiation can result in large changes in climate.
One likely explanation is resonance – something that is overlooked in climate models. We know that the tidal forces of the sun and moon are not enough to cause the large tides we see in the ocean. If we simply consider these as forcings, then the tides on earth should only be about 9 inches. However, the sun and moon repeat in a regular pattern, which sets up resonance in the oceans, similar to a child on a playground swing. As a result, the tides on earth are much larger than can be explained by simple forcings.
ferd berple says:
April 10, 2011 at 7:06 am
We know that the tidal forces of the sun and moon are not enough to cause the large tides we see in the ocean. If we simply consider these as forcings, then the tides on earth should only be about 9 inches.
“It is not what you know that gets you in trouble, but what you know that ain’t so”.
The theoretical tide calculated from the forcings is 37 inches.
The major difference between solar forcings and CO2 forcings is that solar forcings are cyclical. They repeat in a pattern, which can lead to resonance. Resonance leads to amplification. The classic example is bridges failures caused by troops marching in step.
Climate science has ignored resonance in their models. They have not considered that in phase forcings can result in MUCH LARGER motion that happens with non-phased forcings.
Consider the child on a swing. When they lean back, the motion of the swing might be 1 inch. However, if they repeat this in phase, the motion of the swing can easily exceed 10 feet. An amplification of over 100.
Roy Spencers newer data is good evidence and the heat capacity makes it make sense.
http://virakkraft.com/SW-SST.png I have inverted Spencers green SW reflected to show SW to the surface. http://virakkraft.com/SW-SST-07.png The correlation is between SW and dSST, not SW and T. http://virakkraft.com/SW-dSST.png (from mid 07)
The level of solar activity during the past 70 years is exceptional — the last period of similar magnitude occurred over 8,000 years ago. The Sun was at a similarly high level of magnetic activity for only ~10% of the past 11,400 years, and almost all of the earlier high-activity periods were shorter than the present episode.[27]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_variation
27. ^ Solanki, Sami K.; Usoskin, Ilya G.; Kromer, Bernd; Schüssler, Manfred; Beer, Jürg (2004). “Unusual activity of the Sun during recent decades compared to the previous 11,000 years” (PDF). Nature 431 (7012): 1084–7. doi:10.1038/nature02995. PMID 15510145. http://cc.oulu.fi/%7Eusoskin/personal/nature02995.pdf. Retrieved 17 April 2007. , “11,000 Year Sunspot Number Reconstruction”. Global Change Master Directory. http://gcmd.nasa.gov/KeywordSearch/Metadata.do?Portal=GCMD&KeywordPath=%5BParameters%3ACategory%3D%27EARTH+SCIENCE%27%2CTopic%3D%27SUN-EARTH+INTERACTIONS%27%2CTerm%3D%27SOLAR+ACTIVITY%27%2CVariable%3D%27SUNSPOTS%27%5D&OrigMetadataNode=GCMD&EntryId=NOAA_NCDC_PALEO_2005-015&MetadataView=Brief&MetadataType=0&lbnode=gcmd3b. Retrieved 2005-03-11.
ferd berple says:
April 10, 2011 at 7:34 am
They repeat in a pattern, which can lead to resonance. Resonance leads to amplification. The classic example is bridges failures caused by troops marching in step.
Cycles phenomena do not inherently exhibit resonance. Resonance only happens when the forcing coincides with a natural cycle already present.
Consider the child on a swing. When they lean back, the motion of the swing might be 1 inch. However, if they repeat this in phase, the motion of the swing can easily exceed 10 feet. An amplification of over 100.
This is because he push or lean at times of the swing determined by natural frequency of the ‘pendulum’ that a swing really is. The frequency determined by the force of gravity and the length of the rope. External variations can then only lead to resonance if they occurs at a frequency that matches that of the natural oscillations of the climate in the first place.
lgl says:
April 10, 2011 at 7:50 am
The correlation is between SW and dSST, not SW and T. http://virakkraft.com/SW-dSST.png (from mid 07)
The time period is much too short for any definitive statement. And dSST often varies in step with T especially if there is a longer-term trend. Try to plot dSST as a function of T. And where is the phase lag of a 1/4 cycle? In general, if SV = a RT + b, then we can make a simple test case. Rewrite as SV – b = a RT. For the test make some artificial data where S-b is a sine wave [blue curve]. Set a=0.5 and plot a RT [pink curve]: http://www.leif.org/research/SV-and-RT.png . Then the temperature T is the integral of RT [yellow curve]. There is indeed a lag of 1/4 cycle, and a more startling result is that T is the same at the time of a ‘grand maximum’ [left circle] and at the time of a grand minimum [right circle]. This would the consequence of the assumption SV = a RT + b. So you are advocating no difference in temperature between grand minimum and grand maximum, right?
ferd berple says:
April 10, 2011 at 8:20 am
The level of solar activity during the past 70 years is exceptional
No, it is not: see e.g. Figure 10 of this peer-reviewed paper: http://www.leif.org/research/2009JA015069.pdf or http://www.leif.org/EOS/muscheler05nat_nature04045.pdf or http://www.leif.org/EOS/muscheler07qsr.pdf or
http://www.leif.org/EOS/2009GL038004.pdf
“It is not what you know that gets you in trouble, but what you know that ain’t so”.
No, I’m not. The heat capacity is large but not infinite so in the timeframe of grand min/max you have to use net energy input instead of SV 🙂
lgl says:
April 10, 2011 at 11:28 am
No, I’m not. The heat capacity is large but not infinite so in the timeframe of grand min/max you have to use net energy input instead of SV
Makes no sense. What is ‘net energy input’? So, you are saying that SV = a RT + b does not hold for the longer cycles when many people think they see ‘obvious’ correlation [LIA, MM].
Leif
Of course it does. If the cycle is very long most of the ocean involved in the energy transfer will reach equilibrium earlier that 1/4 period after SW max, because LW out almost equals SW in. B t w Figure 2b from Solanki and Krivova, if solar was shifted 15 years forward the correlation would improve, because the 1940 peak and 1970 trough is ENSO and can be removed.
lgl says:
April 10, 2011 at 2:28 pm
Of course it does. If the cycle is very long most of the ocean involved in the energy transfer will reach equilibrium earlier that 1/4 period after SW max, because LW out almost equals SW in. B t w Figure 2b from Solanki and Krivova, if solar was shifted 15 years forward the correlation would improve, because the 1940 peak and 1970 trough is ENSO and can be removed.
You should remove ENSO anyway before making the correlation [of course there those that claim that ENSO is also solar cycle related…]. So, if you claim there is a 1/4 cycle lag and SW = a RT + b holds then http://www.leif.org/research/SV-and-RT.png
is applicable. Now, instead of all your hand waving [and ‘of courses’] you could try to do some real science. Take e.g. Loehle’s global temperatures, calculate RT, and Krivova’s TSI for SV, and show that the relation holds.
No need. Their fig.1 and 2 already show the lag.
Ok Leif. I don’t have their numbers so here is a ssn recon. and Loehle. Temperature correlates with C14, which lags ssn by 20 years. You can even see the long-cycle lag of 100-150 years. Because solar stayed below average for a very long time before 1600, temperature kept dropping until 1600. http://virakkraft.com/solar-temp.png
lgl says:
April 11, 2011 at 6:06 am
No need. Their fig.1 and 2 already show the lag.
Not good enough. Just shows a poor correlation.
lgl says:
April 11, 2011 at 8:01 am
Ok Leif. I don’t have their numbers so here is a ssn recon. and Loehle. Temperature correlates with C14, which lags ssn by 20 years.
I don’t see anything but a very poor correlation, how you get a lag is beyond me. Is the graphs supposed to show SW = a Rt + b? That is the issue. If there is a correlation at all a lag might be reasonable anyway. It is also possible there is a lag in the C14 data, as the carbon cycle is long. Conveniently your lag is two solar cycles, so will not show up in a plot of solar cycles versus temps.
You can get SV data from http://www.leif.org/research/Corrected%20SSN%20and%TSI.xls or .txt if you prefer. Loehle’s data is on his website.
Leif
4 out of 5 (or 5 of 6) peaks match, in addition to the one around 2000. http://virakkraft.com/solar-temp-lag.png Thanks for the data but it’s a bit short coverage.
lgl says:
April 11, 2011 at 2:31 pm
4 out of 5 (or 5 of 6) peaks match, in addition to the one around 2000. http://virakkraft.com/solar-temp-lag.png Thanks for the data but it’s a bit short coverage.
You cherry pick sometimes from one curve, sometimes from the others. Not good enough. One of your other graphs claimed that seven years was enough, now you dismiss 400 years. Here are the past 2000 years: http://www.leif.org/research/Steinhilber.xls expressed as the magnitude of the Heliospheric magnetic field.
Leif
No cherry pick. I put the lines on solar peaks. Actually I claimed 3 years was enough, because that covers three periods of temp variation. I also claim 3 days is enough, if you want to find the lag in the diurnal cycle. Your first TSI recon was complete only from 1750 and Loehle stops in 1930, but in this time frame the strongest cycle is more than 100 years so 180 years of data is not enough.
The Steinhilber is good and this time I have cherry picked post 1200 because we don’t have good proxies before 1300, and I have used the integral of SW. Then there should be no lag and there isn’t. Still 4 of 5 peaks intact. http://virakkraft.com/TSI-integral-temp.png
lgl says:
April 12, 2011 at 3:04 am
The Steinhilber is good and this time I have cherry picked post 1200 because we don’t have good proxies before 1300, and I have used the integral of SW. Then there should be no lag and there isn’t. Still 4 of 5 peaks intact.
Should not cherry pick past 1200. What you mean is that it breaks down before 1300, so the data must be bad. Your ‘peaks’ are in the eyes of the beholder.
There are peaks at 1250, 1400, 1800 and (probably) 2000, both curves. It breaks down around 1100, 1450-1480 and 1600s because of volcanoes. http://www.volcano.si.edu/world/largeeruptions.cfm
lgl says:
April 12, 2011 at 6:03 am
There are peaks at 1250, 1400, 1800 and (probably) 2000, both curves.
Data goes back 2000 years…