I’ve managed to get a copy of the official press release provided by the Southwest Research Institute Planetary Science Directorate to MSM journalists, for today’s stunning AAS announcement and it is reprinted in full here:
WHAT’S DOWN WITH THE SUN?
MAJOR DROP IN SOLAR ACTIVITY PREDICTED
A missing jet stream, fading spots, and slower activity near the poles say that our Sun is heading for a rest period even as it is acting up for the first time in years, according to scientists at the National Solar Observatory (NSO) and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL).
As the current sunspot cycle, Cycle 24, begins to ramp up toward maximum, independent studies of the solar interior, visible surface, and the corona indicate that the next 11-year solar sunspot cycle, Cycle 25, will be greatly reduced or may not happen at all.
The results were announced at the annual meeting of the Solar Physics Division of the American Astronomical Society, which is being held this week at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces:
http://astronomy.nmsu.edu/SPD2011/
“This is highly unusual and unexpected,” Dr. Frank Hill, associate director of the NSO’s Solar Synoptic Network, said of the results. “But the fact that three completely different views of the Sun point in the same direction is a powerful indicator that the sunspot cycle may be going into hibernation.”
Spot numbers and other solar activity rise and fall about every 11 years, which is half of the Sun’s 22-year magnetic interval since the Sun’s magnetic poles reverse with each cycle. An immediate question is whether this slowdown presages a second Maunder Minimum, a 70-year period with virtually no sunspots during 1645-1715.
Hill is the lead author on one of three papers on these results being presented this week. Using data from the Global Oscillation Network Group (GONG) of six observing stations around the world, the team translates surface pulsations caused by sound reverberating through the Sun into models of the internal structure. One of their discoveries is an east-west zonal wind flow inside the Sun, called the torsional oscillation, which starts at
mid-latitudes and migrates towards the equator. The latitude of this wind stream matches the new spot formation in each cycle, and successfully predicted the late onset of the current Cycle 24.
“We expected to see the start of the zonal flow for Cycle 25 by now,” Hill explained, “but we see no sign of it. This indicates that the start of Cycle 25 may be delayed to 2021 or 2022, or may not happen at all.”
In the second paper, Matt Penn and William Livingston see a long-term weakening trend in the strength of sunspots, and predict that by Cycle 25 magnetic fields erupting on the Sun will be so weak that few if any sunspots will be formed. Spots are formed when intense magnetic flux tubes erupt from the interior and keep cooled gas from circulating back to the interior. For typical sunspots this magnetism has a strength of 2,500 to 3,500 gauss
(Earth’s magnetic field is less than 1 gauss at the surface); the field must reach at least 1,500 gauss to form a dark spot.
Using more than 13 years of sunspot data collected at the McMath-Pierce Telescope at Kitt Peak in Arizona, Penn and Livingston observed that the average field strength declined about 50 gauss per year during Cycle 23 and now in Cycle 24. They also observed that spot temperatures have risen exactly as expected for such changes in the magnetic field. If the trend continues, the field strength will drop below the 1,500 gauss threshold and
spots will largely disappear as the magnetic field is no longer strong enough to overcome convective forces on the solar surface.
Moving outward, Richard Altrock, manager of the Air Force’s coronal research program at NSO’s Sunspot, NM, facilities has observed a slowing of the “rush to the poles,” the rapid poleward march of magnetic activity observed in the Sun’s faint corona. Altrock used four decades of observations with NSO’s 40-cm (16-inch) coronagraphic telescope at Sunspot.
“A key thing to understand is that those wonderful, delicate coronal features are actually powerful, robust magnetic structures rooted in the interior of the Sun,” Altrock explained. “Changes we see in the corona reflect changes deep inside the Sun.”
Altrock used a photometer to map iron heated to 2 million degrees C (3.6 million F). Stripped of half of its electrons, it is easily concentrated by magnetism rising from the Sun. In a well-known pattern, new solar activity emerges first at about 70 degrees latitude at the start of a cycle, then towards the equator as the cycle ages. At the same time, the new magnetic fields push remnants of the older cycle as far as 85 degrees poleward.
“In cycles 21 through 23, solar maximum occurred when this rush appeared at an average latitude of 76 degrees,” Altrock said. “Cycle 24 started out late and slow and may not be strong enough to create a rush to the poles, indicating we’ll see a very weak solar maximum in 2013, if at all. If the rush to the poles fails to complete, this creates a tremendous dilemma for the theorists, as it would mean that Cycle 23’s magnetic field will not completely disappear from the polar regions (the rush to the poles accomplishes this feat). No one knows what the Sun will do in that case.”
All three of these lines of research to point to the familiar sunspot cycle shutting down for a while.
“If we are right,” Hill concluded, “this could be the last solar maximum we’ll see for a few decades. That would affect everything from space exploration to Earth’s climate.”
# # #
Media teleconference information: This release is the subject of a media
teleconference at the current meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s
Solar Physics Division (AAS/SPD). The telecon will be held at 11 a.m. MDT
(17:00 UTC) on Tuesday, 14 June. Bona fide journalists are invited to attend
the teleconference and should send an e-mail to the AAS/SPD press officer,
Craig DeForest, at deforest@boulder.swri.edu, with the subject heading “SPD:
SOLAR MEDIA TELECON”, before 16:00 UTC. You will receive dial-in information
before the telecon.
These results have been presented at the current meeting of the AAS/SPD.
Citations:
16.10: “Large-Scale Zonal Flows During the Solar Minimum — Where Is Cycle
25?” by Frank Hill, R. Howe, R. Komm, J. Christensen-Dalsgaard, T.P. Larson,
J. Schou & M. J. Thompson.
17.21: “A Decade of Diminishing Sunspot Vigor” by W. C. Livingston, M. Penn
& L. Svalgard.
18.04: “Whither Goes Cycle 24? A View from the Fe XIV Corona” by R. C.
Altrock.
Source:
Southwest Research Institute Planetary Science Directorate
http://www.boulder.swri.edu/~deforest/SPD-sunspot-release/SPD_solar_cycle_release.txt
Supplemental images: http://www.boulder.swri.edu/~deforest/SPD-sunspot-release/
Wow even national geographic has just conceded I confidently predict the whole AGW scm if over (but for a different reason FEAR! of cold). Just watch the warmistas handle this one! Time to watch the movie get your popcorn out LOL Already noticed the wrmist trolls are out trying to debunk of course all the funds are going to dry up real quick.
link to national geographic
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/06/110614-sun-hibernation-solar-cycle-sunspots-space-science/
Time to short Wheat in Canada?
Time to invest in a snow shoe company.
Time to recognize David Archibald, Svensmark, Landsheit and yes even Vulvecic LOL. I remeber DA actually forecast a maximum of 40 SSN for solar 24. It looks like he might be on track. BTW this is really spinning look at the registers just released
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/14/ice_age/ greatest story of the century me thinks
Phase lag between readers of WUWT and ‘the more enlightened scientist’ = about 3 years.
……..and for climate scientists add another 10 – 15 years. (variability is directly proportional to the size of the grant cheque!)
It seems the science isn’t settled after all. That’s all anyone really wanted to be admitted. And if the science is not settled, then why are we convulsing over “Green” jobs, etc., etc.?
Joe Romm will be blaming a cloud of CO2, escaping from earth’s atmosphere, having an insulating effect on the sun
More yankees on their way to South Carolina
“If the trend continues…”
A word of caution to global coolers going forward, we’ve all heard that phrase before.
Wow, if this is turns out to be true, we are in for some big changes. This is far scarier than any bs AGW agenda. Here is hoping we somehow see some changes for the better.
Must keep an eye out for this in the MSM. It should be the top news story, lead in, with experts explaining the possible ramificatiions, history of periods of minimal sunspot activity, this is big…..just kidding, doesn’t fit the meme, ignore it.
This is another case where if we’re right, we won’t like the results. Last thing we need is cold weather and crop failures. Bring on the global warming, PLEASE!
Is there a history of hurricanes during the Maunder Minimum? I was just wondering if low activity and low number of sunspots had any coerlation to tropical weather. Also, does the earth’s magnetic fields weaken or stay about the same? Maybe the records are bad or non existant for these periods. I believe the Spanish were just starting many voyages to the New World about this time and some hurricane records I know do exist because several gold laden ships were sunk during or soon after the Maunder Minimum and were reported.
Laura says:
link to national geographic
Doesn’t exactly read like a concession: “I don’t think you’d see the same cooling effects today if the sun went into another Maunder Minimum-type behavior.”
I am pleasantly pleased that this paper was finally published; and that it received major news broadcast. There are some scientists who are still scientists, rather than propagandists for their paymasters.
Even science AAA has published it
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/06/end-of-the-sunspot-cycle.html
Yes, mainstream media is really taking this up. Forecast AGW cannot proceed politically economically or in any other way. Cucinelli’s thing for Mann etc… has now become irrelevant LOL
Joshua Science said:
Yeah we’ve heard it said before but it’s not usually in connection to “observed data” , rather a trend drawn by a Nintendo 64.
I don’t think being short wheat, coal, oil or natural gas would be a good investment.
I know-Columbus/1492–etc. But I think most Spanish ships carring gold was late 15 hundreds and early 16 hundred.
Don’t be so silly. The models show that the sun has no effect on the Earth’s climate. 😉
Perhaps the Bilderberg group were receiving advice of this sort when they framed the agenda for their meeting last year.
German news magazine tells us already, that the outcome will be positive. Less distortions for power supply networks and mobile phones, even a “slight decrease in increasing global warming”. No cooling.
So don’t worry.
Warmist trolls Ramsdorf et al below. I thought according to AGW the sun had NOTHING to do with earth’s climate. Apparently, now it suddenly does. Their reply to above findings quoted from AFP just now….
“This “cancelled part of the greenhouse gas warming of the period 2000-2008, causing the net global surface temperature to remain approximately flat — and leading to the big debate of why the Earth hadn’t (been) warming in the past decade,” Lean, who was not involved in the three studies presented, said in an email to AFP””
Hoisted by their own petard…..
.
CO2 will keep us warm. After all, there’s 0.04 percent of it in the atmosphere. Imagine the backradiation. Hmmm…. warm backradiation…
Jaypan says:
June 14, 2011 at 4:11 pm
“German news magazine tells us already, that the outcome will be positive. Less distortions for power supply networks and mobile phones, even a “slight decrease in increasing global warming”. No cooling.
So don’t worry.”
I hope they did mention less Van Allen belts?
While I do find this interesting, it is a long way from matching cause to effect. Please, let us not in our haste to kill CAGW make the same mistakes they have, and jump to conclusions before the proof is in.
I know proposals have been put forth as to the vehicle of effect, but they have not been fully explored and tested. All we have are hypothesis at this point I believe. While they are encouraging and appeal to common sense, let us not form a IPSC (Intergovernmental Panel on Solar Change) and go through this corruption of the scientific process again!
Whew, posts and comments have been coming fast and furious, so apologies if someone has already mentioned this.
We can always count on NASA getting things right.
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2008/11jul_solarcycleupdate/
Maybe Phil Clarke will show up telling us it was all correct, except for what they got wrong.
Tony: They (MSM) are already conceding “it may cool” its enough to stop the warmista agenda. We shall see what eventuates in the coming months, but I am pretty sure the AGW will fall on its legs because of this. REASON most people fear extreme cooling, especially in the higher latitudes, even if its a theory just like AGW. For example consider this: WE are going to prevent warming by AGW when in fact it MAY be cooling. I emphazise the “MAY” because that’s whats scares people. I predict a massive populist backlash against the warmista postion because of this when people become aware of this story. In any case we shall see.
Piers Corbyn vindicated?
It will be interesting to hear Piers take on all this as it unfolds I think. I don’t expect him to spare the warmists at all and I look forward to some skewering and wriggling.
Eriberto Calante says:
Yes, mainstream media is really taking this up. Forecast AGW cannot proceed politically economically or in any other way. Cucinelli’s thing for Mann etc… has now become irrelevant LOL
From the comments at the Register I was just reading, not so much. Then again, nothing changes the mind of the True Believer.
John M – Priceless! Thanks for that link
Please can we start an archive of links and screenshots of all the warmist claims that the sun has no effect climate – before they start erasing them. Warmists have a habit of trying to re-write history when their claims are proved to be false: Same way they denied the 1970’s claims of a coming ice-age & Nasa’s himalyan glaciers melt page etc.
Eriberto Calante says:
June 14, 2011 at 3:38 pm
Time to recognize David Archibald, Svensmark, Landsheit and yes even Vulvecic LOL. I remeber DA actually forecast a maximum of 40 SSN for solar 24.
____
Um, we’ve already exceeded 40 SSN in Solar Cycle 24, and have about 2 years left to solar max.
I have forwarded links to your article(s) to Sun TV News here in Canada, along with the article from Space.com. I am hoping our new “little network that could” up here will give this lots of airtime. I am beginning to think this may be the turning point — at last. I said it before some years ago that it is ironic that nature itself will prove to be the CO2 alarmists undoing. Regardless, this is a big story on it’s own. Great coverage BTW!
Cheers!
PS. For all my fellow canucks, email, tweet — or whatever — to Sun News to run with this story!
Email links to WUWT? to your favourite host, or go here and fill out the “contact us” form.
I have prepared a statement:
“There is consensus among Anthropogenic Solar Minimumologists that
western style capitalismhuman activity is the cause of the impending decline in solar activity — the precise mechanism is yet not fully understood. I hereby propose that the UN form a Intergovernmental Panel to study the link betweencapitalismhuman activity and the decline in solar activity. And let me be the first to say, that if you don’t believe in this yet-to-be-fully-understood mechanism, than you are a denier.”See, it won’t take long for the Team to pivot to a new cash cow. Let the fund raising begin.
Time to drag out the pitchforks and torches.
“The Age of Witch-Hunting thus seems pretty congruent with the era of the
Little Ice Age. The peaks of the persecution coincide with the critical
points of climatic deterioration. Witches traditionally had been held
responsible for bad weather which was so dangerous for the precarious
agriculture of the pre-industrial period. But it was only in the 15th
century that ecclesiastical and secular authorities accepted the reality of
that crime. The 1420ies, the 1450ies, and the last two decades of the
fifteenth century, well known in the history of climate, were decisive years
in which secular and ecclesiastical authorities increasingly accepted the
existence of weather-making witches. During the “cumulative sequences of
coldness” in the years 1560-1574, 1583-1589 and 1623-1630, again 1678-1698
(Pfister 1988, 150) people demanded the eradication of the witches whom they
held responsible for climatic aberrations. Obviously it was the impact of
the Little Ice Age which increased the pressure from below and made parts of
the intellectual elites believe in the existence of witchcraft. So it is
possible to say: witchcraft was the unique crime of the Little Ice Age.”
http://www.scribd.com/doc/32396573/Witch-Hunting-Maunder
Joshua Science says:
June 14, 2011 at 3:51 pm
“If the trend continues…”
A word of caution to global coolers going forward, we’ve all heard that phrase before.
_____
Indeed, and it would seem that some AGW skeptics are nearly frothing at the mouth with excitement over this…which really amounts to pure speculation of what might happen. Meanwhile, in the real world, arctic sea ice extent is at or near record low levels for this date in June.
R gates the current SSN is 16 and has been for a week calculate your means to date. I of course meant mean SSN. It can go to 200 for a day or so it does not mean the mean will be 200 pun intended.
http://www.solarham.com/
Just looked at TV ‘news.’ Too bad the Sun hadn’t fallen down a well, sent out some embarassing tweets, or was on trial for murdering its child. Might have got some coverage.
The other ‘big story’ is almost non-stop stories of ‘hackings’…. which appears to be leading up to the ‘need’ to clamp down on the inconvenient net.
re: R.Gates: …”arctic sea ice extent is at or near record low levels for this date in June.”
______________
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm
R gates Arctic ice at this time of the year is not indicative of arctic minimum ice (which is what warmistas really like to use example 2007 minimum why all of a sudden has June become so important?) look at ALL previous years here:
http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/ice-area-and-extent-in-arctic
http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/total-icearea-from-1978-2007
BTW look at SH ice its still above anomaly for the past 4 years from your pals at cryosphere today (just joking BTW re pals please don’t feel insulted just a bit of sarcasm).
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.recent.antarctic.png
Thank you for the familiar link. It showed exactly what I stated…arctic sea ice extent is at or near record lows for this date in June. Looks like no pending “Little Ice Age” just yet…but in a sick sort of way, it seems the AGW skeptics are almost hoping for one and it can’t come too soon.
R Gates
Mostly I disagree with you but:
“Indeed, and it would seem that some AGW skeptics are nearly frothing at the mouth with excitement over this…which really amounts to pure speculation of what might happen. Meanwhile, in the real world, arctic sea ice extent is at or near record low levels for this date in June.”
Makes sense.
My own comment:
“While I do find this interesting, it is a long way from matching cause to effect. Please, let us not in our haste to kill CAGW make the same mistakes they have, and jump to conclusions before the proof is in.
I know proposals have been put forth as to the vehicle of effect, but they have not been fully explored and tested. All we have are hypothesis at this point I believe. While they are encouraging and appeal to common sense, let us not form a IPSC (Intergovernmental Panel on Solar Change) and go through this corruption of the scientific process again!”
Appears to be relevant
Please people, do not succumb to what the IPCC’ers did!! That is, and will never be science. Scientists do not gloat over their victories. They accept the new POSSIBLE paradigm.
R gates you might want to have a look at global temperatures as well while your at it (Tornadoes due to global warming when in fact ALL temperatures were BELOW anomaly SH, NH and tropics pluuezzz…..
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/600/dailyuahtempsmar312010.png/
Jack Morrow,
Just doing a quick search there are records of hurricanes hitting throughout the latter half of the 17th century and the early 18th century. A particularly famous storm created “flooding so great it created new permanent inlets”.
The only thing I’d like to see if it cools as much as some seem to think is a hurricane coming north in late October or November, becomes extratropical, and wraps a bunch of cold air into the system and drops a ton of snow. But I bet Co2 would still be to blame
Eriberto Calante says:
June 14, 2011 at 4:50 pm
R gates the current SSN is 16 and has been for a week calculate your means to date. I of course meant mean SSN. It can go to 200 for a day or so it does not mean the mean will be 200 pun intended.
http://www.solarham.com/
_____
Fair enough, but you said nothing about “the mean” in your original post. Thanks for clarifying your intent. The SSN has been trending upward for about 2 years and hit a peak so far over 50. But the point of a quiet sun is still valid…now we’ll have to see what actual real world effects it will have. If in fact a Maunder type minimum does develop, I think it’s far too early to say it wil definitely cool off globally because of it. I though this kind of frothy speculation was what skeptics were opposed to?
Eriberto Calante says:
June 14, 2011 at 5:03 pm
R gates you might want to have a look at global temperatures as well while your at it (Tornadoes due to global warming when in fact ALL temperatures were BELOW anomaly SH, NH and tropics pluuezzz…..
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/600/dailyuahtempsmar312010.png/
______
I well aware of the temperature variations around the world over the past few decades, years, months, days, and weeks. We know what happens during a La Nina (less heat is given off by the oceans to the atmosphere). Now that this particular La Nina has come to a close, let’s see what the next six months bring. If you were to listen to some of the AGW skeptics, we’ll have glaciers forming soon. I tend to think that we’ll probably say in a ENSO neutral range for a while, and tropo temps will reflect that. The continued near record low extent of artic sea ice reflects continued warmth in the Arctic, but why talk about the facts…
^^^that storm struck New York and New England
If this pans out, all of a sudden the Sun is going to become a climate driver……………….again
Only this time “global warming is still there, it would have been a lot worse, just wait until the sun gets back to “normal”
I don’t like that straight line extrapolation. A curve that has nearly or already reached the minimum would be a MUCH better fit, IMO. I would want to see more data to be even slightly convinced, and I am sure there must be more?
It could be just yet another example of looking at too short a period to and dragging out a trend that does not exist (a bit like the warming ‘trend’ from ’79 to ’99).
This is of course unprecedented and much worse than we thought. We must shut down our BIG OIL plants to save the world from man-made catastrophic warming. The signs are in the stars.
Queue snappy ska beat ….
“It’s the dawning
of a newwww era”
funny how skepticism about models and predictions all fly out the window
Here’s the quandary this sets up for the warmists
* If they claim the Sun has no significant impact on Earth’s climate, then as it continues to cool – their models and projections continue to be falsified making it increasingly apparent that CAGW is a falsified hypothesis.
* If they admit the Sun does impact Earth’s climate in substantial ways, they get a small temporary fig leaf to blame for why their projected warming has been delayed, however they are also admitting that the Sun may have been driving most or nearly all of the climate change we’ve seen. They would also be opening the possibility of dramatic solar forced cooling in the future which scares most people far more than warming.
They can’t have it both ways.
This is what happens when you get out of group think. This is settled science. Now let’s proceed to re-organise our entire energy infrastructure based on the finings of a few climate scientists whose very livelihoods depends on continued global warming.
HA ! So the “experts” predicts a big solar minimum.
That means we are 100% guaranteed to have a normal, large-ish cycle.
steven mosher says:
June 14, 2011 at 5:32 pm
“funny how skepticism about models and predictions all fly out the window”
Well, yes and no. If sceptics embrace models of the sun then they must do extra work to justify their rejection of models of climate. At this time, it is not entirely clear to me what part of the claims about the sun are based on models and what part on genuine physical hypotheses.
However, Svensmark’s work is pure science that follows scientific method perfectly. Now, I take it that Svensmark is not one of those who is predicting the sun’s behavior. But the sun’s changed output will provide him with new initial conditions for his universally generalized hypotheses and he can then predict changes in Earth’s climate.
When people show graphics of the sun’s cycles, it is a truly impressive sight. However, if they are simply saying that the existing graph really resembles the graph at the beginning of the Little Ice Age then that is just extrapolation and is not science. However, if time reveals that the graph for this time is identical to that for the Little Ice Age then Svensmark has the data that he needs for his genuine science.
Yes, that.
The fact is, we don’t really know what will happen. We’re dealing with a chaotic system (weather) that may or may not be influenced by the largest thermonuclear explosion in the solar system, that itself may have cycles that complete in time spans much longer than the average human lifespan.
Interesting times, for sure. I do wish it would cool the heck off. It’s hotter than blue blazes here in Houston.
R. Gates,
Don’t you think it is strange that the topic of this forum is the AAS announcement about solar activity and you talk endlessly about sea ice?
Mr. Mosher,
The new claims of climate change causes and proposed restructuring of our entire energy system is not being made by sceptics but by Warmists. What else do you want us to do? Accept the ‘settled’ science? Go along with program?
Models:
“Modellers have an inbuilt bias towards forced climate change because the causes and effect are clear.”
http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/shared/articles/Schmidtetal-QSR04.pdf
Why Climate Models Lie
http://theresilientearth.com/?q=content/why-climate-models-lie
“The Royal Society’s motto ‘Nullius in verba’ roughly translates as ‘take nobody’s word for it’. It is an expression of the determination of Fellows to withstand the domination of authority and to verify all statements by an appeal to facts determined by experiment. ”
http://royalsociety.org/about-us/history/
Beware of pending new ice age predictions from the past .
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;173/3992/138
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0033-5894(72)90047-6
http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2009/12/scientists-considered-pouring-soot-over.html
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,944914,00.html
http://old.businessandmedia.org/specialreports/2006/fireandice/fireandice.asp
I wouldn’t count on the sun taking a rest anytime soon.
http://dublinmick.wordpress.com/2011/05/25/mayan-elder-carlos-barrios-2/
http://dublinmick.wordpress.com/2011/04/29/little-darling-here-comes-the-sun/
http://dublinmick.wordpress.com/2011/04/28/nasa-warning-super-storms-billions-could-die/
http://dublinmick.wordpress.com/2011/06/14/controlled-power-cuts-likely-as-sun-storm-threatens-national-grid/
Living in Houston and having had all of my tropical plants killed by snow the last two winters, I do not like this report.
Mosher
It appears to be a prediction based on observation rather than a model… though it is still just a prediction. We will observe whether or not it comes true. At least no one is trying to change the way we all live based on this prediction…yet…
steven mosher says:
June 14, 2011 at 5:32 pm
funny how skepticism about models and predictions all fly out the window
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Could it just be that solar scientists are more respected than climate scientists? “Solargate” anyone?
That aside, all true scientists have good reason to hope this pans out. The opportunity to observe a prolonged solar minimum “up close and personal” may help to answer a lot of unresolved questions.
Yeah, the freeze pretty much kicked my St. Augustine in the cods and it still hasn’t really recovered. But I’m DONE with 100+ highs. I’m afraid for my new SmartMeter — it may get hot and shut me down. Thanks, Reliant!
The reason why I immediately distrust global warming climate scientists is because most of them rely on their livelihoods on continued global warming. What if the world cools for 30 years? What papers can we expect from them?
Now proponents of carbon climate control say that we should not believe reputable scientists when they release well composed and thoroughly reviewed papers. Make up your minds will ya! At least R.Gates has the decency to be transparent in his efforts to obfuscate and change the subject.
This is sort of being between a rock and a hard place!
On the one hand it [may] stop our governments recklessly spending trillions of OUR money on combatting [almost] non-existent AGW, but on the other we may have extreme global cooling.
R. Gates: “Which really amounts to pure speculation of what might happen. ” At least this speculation is based on something that is happening now and has happened in the past. Which is a heck of a lot more than what AGW models are based on. Increase in CO2 never lead to higher temperatures in the past.
Observe!!! That is what they don’t want to hear. People all over the world could be freezing their nuts off and they would be told that they are overheating. Amazing stuff!
Perpetual drought in Australia
Declining US snowpack
Sinking coral island atolls
Accelerating rate of sea level rise
Doomed and dead corals………………………………. FAIL.
Arctic spiral death – still waitng despite the long-term trend.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2010.08.016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2010GL045698
Jimbo says: June 14, 2011 at 6:18 pm
[ What if the world cools for 30 years? What papers can we expect from them?]
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Not a peep from RealClimate.
News like this is pretty much a layoff notice.
Why do they have the sun on the top of their webpage anyways?
Just one question for the AGW folks. Is the science still settled?
Well it isn’t on Drudge as of 9.30 pm so it can’t be in the MSM.
I have yet to hear of ex VP Joe Cool starring in a movie named “Convenient Lies” scolding the world that unless we burn all the fossil fuels we can lay our hands on very soon, that the Earth will plunge headlong into the Next Ice Age. I don’t hear the Coolistas demanding a tax on Oxygen as the evil poisionous gas that will freeze us all to death, castastrophically falling sea levels that make ports and canals useless, advancing ice sheets and glaciers wiping out billions of people, and summers will become a thing of the past. Don’t hear any Brown cries of “Save the Deserts”.
Nope, not a word.
Not yet, anyway.
Alvin says:
June 14, 2011 at 3:43 pm
More yankees on their way to South Carolina
************************************************
Too late. I did that in April. Cheers.
The Lean et al. (1995) forcing from the Maunder Minimum was estimated to be -0.5 W/m2 (this is now regarded too high if anything), while that from doubling CO2 is +3.7 W/m2. Which one will one in the next few decades? You can figure it out.
It should say … Which one will win…
steven mosher says:
June 14, 2011 at 5:32 pm
“funny how skepticism about models and predictions all fly out the window”
Not for me…if the sunspot number suddenly spikes, the modelers will be backtracking as usual (cf. David Hathaway).
Climate models, numerical methods, and predictions are much easier to criticize, however…(cf. NASA GISS)
The results were announced at the annual meeting of the Solar Physics Division of the American Astronomical Society, which is being held this week at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces…”This is highly unusual and unexpected,” Dr. Frank Hill, associate director of the NSO’s Solar Synoptic Network, said of the results.
I have been expecting this for some time now. But I looked at historical data.
Poor peeps in the Midwest… Tornado seasons over the next few years could be really bad if the earth starts cooling fairly rapidly while the gulf still warm.
This news has not hit the BBC yet, I wonder if it will? Top story in Science is Phil Jones now saying warming since 1995 ‘..is now significant’ !
I wonder how the MSM will treat this story – at least it shouldn’t be going via the ‘Environmental Correspondent’ so might scrape through, possibly without the reference to global cooling!
Who will be the first prominent Global Cooling Denier?
Al Gored: I was just singing that song from The Wizard of Oz – something about a big bad witch being brown-bread) and came upon your witty piece about pitchforks and witchhunting.
Yes, the warmists must be held accountable for the damage they have done. Wicked watermelons always had an antidevelopment agenda. They must not be allowed to slink quietly away. D’you reckon Al Gore will go in front of the cameras, all contrite, and weep like a disgraced Japanese businessman?
To Jim D.:
Check your circuits, sir, you’re getting wrong answers. That 3.7 W/m2 is not just from CO2, it’s from all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions (e.g., methane, CFCs, etc.). And that is not a direct number, but includes much assumed feedback from water vapor–which could very well not be happening. All of which renders your point somewhat moot. Further, Judy Lean’s reconstructions may be wrong as well–even the IPCC admits that the level of our scientific understanding of solar effects is “LOW”.
Jim D says:
June 14, 2011 at 6:52 pm
The Lean et al. (1995) forcing from the Maunder Minimum was estimated to be -0.5 W/m2 (this is now regarded too high if anything), while that from doubling CO2 is +3.7 W/m2. Which one will one in the next few decades? You can figure it out.
=======================================================================
lol, would that be from the group that believes the sun has very little to do with our climate?……yeh I thought so.
How in the world would anyone believe that someone could estimate what the forcing was of the MM to tenths of a W/m2 when the event was mostly before thermometers?…….. sigh, nvm,
You know, faith is a good thing when properly applied……. I don’t think this is a case where it is being properly applied…….
Yeh, I measured the Sun’s output 300 years ago……. it measured in miliwatts………sigh.
Jim D says:
June 14, 2011 at 6:52 pm
The Lean et al. (1995) forcing from the Maunder Minimum was estimated to be -0.5 W/m2 (this is now regarded too high if anything), while that from doubling CO2 is +3.7 W/m2.
—————————————————————————–
Uh oh, can I smell a SCA …….. a “sunspot cycle adjustment” showing up in the temperature record ??
A study in the March 2010 issue of Geophysical Research Letters explored what effect an extended solar minimum might have, and found no more than a 0.3 Celsius dip by 2100 compared to normal solar fluctuations.
“A new Maunder-type solar activity minimum cannot offset the global warming caused by human greenhouse gas emissions,” wrote authors Georg Feulner and Stefan Rahmstorf, noting that forecasts by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have found a range of 3.7 Celsius to 4.5 Celsius rise by this century’s end compared to the latter half of the 20th century.
“Moreover, any offset of global warming due to a grand minimum of solar activity would be merely a temporary effect, since the distinct solar minima during the last millennium typically lasted for only several decades or a century at most.”
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110614/ts_afp/usspacesun
Just another scarewagon to jump on.
The SC24/25 grand minimum prediction is now being observed by regular science. But they have no clue as to why or even how long it will last. The Landscheidt Minimum will not be anything like the Maunder Minimum and should recover during SC26. The most interesting data to follow will be the solar pole field strength which has the very real prospect of showing a failure of the Hale cycle if the southern hemisphere fails to reverse.
For those interested in learning about a solid theory explaining how our Sun is controlled can read my paper published at the Cornell Uni website HERE.
You haven’t been looking hard enough
The article is under the picture of the Australian P.M.
I, for one, welcome our new glacial overlords! 🙂
Also, couldn’t the jet stream being monitored by the NASA group just have moved a little deeper, too deep to see…. and cycle 25 will be pretty normal? I’m not sure how you rule that out.
This is terrible.
Clearly we must immediately transfer trillions of dollars to developing countries to help them cope with the horrors to come from this Solar Cooling.
Now would be an appropriate time to read “The Chilling Stars” by Nigel Calder.
Just made Instapundit @ 10.43 ….an Instalanche…
Brent Hargreaves says:
June 14, 2011 at 7:26 pm
Al Gored: I was just singing that song from The Wizard of Oz – something about a big bad witch being brown-bread) and came upon your witty piece about pitchforks and witchhunting…………….
Brent I had similar thoughts, and Julia Gillard is not doing so well in the polls in Australia with her carbon dioxide tax she won’t put to the voters before forcing it upon us – shades of witch burning in the air!!.?? Then as I see the changing roles and places of those who are now the new sceptics I am reminded of that kindergarten song and dance – doing the Hokey Pokey, you know put your right foot in and shake it all about…. ……. then turn around, that’s what its all about!!
Science, Science…now what can I say!!
Replying to various people, the 3.7 W/m2 was for doubling CO2 from pre-industrial, which may happen within 50 years. So far we have had nearly 2 W/m2, also larger than the Lean estimated 0.5 for the Maunder Minimum. The downward revision of Lean’s number was from astronomical studies of sun-like stars that just don’t have much variability, but I’d tend towards Lean’s number, if I had a say. This is about 2.5 times a solar 11-year cycle variation which sounds reasonable, and even more recent work is revising it up again towards Lean’s number. Where do people get the idea that the IPCC discounts the sun when they were using solar forcing variations in addition to volcanoes, CO2, etc. The warming from 1910-40 relies on it for a significant fraction of the effect.
Station announcement at Las Cruces: Ladies and gentlemen, those of you who arrived on the AGW Gravy Train, now standing at platform one, will be required to seek new transportation to your next destination. Spaces are still available in the Maunder Minimum Special, now boarding at platform two. We regret that your tickets are not transferable, AGW grants can not be accepted for passage and no models can be accommodated. Only scientists with actual data in hand may board. Correction, only actual scientists with actual data in hand may board.
Theo Goodwin says:
June 14, 2011 at 5:55 pm
R. Gates,
Don’t you think it is strange that the topic of this forum is the AAS announcement about solar activity and you talk endlessly about sea ice?
—–
As the long-term decline in arctic sea ice is what IS happening in the region of the planet that is supposed to be on the front lines of global warming, when all the AGW skeptics are getting all frothy about a new pending Little Ice Age, I think it wise to keep them grounded in what actually is happening.
REPLY: Mr. Gates, since you mention “grounding” let me help you understand what that really means.. It’s my job (and moderators) to manage this forum and where it goes, not yours. Stay on topic or comment on another thread, but don’t clutter up this one with off-topic pronouncements because you think you’ve been assigned a job here.
– Anthony
I’m writing to several BBC shows suggesting that they run this story big style. Mostly a nest of warmist vipers, the BBC influences public opinion to such an extent that governments think, “Well, this global warming thing is just codswallop, but there are votes to be won from having green credentials.”
It’s infuriating that the public’s support for a green agenda has been hijacked by the wicked myth of Global Warming. How much better might these vast amounts of cash be spent? We squander billions on useless windmills, driving up energy prices to the detriment of manufacturing industry. And at the same time we barely scratch the surface of genuine problems such as habitat loss and endangered species.
Let’s hope that the NASA announcements signals the end of the Global Warming Religion and a return to sanity.
2012 is approaching and everything going on is just a coincidence.
I’d like to be joking around but I’m instead forced to at least ponder.
Geoff Sharp says:
June 14, 2011 at 7:44 pm
The SC24/25 grand minimum prediction is now being observed by regular science.
As was predicted by ‘regular science’ , e.g. http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2003SPD….34.0603S
The most interesting data to follow will be the solar pole field strength which has the very real prospect of showing a failure of the Hale cycle if the southern hemisphere fails to reverse.
That is a vacuous statement. A failure of the Hale cycle would result in ANY solar cycle if the polar fields did not reverse. However, the Northern Polar fields are already gone and the Southern are down to half of what it was.
Im just saying I dont see anyone clamoring for IV&V on the solar models. I dont see anyone taking a hard look at the hindcasts or the differences between models. I don’t see any of the RIGOR and DOUBT that one normally sees from a skeptical crowd.
The sun of course is hugely complex, the same fluids problems exist for the modelers of the sun. Yet, where are the guys screaming “chaos”. We cant predict the sun spots 4 weeks from now, what makes you think you can
forecast them years from now.. arguments that that.
There is a funny thing about skeptical arguments. they have specific forms. They can be applied to anything.
watching how and when people choose to apply them is interesting
R. Gates: Indeed, and it would seem that some AGW skeptics are nearly frothing at the mouth with excitement over this…which really amounts to pure speculation of what might happen. Meanwhile, in the real world, arctic sea ice extent is at or near record low levels for this date in June.
Excuse me Mr. Gates, you are the one with the pure speculation of what might happen. Those of us with clear thinking minds that are not poisoned by your AGW bias are cognizant of reality. We are capable of looking out the window and recognize that AGW is actually NOT happening.. Your postings are supported by nothing more than AGW money driven entities.
You are condescending in self high minded cloud of righteousness.
We welcome the warming your agendist claim is so dangerous. We are not ignorant to the consequence of substantial cooling. But your platform is that we are somehow behind the phantom AGW and should therefore succumb to a lessor life style that would falsely protect our future from ourselves. Does arrogant elitist ring any self examination? Please take this personal, as that is how I intend it. As for others who follow such Gore-ism clandestine money driven agenda do your family a favor…find a new agenda.
But Gordon Brown insisted, INSISTED dammit, that the science was settled.
He wasn’t telling fibs, was he?
Astrophysics is in its infancy. There have been some big advances recently but there’s a long way to go.
Sunspot predictions have smacked of dumb numerology until recently. But at least the predictions have been falsifiable (as Karl Popper insisted). Honest scientists acknowledge failures and adapt their theories. (Did somebody say that AGW science was “settled”? What a bizarre concept!) Chaos theory tells us that there will be a limit to solar forecasting (we’ll never be able to predict the emergence of individual sunspots) but they’re sure to gradually unearth the basic mechanisms as the decades pass.
R. Gates says:
June 14, 2011 at 5:00 pm
Looks like no pending “Little Ice Age” just yet…but in a sick sort of way, it seems the AGW skeptics are almost hoping for one and it can’t come too soon.
Not quite. As per our area of agreement concerning the wisdom of China and India’s going whole hog into the construction of coal-fired electricity plants in order to, as you said, ~”feed their people’s hungry mouths”, it looks more certain that China and India should even be considered downright prescient compared to countries falling for the stringent and irrational – “the alleged cure is worse than the alleged disease” – Kyoto Protocols. China and India’s emphasis upon development vs stasis or even regression is what I’m hoping for, for all people..
And whatever comes along the lines of a LIA was going to come anyway. We can’t control it. And we still really know we’re due for a glaciation, regardless.
Funny how mosher fails to differentiate the reasons for skepticism about climate models. Maybe some of the lower brow skeptics distrust the entire process of modeling, just like some lower brow warmists distrust all skepticism as oil funded. Invalid sure, but an easy straw man to beat. You must be proud of yourself for that gem. It is also somewhat ironic you would bring up the lack of doubt modeling the sun to people who accept proxies for the MWP and LIA. Surely skeptics are not allowed to accept proxies either, right? I mean, Mann and Briffa used proxies and they were the anti-Jeebus.
It’s disingenuous to say this, and you know it. The particular proxies people have a problem with are the “hide the decline” style proxies. The problems people have with models are that they do not understand basic weather processes. That is an issue. The thunderstorm thermostat Willis discusses is a good illustration of why ignoring the underlying process to rely solely on the average is unscientific, and if I may add, naive.
Leif: If the flux that has returned to the Northern Solar Pole never received any more, what would that flux then be capable of producing in a SC25 Northern cycle? You could give it in Active Regions and/or SSN.
Thanks.
steven mosher says: June 14, 2011 at 8:47 pm;
[We can’t predict the sun spots 4 weeks from now, what makes you think you can forecast them years from now.. arguments that that.]
Steven may of us have followed the ‘predictions’ about the solar cycle for a while, this last cycle, has been ‘re-predicted’ at least three or four times by the contributors to NOAA (www.swpc.noaa.gov/SolarCycle/) . Although it is not a consensus prediction the many revisions have shown that all they appear to have been doing in the past is ‘predicting’ more of the same. With each re-prediction is became clearer and clearer that the majority opinion does not really have any clue as to how things would unfold.
Now some of the contributors are saying ‘we do not know what comes next’, ‘we have never actually seen this before’. This is skepticism, the people doing the predictions are clearly skeptical of the understanding and knowledge themselves. What I see in the comments on this page is a ‘hope’, not that the predictions of the blank Sun will be correct, but rather if the blank Sun does persist that the outcome will consistent with some past solar minima, cooling.
Based on what has transpired over these last few years I think that most people realize that you can not really predict the Sun over the long term. We can’t predict the sun spots.
When I think of the current situation with people looking at experiments like CLOUD and models of the effect of the Sun the first thing that comes to mind is a scene in the movie Dante’s Peak where all the investigators are watching the effect of the earthquakes and a prediction of a volcanic eruption on their screens using data from seismometers, lasers and GPS units, and then one of them says I’m going outside to see the real thing.
Well, we may be able to go outside and see the real thing without a model, or a thermometer or a satellite. If the blank Sun persists then we will know the effect, one way or another we will know and no one will need scientists to tell them what happened; how maybe but not what.
As much as I would like to know the outcome, and may live to see it; I would rather not, if it means urban famine on a global scale.
Theo Goodwin says:
June 14, 2011 at 5:55 pm
R. Gates,
Don’t you think it is strange that the topic of this forum is the AAS announcement about solar activity and you talk endlessly about sea ice?
=====================================================================
Perhaps declining Arctic sea ice extent is one of the few remaining “proofs” of AGW.
Gary Krause,
Wow. Since you obviously know nothing about me nor my positions on anything, even if you meant your post personally, it can’t be…sorry.
I’d you enjoy science as I do, this is probably the most exciting time to be alive and if you knew me you’d know I could care less about the politics. With a possible new Maunder Minimum coming in the next few decades, what better time to put to the test all sorts of notions of how much influence the sun plays in climate as compared to the 40% increase in GH gases we’ve had since the last Maunder minimum next. Galactic cosmic rays should shoot right of the charts and people will be burning everything they can get their hands on just to stay warm. CO2 levels should skyrocket. But what if, even with a grand solar minimum we don’t cool that much or at all? What if we continue to warm? What will skeptics think then?
steven mosher says:
“funny how skepticism about models and predictions all fly out the window”
I think you make a fair point.
I’d say though, that this prediction, whilst model based, does have some important differences to the AGW predictions.
1: Sunspots measurement is well documented, follows well defined rules and is easily checked by anybody who cares to go to sites like spaceweather.com or http://www.solarham.com/ or the widget on this site. And it also is calibrated against the original instruments used to observe them.
2.. The prediction is made for a fairly short time span, so we should be able to observe and either confirm or falsify the prediction easily.
The other point is, there is a large difference, too, between superficial reaction to something and true level of skepticism. You could test it by asking how much tax they would be willing to pay to alleviate the risk of harm if it comes true. 🙂
D’you reckon Al Gore will go in front of the cameras, all contrite, and weep like a disgraced Japanese businessman?
No, he’ll probably commit Kama Sutra.
We must not forget all the talk of firing, non stop, rockets loaded with sulfates… Of dumping iron into the oceans, of stupendous quantities… Of constructing enormous sun shields to cool the earth… Of painting every surface with whitewash (lime)… Of the immediate decommissioning of every coal power station… Of a tax on everything!!!
Do these things sound prudent during a solar system event that has accompanied cold and famine before?
Where is our world stockpiles of foodstuffs during these present and past times of plenty? Even this obvious, prudent, logical precaution seems beyond, our enlightened intellects. Where are the grain filled, UN silos located? GK
steven mosher says:
June 14, 2011 at 8:47 pm
We cant predict the sun spots 4 weeks from now, what makes you think you can forecast them years from now.. arguments that that.
==============================================
Also, someone earlier compared modeling the sun to counting bubbles in boiling water. Surely that is the kind of ‘skepticism’ you are looking for Mr. Mosher?
Still, permit me to run with that example. Perhaps we will never be able to predict the sunspots emergent points. Even were that the case, I will return to the analogy of the boiling pot. You can model that process. You can give parameters for the amount of heat applied, the surface area it is applied to, the thickness of that surface area, the conductivity of the material it is applied to, the surface are of water that the heat is conducted to (should be greater than the SA receiving heat), the airflow of the room, the temperature of the room, the coverage of the pan doing the boiling, et cetera. You can see how truly complex modeling a pot of boiling water can be if you want to do it correctly.
Modeling climate is much the same. There are a great multitude of factors to consider. continental position, solar input, albedo, energy retention, system efficiency, feedbacks, etc. Yet, somehow, the attribution studies do not include them all. For instance, and comparable to my inclusion of the room’s temperature and air flow in my previous example, the addition of heat from the Earth’s core via volcanic venting in the ocean to the climate system. If deep sea heat is not important, by all means, ignore this source. But in that case, why study deep sea heat with diving buoys?
Maybe we can’t count all the bubbles in the climate system. Maybe we can’t measure some of the relevant factors. The point is, when someone says that the science is settled and then ‘loses’ some of their heat, it really is a travesty they can’t explain the warming. Especially so when they purport that the new null hypothesis should be that man causes warming by releasing CO2, without ever having sufficiently supplanted the null hypothesis that natural processes, both understood and not (csomic rays, anyone?), are causing the changes and that these said changes are outside the bounds of relevant factors. The assertions made at the beginning of this paragraph, as you know, were made by one person. A person with a heavy stake in the modeling. Yet, he can’t explain the travesty of his lost heat. I see solar scientists saying all the time that certain things are known, and certain things are not. I do not hear any talk now of ‘missing sunspots’, do you?
R. Gates says:
June 14, 2011 at 9:41 pm
I’d you enjoy science as I do, this is probably the most exciting time to be alive and if you knew me you’d know I could care less about the politics. With a possible new Maunder Minimum coming in the next few decades, what better time to put to the test all sorts of notions of how much influence the sun plays in climate as compared to the 40% increase in GH gases we’ve had since the last Maunder minimum next. Galactic cosmic rays should shoot right of the charts and people will be burning everything they can get their hands on just to stay warm. CO2 levels should skyrocket. But what if, even with a grand solar minimum we don’t cool that much or at all? What if we continue to warm? What will skeptics think then?
———————————————-
Hmmmmm, ……… being warm is nice ????
Mike says:
June 14, 2011 at 7:41 pm
A study in the March 2010 issue of Geophysical Research Letters explored what effect an extended solar minimum might have, and found no more than a 0.3 Celsius dip by 2100 compared to normal solar fluctuation.[quote]
And Hansen assured us that future glaciations simply would not occur, while we have also been recently appraised by “the physics”/Models of the fact that “irreversible” heating of Summers will strike within 20 – 60 yrs.. Not to mention “tipping points”. Shouldn’t the Modellers do some more “experiments” and crank us out some new “facts” pretty soon?
“apprised”
Well. . . Russian Habibullo Abdusamatov told this in 2005. So what’s the point?
http://www.gao.spb.ru/english/astrometr/index1_eng.html
Steven Mosher said, “funny how skepticism about models and predictions all fly out the window.”
This works the other way, too. i.e. the warmists are the ones who fervently embrace modeling. It’s the lynchpin of their theories. And several of their models now suggest global warming may be the last thing we need to worry about.
So the question is, will THEY address these latest results/predictions — generated by their own research — or with they throw them out the window?
R. Gates:
But what if, even with a grand solar minimum we don’t cool that much or at all? What if we continue to warm? What will skeptics think then?
Especially because I don’t have any problem with new empirical evidence, testable hypotheses, etc., and regardless would rather live in the Tropics than at the South Pole anyway, I’ll still be thinking that China and India have the right idea concerning energy. And that you really don’t.
It’s not even the end of the beginning for the Carbon Dioxide scam as can be seen from this ministry of truth report about the solar news.
“Not enough to offset global warming
The temperature change associated with any reduction in sunspot activity would likely be minimal and may not be enough to offset the impact of greenhouse gases on global warming, according to scientists who have published recent papers on the topic.
“Recent solar 11-year cycles are associated empirically with changes in global surface temperature of 0.1°C,” says Judith Lean, a solar physicist with the US Naval Research Laboratory.
If the cycle were to stop or slow down, the small fluctuation in temperature would do the same, eliminating the slightly cooler effect of a solar minimum compared to the warmer solar maximum. The phenomenon was witnessed during the descending phase of the last solar cycle.
This “cancelled part of the greenhouse gas warming of the period 2000-2008, causing the net global surface temperature to remain approximately flat — and leading to the big debate of why the Earth hadn’t (been) warming in the past decade,” says Lean, who was not involved in the three studies presented.
A study in the March 2010 issue of Geophysical Research Letters explored what effect an extended solar minimum might have, and found no more than a 0.3°C dip by 2100 compared to normal solar fluctuations.
“A new Maunder-type solar activity minimum cannot offset the global warming caused by human greenhouse gas emissions,” wrote authors Georg Feulner and Stefan Rahmstorf, noting that forecasts by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have found a range of 3.7°C to 4.5°C rise by this century’s end compared to the latter half of the 20th century.
“Moreover, any offset of global warming due to a grand minimum of solar activity would be merely a temporary effect, since the distinct solar minima during the last millennium typically lasted for only several decades or a century at most.” ”
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2011/06/15/3244234.htm
Steven Mosher says:
funny how skepticism about models and predictions all fly out the window.
Climate “Science” is the problem, not the use of Models per se. The record shows that none of Climate Science’s Model predictions have been correct, but that is of no concern to Climate Science! In practice, the Model predictions are “consistent with” everything, therefore, they say nothing to begin with.
Funny how everyone is making a leap based on pseudoscience.
There is a presumption of cooling to offset warming forcing, but no evidence to support it. No evidence = unsupported assertions.
And how long is a solar cycle in question here? Longer than this?
“This paper shows that the climate change that takes place due to increases in carbon dioxide concentration is largely irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stop. ” http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/01/28/0812721106.abstract
Olavi says:
June 14, 2011 at 10:08 pm
> Well. . . Russian Habibullo Abdusamatov told this in 2005. So what’s the point?
> http://www.gao.spb.ru/english/astrometr/index1_eng.html
Confirmation is an important part of the scientific method.
I’ve got a theory. Those all-powerful aliens who observe and nurture our nascent civilization, they didn’t like where it has been going lately (namely, toward self-destruction by the way of the collective guilt-trip). They don’t want us to die out just because some crooks saw an opportunity to make big bucks on human stupidity again. They like Bach’s music, Persian rugs, Perelman’s geometric algebra, etc., and hope for more stuff like that in the future. Which isn’t coming if we invest all our money and efforts in whirligigs until all Earth looks like a used car dealership. Therefore, they decided to show Mr. Gore and Dr. Hansen one huge green middle finger, and shut down the Sun for a while — just to give us a chance to sober up and stop loathing ourselves so much. “Set the control in the heart of the Sun,” as Pink Floyd prophesied.
Do you think my theory has a chance to be published in Nature or Scientific American? Given the absolute junk these magazines peddle as “science”… My only problem, alas, is peer review. In my case it’s impossible. I have no peers. I am peerless.
It’s still not hit the BBC yet. Surprise, surprise.
Well, I did figure out that the global warming observed (from ca. 1974) is natural.
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/henrys-pool-table-on-global-warming
What still puzzles me though why there was no warming in the SH (the first 5 stations in the tables)
It all happened on the NH.
Anyone here with an idea on that?
Theo Goodwin says:
June 14, 2011 at 5:55 pm
R. Gates,
Don’t you think it is strange that the topic of this forum is the AAS announcement about solar activity and you talk endlessly about sea ice?
———————–
At least he hasn’t mentioned “snowball earth” or “non-condensing GHGs” yet. A true master of misdirection , diversion and ‘spotty’ logic.
Mountain snow packs in the Pacific Northwest are far above normal for this date. See the link to SNOTEL for water content equivalents in the Columbia River Basin. My local basin is 304% of normal. We have had overcast, clouds, rain and snow all spring and the solstice is fast approaching.
http://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/reports/UpdateReport.html?textReport=Columbia+River+Basin&textRptKey=17&textFormat=SNOTEL+Snow%2FPrecipitation+Update+Report&StateList=Select+a+State&RegionList=17&SpecialList=Select+a+Special+Report&MonthList=June&DayList=14&YearList=2011&FormatList=N0&OutputFormatList=HTML&textMonth=June&textDay=14&CompYearList=select+a+year
Olavi says:
June 14, 2011 at 10:08 pm
Reminds me of the efforts of Picard at the Observatorie de la Paris making as precise measurements of the Solar Diameter as he could possibly muster. He was way ahead of his time. Something to look into.
I am waiting for the first Politician to latch on to this, anyone for a Sun Tax, or a Freeze your Nuts off Tax.
This may or may not be a Theory to disprove AGW but the ‘One Global Govt’ movement have no shame and will just swap ships.
Reading the comment above this one, I hope, (Richard G @ 11:01), I wonder if the climate models (sorry, Mosh another failure on their part) deal with the altitude of precipitation. Higher altitude precipitation means more albedo.
Make that Four lines of evidence. Unless they are going to continue to ignore the line of evidence which successfully predicted the solar slowdown many years in advance.
Another feather in the cap of the Solar-Planetary theorists.
What was the name of the 15 year old girl that had the school essay called “Ponder the Maunder? It is now hosted on http://www.globalwarminghoax.com/e107_plugins/content/content.php?content.6
I just went back for another read and the first picture accompanying the essay is interesting in light of the above article and comments!
let’s see … for the longer term history of earth’s climate :
were there periods during ice ages when CO2 levels were elevated from the current AND
any evidence such sub periods influenced climate from the boundary conditions and FW or REV in
either quote direction un quote ? ?
my concluded reaction is that this increase in GH gasses is going to be swamped by our star’s influence
upon the planet’s climate. i see how it’s one of the few remaining IF’s the AGW types have to hang their
hats on.
@ Henry P:
Heat leaving a system that stores heat in the ocean might decide to leave over the landmasses. There is an abundance of landmass on the NH compared to SH.
curses, it’s the hard carriage return come to bite me
From the following article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/14/ice_age/page2.html
“The big consequences of a major solar calm spell, however, would be climatic. The next few generations of humanity might not find themselves trying to cope with global warming but rather with a significant cooling. This could overturn decades of received wisdom on such things as CO2 emissions, and lead to radical shifts in government policy worldwide.”
Says it all really …
Steven Mosher said, “funny how skepticism about models and predictions all fly out the window.”
Come on Steve! You of all people know that models are the result of data and statistical methods. I use several models in my electrical engineering work. All work exceedingly well.
It is the data and use of RE etc, used in the “Climate Models”, that has been questioned by the likes of McIntyre and many others and has led to the distrust!
If the warmists are right then we need more CO2 not less, otherwise it’s going to be a long winter.
Henry P : The warming in the Northern hemisphere seems to mostly follow ocean cycles of the 60 year variety. S. Hemisphere is a big puzzle and with so much less data we can not even be as sure as to whether it has warmed or cooled. (Current data seems to indicate rather steady temperatures overall…) Spectulation could go wild on this front in reality, but I think the largest case to be had is that the geography of the S. hemisphere is what drives its differences between it and the N. Hemisphere. Lots of study is really needed if its even desired to figure out the mechanism of the S. Hemisphere.
Ice ages give us a fundamental clue in this difference, as the ice ages tend to happen more in the N. Hemisphere and do not seem to occur in the S. hemisphere except on a very limited scale, which indicates that most of the cooling/warming is due to ocean current differences between the hemispheres. (geography).
This is all speculation, in that there is evidence to support it, but its by no means a sure thing.
Same thing with this entire Solar max that will appear to be a min. Until the Max has passed, its nearly impossible to guess what we will see. I have said all along that it appears to be something on the order of Dalton/Mara and that time will tell us the truth. We do know several things though after over 100 years of mostly good coverage of the world with temps.:
The cool-down will take a decent amount of time. The oceans so to speak hold a lot of heat and will be able to release this gradually to make it appear that the cooling is sudden. We will have time to adapt. The first thing we need to do is not panic (which I will repeat as a message over and over again.) The cool down will be gradual. I expect some “exciting” things as far as our understanding of the climate goes.
But in that vein, now is the time to make it even more important to drive the idiots in charge of climate science into the ground. The Team as we call them (not all climate scientists, but the ones who engage in pseudo science and propaganda.)
They need to be removed from the puzzle quickly and there is no way we should allow them any say in the future. That being said, they can be given jobs chopping down trees for firewood for all I care, because they obviously lack the morals and/or the intelligence to be good scientists.
But back to what we can expect:
Glaciers therefore will not be outside NYC or London are not a threat in our lifetimes.
Temperatures will plummet over next few years since oceans are in their “recharging phase.” This is what has been causing the flare-up in the AO which has really been the driver of weird weather events. But this will be gradual and I expect if the solar effects start really effecting the climate that the oceans will go into a warming phase again as they attempt to equalize temps. Therefore, we can expect BRUTAL winters for awhile, but overall temperatures should be rather steadilly dropping. (All except GISS of course with one temp. gauge and a crazy Dr. Hansen standing over it with a blow-torch yelling “Fossil fuel trains are death trains…” But moving on…..
If you want to see what our climate compares to today, go look up the 1950’s. Its like a mirror image of what we see today. High AO, newly cold PDO, Atlantic getting ready to switch to cold…its like case in point to what is happening today. 1970’s can also point to some events, but by far 1950’s are a better fit. Expect a very bad hurricane season this year. The la nina track with rising heat from the Atlantic as the Nina weakens….just spells disaster especially for the E. Coast of the US. But what does further cooling indicate for hurricanes? Let me be the first to say: It depends. One year could be like last year, then this year happens and blows the previous years away. Weather happens, the temperatures are what people should be concerned about.
As for temperatures, we have no idea of the actual effects. We know it got colder (1600’s), and the dominant theory is the solar cycles (or lack thereof) but before people start a panic, realize that all along we have to adapt.
Fossil fuels we have plenty of. Energy and heat will not be an issue, crops will be. This is the issue with farming in general, but on the bright side, there is plenty of fallow land in areas that will still be good farming land even with say a 2C decrease in temps. overall. Future will unfold as it will. The losers in this case will be Russia and Canada who will lose farming land as a 2C decrease (in my mind worst case scenario) would cause all of Canada to basically be unfit for farming. But that is the future. Hold onto reality, don’t look too much into guesses on future climate…we can not truly predict the future, which is something I have always said to alarmists.
And like I said previously, its now time to up the anty even more and drive alarmists out of science. Do not forget what they did in the past…they will do it to us again in a heart-beat and if you let them screw you over a second time, you have only yourself to blame for not fighting it out now.
JPeden says:
June 14, 2011 at 9:59 pm
“Shouldn’t the Modellers do some more “experiments” and crank us out some new “facts” pretty soon?”
A new term is needed. A “model fact”? Or, since the debate is over, a more authoritarian “Modelfact”? Or just MF. But for Planetary Fever PR purposes, best not to mention it. Facts are facts, and there are models that prove that.
Well the 20% increases this year and then 5% each year after that in energy bills here in the UK will be welcomed along with this news.
At least when the 10,000 die from the cold ti will bring the housing prices down, and make the enviro’s happy.
At least there will be no snow with the cold as AGW will make winters snow free.
benfromMO says:
June 14, 2011 at 11:52 pm
The cool-down will take a decent amount of time. The oceans so to speak hold a lot of heat and will be able to release this gradually
Good comment Ben. My simple model I built a couple of years ago agrees. Even if we get a Dalton style solar minimum, the solar heat stored in the oceans will see us through for a good while. Of course, that will be wilfully misinterpreted by the AGW loons to show the Sun has little effect on climate….
I would expect to see a 0.3-0.5C drop in the Northern Hemisphere over the next 25 years if the Sun stays quiet and we get a few more big volcanoes. Of course, that drop would be bigger than the Southern hemisphere will see.
Bad, but not catastrophic.
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2010/01/05/my-simple-solar-planetary-energy-model/
If this is true, and we are headed for a new Maunder type minimum, shouldn’t we be worried that it will get colder than even the little ice age as the current warm period, just ending, has a lower temperature than the medieval warm period? It seems to me that if we experience a similar drop in temperatures, but start from a lower point, we will end up colder than last time.
Thanks Antony for keeping us informed. My blog (in Icelandic) has information obtained here. http://agbjarn.blog.is/blog/agbjarn/
The Team are on to it with comments by Schmitt on MSNBC Cosmic Blog
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/06/14/6857473-solar-forecast-hints-at-a-big-chill
RC has their tame “little trolls” spreading the comments around. I picked up on a Australian newspaper blog.
Time to emigrate to the med before britain freezes!
That holiday home in Murcia may not be such a bad investment after all.
If you want to see a first response from the AGW “side” of the deabte, here is Gavin Schmidt’s early take, as reported on msn.
Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the founders of the RealClimate blog, said the effects of solar activity on climate over the past 30 years have been “at the margin of what we can detect.”
“They are detectable in the high atmosphere, but when you get down to the surface, there is so much other stuff going on that it’s been really hard to get a clean signal,” he told me.
One of the reasons why so little is known about solar effects on climate is that the sun’s highs and lows have been within such a narrow range in recent history.
“If we were to see a return to what’s called Maunder Minimum conditions in the next 50 years or so, that would be interesting,” Schmidt said. “I think we’d learn a lot about solar physics and solar variability. … It’s going to be scientifically very exciting if all this pans out.”
Even then, however, he estimated that the effect of greenhouse-gas emissions would be on the order of 10 times as great. “What you might see over a 20- to 30-year period is a slight slowdown in the pace of warming,” Schmidt said. “In terms of how we should think about climate change prediction in the future, reducing emissions and so on, it really wouldn’t make much of a difference.”
Robin Barry says: June 15, 2011 at 12:26 am
If this is true, and we are headed for a new Maunder type minimum, shouldn’t we be worried that it will get colder than even the little ice age as the current warm period, just ending, has a lower temperature than the medieval warm period? It seems to me that if we experience a similar drop in temperatures, but start from a lower point, we will end up colder than last time.
Robin, I’ve written a piece on my private blog and I’d be interested in comments. It’s a very difficult balance. Obviously people ought to be aware of the possible implications, but obviously we don’t want another global warming scam and another huge waste of public money.
My fear is that we will get both: total denial by the warmist policy advisors suddenly switching to hysterical “sunspot” fever when the alarmist industry works out how to make money from the scare.
Whilst definitely relevant, surely forecasting solar activity, isn’t the sole issue, re: Svensmark and the influence (now seemingly confirmed by CERN, etc) of cosmic rays and their associated particles?
Are we considering the extra solar system flow, the level of availability, of cosmic rays, to be a constant? Wouldn’t that be a rather large assumption?
Are there perhaps cycles of cosmic ray availability? Plus perhaps irregular extra flows along with irregular lesser flows (supernovas don’t appear to happen every week, at regular distances).
Now if there’s a period of low solar activity, and the solar system’s resistance to the influx of cosmic rays weakens as a consequence, and that event should happen to coincide with a period of low cosmic ray flow rates, then that could be a remarkably different scenario to a period of low solar activity, coinciding with a period of high cosmic ray flow rates.
Given that we can only measure, and therefore know, the cosmic rays that the solar system grants entry to, by seeing what actually arrives here, it might be important to see if there are any other telltales that usually accompany them, which might have the potential to be measured at significant distances outside the solar system? So we get to know just what sort of ‘weather fronts’ might be moving in?
Otherwise, we would all appear to be up the creek without a paddle, and stumbling around in the dark, with everything being ‘after the fact’? I’m ok with being on the receiving end of ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’, but it would be nice to have that reality stressed properly if that is actually the case.
If being forced to acknowledge that allows ‘Government’ to become a little more humble than it presently seems to wish to be, then that itself could be a significant win for all of us.
At the end of the day, if the truth is ‘We don’t know’, then there’s absolutely nothing wrong with saying ‘We don’t know’. It can even be highly valuable to confirm it, and not just from the point of view of saving valuable wealth and resources from being wasted on futile follies..
Jim D says: June 14, 2011 at 8:16 pm wrote
quote
Replying to various people, the 3.7 W/m2 was for doubling CO2 from pre-industrial, which may happen within 50 years. So far we have had nearly 2 W/m2,
unquote
Tamino, owner of the blog Open Mind, was kind enough to calculate the warming from CO2 during the two 20th century warming spells. In the first it was 0.25 w/m^2, in the second 2.0 w/m^2.
quote
also larger than the Lean estimated 0.5 for the Maunder Minimum. The downward revision of Lean’s number was from astronomical studies of sun-like stars that just don’t have much variability, but I’d tend towards Lean’s number, if I had a say. [] Where do people get the idea that the IPCC discounts the sun when they were using solar forcing variations in addition to volcanoes, CO2, etc. The warming from 1910-40 relies on it for a significant fraction of the effect.
unquote
Presumably the same other forcings are occurring now — including albedo change and aerosols which are, perhaps, included in that little weasel word ‘etc’ in your statement above. Have you an explanation of how the extra 0.5 w/m^2 from the sun in 1925 compensated for the 1.75 w/m^2 less from the sun? Are sun’s watts more powerful than CO2 watts? Is this also discussed by the IPCC?
mosher wrote
quote
funny how skepticism about models and predictions all fly out the window
unquote
But what a time to test one set of forecasts against another! If, for example, the iris theory is correct then the putative cooling will be resisted by less heat dumping to space, if the climate is homeostatic then presumably albedo will drop. A good time to be a scientist who has nailed no flags to the mast. For those who have, not so much.
JF
Some genuine scientists have always said that the time has come when the whole warmist agenda will be smashed and made futile. This is the beginning of their contention that rather than warming, the planet was due for a cooling down, even to the point of entrance to a new mini ice age. The establishment laughed at us. Now there is **official** support for the contention that a solar minimum will bring about the cooling effects that will stop the global warning agenda dead in its tracks. As a certain fictional character once said: “The truth is out there”. This really is the beginning of the end!
BBC response: silence.
CNN response: silence.
The silence of the AGW lambs.
I would like to take credit, but I read it on another site…This should not be called a Maunder Minimum, but be referenced as “The Gore Minimum”
Another trend to worry about?
Another trend we have to live with and adapt to.
In a cyclic system any trend will only show which part of the cycle you happen to be on.
I am confused. Should I be hoarding drinking water for the prevously predicted long term droughts caused by climate change or building an ark to deal with the predicted flooding caused by climate change? I am just a simple person who needs some clarity and direction. Instead I seem to get any opinion that will suit climate change disaster predictors even if it totally contradicts the preceeding opinion. Whatever happened to the impartial scientific method?
Hmmmm !
did I not read somewhere that the egg beaters don’t work in extreme cold ?
A little help please!
Could someone point me to a link that seeks to prove the relationship between sunspots and climate. I have read of these things in the past but now can not find the links anymore. I used Google but got back millions of hits to sites saying that it was not the sun but rather it was CO2.
Would someone help me out here please?
Most of the last decade solar scientists were predicting strongest SC24.
How wrong they were.
Now solar scientists are predicting no sunspots at all.
My view is that they are unjustifiably leaping into another extreme.
Dalton type minimum likely, but anything more extreme is highly unlikely.
I hope we do not spend years speculating about something that we will not live to see.
“Saved by the sun. Despite the massive amounts of CO2 being spewed into the atmosphere at an increasingly, unprecedented accelerating rate, it is now obvious that mankind will be saved by the sun, what irony.”
This is how the agw crowd will save face.
So if the solar activity remains low, at the level it reaches during the abscence of sunspots for an extended time then the reduction in solar energy recieved will be about 1W/m2.
A doubling of CO2 gives an increase of around 3.7W/m2
If you accept the widely supported figure for climate senstivity of around 3degC for a doubling Of CO2 this would mean the new ‘Maunder minimum’ would cause cooling of around 1degC, negating up to a third of the rise from CO2.
If you prefer Lindzen and others much lower climate sensitivity then the drop in solar activity will cause a cooling of about 0.3degC.
But then scientists predicting the future behavior of what is clearly a chaotic system in the solar ‘cycle’ from the present ‘initial conditions’ are fooling themselves that such a system is even capable of prediction – according to Dr. Andy Edmonds!
It would appear the cognoscenti have flown, their paradigm having crashed and burned. Schadenfreude does not quite capture our delight.
I’m waiting for the “human caused warming is being masked by changes in the sun” argument. That is, a causal factor of climate change dismissed by the alarmists as being too weak and unimportant to be counted is now overcoming the factor they consider to be the primary cause of climate change.
For several years I posted on warmist blogs that solar influences on climate were supported by several lines of research. I was denigrated or my posts were expunged. Believers in global warming completely disregard solar influences in their climate models. They have long claimed that solar influences on climate are negligible compared to those of CO2. With this new release’s mention of the Maunder Minimum solar influences on climate will be hard to deny. It looks like nature may be giving us a test of the null hypothesis that the sun has no influence on climate.
Meanwhile, the view that a rise in CO2 can cause harmful warming has been challenged by the work of Richard Lindzen of MIT and others showing that CO2 does not have a positive feedback effect. Put the work on the importance of solar influences on climate together with the lack of support for CO2 increases causing harmful warming and the rational case for global warming has fallen apart.
AdderW: 3.54 am. As per my comment, 4:39 am (although it’s mid evening here in Australia) only the really stupid ones will make that argument, not realising how it undermines their whole case.
Couple of things people should keep in mind:
1) This possible maunder-or dalton-like period doesn’t look likely to be as low or long as the previous maunder.
2) We’re starting from a much better position. Global temps this decade were quite a bit higher than the period pre-maunder. Nearly .3C of this can reasonably be attributed to a-GHG warming. That’s about .3C of warming that otherwise would not be retained. Also, being well mixed, this is pretty even throughout the atmosphere. This prevents temperature drops from being as large and also means temperature differentials will be smaller than they otherwise would be. This should take the edge off the weather effects we would otherwise expect.
Recently I made a minor discover which shows that the changes in the North Hemisphere geomagnetic field intensity follow the solar magnetic activity.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/SSN-dBz.htm
Importance of this discovery may be properly assessed in the future years .
Good old Sol is taking a slumber, but we shouldn’t observe the sun because global warming, which must be catastrophic and anthropogenic otherwise taxpayers might want their money back, is still ongoing in the minds of the crazed climate hippie parade. Apparently some of the reasons are elderly getting heat strokes during warm weather because they can’t afford the new green world of electricity, hurricane season, it generally being warm during summer, folks being able to take a swim, in JUNE, for pete’s sake, and BEJESUS me but the arctic ice is melting at the outer rims during summer time! The horror, the horror of it all! o_0
So, essentially, the logic of the crazed climate hippie parade goes something like this: If we were really heading for global cooling (again!!!) why would people learn to swim?
In the world of the hippies, there is no lag time for they have still plenty of time to leave the 60’s behind? :p
It really is quite entertaining to watch the sudden embrace of models, not to mention the hope for severe cooling, by some sceptics at this news! It’s also enlightening to see the responses from Warmists, which I’m pretty sure they just cribbed from the Sceptic’s old notes. Makes me wonder if genuinely impartial scientific thought is possible given human nature 🙂
One thing that should be remembered about this, tentative, prediction, which sets it apart from most AGW pronouncements is that it’s validity will be testable over a relatively short time-span. It’s also falsifiable in that, if SC25 turns up on-time and on-strength then the prediction was wrong. So, within a decade, we’ll know one way or the other. That’s a very different proposition to climate models, where the modellers have set the rules such that they’ll be retired or dead (and so will most of us) before the results are in, because apparent results sooner than that “don’t count” unless they seem to follow the hypothesis. So we have to accept the predictions on faith (or not, as the case may be).
As for hoping for another Little Ice Age, I’d like nothing better than to see Dr Jones, Mann et all shivering beside a Frost Fair on the Thames, still trying to tell us that we’ve got to stop burning all that coal, oil and gas and put another ethnically produced sweater on instead. The ensuing lynching would be memorable.
Fortunately, we don’t actually need cooling that bad to scupper the AGW position. The hypothesis has always been based on the rather shaky ground that “it must be CO2 because we don’t know any other forcings strong enough”. They specifically rule out solar activity as being no-where near enough of a forcing.
Leaving aside any question of the validity of global mean temperatures for now, all that an extended solar minimum needs to do is cause a small drop, or even an extended plateau in that global mean. The CO2 forcing, and all hypothesised feedbacks, will still exist so any such drop or extended plateau will demonstrate that solar activity can at least</i. match the suggested total forcing from GHG emissions. Which completely invalidates the assertion that "it must be because nothing else is that powerful".
So, let's all wish for some scientifically interesting solar inactivity and some pleasant, snowy, winters ahead – even an occasional Frost Fair could be nice for the festive spirit – without hoping for conditions which will bring hardship, famine and death on a massive scale! If this extended minimum happens, and does cause cooling, then feel free to gloat (I know I will be) but gloat nicely, without wishing harm on anyone when that harm isn't needed.
In fact, if you see Dr Jones huddled by the Thames, buy him a hot-dog from me 🙂
[snip. Do not call people “deniers.” ~dbs, mod.]
vinnster says:
June 15, 2011 at 2:43 am
> I would like to take credit, but I read it on another site…This should not be called a Maunder Minimum, but be referenced as “The Gore Minimum”
Cute, but the general consensus here that that Gore hasn’t contributed anything to science and hence does not deserve the honor. Jack Eddy has contributed a lot to solar physics, does deserve such an honor, and a lot of us want it named the Eddy Minimum.
See
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/13/online-petition-the-next-solar-minimum-should-be-called-the-eddy-minimum/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/04/22/wuwt-poll-what-should-we-call-the-current-solar-minimum/
What “alarms” me about this, is the mentioning of the Maunder Minimum. Why not the Dalton Minimum? The same with “lowest level since space based instruments”. Solar activity was pretty high right up to the end of the century, who’s to say this isn’t just a pause in that? My guess is we are going to be hearing a lot more about this as alarmists and politicians use it as their “Get out of Jail free” card.
scepticalnotyetcynical says at June 15, 2011 at 2:59 am
” Instead I seem to get any opinion that will suit climate change disaster predictors even if it totally contradicts the preceeding opinion. Whatever happened to the impartial scientific method?”
This is a strawman argument, and is a logically fallacy. A straw man is a component of an argument and is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent’s position
You are making a claim against climate science that is unsupported by the facts. Climate science has included solar forcing as a consideration, and there is no contradiction in the variability of solar forcing changing. In fact this line of argument just helps prove deniers wrong.
“As NASA has said – A deep solar minimum has made sunspots a rarity in the last few years. Such lulls in solar activity, which can cause the total amount of energy given off by the sun to decrease by about a tenth of a percent, typically spur surface temperature to dip slightly. Overall, solar minimums and maximums are thought to produce no more than 0.1°C (0.18°F) of cooling or warming.
In 2009, it was clear that even the deepest solar minimum in the period of satellite data hasn’t stopped global warming from continuing,”
BBC total silence boycott
So now we know! Low sunspot levels = cooling and visa versa. The problem is that, compared with a little warming, a little cooling could be a serious matter for us all.
I’ll still be thinking that China and India have the right idea concerning energy. And that you really don’t.
____
Don’t recall me ever expressing my ideas concerning energy, but perhaps you are a mind reader.
http://www.publish.csiro.au/?act=view_file&file_id=AS06018.pdf
Please read our paper above to see what we predicted in 2005 [but couldn’t get published until 2008] . If our work is correct, all solar-type stars showing cyclical solar activity will have have multiple Jovian-like planets in near-circular orbits with periods ~ 3 – 15 years. It is the (collective synodic) periods of these orbits that set the stellar magnetic activity cycles.
The real pioneers in this field are Paul Jose, Theodore Landscheidt, W. Fairbridge, J. Shirley, Carl Smith, Geoff Sharp, Tallbloke, Vukcevic, Timo Niroma, David Archibald and others who have dared to think differently.
Another L.I.A. in the offing? Maybe. Anybody want to buy a wind farm?
Thank goodness that, due to economics, there are zillions of tons of unexploited coal in Africa. That should keep my great grandchildren warm.
Time for a new word………………”Coolistas” !!!!!
I will agree with Mosh to a degree. For the last three years, to my eyes, the solar scientists as a group have generally born an unsettling resemblance to the Three Stooges in making predictions to watch them be shot down. This fact should be considered when assigning credibility to their newest effort here. I’m not generally a fan of “appeals to authority” in the first place, but to the degree I will give credence on that basis, your “authority” better be gleaming of late with right-on predictions proved true –and the solar boys and girls, of late– have not so gleamed.
Having said that, it also appears to be much more falsifiable than AGW modelling, and most of the predictions the solar boys have made have been able to be tested in months, or a few years, rather than, oh, “safely after I’m retired”. And for all their flailing around, that is far to be preferred (if sometimes gruesome to observe) than the AGW modelling crowd.
huishi says:
June 15, 2011 at 3:12 am
Could someone point me to a link that seeks to prove the relationship between sunspots and climate
The link between sunspots and climate is based on correlation without causation. There are a number of hypothesis but none have been proven.
steven mosher says:
June 14, 2011 at 5:32 pm
Nobody has rejected the idea of computer models completely. What we have rejected are climate models because of their complete failure to accurately predict anything. When the solar models fail as badly as climate models have, we will start rejecting them as well.
Let’s cut to the quick, earlier comments stated that the study of Astrophysics is in it’s infancy. I would argue that Man’s understanding of much of the world and the universe around him is also in it’s infancy. There is not a field of study where we have defined the whole of what there is to be understood. Not even close. To imply that we understand Climate and what will happen to Climate over the next 100 years based solely on rising CO2 levels is arrogant given the level of knowledge on the subject and the questionable data that gets massaged to try and understand it. Likewise, to say we know what the sun will be doing over the next 10-50 years is equally a reach. Other than counting sunspots we dont have longstanding records of the type we are just now developing regarding the processes of the sun. To say we have “understanding” of the sun from a 10-30 year snippet out of a 5 billion year time frame is ludicrous.
I know people feel more comfortable having someone of authority provide them some certainty in their lives, but we fail ourselves and our species when we “make believe” that we have all the answers.
Both this site and Bishophill state that the press release has been issued to the MSM.
Pity none of them are using it then.
Nearest we get is the lunar eclipse and the CME here in the UK.
For ANY of them here to admit to this report having any weight is to admit that
‘CAGW was BS all along and we supported it and lied to you’
Careers for many politico ‘scientists’ and ‘journalists’ and massive financial and job losses worldwide
could hang on this; so the establishment will circle the wagons but there
is a chance that this is CAGW’s last stand.
There are just too many downward indicators to ignore and although the cooling denial continues
outwardly I’m sure that behind closed doors an escape plan is being devised.
Also, couldn’t the jet stream being monitored by the NASA group just have moved a little deeper, too deep to see….
—
The jet stream was detected using sound waves. (Similar to how the interior of the earth was mapped using the sound waves from earthquakes.) These sound waves have been used to map the interior of the sun, all the way to it’s core. It is not possible for the jet stream to sink so low that it couldn’t be seen.
The best test of a theory is its ability to make predictions of future events. Over 20 years ago Landscheidt predicted a mini ice age around 2030. It is time to reconsider Landscheidt’s theories of conservation of angular momentum in the integrated Solar System and its effects on solar activity. The Sun should not be viewed as an isolated entity. Until the underlying physics is thoroughly understood, we will be unable to make accurate predictions regarding solar activity.
http://www.landscheidt.info/?q=node/172
R. Farr
The warming capacity available in anthropogenic CO2 can be mathematically calculated, all other things being equal. The warming capacity of available energy emanating from the Sun (in all its forms) can be mathematically calculated, all other things being equal. Guess which part of the statement is creating all kinds of stomach upset on both sides of the fence? As in “It’s a travesty that there has not been significant [fill in with your word] in the past 10 years. Apparently, Earth, and its oceans and atmosphere don’t give a rat’s hind end about “all other things being equal”.
I hate this phrase, “It’s the -blank- stupid” because it speaks of an underlying lack of basic scientific knowledge in physics and chemistry, let alone Earth science, combined with a lack of understanding regarding proper statistical analysis of noisy, hard to measure, baseline chaotic data in which is buried both CO2 changes and Sun changes on Earth’s temperatures.
aaron says:
June 15, 2011 at 4:52 am
OTOH, volcanism that accompanies the minima, mostly on the backend, has yet to take off. Note the coincidental spike in AP on 3/11/11. As the Sun reawakens the relaxed Lithosphere is going to see more rift activity as we’ve seen in recent weeks in Chile and Eritrea. SO2 outgassing will cool as surely as reduced TSI.
Ric Werme says:
June 15, 2011 at 5:55 am
Jack Eddy has contributed a lot to solar physics, does deserve such an honor, and a lot of us want it named the Eddy Minimum.
Jack Eddy did much to promote the better study of the Sun in general, and the Grand Minima, the Maunder in particular. But he didn’t forecast this one. Despite being persona non grata here, I think Landscheidt should get the honours for this paper:
http://bourabai.narod.ru/landscheidt/new-e.htm
When I predicted three decades of global cooliing in 2000 based on geologic data of recurring climatic cycles (ice core isotopes, glacial advances and retreats, and sun spot minima), I presented a temperature graph showing several possible historic analongs the 1945-1977 global cooling, the 1880-1915 cooling, the Dalton Minimum (1790-1820 cooling, and the 1650-1700 Maunder Minimum, and suggested that it was too early to tell which one we were most likely too experience. The graph and supporting data are available in several GSA papers, my website, and in a paper scheduled to be publishd in Sept. If we are indeed headed toward a disappearance of sunspots for decades, as in the Maunder during the Little Ice Age, then my most dire prediction may come to pass. As I have said many times over the past 10 years, time will tell whether my prediction is correct or not. The announcement that sun spots may disappear totally for several decades is very disturbing because it could mean that we are headed for another Little Ice Age during a time when world population is predicted to increase by 50% with sharply increasing demands for energy, food production, and other human needs. Hardest hit will be poor countries who already have low food production, but everyone would feel the effect of such cooling. The time to prepare is now–later may be too late.
The clock is ticking. Time will tell!
And the spin begins: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110614/ts_afp/usspacesun
They won’t give up this meme. Not ever.
The mainstream media is in fact already covering the story, and although there will be a lag with BBC, The Guardian etc, I predict even they will cover it in the next few days. While it is hard to know at this stage what the ultimate impact will be, the admission that the possibility of an extend quiet period could have a cooling effect is an important development in the public debate over the science.
What is also important is that the distinction has been made between, on the one hand, the impact of the normal variation within a solar cycle and between solar cycles (ie, some grander than others), and, on the other hand, the impact of the absence (or near absence) of any solar cycle altogether. This means that folks (including IPCC authors) that said the normal variation has an insignificant impact on climate are open to the idea that an extraordinary event like a Maunder Minimum could have a significant impact. In other word, there is a way out here for climate alarmists without them loosing face.
Gavin Schmidt has already been quoted as saying that the reason that so little is known about solar effects on climate is that the sun’s highs and lows have been within such a narrow range in recent history, however “if we were to see a return to what’s called Maunder Minimum conditions in the next 50 years or so, that would be interesting.” Schmidt again: “I think we’d learn a lot about solar physics and solar variability. … It’s going to be scientifically very exciting if all this pans out.” In other words: there’s more to learn, and so the question remains open. (See: http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/06/14/6857473-solar-forecast-hints-at-a-big-chill )
And then there is the Solar Physicist who was the main authority for the current IPCC report, Judith Lean:
“Recent solar 11-year cycles are associated empirically with changes in global surface temperature of 0.1 Celsius,” said Judith Lean, a solar physicist with the US Naval Research Laboratory. This she says “cancelled part of the greenhouse gas warming of the period 2000-2008, causing the net global surface temperature to remain approximately flat — and leading to the big debate of why the Earth hadn’t (been) warming in the past decade.” If Lean answers the question of why no warming so far this century by giving it to the negative effect of a quiet solar cycle, then she leaves herself wide open to the possibility of a much greater impact on warming by no solar cycle at all.
See AFP: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gCyKV3JBekkM64KzB2y5sBT9cmFQ?docId=CNG.0859eaa6a7b504a1beff9276b550af2a.371 On Judith Lean and the IPCC see: http://climatechange.thinkaboutit.eu/think4/post/judithgate_ipcc_consensus_was_only_one_solar_physicist
The same AFP article goes on to quote a GRL paper giving the effect an extended solar minimum at around a 0.3 Celsius dip by 2100 compared to normal solar fluctuations. The authors are quoted as saying that “A new Maunder-type solar activity minimum cannot offset the global warming caused by human greenhouse gas emissions.” But what it is required to offset is given as the maximum 4.5 degree C rise given by the IPCC . Whereas, if we look to the IPCC estimated minimum rise, then 0.3 C does look like a significant offset.
The author’s of the GRL article are again quoted: “Moreover, any offset of global warming due to a grand minimum of solar activity would be merely a temporary effect, since the distinct solar minima during the last millennium typically lasted for only several decades or a century at most.” Hummm, ‘several decades or a centruy’ is getting into ‘grandchildren’ territory, and so i am not so sure that policy makers and the voting/taxpaying public would view this as exactly ‘short term.’ There’s still lots of spinning going on, but we can only wait an see how much traction can be achieved with this new development in the public debate over the science of AGW.
I forget to mention I. Charvátová
[reply] and P.A. Semi TB-mod
OT: Is there any reason why my posts spend over an hour awaiting moderation while the comments of others seem to continue being posted?
[reply] Moderation work can be patchy at this time of day. bear with us. TB-mod
And when this global cooling doesn’t happen, will you conveniently forget that you ever made this prediction?
Mark Wilson says at June 15, 2011 at 6:39 am
“Nobody has rejected the idea of computer models completely. What we have rejected are climate models because of their complete failure to accurately predict anything.”
That is a deceptive statement unsupported by valid evidence and historically false. A straw man is a component of an argument and is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent’s position.
Models have predicted the warming we are seeing, the CO2 concentration levels, the interplay between CO2 and other GHG, impact on ocean temperatures and ocean acidification.
Moderate Republican says:
June 15, 2011 at 5:56 am
Overall, solar minimums and maximums are thought to produce no more than 0.1°C (0.18°F) of cooling or warming.
Thought by whom? And why? Nothing to do with little things like funding, careers, egos?
“Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and among the founders from the RealClimate blog, stated the results of photo voltaic activity on climate in the last 3 decades happen to be “in the margin of what we should can identify”
Calling the sun’s effect on climate “photo voltaic” is nonsense. Photo voltaic is the conversion of light to electricity. Nowhere is electricity a measure of climate. Clearly physics is not Gavin’s subject.
RC is trying to confuse the issue and marginalize the solar influence on climate by using the term “photo voltaic” in place of “solar”. Since there is no “voltaic” measure of climate they can quite rightly claim there is no “photo voltaic” influence on climate.
Thus, by substituting the term “photo voltaic” for “solar”, RC is attempting to pull the wool over the eyes of the scientific community to perpetuate their own belief system.
This is no different than the continuing disingenuous terminology we have seen from “Climate Science”. Global warming, climate change, climate disruption. When the facts don’t support your position, change the terminology.
If you see the term “photo voltaic” used in place of “solar” you are seeing a disinformation campaign in action. You are seeing the corruption of language in science as a means of obscuring the lines between fact and fiction.
To Moderate Republican:
Your quote:
“As NASA has said – A deep solar minimum has made sunspots a rarity in the last few years. Such lulls in solar activity, which can cause the total amount of energy given off by the sun to decrease by about a tenth of a percent, typically spur surface temperature to dip slightly. Overall, solar minimums and maximums are thought to produce no more than 0.1°C (0.18°F) of cooling or warming.
In 2009, it was clear that even the deepest solar minimum in the period of satellite data hasn’t stopped global warming from continuing,”
….needs to be carefully assessed. The statement made there applies “for the period of satellite data”.. That period is only from approx. 1962 to now, What some here are talking about is a possible repeat of the Maunder Minimum, conventionally dated from 1650-1700, where sunspots disappeared for decades. This is believed to have resulted in a severe cooling referred to as the Little Ice Age. This is a far more severe event than anything in the past 5 decades. In fact, the past 5 decades include time when the Sun has been more active than at any time in the past 1000 years! (Search elsewhere on the Wattsupwiththat site for quoted papers on that.) The quoted statement for the last 5 decades, a period of very high solar activity, is almost completely irrelevant to the possible case being debated here. And as Steven Mosher has forcefully reminded everyone here, models of the Sun are not necessarily a priori more believeable than those of, say, the more extreme climate modellers.
Many commenter(s) seem to put all models on the same footing.
There are good models and there are bad models. There are testable models and there are untestable models. There are validated models and there are unvalidated models.
One thing for sure… if a model’s output does not match real life, empirical measurements… then it’s printout sheets retain usefulness, only as toilet paper or fire starter.
Good, valid models, have been in use for millennium, and are probably the single most important tool available for civilization. Mistaking a bad model for a good model can cause it’s destruction. Do I need to suggest which category our present, woefully inadequate climate modality falls into. GK
Were the results of this poll ever posted? I couldn’t find any.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/13/online-petition-the-next-solar-minimum-should-be-called-the-eddy-minimum/
Carbon market crash? Switch to long john futures?
rbateman says:
June 14, 2011 at 9:35 pm
Leif: If the flux that has returned to the Northern Solar Pole never received any more, what would that flux then be capable of producing in a SC25 Northern cycle?
There are something like five to seven ‘surges’ of flux that go to the poles. You can see them here http://obs.astro.ucla.edu/torsional.html so we expect there to be several more in SC24.
Moderate Republican(democrat) says:
June 15, 2011 at 7:25 am
“Models have predicted the warming we are seeing, the CO2 concentration levels, the interplay between CO2 and other GHG, impact on ocean temperatures and ocean acidification.”
WRONG.
No model has yet accurately predicted the decade plus stagnation and decline in global temperatures. All of the IPCC model simulations from the first IPCC though to AR4, from the highest estimate to the lowest they were all wrong. Climate models failed to predict the halt and recent decline in sea level rise, they failed to take account of negative feedbacks, they failed to predict a global sea ice stabilization. Climate models have been a spectacular failure and only the constant fiddling and adjustments and tinkering have made them anywhere near accurate. If a model is devised and run from 1990 and then needs constant corrective inputs to bring the model back from a false conclusion then that model has failed.
Show me a climate model that has accurately provided a global temperature prediction, one that has not been fiddled and adjusted over time to account for its failure. Climate models fail to predict, they are then adjusted with new data and still they failed, they were and are continually adjusted as they fail and still they fail. There has been no statistically significant warming since 1998. models from 1990 onward failed to predict the halt and decline.
Show me an unadjusted model that has been proven to have accurately forecast the last decades cooling. Please provide just one unadulterated model from the IPCCs stable that has proven to be accurate.
“Models have predicted … ocean acidification.”
In point of fact, temperature, CO2 levels and ocean PH levels are simply returning to the levels that they have been for most of the past 100 million years. The current climate conditions of low temperature, low CO2 and high ocean PH are the unusual conditions. They coincide with the current cycle of ice ages and are not the conditions that most of the life on earth evolved in.
The idea that a return to conditions prior to the past few million years in which ice ages ruled he climate will somehow harm life on earth ignores the reality of evolution. Life on earth evolved in a time prior to the ice ages, in which temperatures were warmer, CO2 levels were higher and ocean PH was more acidic than it is now. If these conditions were so bad for life, how did life survive? What built the huge deposits of limestone we find all over the planet if higher CO2 makes it impossible to shellfish to convert CO2 to limestone?
But the solar forcing climesci includes is only the direct heat impact, not the indirect and amplified effect of a reduction in solar wind leading to more cosmic ray nuclei to form clouds.
As for 2009, maybe there’s a lag and it takes a while for the earth to shed its heat. We should know a bit better in a few years.
He’d be a brave man to do that–to “confirm” that something “IS” going to happen. Foolhardy. But Hill, or one of the authors of these three papers, did state that the findings have implications for the earth’s climate. Therefore your words “completely unsupported” are a rash overstatement.
It is based on extrapolating the effects on temperature of earlier prolonged solar minimums. Your “no basis” is unwarranted.
Another rash overstatement filled with absolutes. “Deniers” presumably means all deniers, which isn’t justified. And “being totally useless” isn’t the objection that most deniers make to models. Here’s a quote, maybe from another thread, on this matter:
Pretty immoderate.
Cassie
Actually, some did. There are around 20 models or so. For Ar4 there were about 50 runs contributed by those models. The mean or average of all those runs is clearly above observations. However, some runs of some of the models were actually below observations. Some models run too hot, some run too cold. As it stands
now, more run too hot than too cold.
steven mosher,
Just because a model appears to get one prediction right out of multiple runs means nothing. Consistency is required. Let us know when a specific model consistently makes accurate predictions of the future climate, including temeprature. If that ever happens, I’ll start to believe that models have credibility. Until then, getting a hit once in a while is simply a model version of the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy.
[Labeling others “deniers” violates site Policy and results in your comment being snipped. ~dbs, mod.]
[Snip. Labeling others with the d-word is against site Policy. ~dbs, mod.]
Smokey says June 15, 2011 at 8:25 am “Just because a model appears to get one prediction right out of multiple runs means nothing. ”
This is a strawman argument because there are multiple climate models that have successfully predicted the warming we are seeing. Models have successfully predicted the following;
* Cooling of the stratosphere
* Warming of the lower, mid, and upper troposphere
* Warming of ocean surface waters
* Trends in ocean heat content
* An energy imbalance between incoming sunlight and outgoing infrared radiation
* Amplification of warming trends in the Arctic region
Moderate Republican,
I suggest you re-read Cassie King’s comment @7:59 am above.
~ Moderate Independent☺
Smokey – Cassie is wrong (as shown) and so are you.
It’s unusual to see myself agreeing with such people as R Gates, but stranger things have happened:
As a sceptic, I’m dismayed to see people jumping on this story like a proverbial tramp on a sandwich.
Despite (rightly) denigrating warmists for making un-founded assumptions and relying on wretched models, people on this site are doing those very same things, just because the story is about cooling rather than warming.
Case in point: After contributing an interesting and informative post about his work, Don Easterbrook then (in my opinion) ruined it all by coming out with the line, “The time to prepare is now–later may be too late.The clock is ticking. Time will tell!” Such a phrase could have been lifted verbatim from Real Climate.
If any cooling does happen, I believe it will be interesting for the following reasons:
1. Governments who have wasted billions on AGW legislation, such as the UK and Australia will have a hell of a lot of explaining to do
2. Greenpeace and their cronies will have to do a hell of a lot of back-pedalling
3. Hansen will have a sh*t-fit
However, I wouldn’t be surprised if the AGW team use a quiet Sun as an excuse to explain away the lack of warming that they had so confidently predicted i.e. “if it wasn’t for the lack of sunspots covering up the AGW we’d be really frying by now, so we need to keep cutting those CO2 levels!”
The Team and the IPPC will not give up so easily, so if cooling really does come about we may have an even bigger fight to try and win…
[Snip. If you continue to label others as “deniers” all your comments will be snipped. ~dbs, mod.]
Pete H says:
June 14, 2011 at 11:28 pm
Thanks for the link, Pete!
ModRep,
Actually, Cassie King was spot on. And your cherry-picked model ‘successes’ are one-offs. You cannot produce a model that hasn’t been tweaked, and that has correctly predicted any one of your parameters for a decade in advance within ±1 S.D. The Met office’s super expensive supercomputer predicted a “barbecue summer” for last year. That competely wrong prediction is typical of model outputs.
Climate models operate on the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy: shoot holes in a barn door, then draw a bulls-eye around them. Presto! Models can accurately predict…
…not.
steven mosher says:
June 15, 2011 at 8:20 am
Actually, some did. There are around 20 models or so. For Ar4 there were about 50 runs contributed by those models. The mean or average of all those runs is clearly above observations. However, some runs of some of the models were actually below observations. Some models run too hot, some run too cold. As it stands
now, more run too hot than too cold.
According to Andy Edmonds, in the recent June 13 post on chaotic theoretic modelling:
Models are generated by observing the earth, modelling land masses and air currents, tree cover, ice cover and so on. It’s a great intellectual achievement, but it’s still full of assumptions. As you’d expect the modellers are always looking to refine the model and add new pet features. In practice there is only one real model, as any changes in one are rapidly incorporated into the others.
So how different and independent are these 20 models you mention? Are they not just different implementation of more or less the same math(s)?
Moderate Republican@June 15, 2011 at 6:39 am
“Models have predicted the warming we are seeing”
What warming are we currently seeing? I haven’t seen any for the past decade.
Models have predicted the current warming.
They have? Where?
They have failed completely when they try to hindcast weather.
They can be tuned so that they predict the overall warming claimed by the extremely flawed ground based temperature network, however they fail to get any regional distribution right.
They fail when trying to handle cloud coverage.
They fail when trying to predict distribution of heat vertically as well as horizontally.
The truth is that the climate models have completely failed to predict anything.
Mosh,
“Actually, some did. There are around 20 models or so. For Ar4 there were about 50 runs contributed by those models. The mean or average of all those runs is clearly above observations. However, some runs of some of the models were actually below observations. Some models run too hot, some run too cold. As it stands
now, more run too hot than too cold.”
Just to clarify, was that around 50 runs in total (ie: about 2.5 per model)?
If so then it doesn’t really bode well for their skill that “some runs from some models” predicted lower than observations because it suggests that even those models that admitted a possibility of what we’ve observed were getting it right on some of their runs.
Seeing as “some runs” out of 2.5 each is between 40 and 80% that suggests that even the most accurate ( according to subsequent observations ) models were predicting higher than reality between 80 and 40% of the time and all the rest were predicting high 100% of the time. That smacks pretty strongly of a systematic bias somewhere in the way the models are constructed.
The warmists tell us that the reason we haven’t seen all of the heating that they are predicting is because the thermal lags of the oceans are decades in length.
Now they tell us, less than two years from the start of the current solar minimum, that because we didn’t see lots of cooling that this proves the sun has little impact on the climate.
Which is it. The oceans cause a decades long thermal lag, or changes should be seen instantly. You can’t have it both ways.
More wisdom from Gavin Schmidt:
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/06/14/6857473-solar-forecast-hints-at-a-big-chill
Let’s see….Chile, Eritrea, maybe Iceland…..Maunder II, here we come!
Anyone want to buy a very nice chalet in Graubünden? Cheap?
Mod, please snip this junk:
Moderate Republican says:
June 15, 2011 at 8:40 am
“… denier deception.”
[Reply: Snipped. Moderate Republican is on thin ice with his pejorative labeling. ~dbs, mod.]
So the alarmist response from various sources has been the sun will not affect the climate enough to prevent so called global warming. Well, if the predicted sun decline did occur, it would be a much bigger change than the decline over recent years. This was enough to stop global warming at least over the recent decade, so it’s fair to say already wrong before this period in question even occurs. So the question I ask you, why then are global temperatures not warming?
No, Smokey you are still wrong and Cassie King remains wrong.
A straw man is a component of an argument and is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent’s position. it is inherently deceptive
smokey said “The Met office’s super expensive supercomputer predicted a “barbecue summer” for last year. That competely wrong prediction is typical of model outputs.”
Weather does not equal climate. presenting weather modeling as evidence as to the veracity of climate modeling is completely bogus. That makes this a strawman argument, and you wrong. Again.
[This is the last time I am going to ask: please stop shouting with bold font. Bold should be used sparingly, if at all. ~dbs, mod.]
A straw man is a component of an argument and is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent’s position. it is inherently deceptive
Mark Wilson saysJune 15, 2011 at 9:04 am “They have failed completely when they try to hindcast weather.”
[Bold font snipped. ~dbs, mod.]
Regarding the “turnaround” by NASA: I get the impression is that it is not so much a change of opinion of some scientists as it as the allowance of other voices to be heard. That can only be good. The messianic attitude of the Alarmists is one reason I am a sceptic, especially when they have so zealously sought to silence and dismiss dissent – a real red flag.
Correlation is not causation, but it takes a very special kind of person to dismiss correlation out of hand in order to promote his pet theory, especially when there are so many unknowns. I am 65 years old and I have seen enough to know that there is very often some subtle causation underlying the correlation that takes time to tease out.
If the alarmists are upset that they are ridiculed and dismissed by some they might consider looking in a mirror for the cause.
[snip]
Moderate Republican claims that models are proven because they “successfully” predict the current warming.
I point out that these same models fail completely when they try to do hindcasting.
MR accuses me of using strawmen.
Sheesh, is that really the best he can do?
paulhan says:
June 15, 2011 at 5:55 am
> What “alarms” me about this, is the mentioning of the Maunder Minimum. Why not the Dalton Minimum?
Until this AAS announcement, most people have been suggesting something like the Dalton minimum. Now with multiple lines of research raising the possibility of multiple cycles of no visible spots, that opens up suggestions of something closer to the Maunder Minimum which featured some 70 years of very few spots.
“If we are right,” Hill concluded, “this could be the last solar maximum we’ll see for a few decades. That would affect everything from space exploration to Earth’s climate.”
I thought sunspots or a lack thereof shouldn’t affect our climate. If this article is right about a minimum, we’ll find out probably within a decade or so.
ferd berple June 15, 2011 at 7:59 am:
Ignoring reality is what Mankind is supremely good at. Science would be second and must overcome the first, in order to dominate perception. This is the see-saw that EVERYONE sits on. Thanks for the raising our seat. GK
Bruce Cobb says:
June 15, 2011 at 7:36 am
Thought by whom? And why? Nothing to do with little things like funding, careers, egos?
Thought by those who have performed a fairly straightforward calculation using a well established formula which defines the relationship between energy anfd temperature. I doubt if anyone got any funding for it. If they did – I want my share.
Matt G says “This was enough to stop global warming at least over the recent decade, so it’s fair to say already wrong before this period in question even occurs.” at June 15, 2011 at 9:12 am
That is a factually incorrect statement Matt.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13719510
If a trend meets the 95% threshold, it basically means that the odds of it being down to chance are less than one in 20.
Last year’s analysis, which went to 2009, did not reach this threshold; but adding data for 2010 takes it over the line.
“The trend over the period 1995-2009 was significant at the 90% level, but wasn’t significant at the standard 95% level that people use,” Professor Jones told BBC News.
“Basically what’s changed is one more year [of data]. That period 1995-2009 was just 15 years – and because of the uncertainty in estimating trends over short periods, an extra year has made that trend significant at the 95% level which is the traditional threshold that statisticians have used for many years.
“It just shows the difficulty of achieving significance with a short time series, and that’s why longer series – 20 or 30 years – would be a much better way of estimating trends and getting significance on a consistent basis.”
Can someone please explain how “alarmist” is not pejorative labeling?
RB says. quoting ‘msn’:
June 15, 2011 at 1:45 am
Even then [given Maunder Minimum Sun conditions], however, he [Gavin Schmidt] estimated that the effect of greenhouse-gas emissions would be on the order of 10 times as great. “What you might see over a 20- to 30-year period is a slight slowdown in the pace of warming,” Schmidt said. “In terms of how we should think about climate change prediction in the future, reducing emissions and so on, it really wouldn’t make much of a difference.”
Right, Gavin alleges that despite just having very effectively prevented a Maunder Minimum via CO2 production, we should still continue trying futilely to prevent net increases in atmospheric Global CO2 concentrations by next having the U.S. itself reproduce the current real world Fascist-Socialist European experiments which have already resulted solely in producing some of the nascent negative side effects of Gavin’s alleged “cure” to his alleged “disease”. With more to come!
Meanwhile, a large number of people living in India and China, who are the main alleged victims of the alleged fossil fuel CO2 = CAGW disease, just keep chugging along in a more rational fashion, producing the very same fossil fuel CO2 and energy which will instead be necessary to the effect the real cure to their own painfully real disease, underdevelopment – and a course which now will even prevent the effects of a Maunder Minimum to boot, as revealed by Gavin himself!
Then, as per the usual Climate Science “method” and contrary to even his own 15 yr. suggestion regarding the time period of no warming which would perhaps cast doubt upon the apparent CO2=GW hypothesis, Gavin ignores the likely fact that there has been no atmospheric warming over the past 15 – 17 years’ divergence of Model predictions of temperatures vs CO2 concentrations, and refuses to allow even the possibility of an extension of this most recent period’s behavior, something which should and would otherwise cast even greater doubt upon the CO2=GW hypothesis, if not effectively falsify it.
Ladies and Gentleman of the Jury, have you reached a verdict?
Re Moderate Republican: 6/15/2011; 9:54
“If a trend meets the 95% threshold, it basically means that the odds of it being down to chance are less than one in 20.”
Surely you know that statistic signifies correlation, not causation. As many have pointed out, there is a mass of data showing that CO2 increase lags temperature increase. There is robust theory that oceanic temperature increase releases CO2 and other less robust theories (e.g. decomposition of algae trapped in ice). Whether there is a positive feedback where CO2 then feeds into further warming and other positive feedbacks is the argument.
Moderate Republican says:
June 15, 2011 at 9:54 am
The one thing that is clear beyond the shadow of a doubt is that Phil Jones intentionally lied for the purpose of deceiving the public about climate change when he “hid the decline.” Why are you citing someone that we know to be a liar?
Is it just me, or does “new” commenter “Moderate Republican,” with his frequent use of bold, tossing around the “d-word,” and multiple assertions that sum up to ‘The (C)AGW-concluding climate scientists have always been right! It is you who is completely wrong!’, sound amazingly like the banned pest “Villabolo” (it was something like that, to use one of his aliases) to anyone else?
ModRep says: “Can someone please explain how ‘alarmist’ is not pejorative labeling?”
Sure, glad you asked. Calling someone a “denialist”, “denier”, etc., is deliberately conflating an opposing scientific view with reprehensible Holocaust deniers. It is a vicious and underhanded insult. On the other hand, those who are attempting to alarm the public with frightening and baseless predictions of looming climate catastrophe are properly referred to as alarmists, because that is exactly what they are trying to do:
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
~~ H. L. Mencken
Alarmism in its many forms has always been used by rabble-rousers for their own aggrandizement. Their unstated goal is to rule over the ‘stupid’ proles. Mencken also wrote:
‘The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.
Smokey,
As I said on another thread. Is it just me or are there more trolls here now that Romm no longer allows comments?
REPLY: Romm allows comments, but comments are highly edited and/or censored there – Anthony
Re: Moderate republican :10:15
“Can someone please explain how “alarmist” is not pejorative labeling?”
I checked the dictionary definition and I concede your point. The definitions I find emphasize the point that an alarmist “needlessly” or “falsely” raises an alarm. since that seems to be the accepted usage, I will no longer use the term, although when I used it I was doing so to simply signify one who raises an alarm (IMO before the case is proven).
Wow the anti-science clerics are out in full force on WUWT doing serious damage control.
Judging by the weak arguments put forward here, the CAGW believers seem very much on the defensive.
Whether, the discussion here is reflective of how this will play out in the media and with the mainstream public is unclear. What is clear is that any suggestion that “something else” other than HUMANS might be possibly influencing the recent and current climate is a huge paradigm shift for so many folks who have been weened on so many lies after lies after lies. (And environmentalist hyperbole is lying as far as I am concerned, as it is stretching the truth much further than we have any justifiable reason to)
Moderate Republican, 9:54 am:
”
Matt G says “This was enough to stop global warming at least over the recent decade,…..
That is a factually incorrect statement Matt.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13719510
“The trend over the period 1995-2009 was significant at the 90% level, but wasn’t significant at the standard 95% level that people use,” Professor Jones told BBC News.
“Basically what’s changed is one more year [of data]. That period 1995-2009 was just 15 years – and because of the uncertainty in estimating trends over short periods, an extra year has made that trend significant ”
”
MR, since when has 16 years been “the recent decade”? You complain endlessly (and often incorrectly) that others are attacking strawmen then you blatantly do it yourself. The mind boggles!
RE: REPLY: Romm allows comments, but comments are highly edited and/or censored there – Anthony
To Anthony’s credit is is allowing more debate here. Thank you.
(still would like to know why “denier” is pejorative but “alarmist” isn’t)
If the alarm is justified then raising it is admirable. The problem is that the globe is not heating significantly, south sea islands are not disappearing and the world is not doomed which is not the only, but sufficient, reason for having a low opinion of alarmists.
In this new case I think we should be careful not to go overboard in the other direction. Sceptics should have time to check it. More real research should be done. Indeed everything that the warming alarmists have been opposed to.
In the long term, or hopefully just medium term, we will have a spacegoing civilisation which will make it possible to geoengineer the Earth from orbit. Then neiither catyastrophic warming nor little ice ages need be a problem. My suspicion is that only one side will support that but that suspicion depends on the alarmists not actually believing in or caring about their own scare story & them simply being anti-technology Luddites.
I will wait for the minimum to occur before I start gloating or saying ‘I told you so”. This is merely a forecast and has several variables to consider including:
1. If it actually happens
2. How long it lasts/ and the severity
3. How much it actually and measurably affects temperature
There are many factors involved in long term temperature such as Solar Cycles, Atmospheric gases, AMO, PDO, and others we may have not even determined yet. The next 20-30 years will be a good test of several theories (including AGW) on what has the MOST affect on our Climate but I doubt any one factor will overwhelm the others and what we will end up with is fluctuations like we have always had. End of the day moral is we are in the early stages of understanding how our
Climate works and the certainty of anyone who claims they know which factor is most important is highly suspect IMO.
Moderate Republican says:
(still would like to know why “denier” is pejorative but “alarmist” isn’t)
Not all those who believe in CAGW are “alarmists”. You are using “denier” to refer to all skeptics.
Also, “denier” has undertones of “holocaust denier”. “Alarmist” does not have such overtones.
I don’t expect that you will accept this, as you have already shown a double-standard in your posts, but there it is.
Joe Horner says June 15, 2011 at 10:43 am “since when has 16 years been “the recent decade”? You complain endlessly (and often incorrectly) that others are attacking strawmen then you blatantly do it yourself. ”
That is simply wrong Joe.
It is impossible that 95% statistical significance could be reach when the prior decade in question is in the data set given the data in the data set..
In addition “January 2000 to December 2009 was the warmest decade on record. ”
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/temp-analysis-2009.html
Second that.
Moderate Republican says:
June 15, 2011 at 9:54 am
No it isn’t, that was down to one fairly strong El Nino and only up to 2010, the period is also much longer than a decade. (15-16 years) This year global temperatures have already fallen below the 95 percent threshold.
There is warming since 1995 and the El Nino during 2010 help cook up the data a very little, compared with 2009.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1995/magnitude/plot/rss/from:1995/magnitude/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1995/magnitude/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1995/magnitude/plot/uah/from:1995/trend/plot/rss/from:1995/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1995/trend/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1995/trend
Up to 2009, no noticeble difference in rate of trends.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1995/to:2009/magnitude/plot/rss/from:1995/to:2009/magnitude/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1995/to:2009/magnitude/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1995/to:2009/magnitude/plot/uah/from:1995/to:2009/trend/plot/rss/from:1995/to:2009/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1995/to:2009/trend/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1995/to:2009/trend
There is generally no warming over the past decade, except UAH currently showing a little. If these are combined as one data set this is no warming.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:2001/magnitude/plot/rss/from:2001/magnitude/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:2001/magnitude/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2001/magnitude/plot/uah/from:2001/trend/plot/rss/from:2001/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:2001/trend/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2001/trend
Still no warming since when go back to the the El Nino of 1997/98.. (UAH showing little again)
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1998/magnitude/plot/rss/from:1998/magnitude/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1998/magnitude/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1998/magnitude/plot/uah/from:1998/trend/plot/rss/from:1998/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1998/trend/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1998/trend
The 2nd strongest El Nino since the early 1980’s has still made little difference to the overall trend. The only reason why warming is shown a little over recent 13/14 years is down to there has been more El Nino’s than La Nina’s so far.
Search Google News for “sunspots,” I found over 300 articles listed. Rivkin weighs in on NYT’s “Dot Earth”:
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/would-solar-lull-snuff-climate-action/
Not to worry, ocean acidification is not impacted by solar activity, except that it gets worse with colder temperatures. Watch for it, this may be their last, best hope.
From Moderate Republican on June 15, 2011 at 10:47 am:
Is it really this hard for you to accept and understand the connotation?
Did you ever hear someone be called a “Holocaust alarmist”?
Folks should realize that Moderate Republican is not debating the accuracy of the term, but whether or not it is a “pejorative”, a term used to speak ill of another, which lowers the debate to name-calling.
I think he has a point.
Would probably have to use the Gordo Sutra version. 😉
R. Gates says:
June 15, 2011 at 6:24 am
[JPeden]I’ll still be thinking that China and India have the right idea concerning energy. And that you really don’t.
____
Don’t recall me ever expressing my ideas concerning energy, but perhaps you are a mind reader.
Then, Gates, on what other basis did it seem reasonable to you for China to act as it is acting in producing massively increasing amounts of CO2 in the course of producing the fossil fuel energy, which it has decided with full knowledge of all available science, is necessary to cure its real problem of underdevelopment, therefore as you said, when it has “so many hungry mouths to feed”?
Question: what is the difference between your alleged amnesia and a propaganda tactic?
Gates, snap out of it! Based upon your objective behavior, I certainly don’t need to read minds in order to derive a working hypothesis as to the nature of much of what you claim.
Btw, in our very first interaction, you stated that it was irrelevant whether you were even a scientist or had a scientific background, but that you had some acquaintances who were indeed Climate Scientists. So given your performance from then until now, I’m going to have to agree with you that within the realm of ipcc-style Climate Science both conditions appear to be the same.
Moderate Republican says:
June 15, 2011 at 10:47 am
(still would like to know why “denier” is pejorative but “alarmist” isn’t)
How about leaving the name calling out? Labeling your opponent in an intense, yet interesting argument is simply weak.
The difference between denier and alarmist is simply degree. The first is strictly offensive with no other merit. The second is also offensive, but it is a label that is focused on the topic at hand, not bringing to the table a horrific episode in our history, that simply has nothing in common with climate.
I simply find the report exciting, within my lifetime we will see the effects of the sun on our plannet, in ways that regular solar activity never would.
Moderate Republican, 10:58 am:
“It is impossible that 95% statistical significance could be reach when the prior decade in question is in the data set given the data in the data set..”
Not at all, MR. If you honestly believe that then you’re demonstrating a very poor understanding of statistical trends, especially the fact that they can change for various reasons – which is something that the whole AGW hypothesis relies on because, if nothing can change a trend, then CO2 can’t change the natural trends of climate.
So, given that trends can change, you could have 5 years of fast warming followed by 10 years of cooling which brings the overall 15 year trend below significance, followed by a single (anomalous to the new trend) warmer year that just pushes the 16 year trend back into significance. In fact, that’s more or less what’s happened over the past 10 – 15 years. By claiming significance at that point, you’re basing your claim on that single, final, year of data.
In addition “January 2000 to December 2009 was the warmest decade on record. ”
Another common for AGW strawman!
The “warmest decade on record” has absolutely no meaning whatsoever if it happens to come at the end of a sharp warming period. Of course it will be the warmest on record because it started at the highest temperature so, unless the cooling happens at a catastrophic rate, the average for the decade will be high.
Looks like this solar thread has been successfully derailed then. Everyone’s talking about co2 and models for a change…
The Warmista are *DESPERATE* to prevent serious discussion of the Sun as a major climate driver. Don’t let them get away with their cheap tactics. Ignore their comments which are not on topic.
Ninderthana says:
June 15, 2011 at 6:27 am (Edit)
http://www.publish.csiro.au/?act=view_file&file_id=AS06018.pdf
Please read our paper above to see what we predicted in 2005 [but couldn’t get published until 2008] . If our work is correct, all solar-type stars showing cyclical solar activity will have have multiple Jovian-like planets in near-circular orbits with periods ~ 3 – 15 years. It is the (collective synodic) periods of these orbits that set the stellar magnetic activity cycles.
The real pioneers in this field are Paul Jose, Theodore Landscheidt, W. Fairbridge, J. Shirley, Carl Smith, Geoff Sharp, Tallbloke, Vukcevic, Timo Niroma, David Archibald and others who have dared to think differently.
Great paper and thanks for the props. You forgot to mention Ian WIlson in the pioneers list. 😉
My handy on-line dictionary definition: alarmist n. someone who is considered to be exaggerating a danger and so causing needless worry or panic.
Climate alarmism describes exactly what the IPCC, Algore, realclimate, Mann, climate progress, Trenberth, skeptical pseudo-science, Briffa, Schmidt, etc., are doing: deliberately trying to alarm the public based on evidence-free conjectures.
In U.S. law, truth is an absolute defense. The truth is that the promoters of the catastrophic AGW conjecture are trying to alarm the public. Is there any doubt? Some may even believe the scare stories, despite the lack of evidence and the failure of their alarming predictions. But all of them are, one way or another, climate alarmists. What else would you call them?
No Joe – you are wrong. Several times actually.
1) What Jones is talking about is the temperature trend – you introduced cause in to it. Those are different things, and introducing cause into a discussion of statistical significance constrained to temperature measurements demonstrates you do no understand the concepts here.
2) The trend is either significant or not or a given time period. Joe says “By claiming significance at that point, you’re basing your claim on that single, final, year of data.” which is simply wrong.
3) Joe is wrong again when he states “The “warmest decade on record” has absolutely no meaning whatsoever if it happens to come at the end of a sharp warming period.” That is a non-logical statement – the measurements for a given time period are what they are, and those can be compared to other time period. Year to year variations are included in any time period snapshot.
Thought by those who have performed a fairly straightforward calculation using a well established formula which defines the relationship between energy anfd temperature.
———
In other words they ignore most of the ways in which the sun affects the climate.
Moderate Republican said:
(still would like to know why “denier” is pejorative but “alarmist” isn’t)
You’ve already got the basic picture, but you might also want to consider that if you call someone a “denier”, you leave yourself open to being called an ideological “believer”, which also starts to make the case for psychological projection on your part, where you are potentially actually only talking about yourself, throughout.
[I didn’t realize that dysfunctional psychological mechanisms such as “projection” were so prevalent or uncontrollable until the rise of ideological Liberalism.]
I may be wrong but I do not believe a model has taken data begining in 1900 and successfully forecasted the climate we have experienced over the last 112 years. Not even close even with knowledge of the volcanix eruptions, particulates, sun activity and CO2 levels. The predictions and errors are astounding. That should provide some indication of what the models are capable of predcting 100 years from now.
John Finn says:
June 15, 2011 at 9:54 am
Bruce Cobb says:
June 15, 2011 at 7:36 am
Moderate Republican says:
June 15, 2011 at 5:56 am
Overall, solar minimums and maximums are thought to produce no more than 0.1°C (0.18°F) of cooling or warming.
Thought by whom? And why? Nothing to do with little things like funding, careers, egos?
Thought by those who have performed a fairly straightforward calculation using a well established formula which defines the relationship between energy anfd temperature. I doubt if anyone got any funding for it. If they did – I want my share.
Would this be the famous (yet never seen) “back-of-the-envelope” calculation then? Perhaps you could produce it here? Others have asked for it, but been rebuffed, or simply ignored. It sure would be a relief to all to be able to reduce the sun’s effect on climate to a simple formula.
TonyG says June 15, 2011 at 10:56 am
Pejoratives (or terms of abuse) are words or grammatical forms that connote negativity and express contempt or distaste.
Alarmist as applied here against scientists simply reporting what they are finding clearly fits that description.
Truegold says June 15, 2011 at 11:41 am ” The predictions and errors are astounding. ”
Without specific studies and confirmation that they were wrong outside the boundaries in the model this is an unsupported assertion.
Why would someone want to try and convince people that this new turn of solar events is not a cooling risk. Yes, Moderate So Called Republican, I’m talking to you.
Mark Wilson said on June 15, 2011 at 11:35 am “In other words they ignore most of the ways in which the sun affects the climate.”
That is a factually incorrect statement – the variability of the sun is/has been looked at but it simply has not been enough to offset the climate forcing from GHG.
As supplier of almost all the energy in Earth’s climate, the sun has a strong influence on climate. A comparison of sun and climate over the past 1150 years found temperatures closely match solar activity (Usoskin 2005). However, after 1975, temperatures rose while solar activity showed little to no long-term trend. This led the study to conclude, “…during these last 30 years the solar total irradiance, solar UV irradiance and cosmic ray flux has not shown any significant secular trend, so that at least this most recent warming episode must have another source.”
In fact, a number of independent measurements of solar activity indicate the sun has shown a slight cooling trend since 1960, over the same period that global temperatures have been warming. Over the last 35 years of global warming, sun and climate have been moving in opposite directions. An analysis of solar trends concluded that the sun has actually contributed a slight cooling influence in recent decades (Lockwood 2008).
http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming-intermediate.htm
Bruce Cobb says June 15, 2011 at 11:44 am “It sure would be a relief to all to be able to reduce the sun’s effect on climate to a simple formula.”
Many people who do not believe the scientific evidence present the complexity of modeling all the variable as a reason why models cannot be trusted and now you as for a simple formula that fully explains the sun’s complete interaction with the earth’s climate?
That is logically inconsistent. Either you are rejecting the validity of other people who do not scientific evidence present the complexity of modeling or are confirming that such modeling is possible.
This is where the warmist policy bias really gets nasty and to a new level of disater. That is where the spending of borrowed money in an unsustainable economy continues to chug along in the wrong dirstction while the science turns back in the other direction. This directional problem of the policy error is doubled when it does not see the next food and economic growth implications coming from the cooling. Ouch!
From tallbloke on June 15, 2011 at 11:18 am:
I concur. “Moderate Republican” has got this twisted around to Phil Jones, models, plus the “alarmists vs deniers” bit, while he’s arguing the same things on the older Phil Jones post! Doesn’t seem like any more effort for him, since his arguments are almost cut-and-paste, but it’s at least twice the aggravation for us.
A straw man is a component of an argument and is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent’s position.
SteveSadlov says: June 15, 2011 at 12:01 pm “Why would someone want to try and convince people that this new turn of solar events is not a cooling risk. Yes, Moderate So Called Republican, I’m talking to you.”
This is a strawman arguement because I have never asserted that there is “not a cooling risk”. I have simply pointed out that – like you – people are making wild leaps based on things that have not been said.
Moderate Republican says:
June 15, 2011 at 11:34 am
No Joe – you are wrong. Several times actually.
You sure you want to keep setting yourself up like this?
1) What Jones is talking about is the temperature trend – you introduced cause in to it. Those are different things, and introducing cause into a discussion of statistical significance constrained to temperature measurements demonstrates you do no understand the concepts here.
Strawman. I didn’t introduce cause and I was also talking about trend. In fact, I was answering your very specific statement that it was “impossible” for a trend to show significance if a period that goes against the trend is included in the data. The nearest I came to “introducing cause” was by offering a perfectly reasonable scenario that disproves your assertion as a quick and I would have thought) simple way of falsifying it.
2) The trend is either significant or not or a given time period. Joe says “By claiming significance at that point, you’re basing your claim on that single, final, year of data.” which is simply wrong.
I agree totally that (assuming no new data) the significance is fixed over a given time period. But, by Dr Jones’ own statement, it was not significant over 15 years, but became significant when an extra year is added. So the time period is not “given” because it changes between the significant and not significant analyses. When a trend is on the borderline of 95% significance (and Dr Jones said, the first 15 years were significant at the 90% level) then it is entirely possible for an outlying new data-point to push it over that (arbitrary) level regardless of what the actual trend is.
3) Joe is wrong again when he states “The “warmest decade on record” has absolutely no meaning whatsoever if it happens to come at the end of a sharp warming period.” That is a non-logical statement – the measurements for a given time period are what they are, and those can be compared to other time period. Year to year variations are included in any time period snapshot.
I’ll concede that, in as far as I carelessly gave you an opportunity to create yet another strawman by my less than pedantic wording.
In the context of this discussion I assumed it was clear that my claim of “absolutely no meaning” would be taken to mean “absolutely no meaning in terms of whether the temperature is continuing to rise or not”. Clearly you either failed to see that obvious implication, or chose to ignore it. In good faith I’ll assume that my (I thought obvious) meaning was less than clear so I happily re-phrase my point thus:
The “warmest decade on record” has absolutely no meaning whatsoever in the context of whether or not temperatures are continuing to rise if it happens to come at the end of a sharp warming period. Of course it will be the warmest on record because it started at the highest temperature so, unless the cooling happens at a catastrophic rate, the average for the decade will be high.
Like I said many months ago in another post, the solar cycle downshift to a Dalton Minimum or worse in combination with a downshift in the AMO is scary!
Re: Moderate Republican : 11:51
“Alarmist as applied here against scientists simply reporting what they are finding clearly fits that description.”
I agree that for the sake of scientific debate we should refrain from the use of pejoratives, but I vehemently disagree that some actions as revealed in the “Climategate” emails depict “scientists simply reporting what they find”.
For these men and such actions I have several pejoratives that Anthony would rather I not use.
Moderate Republican says:
June 15, 2011 at 12:10 pm
Bruce Cobb says June 15, 2011 at 11:44 am “It sure would be a relief to all to be able to reduce the sun’s effect on climate to a simple formula.”
Many people who do not believe the scientific evidence present the complexity of modeling all the variable as a reason why models cannot be trusted and now you as for a simple formula that fully explains the sun’s complete interaction with the earth’s climate?
That is logically inconsistent. Either you are rejecting the validity of other people who do not scientific evidence present the complexity of modeling or are confirming that such modeling is possible.
What??????? I personally think it sure would be nice if Santa Claus exists. That’s a whole logical world away from suggesting he might!
Resourceguy says at June 15, 2011 at 12:13 pm “while the science turns back in the other direction.”
That is an unsupported statement since there is no conclusive, well anything, really from the article in which Hill is quoted. You are making an unsubstantiated leap, which makes the assertion unsupported.
Moderate Republican said: “A straw man is a component of an argument and is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent’s position.”
Here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
there (Phil Jones post),
there…
And I said almost cut-and-paste?
Hellow lowercasefred – thanks for the response.
I agree that the language used looks awful, but several independent reviews all concluded that the conclusions reached were scientifically valid.
“None of the e-mails flagged by the AP and sent to three climate scientists viewed as moderates in the field changed their view that global warming is man-made and a threat. Nor did it alter their support of the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which some of the scientists helped write.
“My overall interpretation of the scientific basis for (man-made) global warming is unaltered by the contents of these e-mails,” said Gabriel Vecchi, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist.
Gerald North, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, headed a National Academy of Sciences study that looked at — and upheld as valid — Mann’s earlier studies that found the 1990s were the hottest years in centuries.
“In my opinion the meaning is much more innocent than might be perceived by others taken out of context. Much of this is overblown,” North said.”
http://www.usnews.com/news/energy/articles/2009/12/12/climategate-science-not-faked-but-not-pretty?PageNr=3
See
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm
AGW writhing in its death throes now meets collapsing government revenues. Time to euthanize the fallen.
The last month’s economic news indicates we’ve entered recession and only await the 6 month threshold for official acknowledgement despite fudged data from the Ministry of Truth.
Layoffs of state employees have begun with local governments to follow shortly as income and sales tax transfers will not be forthcoming. QED, 2011 is descending staircase into depression.
NASA is doing Muslim outreach, climate scientists will soon be installing weatherstripping.
Bruce Cobb says:
June 15, 2011 at 11:44 am
[several previous exchanges snipped]
Would this be the famous (yet never seen) “back-of-the-envelope” calculation then? Perhaps you could produce it here? Others have asked for it, but been rebuffed, or simply ignored. It sure would be a relief to all to be able to reduce the sun’s effect on climate to a simple formula.
TSI is ~1360 w/m2 which varies by ~1.3 w/m2 (i.e. ~0.1%) over the duration of a solar cycle. These are measured observations.
Now, by the Stefan Boltzmann Law, Energy is directly proportional to the 4th power of temperature, i.e.
E = sigma x T**4 where sigma is the S-B constant, E is energy & T is temperature.
In this case E is solar energy. I’m guessing it’s at this point that most people decide against posting an explanation because there’s a bit of algebra and some long-winded explanations involved, but I’m going to cheat a bit and say that if the initial temperature T0=288K at solar min, it can be shown that, at solar max, the final temperature T1 can be expressed as follows:
T1 = 288 x (1.001)**0.25
Therefore
T1 = 288.072 deg
i.e. ~0.07 deg warmer at solar max than solar min.
Call it 0.1 deg to allow for stronger max/weaker min.
the variability of the sun is/has been looked at but it simply has not been enough to offset the climate forcing from GHG.
That is a factually incorrect statement. All they look at is TSI, ignoring everyting else.
ModerateRepublican is a troll. Do not feed trolls.
[snip by me] in spite of my own advice I still wanted to feed the troll, but managed not to.
That said, I’m looking forward now to seeing how these new papers hold up against the data going forward. I’ve argued in the past that the precautionary principle doesn’t help in situations such as climate change because if you take the action suggested by those who worry too much, a natural cooling may be exacerbated. Since cooling is much more dangerous than heating, it would be very helpful if the CO2 did heat up the earth, but I don’t think the data supports that. If we go into an extended minimum, we’ll get to see if there is a causal link between a quiet sun and cooler temperatures.
A sample size of two (maunder and dalton minimums) is too small to be statistically meaningful. Still, both of them had significant cooling, so my theory is there is a connection and this time around we have much better instrumentation for gathering data. My theory can’t be proven today, so arguing about it is a waste of time. It will take years to prove or disprove. These papers that suggest a quieting sun offer a basis for speculation that cooling will ensue, and over the next few years we’ll get to see what happens. So maybe its time we all relaxed and chilled…
Hello. Anybody there?
So many comments to browse, so little time. I hope this is new and not a retread. I’ve seen one posting already saying these studies mean nothing, that they can’t make much difference, as illustrated by modeling a year ago (GRL paper referencing the 0.3 degree difference if there was a new Minimum… (New Scientist blogger Michael Marshall on “Short, Sharp Science”; see: http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2011/06/new-ice-age-dont-count-on-it.html).
I’ve tried to post a comment (reproduced below); we’ll have to see if the blog owner allows it. Blogger takes issue with some in the mainstream media jumping on this to suggest a new ice age.
———— Posted Comment (awaiting moderation as of ~17:05 EDT) ————
I find it interesting that the potential associated with these new studies that were announced at yesterday’s annual meeting — all three of them from members of the American Astronomical Society’s solar physics division — were disproved a year ago (based on computer modeling using what are likely to be some very significant assumptions).
The FACT is these are a set of unprecedented results (three reportedly independent studies, each from a different angle, and all reaching the same basic conclusion of a solar slowdown of some, as-yet-to-be-determined magnitude). They used modern technology to investigate what the Sun is doing today and, yet, we have no similar data from the past: that’s unfortunate, because we are left to wonder what the Sun is producing (like Gauss emissions and so forth, things we can measure TODAY but could not until the past decade or two) when we have no similar data from legendary periods such as the Little Ice Age, the Maunder Minimum, the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods, and so on. Regardless of any assertion of whether the MWP or LIA were global or not, we just don’t have data of a modern type against which to compare, so we don’t know how “big” or “small” or “long” this episode might be — if the investigators actually have it right (and I don’t see why we should doubt them).
I suggest that last years computer modeling is, as a result, an educated guess wrapped up in computer code as to what effect an assumed set of changes in the Sun will have in the future, forgetting that we still do NOT know what drives ocean oscillations, for example.
In the end, these three studies seem to illustrate, again, that we don’t know a great deal about the Sun and its interactions with Earth’s climate. We also don’t know about a lot of other things, such as Ocean Oscillations (Pacific Decadal Oscillation, Pacific Ocean Dipole, ENSO, and so on). Heck, we still don’t understand fully about cloud formation and dissipation, and precipitation, so the GCM’s only have a swag in place for those…
BTW, Space.com had what appears to be a fairly unbiased set of articles on the actual scientific studies that were announced yesterday: http://www.space.com/11960-fading-sunspots-slower-solar-activity-solar-cycle.html
You can call us “deviationists” 😉 (Or dissenters or disbelievers or dissidents.)
The most accurate term is “scoffers,” which is midway between “denier” (too strong) and “skeptic” (too weak). You can pretty-up the word with an adjective, like “science scoffers,” and we can do the same, with “scorcher-scam scoffers.”
I see that warmists continue ad hominem attacks as their default argument. Why am I arguing with people like yourself again when this is your preferred tactic? In answer to your surprise at how skeptics are behaving over this announcement, maybe it has something to do with how belittled so many skeptics have been over the past 10 years for daring to suggest the sun had any major influence. How the media was told those skeptics were kooks. But as I see your belittling continues, why should the skeptics behavior change?
We are cooling, folks; for how long even kim doesn’t know.
================
Funny, I think the skeptics have been saying that about the warmist predictions for a decade now. There are still people who claim that the Earth can have “runaway” global warming, that we are at some “tipping point” as if the earth was not naturally trying to find the lowest energy state like everything else in the universe but was instead miraculously holding at some metastable state and any more changes in a trace gas would surely tip the balance of such a googleplex of complexity. Warmists have been trying to tell us for over a decade now just how terrible things were going to be if we kept using cheap energy, and calling the skeptical ones fools and flat-earthers. Now when data comes out that seems to support an alternative view, all those models and predictions and warnings and fire-and-brimstone of the warmistas gets dropped like refried beans out of a babys butt in favor of keeping all the “frothing-at-the-mouth” skeptics ‘grounded in reality’ as some kind of altruistic public service.
Mr Gates, you are hilarious. Just please don’t think that, like some of your compatriots in CO2 fear, that I subscribe to my own droppings.
Moderate Republican says:
June 15, 2011 at 10:58 am
The graphs there come from Hansen’s GISS data which WUWT has pretty much given up on. UAH is, not quite the gold standard, let’s call it the silver standard. The poor quality ground record and GISS’ adjustments have more problems than come from the remote, lower tropospheric temps that UAH has.
Check out WUWT’s reference page http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/global-climatic-history/ (you can go to the top of any WUWT page and click on Reference Pages too).
With the swing from warm PDO to cool, it makes more sense to view the 200x years as a plateau – the previous decade was still warming, so the next is significantly benefits from that. It is nice to be nearly free from people pointing out each year that was the warmest on record, now they have to look at decades! Maybe next decade 200x will still be the warmest on record.
The first image, Global Heat Content, is a better metric of global warming since the oceans have a much higher heat capacity. BTW, the Y axis should be labeled anomaly or delta from some reference. Obviously the heat content wasn’t negative in 1970.
This warmest decade thing has not escaped WUWT’s attention, please read Bob Tisdale’s analysis at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/22/flashback-bob-tisdales-november-prediction-on-giss-exploiting-the-warmest-decade-on-record/
One reason behind GISS’s warmest whatevers is there data “corrections” have a nasty habit of cooling old temperatures. Pick a day at home when you were growing up. GISS will likely tell you is was really colder on that data than the thermometer said. That’s looked at in several WUWT posts, e.g. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/18/recent-differences-between-giss-and-ncdc-sst-anomaly-data-and-a-look-at-the-multiple-ncdc-sst-datasets/
In summary, don’t try to impress us with data from James Hansen and/or GISS. We don’t trust it, and with good reason.
So anyone who points out the logical fallacy of an assertion here is a troll?
If the people who post here get the science and math wrong what is wrong with pointing that out – since everyone agrees that accuracy matter, no?
Surely if you are interest in truth a little sunlight cannot be a problem?
@tallbloke
You’re right, this solar thread has been distracted by hecklers.
Three major types of data and analysis are unveiled, converging on the conclsion that cycle 25 will likely be a no show; these are:
– Imaging of zonal subsurface flows
– Poleward “march” of flares not happenning
– L&P magnetic field decline
Of these, only the last one, the L&P magnetic field decline, has had a high profile in WUWT discussions. The other two are somewhat “left field” and unexpected – who saw them coming? Leif S probably knew about them but seems to have kept quiet. However the general consensus at WUWT – that a solar minimum has been developing – has been confirmed by the newly announced research findings.
One wonders what other data might be out there below the radar of the WUWT blogosphere which might either support or refute other widely supported predictions such as imminent global cooling?
Are we a little myopic at WUWT in the range of data types we include in the frame of discussion? Anthony has created the world’s leading science blog forum, but its content is largely our responsibility. Is content a little restricted by the aggressive promotion of certain memes and theories each with its own limited supporting data set?
We need to cast the net as widely as possible to give us the best chance not to miss critical clues and have a chance of solving the profound scientific challenge of climate complexity, a much more difficult problem than generally realised with real understanding still far distant.
Moderate Republican says:
Pejoratives (or terms of abuse) are words or grammatical forms that connote negativity and express contempt or distaste.
Alarmist as applied here against scientists simply reporting what they are finding clearly fits that description.
I can agree with that. Show me the scientists “simply reporting what they are finding” and I won’t call them alarmists. Those who are sounding a clarion call for massive policy changes, saying “we must act now”, and refusing to entertain public scrutiny of their “findings” remain “alarmists”.
R. Gates (June 14, 2011 at 9:41 pm) wrote:
“But what if, even with a grand solar minimum we don’t cool that much or at all? What if we continue to warm? What will skeptics think then?”
That’s easy! If the Earth gets warmer and warmer we’ll accept that there’s global warming; we’ll concede defeat. This is what rational people do when faced with facts which contradict their expectations.
So what will you do if the 1998 peak isn’t surpassed by, say, 2011?
The intellectual divide between us is clear, R…. one group holds a view in the light of the evidence before them and the other holds views regardless of the evidence.
There has been a small movement over the past couple years to adjust
or “calibrate” the historic monthly sunspot numbers to reflect our
“modern” understanding of what constitutes a countable “sunspot”.
Fortunately, unlike the GISS and Hadley-controlled databases
reporting earthly historic temperature reports, the revision of the
past to fit current paradigms and models hasn’t quite caught
in the world of solar observers… yet.
If you can see a sunspot, it’s a spot and is counted. If you
can detect a sunspot by other than normal optical means and
viewing conditions, but if you can’t actually see it, it’s
not a spot and doesn’t get counted.
The sunspot database is robust back to the 1750’s.
It doesn’t need proxies, interpolations or adjustments after that
year to validate the information and the month-to-month and
year-to-year comparisons based on it.
For a quick summary of how the earliest observations were made
see:
http://www.cosmosportal.org/articles/view/138714/
P.S. Anthony, many thanks to you and yours from adjusting the
comment box for us oldsters.
Mark Wilson says at June 15, 2011 at 1:44 pm
” All they look at is TSI, ignoring everyting else”
That is another strawman. For it not to be you must prove that all = ever climate scientist and every model only looks at TSI and all climate science is defendant upon that.
Sure you have all of that on hand before making such a broad sweeping statement given that broad sweeping statements are almost always untrue. In any case simply provide the documentation otherwise this remains simply an unsubstantiated assertion.
JPeden
And Hansen assured us that future glaciations simply would not occur,
As easy as that might be to believe, I’m afraid I need evidence of that claim.
John Finn says:
June 15, 2011 at 1:41 pm
My question is what time frame does this T0=288K to T1=288.072K (delta=.072K) occupy?
How long does it take, a day, a week, a month, a year, an entire Solar Cycle?
mod rep
A smart a$$ might ask you to substantiate that.
May want to check the source of MR comments. He reminds me of a character I encountered several years on an ABC forum on the Great Global Warming Swindle. Faux sympathy, voluminous inane comments that make a thread undesirable to read; derailing promising discussions. Standard dis-information/subversion. It prompted me to ask the commenter, voltscommissar, if his real name happened to be Gavin. His reply was simply “No comment.”
aaron,
Gavin did make a few comments on Curry’s blog earlier today. Perhaps he has the day off.
Smug is an accuate description in this picture.
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/staff/gschmidt/
Then there’s this from Wiki,
Schmidt defended the scientists named in the 2009-2010 Climatic Research Unit emails controversy, including Michael E. Mann and Phil Jones, saying in a post on the blog, “Gravity isn’t a useful theory because Newton was a nice man.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin_Schmidt
Aaron, I sincerely hope that’s not the case here because if MR’s abortive attempts at logical argument here are indicative of the deductive abilities of the only “Gavin” I know of then it really is worse than we thought!
rbateman says:
June 15, 2011 at 3:18 pm
John Finn says:
June 15, 2011 at 1:41 pm
My question is what time frame does this T0=288K to T1=288.072K (delta=.072K) occupy?
How long does it take, a day, a week, a month, a year, an entire Solar Cycle?
—————————————–
….. and furthermore, does this take into account the cumulative, day after day, trapping of energy delta in the oceans, including the UV component, which, I believe from reading here, varies by 8% over a solar cycle ??
Brent Hargreaves says at June 15, 2011 at 3:03 pm “one group holds a view in the light of the evidence before them and the other holds views regardless of the evidence.”
So quick test on which group you fall into. Are our CO2 emissions change the chemistry of the ocean at a pace unseen in 55 + million years? Yes or no?
MR: You’re surely new here. I waited almost three months before commenting, spending that time reading through the archives. You can’t expect posters here to drop this discussion and start disputing all the broad spectrum of warmist claims you’ve been making. Our side has comebacks for most of your assertions. You should click on “Categories” in the sidebar (hit page-down five times after going Home). This will give you a list of hundreds of threads here under various category headings.
Ah, but TonyG you are mixing multiple standards here
TonyG says June 15, 2011 at 2:58 pm “Those who are sounding a clarion call for massive policy changes”
Few of the research reports I read address policy issues, and for that statement not to be strawman you need to provide evidence that the science community (who many of the people here lump into the alarmist camp) does this writ large.
In fact – I think you hit on something there. It certainly appears that much of the froth from the ‘I don’t believe the science’ crowd here is actually more worried about what we do about the warming than the actual science. Just an observation – not claiming it is fact.
Re: Moderate Republican; 1:17 pm
Your reply is mind boggling.
You simply do not understand me.
As background I will tell you that I frequently serve as an expert witness in civil cases. An appeal to authority is meaningless to me. I have often heard experts express opinions at complete odds to evidence and science. When caught, they don’t recant their opinions, they obfuscate. Citing experts who are committed to a point of view and whose words are carefully parsed to obfuscate arouses nothing but antipathy in me.
One simple fact is that these men tried to surpress opinions and evidence that challenged their “opinions” (yeah, those are scare quotes, I find it hard to believe that they honestly believed the “facts” they presented).
The other simple fact is that these men tried to obfuscate a simple understanding of the point they were trying to make (“hide the decline”, “get rid of the Medieval Warm Period”).
I strongly disagree with their “opinons” for what I believe to be rational reasons (IMO, but that’s life), those can be debated, only time and science will tell, but by their actions they have sunk as low as human beings can sink.
If you recall, we were debating pejoratives.
Ric Werme says at June 15, 2011 at 2:40 pm “The graphs there come from Hansen’s GISS data which WUWT has pretty much given up on.”
OK, fine, but that doesn’t make it scientifically valid to do so. You may “give up” because you don’t like the conclusions perhaps….
Ric Werme says at June 15, 2011 at 2:40 pm “The poor quality ground record and GISS’ adjustments have more problems”
Yet multiple independent studies confirm the same warming trends, such as this one.
Global surface temperature trends, based on land and marine data, show warming of about 0.8°C over the last 100 years. This rate of warming is sometimes questioned because of the existence of well-known Urban Heat Islands (UHIs). We show examples of the UHIs at London and Vienna, where city center sites are warmer than surrounding rural locations. Both of these UHIs however do not contribute to warming trends over the 20th century because the influences of the cities on surface temperatures have not changed over this time. In the main part of the paper, for China, we compare a new homogenized station data set with gridded temperature products and attempt to assess possible urban influences using sea surface temperature (SST) data sets for the area east of the Chinese mainland. We show that all the land-based data sets for China agree exceptionally well and that their residual warming compared to the SST series since 1951 is relatively small compared to the large-scale warming. Urban-related warming over China is shown to be about 0.1°C decade−1 over the period 1951–2004, with true climatic warming accounting for 0.81°C over this period.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2008/2008JD009916.shtml
Moderate Repub, do you have any skepticism on the surface data set? What do you think the margin of error is and what do you say about the constant massaging of the data sets by Hansen? Alarm you at all? It sure alarms this meteorologist.
R. Gates says:
June 14, 2011 at 8:35 pm
As the long-term decline in arctic sea ice is what IS happening in the region of the planet that is supposed to be on the front lines of global warming, when all the AGW skeptics are getting all frothy about a new pending Little Ice Age, I think it wise to keep them grounded in what actually is happening.
Does the Antarctic count? That’s the ice that counts in any event and she ain’t and never will melt because of mans input of co2. Perposterous.,
Surprisingly restrained post from Andy Revkin on this, including mention of the MM coinciding with cold temperatures and no attempt to deny (or confirm) a link. His final comment that the sun will have the last word on this is bang on for once:
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/a-solar-scientist-rebuts-a-cool-sunspot-prediction/
The only trouble is, being AR, I can’t help wondering what he’s up to…… 😛
I am not a scientist and I went to school in the 70s and studied a bit a physics. Somebody help me out here. Has there been a period of an extended solar minimum during which it was not cold? I know we don’t know why these two things seem to be associated (lower sun activity = cold) but as far as I have read, they are associated. I am a bit of a student of history so I am familiar with the Dalton Minimum and the Maunder Minimum. I have also looked at the specific patterns (Alaska warm, Greenland warm, East Coast of North America, Northern Europe and Russia very very cold and the rest of the world just cold). Comments?
Jeremy says at June 15, 2011 at 2:40 pm ” Now when data comes out that seems to support an alternative view, all those models and predictions and warnings and fire-and-brimstone of the warmistas gets dropped like refried beans out of a babys butt in favor of keeping all the “frothing-at-the-mouth” skeptics ‘grounded in reality’ as some kind of altruistic public service.”
Well that was interesting;
1) What data that supports alternative view – nothing has happen yet.
2) Not sure exactly what refried beans have to do with the science
Brent Hargreaves says:
June 15, 2011 at 3:03 pm
R. Gates (June 14, 2011 at 9:41 pm) wrote:
“But what if, even with a grand solar minimum we don’t cool that much or at all? What if we continue to warm? What will skeptics think then?”
That’s easy! If the Earth gets warmer and warmer we’ll accept that there’s global warming; we’ll concede defeat. This is what rational people do when faced with facts which contradict their expectations.
So what will you do if the 1998 peak isn’t surpassed by, say, 2011?
The intellectual divide between us is clear, R…. one group holds a view in the light of the evidence before them and the other holds views regardless of the evidence.
———
If 2011 is not warmer than 1998 (and I currently don’t expect it will be given the La Nina that just ended), I will look at the data and understand why a La Nina year, when the oceans are absorbing net heat might not be warmer than an El Nino year when the oceans are giving off heat to the atmosphere. This process says nothing about the longer term effects of CO2. The ENSO cycle is shorter term while the effects of the slow build-up of anthropogenic CO2 have been building for centuries. Likewise, if the sun goes into a sleep mode for a few decades it will give ample chance to see how strongly that affects the climate versus the 40% more CO2 we have now in the atmosphere over the last time the sun took a nap…
tom says at June 15, 2011 at 4:09 pm “Does the Antarctic count? That’s the ice that counts in any event and she ain’t and never will melt because of mans input of co2. Perposterous.”
1) “Never” is kinda a scientific no-no tom. After all, saying never implies certainty over an event. Maybe you’d rather apply a mathematically valid statistical significance to your statement instead of saying never?
2) ‘A new study finds that global warming is responsible for snowfall that’s expanded the range of Southern Ocean sea ice, even as western Antarctic glaciers have disintegrated.
That expansion contrasts with the common public perception of a uniformly melting Antarctic. But this fortunate balance between loss and gain likely won’t last. By the end of this century, continued warming will turn extra snow into rain.
“With increased loading of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere through the 21st century, the models show an accelerated warming in the Southern Ocean,” writes Georgia Institute of Technology climatologists Jiping Liu and Judity Curry in an Aug. 16 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study. The ultimate result “is a projected decline of the Antarctic sea ice.””
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/08/antarctic-ice-future/
Moderate Republican, you are sounding a bit like Spock; admittedly you haven’t used the term ‘illogical’ but you’ve thrown around a lot of ‘that is a factually incorrect statement’ and a lot of definitions.
You completely blew your credibility by linking to ‘skepticalscience’.
Are you actually IBM’s Watson fresh from Jeopardy fame?
Topic reset:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalton_Minimum
The Dalton Minimum was a period of low solar activity, from about 1790-1830 that coincided with a period of lower-than-average global temperatures.
The Year Without a Summer, in 1816, occurred during the Dalton Minimum.
1. The Sun was quiet for 40 years.
2. The Earth got very cold.
3. We don’t understand the exact relationship.
4. No correlation with CO2.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunder_minimum
The Maunder Minimum was a period of low solar activity, from about 1645-1715 that coincided with a period of lower-than-average global temperatures.
The Maunder Minimum coincided with the middle — and coldest part — of the Little Ice Age.
1. The Sun was quiet for 70 years.
2. The Earth got very cold.
3. We don’t understand the exact relationship.
4. No correlation with CO2.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sporer_Minimum
The Sporer Minimum was a period of low solar activity, from about 1460-1550 that coincided with a period of lower-than-average global temperatures.
1. The Sun was quiet for 90 years.
2. The Earth got very cold.
3. We don’t understand the exact relationship.
4. No correlation with CO2.
@ Joe Horner 4:12
“The only trouble is, being AR, I can’t help wondering what he’s up to…… :P”
Pretty simple, the NYT is trying to keep from going broke so they are softening their appoach.
Krazy P says at June 15, 2011 at 4:17 pm ” Has there been a period of an extended solar minimum during which it was not cold?”
Well the recent solar minimum hasn’t stop the warming, so maybe – just maybe – the climate is driven by more than the sun. I know – crazy idea. I mean, it isn’t like there is a dynamic atmosphere to consider or anything.
NASA solar physicist David Hathaway said of the sun’s Great Conveyor Belt has been running at record-high speeds for the past five years. “I believe this could explain the unusually deep solar minimum we’ve been experiencing,” says Hathaway.
Billy Liar says at June 15, 2011 at 4:30 pm “but you’ve thrown around a lot of ‘that is a factually incorrect statement’ and a lot of definitions.”
Well, there is a lot of factually incorrect statements here. There are a lot of logical fallacies as well, especially in the form of strawman, so that gets brought up a lot.
If only I had the recall capabilities that IBM’s Watson does – pretty cool stuff.
The practice of quoting out of context, sometimes referred to as “contextomy” or “quote mining”, is a logical fallacy and a type of false attribution in which a passage is removed from its surrounding matter in such a way as to distort its intended meaning
DCA says at June 15, 2011 at 3:34 pm ““Gravity isn’t a useful theory because Newton was a nice man.”
That is an out of context quote, and is a thus a logically fallacy.
Roger Knights says at June 15, 2011 at 3:52 pm ” Our side”
Truth and scientific accuracy has a side? Care to explain that?
lowercasefred says at June 15, 2011 at 3:58 pm ” I have often heard experts express opinions at complete odds to evidence and science. When caught, they don’t recant their opinions, they obfuscate.”
Well thank goodness none of that happens here! I mean the flood of corrections coming from the frequent posters here has been just outstanding.
Moderate Republican: 4:33
Quote from MR:
“NASA solar physicist David Hathaway said of the sun’s Great Conveyor Belt has been running at record-high speeds for the past five years. “I believe this could explain the unusually deep solar minimum we’ve been experiencing,” says Hathaway.”
Uhh:
“The Sun’s Great Conveyor Belt has slowed to a record-low crawl, according to research by NASA solar physicist David Hathaway. “It’s off the bottom of the charts,” he says. “This has important repercussions for future solar activity.”‘
http://www.space.com/2397-sun-currents-fire-slow-record.html
Notice how I provided a link?
You are starting to look more and more like a troll.
@Moderate Republican,
Are you “related” to Ludwig Van Quixote?
@Moderators:
Please see my 4:51. If “Moderate Republican” cannot supply a link for his quote I believe you should consider that he may a troll, interested only in creating confusion.
@ MR; Please understand that I consider honest debate to be essential, if I am mistaken, I will be happy to be corrected.
“Well the recent solar minimum hasn’t stop the warming”
Yes it has.
It has not warmed significantly since the end of the last maxima.
Last year was ‘the warmest’ in the last 10 years (El Nino)
This year is tracking to be the coldest in 20 or 30 year (La Lina)
Those effects, like Mt. Pinatubo are Very Short Term Fluctuations.
A grand solar minimum appears to have a Generational effect (20+ years).
It takes time, the Earth has a lot of mass.
We shall see what actually happens, no models are needed, it may happen for real.
Note: El Nino and La Nina are Caused by Something.
Andrew30 says:
June 15, 2011 at 4:30 pm
The Dalton Minimum was a period of low solar activity, from about 1790-1830 that coincided with a period of lower-than-average global temperatures. The Year Without a Summer, in 1816, occurred during the Dalton Minimum.
Caused by several volcanic eruptions, in 1809, 1812 (Mayon), and 1815 (Tambora)
1. The Sun was quiet for 40 years.
2. The Earth got very cold.
3. We don’t understand the exact relationship.
4. No correlation with CO2.
The Oort Minimum was a period of low solar activity, from about 1010-1060
1. The Sun was quiet for 50 years.
2. The Earth was very warm [vikings thrived in Greenland].
3. We don’t understand the exact relationship.
4. No correlation with CO2
lowercasefred says@ June 15, 2011 at 5:12 pm “If “Moderate Republican” cannot supply a link for his quote I believe you should consider that he may a troll, interested only in creating confusion.”
Sorry – I did in fact miss posting the link, was on my Blackberry which is a pain to use for this site, but it should have been posted.
However, does that mean that the standard for being a troll is anyone who makes an assertion that cannot provide a citation? Yes/no?
“Both of these UHIs however do not contribute to warming trends over the 20th century because the influences of the cities on surface temperatures have not changed over this time. ”
Wow.
The effect is not static over time and not confined to areas classified as urban.
The heat island effect does change over time as intensity of use increases; irrigation, flora cover etc., water use change with economic activity level and size.
GHG are well mixed, but at sources– at the surface– concentrations are higher, though the depth is slight. (it will affect ground level readings, though affect global and near surface temps negligibly.)
But I digress.
LW radiation doesn’t not vary quite as much albedo. To get back to the subject at hand, GHG warming affects only LW radiation. Supposed effects of solar minima are due to decreased absorption of SW radiation (ie, increased albedo). Now, if there is a drop in heating, GHG warming will prevent a drop in temperature commensurate ; that’s it’s nature.
Thank god for global warming!
Moderate Republican says:
June 15, 2011 at 4:39 pm
The practice of quoting out of context, sometimes referred to as “contextomy” or “quote mining”, is a logical fallacy and a type of false attribution in which a passage is removed from its surrounding matter in such a way as to distort its intended meaning
DCA says at June 15, 2011 at 3:34 pm ““Gravity isn’t a useful theory because Newton was a nice man.”
That is an out of context quote, and is a thus a logically fallacy.
MR,
Since you claim the quote is “out of context” , you’re claiming you know the context and you really are Gavin. Would you care to share the context with us?
Perhaps Connolley missed that one.
(It amazes me how I can put letters and words in the wrong place and not notice!)
The Medieval Maximum was a period of very high solar activity, from about 1100-1250
1. The Sun was vary active for 50 years.
2. The Earth was very warm [vikings thrived in Greenland].
3. We don’t understand the exact relationship.
4. No correlation with CO2
Moderate Republican says:
June 15, 2011 at 4:05 pm
Ric Werme says at June 15, 2011 at 2:40 pm “The poor quality ground record and GISS’ adjustments have more problems”
Yet multiple independent studies confirm the same warming trends, such as this one.
That’s been touched on here, see http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/18/finally-an-honest-quantification-of-urban-warming-by-a-major-climate-scientist/ which says
0.1°C per decade over 5 decades – that’s 0.5°C. “true climatic warming accounting for 0.81°C”
However, given it’s a Phil Jones paper on Chinese UHI I’m not about to spend $25 to read it. I hope it’s better than an earlier report which took people years before they came up with proof that Jones couldn’t say where the weather stations were.
The earlier paper is one of the landmark papers in Phil Jones’ history and just reading the saga of trying to get the Supplemental Information for the paper will take an hour. Of all the reasons why we won’t give Dr. Jones the time of day, this is near the head of the pack.
Steve McIntyre offered this summary:
So, the old paper reported ~0.05 deg from 1900-1990, the new one implies ~0.90 degrees – an 18-fold increase. I think you’ve been fooled by the spin in the abstract. “Relatively small” – not!
See
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/07/phil-jones-and-the-chinese-weather-station-corruption/
http://climateaudit.org/2010/11/03/phil-jones-and-the-china-network-part-1/
http://climateaudit.org/2010/11/04/phil-jones-and-the-china-network-part-2/
http://climateaudit.org/2010/11/06/phil-jones-and-the-china-network-part-3/
One thing we’ve found with looking at some of the USHCN stations is that UHI can be seen in pretty small towns. Dr. Pielke Sr.’s references to land use changes having a big impact are part of it.
Perhaps I’ll hunt down a few of those links too.
@Moderate Republican:
“However, does that mean that the standard for being a troll is anyone who makes an assertion that cannot provide a citation? Yes/no?”
Certainly not, but if you notice your quote says the conveyor belt has been at high speed, while mine, and all I can find, says “low speed”, off the charts to the low side (I’ve been following this for a while).
What gives?
Leif, excellent point. Do we know the relative activity levels? Also, can we isolate any particular spectra (eg, was UV or magnetic energy different in any of these warm and cool minima)?
Folks, I am a little disappointed at the lowered tone in the house since this “Moderate Republican” showed up. Here we were studying the interesting (and I think very important) news about the Sun’s looming quiescence; and suddenly we’re stuck in a junior-high mode? With MR hogging the thread and offering “snappy” comebacks? Sigh.
Can’t we please go back to the science now?
[Reply: Good point. Moderate Republican needs to take a few days off. ~dbs, mod.]
The Oort Minimum was a period of solar activity, from about 1010-1060 that was about the same as occurred as normal activity in the late 1800s and 1900s.
It was really quite a high value to be classified as a solar minima. The Oort Minimum was shorter in duration and had the highest solar activity of any episode in the last 1000 years to be given the label ‘solar minima’. Perhaps it met the ‘minimum’ requirements for the label.
Attacking science is what science is all about.
Ric Werme says:
June 15, 2011 at 6:05 pm
Yep, here’s more links. Here’s a good one on the older Jones paper.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/01/climategate-intensifies-jones-and-wang-hid-chinese-station-data-issues/
An another, http://www.eenews.net/public/25/14363/features/documents/2010/02/16/document_gw_01.pdf from the Texas Attorney General’s office, that says on page 20:
More on UHI. BTW, if you visit http://home.comcast.net/~ewerme/wuwt/categories.html and select uhi in the left column you’ll see a lot more.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/31/uhi-is-alive-and-well/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/10/spencer-global-urban-heat-island-effect-study-an-update/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/26/uhi-study-of-the-uk-armagh-observatory/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/08/19/impacts-of-land-use-land-cover-change-on-climate/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/11/georgia-tech-50-percent-of-the-usa-warming-that-has-occurred-since-1950-is-due-to-land-use-changes/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/02/new-study-shows-how-local-land-use-changes-can-affect-surface-temperature/
And finally, perhaps we can get back on track?
Here are the previous posts about the fading sun spots:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/18/suns-magnetics-remain-in-a-funk-sunspots-may-be-on-their-way-out/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/08/15/livingston-and-penn-in-eos-are-sunspots-different-during-this-solar-minimum/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/13/sunspots-today-a-cheshire-cat-new-essay-from-livingston-and-penn/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/06/02/livingston-and-penn-paper-sunspots-may-vanish-by-2015/
That oldest paper is actually the most interesting as it goes into the methodology of the several different ways they looked at the issue to verify what they were seeing was real. A refreshing change of pace compared to anything from Phil Jones.
Anthony, Hot Air has linked to you in their thread about the decreased solar activity. It is to an older thread on a possible Dalton Minimum, though.
http://hotair.com/archives/2011/06/15/a-new-ice-age-approaches/
Pamela Gray says:
June 15, 2011 at 6:51 am
I hate this phrase, “It’s the -blank- stupid” because it speaks of an underlying lack of basic scientific knowledge in physics and chemistry, let alone Earth science, combined with a lack of understanding regarding proper statistical analysis of noisy, hard to measure, baseline chaotic data in which is buried both CO2 changes and Sun changes on Earth’s temperatures.
==============
I hate that phrase, too. But that’s kind of a red herring….don’t ya think?
Your seemingly equal treatment (in the same sentence) of both CO2 and the and the thing that occupies 99% of the Solar System’s mass…is just plain awkward, Pamela.
Just awkward….illogically awkward.
There is no (I repeat, NO) comparison to be made in the same sentence…between CO2 and the Sun.
I understand your frustration at the quickness to jump to conclusions on both sides.
On the other hand…the two “sides” in this case…do not exist.
There is no comparison: i.e between the CAGW conjecture…and the unproven (but highly more plausible) effects of solar variability (however minute)
No comparison between the two. None.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Another “bombshell” from NASA, via the The Daily Telegraph (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/7819201/Nasa-warns-solar-flares-from-huge-space-storm-will-cause-devastation.html):
Nasa warns solar flares from ‘huge space storm’ will cause devastation
* * *
“National power grids could overheat and air travel severely disrupted while electronic items, navigation devices and major satellites could stop working after the Sun reaches its maximum power in a few years.
Senior space agency scientists believe the Earth will be hit with unprecedented levels of magnetic energy from solar flares after the Sun wakes “from a deep slumber” sometime around 2013, The Daily Telegraph can disclose….”
Now what do I believe? (In one case they must be making it up… Perhaps the three new scientific papers? Can’t be the “exclusive” in the The Daily Telegraph that has no citations other than a reference to a Dr Richard Fisher, the director of Nasa’s Heliophysics division.)
This is to Mr Troll and you know who you are, why the sudden offensive?
Please explain why suddenly there is a need to attack everyone and anyone on this thread when there is a lead story about the possibility that the SUN might have an influence on the climate?
Mr Troll are you a true believer that cannot accept that anything other than man-made CO2 will influence climate?
Mr Troll do you find the “anecdotal” (so far) evidence about the SUN’s influence a frightening threat to your core beliefs?
Mr Troll. The difference between you and the majority of people here is that the regulars here are quite OPEN to the possibility that man-made CO2 is NOT the one true GOD of the sky. Most of us here believe in a panoply of GODS influencing the skies and that monotheism is just pure dogmatic bloody minded ignorance.
I think I’m going to stay out of this thread…it smells like troll…
Andrew30 says:
June 15, 2011 at 6:44 pm
The Oort Minimum was a period of solar activity, from about 1010-1060 that was about the same as occurred as normal activity in the late 1800s and 1900s.
It was at least as deep as the Dalton, but a much deeper Grand Minimum occurred 644-688, yet global temps were very warm. See slide 20 of http://www.leif.org/research/Does%20The%20Sun%20Vary%20Enough.pdf
Hold on a second guys – sure it is annoying but what exactly has Moderate Republican done wrong?
I’ve been a long time reader here but you guys are being hypocritical if you are saying that you welcome skeptical review of he information but aren’t willing to have someone challenge you.
SkepticalGuy says:
June 15, 2011 at 7:55 pm
Hold on a second guys – sure it is annoying but what exactly has Moderate Republican done wrong?
=======================
Its called a “hijack”. That’s what.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
SkepticalGuy,
“Moderate Republican” has posted well over 10% of the comments in this thread alone. His comments label everyone “wrong” that he disagrees with, which appears to be just about everyone with a skeptical view of CAGW. If you’ve noticed, there have been quite a few objections to his incessant angry rants on several different threads.
He is not engaging in the discussion of science so much as he is out to label others “deniers,” and when he disagrees with them, to flatly state that they are “wrong”. When corrected with facts, he ratchets up his name-calling and abuse.
Scientific disagreements are healthy. But constant angry rants, and refusing to try to understand the viewpoints of others are not. “Moderate Republican” comes across like Joe Romm, and who needs that?
I think you guys are being way too defensive here – let’s face it, he’s right on a number of the things he’s pointed out. Getting all worked up about just make you look defensive.
[Note: “SkepticalGuy” has the same IP address as “Moderate Republican”. ~dbs, mod.]
So MR has a friend over in the basement?
SkepticalGuy says:
June 15, 2011 at 7:55 pm
Hold on a second guys – sure it is annoying but what exactly has Moderate Republican done wrong?
——————————————————-
Well first off, Moderate Republican is neither, sort of like An Inconvenient Truth, which is also neither.
It’s not censorship, it’s just avoidance of thread pollution. If he had anything of value to say, I’m sure this site would welcome his comments. Many, many pro-AGW commenters can, and have overwhelmed threads here (Joel, Phil., RGates), but they can’t do it with total garbage (although some will disagree on the definition of total garbage).
I don’t think there’s any disagreement on the level of Progressive Fake Socialist’s garbage.
[Note: “SkepticalGuy” has the same IP address as “Moderate Republican”. ~dbs, mod.]
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Busted, you fraud !!!!
Tell us again how CO2 causes global warming. You’re a beacon of credibility now.
lowercasefred says:
June 15, 2011 at 4:51 pm
[Date: 10 May 2006]
“The Sun’s Great Conveyor Belt has slowed to a record-low crawl, according to research by NASA solar physicist David Hathaway. “It’s off the bottom of the charts,” he says. “This has important repercussions for future solar activity.”‘
http://www.space.com/2397-sun-currents-fire-slow-record.html
If you’d searched a little bit harder you’d have found this more recent article…
March 12, 2010: What in the world is the sun up to now?
In today’s issue of Science, NASA solar physicist David Hathaway reports that the top of the sun’s Great Conveyor Belt has been running at record-high speeds for the past five years.
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/12mar_conveyorbelt/
Leif;
Slide 20 shows a TSI (proxy reconstruction), not counted sunspots.
Who was counting the sunspots in 650?
Who was measuring the temperature in 650?
I will gladly accept that a building foundation half buried under a glacier as a proxy indication that it was much warmer when the building was built, or multiple thick salt pans under the Mediterranean as a proxy indication that the Mediterranean has completely evaporated many times in the past; but have trouble accepting a clever formula that correlates a couple of values as a substitute for physical evidence or real measurements.
Theoretical investigation is important, and it is the theorist that often gets the Nobel Prize, but I place a much greater reliance on experimental investigation and practical demonstration; because it is real.
Please do not take my opinion as a slight to you in any way. What you do is important; it gives the experimentalists and technicians ideas, testable ideas.
PS. Slide 8 is a bit messed up.
[snip]
I see that Leif Svalgaard is still having trouble walking and chewing gum at the same time. Let me help him out.
[quote]The Oort Minimum was a period of solar activity, from about 1010-1060 that was about the same as occurred as normal activity in the late 1800s and 1900s. It was at least as deep as the Dalton, but a much deeper Grand Minimum occurred 644-688, yet global temps were very warm.[end quote]
Clearly, It hasn’t occurred to Leif that the warming-cooling and then warming again that has taken place over the last 1000 years (i..e medieval warm period – Little Ice Age- Modern warming period) may be a millennial cycle that is not necessarily directly connected to the ~ 210 year deVriers solar cycle.
Hence, there is no reason why a short term cooling in the World’s temperature can occur (like those of the Oort, Wolf, Sporer, Maunder, Dalton and Victorian minima) irrespective of whether or not it is a generally warm (or cool) period.
Of course, it will be beyond Leif’s comprehension to envisage a mild cooling period centered on 1020 to 1050 AD
and so he will dismiss this possibility out-of-hand.
savethesharks said:
“There is no comparison: i.e between the CAGW conjecture…and the unproven (but highly more plausible) effects of solar variability (however minute)”
_____
Completely wrong. Both CO2 and Solar influences have been suggested as drivers behind climate change, in addition to many others. To discuss them and compare them is exactly what thinking people ought to do without being afraid of honest open dialog of the issues. I for one think the next few years and into the next decade will be the most exciting time to be studying earth’s climate and the comparison of the relative effects and strength’s of the 40% increase in CO2 over the last few hundred years versus the effects of a potential period of a quiet sun will certainly be the topic of many conversations. To suggest these kinds of comparisons is invalid is absurd.
The Oort minimum was weaker than the Dalton minimum according to the isotope record. It also occurred between two periods of higher solar activity. According to Wiki The Oort minimum causes a slight cooling during Medieval Warm Period. Prior to the Oort minimum there is a medium strength grand minimum from around 600-650 which coincides with more cooling. Having said that the temperature reconstructions vary greatly and its a matter of choosing the one that suits your agenda.
SG = MR = waste of my time, when the topic is solar.
both have a certain air of desperation about them that comes across quickly.
Andrew30 says:
June 15, 2011 at 8:37 pm
Who was counting the sunspots in 650?
Solar activity is reflected in the amount of cosmic rays reaching the Earth and causing deposition of radioactive Beryllium [10Be] and carbon [14C]. We can measure these isotopes in ice cores and tree rings and hence reconstruct solar activity about 10,000 years back.
Who was measuring the temperature in 650?
Craig Loehle describes how the temperature record was put together http://www.ncasi.org/publications/Detail.aspx?id=3025
One can always doubt the data [people do that when they don’t like what the data shows]. but you have to do that be examining the original papers and critique them individually.
PS. Slide 8 is a bit messed up.
It may look busy and messy, but it was constructed VERY carefully and may require a verbal explanation [which I gave at the talk].
Ninderthana says:
June 15, 2011 at 8:50 pm
the warming-cooling and then warming again that has taken place over the last 1000 years (i..e medieval warm period – Little Ice Age- Modern warming period) may be a millennial cycle that is not necessarily directly connected to the ~ 210 year deVriers solar cycle.
By the same token the Little Ice Age etc may just be manifestations of that same cycle and have nothing to do with solar activity [as you seem to agree with]. This is, in fact, precisely how I see it.
mild cooling period centered on 1020 to 1050 AD and so he will dismiss this possibility out-of-hand
The Grand Solar Minimum in 644-688 is the most flagrant disagreement. But I can live with all these disagreements because they are what one would expect if solar activity had nothing to do with it. If, on the other hand, one claims that the Sun is the major driver, then every disagreement requires an explanation. Where are your detailed explanations? Or are you a closet-believer in what I’m saying?
SkepticalGuy says:
June 15, 2011 at 8:13 pm
I think you guys are being way too defensive here – let’s face it, he’s right on a number of the things he’s pointed out. Getting all worked up about just make you look defensive.
[Note: “SkepticalGuy” has the same IP address as “Moderate Republican”. ~dbs, mod.]
——————————————————————————————————-
Of course, I kind of figured after the first post by this guy. Can you stop him ~dbs from hijacking the threads? I don’t mind if he has something constructive to say, but what he is saying has nothing to do with the topic at the top here. We are not discussing global warming in general and statistics, but what the sunspot cycle might entail or might not.
If he wants to have a slug-fest, there are plenty of other blogs for that. Can we just discuss the solar cycle and the implications thereof? Is that too much to ask?
[Reply: Moderate Republican and his sock puppet SkepticalGuy are in limbo for the time being, so you can enjoy this sunspot cycle thread. ~dbs, mod.]
Geoff Sharp says:
June 15, 2011 at 9:15 pm
The Oort minimum was weaker than the Dalton minimum according to the isotope record.
Your isotope records are obsolete and out-of-data. The latest 10Be and 14C records agree well over the past 2000 years as shown on slide 20 of http://www.leif.org/research/Does%20The%20Sun%20Vary%20Enough.pdf
Study that slide carefully.
Leif;
RE: “One can always doubt the data [people do that when they don’t like what the data shows].”
The heading on your slide number 14 is:
“Historical Sunspot Number Records Probably Not Correct”
You make an assumption that the people that actually looked, counted and recorded the values, got it Wrong. And then you build on that.
How about trying this instead:
Historical Sunspot Number Records Are Probably Correct, What Is It That We Don’t Understand?
Of course, one can always doubt the data [people do that when they don’t like what the data shows].
If the historical temperature record does not fit the model, change the record.
If the historical sunspot record does not fit the model, change the record.
Leif Svalgaard says:
June 15, 2011 at 9:52 pm
Study that slide carefully.
Once again it depends on what proxy record you select. Your arguments are far from convincing and expose your agenda.
Mods;
Andrew30 says: June 15, 2011 at 10:47 pm
Is a duplicte of
Andrew30 says: June 15, 2011 at 10:12 pm
Sorry I must have messed up with the comment interface (again).
Please delete it (Andrew30 says: June 15, 2011 at 10:47 pm), It make it look like I’m harping.
Thank You
Geoff Sharp says:
June 15, 2011 at 10:14 pm
Once again it depends on what proxy record you select.
I use the latest 10Be and 14C records [from independent researchers] and they happen to agree very nicely as shown on slide 20. So, perhaps, you can drop that excuse.
Andrew30 says:
June 15, 2011 at 10:47 pm
You make an assumption that the people that actually looked, counted and recorded the values, got it Wrong. And then you build on that.
We have very good reasons for this. Yes, they did get it wrong, because the record is pieced together from observations by many people using different telescopes and different counting methods.
This conclusion is the result of many years of analysis, starting with: http://www.leif.org/research/CAWSES%20-%20Sunspots.pdf then http://www.leif.org/research/AGU%20Spring%202007%20SH54B-02.pdf then http://www.leif.org/research/SSN%20Validation-Reconstruction%20%28Cliver%29.pdf then
http://www.leif.org/research/SH13A-1109-F2007.pdf then
http://www.leif.org/research/AGU%20Spring%202008%20SP23A-07.pdf then
http://www.leif.org/research/Napa%20Solar%20Cycle%2024.pdf then
http://www.leif.org/research/SPD-2009.pdf then
http://www.leif.org/research/Rudolf%20Wolf%20Was%20Right.pdf then
http://www.leif.org/research/SIDC-Seminar-14Sept.pdf then
http://www.leif.org/research/SIDC-Seminar-12Jan.pdf and finally our talk at IUGG [which you’ll have in a few weeks]. Here is the first and last pages:
http://www.leif.org/research/IUGG-preview.pdf
As you can see there has been some evolution, but now we are close to the finish line and ready for formal publication. Note that Ken Schatten [creator of Group Sunspot Number is a coauthor and agrees with our adjustments]. We are having a workshop at Sunspot, NM, in September to get all this straightened out. All the producers of sunspots numbers [e.g. SIDC, NOAA] agree that correction is needed and are sending representatives. So expect something to come from the workshop.
But the data on slide 20 does not depend on our analysis of the sunspots. It is based of Loehle’s temperature reconstruction and measurements of 10Be and 14C in ice cores and tree rings. Nothing to do with sunspot counting being right or wrong. You should be able to understand that.
Apple, meet orange.
I wrote:
To which MR replied:
The right side, of course (our side).
To which MR replied:
It looks as though it’s MR who’s removed the context from the quote.
Non sequitur. An out of context quote is a debater’s trick. There’s no logical flaw involved.
PS: Gavin was defending Jones & Mann by implying that even if they weren’t nice, that didn’t mean they were wrong, any more than newton’s non-niceness meant he was wrong. There’s nothing absurd about that. Therefore DCA’s quoting it, along with the lead-in sentence from wiki that gave context, wasn’t an out-of-context misrepresentation.
Leif Svalgaard says:
June 16, 2011 at 12:45 am
But the data on slide 20 does not depend on our analysis of the sunspots. It is based of Loehle’s temperature reconstruction and measurements of 10Be and 14C in ice cores and tree rings. Nothing to do with sunspot counting being right or wrong.
The big unresolved issue for me is the calibration of TSI and the interpretation of 10Be data and 14C data. But rather than argue with you about it, I’ll wait for ongoing TSI measurements during the impending middling-to-grand solar mimimum. I very much hope all concerned can trust the keepers of the record not to cook the books on TSI, because there are some eminent scientists who don’t have much faith in the person producing the figures, and believe he is agenda driven.
Regarding TSI calibration, we have only a short record from the space age, and even within that there are gaps, problems with hardware degradation, calibration and on orbit performance. The current platform (TIM/SORCE) shows a 4W/m^2 lower reading than expected when deployed, and this apparent aberration goes unexplained as far as I know. http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/total_solar_irradiance_plots/images/tim_level3_tsi_24hour_3month_2400x1800.png
It only takes a tiny error to be magnified many times in the extrapolation of short trends to long time series to change the picture radically. This being so, The error bars on the graph in the middle panel of slide 20 are hopelessly optimistic IMO.
[Reply: Moderate Republican and his sock puppet SkepticalGuy are in limbo for the time being, so you can enjoy this sunspot cycle thread. ~dbs, mod.]
Thanks for that, it’s good to see this thread getting back on track.
From the Loehle paper cited and used above (page 18 of 20 in the pdf):
“The main significance of the results here is not the details of every wiggle, which
are probably not reliable, but the overall picture of the 2000 year pattern showing the
MWP and LIA timing and curve shapes. Future studies need to acquire more and
better data to refine this picture.”
http://www.ncasi.org/publications/Detail.aspx?id=3025
Re: Martin June 15, 8:35
I stand corrected (and embarrased).
Leif Svalgaard says:
June 16, 2011 at 12:45 am
I use the latest 10Be and 14C records [from independent researchers] and they happen to agree very nicely as shown on slide 20. So, perhaps, you can drop that excuse.
You obviously did not look at my link showing the comparison between Solanki C14 and Steinhilber 10Be. If so you would have seen the large variations for the Oort and Dalton periods. I also notice you promote Loehle temp reconstruction as it suits your needs. Cherry picking proxy records is a poor mans science exercise that you seem to revel in. As I said before…pick a proxy record that suits your agenda.
“The ice that counts” in the antarctic is the surface ice, not the sea ice, because that’s the ice that would raise the sea level if it melted. apart from the Antarctic peninsula, Antarctica is always way below freezing, so there’s no melting going on there, nor will there be if the temperature goes up a few degrees. This is why tom said “never.”
lowercasefred says:
June 16, 2011 at 5:45 am
Re: Martin June 15, 8:35
I stand corrected (and embarrased).
No need to be embarrassed, the conveyor belt is measured in two distinct areas. When the top layer is fast the bottom layer is slow which can lead to a whole world of confusion.
If Moderate Republican truly is Gavin and not some 17 year old with a physics book, shame on you Sir.
Being an effective Troll is nothing to be proud of. Creating fake email accounts and posting with fake names (even worse ironic ones that lie about your character) is juvenile and completely unprofessional. Take a moment and read what you have posted here and know much of it is self serving masturbation.
What remains to be discovered is the influence normally perturbing the Solar dynamo as the Sun regularly transits the system’s gravitational center of moment, which event seldom occurs during Grand Minima, the sole characteristic common to minima identified to date.
May I again suggest the Lorentz force. As this force is implicated as the source of jets arising in the billion solar mass centers of Seyfert galaxies perpendicular to the galactic plane why not look for it as the culprit producing magnetic knots in our local gravitational well of one solar mass?
tallbloke says:
June 16, 2011 at 5:20 am
I very much hope all concerned can trust the keepers of the record not to cook the books on TSI, because there are some eminent scientists who don’t have much faith in the person producing the figures, and believe he is agenda driven.
This is just crap. Nobody is cooking the books. And who is ‘that person’? TSI is measured by several independent groups and is watched closely [e.g. by me]: http://www.leif.org/research/PMOD%20TSI-SOHO%20keyhole%20effect-degradation%20over%20time.pdf
The current platform (TIM/SORCE) shows a 4W/m^2 lower reading than expected when deployed, and this apparent aberration goes unexplained as far as I know.
All spacecrafts have undetermined offsets because the absolute level is hard to measure. TIM/SORCE just does it better than the rest. And I don’t know where you got this ‘lower than expected’ from. In any case, the cause has been identified and explained: “Scattered light is a primary cause of the higher irradiance values measured by the earlier generation of solar radiometers in which the precision aperture defining the measured solar beam is located behind a larger, view‐limiting aperture. In the TIM, the opposite order of these apertures precludes this spurious signal by limiting the light entering the instrument.”
http://www.leif.org/EOS/2010GL045777.pdf
Geoff Sharp says:
June 16, 2011 at 5:58 am
You obviously did not look at my link showing the comparison between Solanki C14 and Steinhilber 10Be.
Because Solanki’s 14C is not primary data. Check the comparison in the lower panel of slide 20 of http://www.leif.org/research/Does%20The%20Sun%20Vary%20Enough.pdf
I also notice you promote Loehle temp reconstruction as it suits your needs
Which other temperature reconstruction should one pick? Any suggestions? Mann’s hockey stick?
As long as people continue to address “Moderate Republican” on this thread, he should be allowed to rebut. Rebuttal must always be permitted, otherwise a RC site we become.
Moderate Republican – shame on you for playing with IP addresses and identities. These are typical troll tactics, and are a good reason to ban a commenter. I respect your intellect, and would like to read more, without the troll throwing feces. Honest discussion is what everyone wants. GK
Many posters here seem to think that IF this projection from computer modeling is correct and the solar output does fall to ‘Maunder minimum’ levels there will be actual cooling rather than just a reduction in the rate of warming.
This belief seems unwarranted by the magnitude of the energy change from a solar slowdown compared to the extra energy from rising CO2.
Perhaps one of the posters that believes there will be cooling would dare to predict when statisticallu significant cooling will be detectable. The Earth has warmed by a statistically significant amount since 1995. Will it take another 15 years to cool back down to mid-90s figures, or given the much smaller size of the energy change will it take much longer?
R. Gates said
Completely wrong. Both CO2 and Solar influences have been suggested as drivers behind climate change, in addition to many others.
The problem I have is that any time I’ve brought up solar influences (while discussing GW), I’m told that it’s miniscule compared to the CO2 forcings. My contention is that the NATURAL cycles are more powerful than anything WE can do. I also maintain that CO2 is not a primary causation of warming – but that’s a different discussion.
It will be interesting to see what happens over the next couple decades, should the expected solar minimum come to pass.
G. Karst says @ June 16, 2011 at 8:31 am
That was actually my brother responding on my laptop – hence the same IP – which he did mention on his second response but that comment was blocked. BUT – that said – the point you make is a fair one and is acknowledged.
If I had not been blocked I wouldn’t have explained it to my brother who then in turn wouldn’t of responded – but still – he should have identified himself.
That all said I would like to participate here, and am certainly open to ground rules if they are established. Simply questioning assertions on science that appear to be invalid would seem to make me a troll.
Dear Moderate Republican,
“That all said I would like to participate here, and am certainly open to ground rules if they are established.”
I think perhaps you have not seen the policy page of WUWT (even though notes have been left to tell you to look at it you haven’t seen those- one of the downsides of Crackberry blogging).
So go here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/about-wuwt/policy/
We have another commenter, similar to yourself, who started out this way and almost got banned, but now is a regular. We welcome debate, but know this; broad statements, blanket missives etc about the people who frequent here won’t get you anywhere and will be strongly challeneged. You’ve used the d-word four times now, and have been snipped. That puts you on probationary status. BTW like you, I once believed that AGW was the only possible cause, even going so far as to being an activist in the early 1990’s inspired by James Hansen. Now I see the bigger picture. It is one of many. Perhaps if you open your mind to the possibility that our government funded science is not infallible, you might see the broader picture that I do. – Anthony
As predicted nearly all MSM has covered this story (even the economist). Lets see when BBC takes it on. Expect a dramatic decline in interest on the subject of AGW this year and next to the point of no return. BTW SST are still declining see AMSU despite La Nina ending
“this projection from computer modeling is correct and the solar output does fall to ‘Maunder minimum’ levels”
By the ‘computer modeling’ is meant characterizing the significant physical processes, setting initial conditions and running to conclusion without regard for experiential results updating iterative calculations.
” the magnitude of the energy change from a solar slowdown compared to the extra energy from rising CO2″
From whence do you suppose the “energy from rising CO2” to come, exactly?
Please do not waste our time.
izen June 16, 2011 at 8:58 am:
Yes! That is the important question! It applies to both warming trends and cooling trends. So far, none of climatology’s projections on either condition have been accurate (skillful) or of much practical use.
Probably because they are made by a bunch of naked men, under a full moon, around a burning fire, casting bones, muttering “booga booga”. It is the curse of post-normal science. GK
If Leif Svaalgard (used to be a luke proponent of AGW and doubtful of ANY solar influence on climate, constantly being hammered here by other “solar experts”), is prepared to go out on a limb on this one, you can be assured that he is probably correct and the data is now acceptable enough for him and co-authors to come to the conclusion that the sun is fading for some time.
WE should be thank full L Svaalgard is taking time to answer all these barrage of questions in any case
Fair enough Anthony – and per your request I have not used the d-word since you asked me not to.
I will read and respect the forum policy. I go where the proven science takes us – and as someone with little kids at home no one wants this to be a non-issue more than I do.
May I simply ask that other abide by the same rules and do not attack me merely for engaging on the science? That would seem to be a fair request, no?
For the record – I am not Galvin nor do I receive any direct compensation from the climate science field of scientific inquiry. My broader profession – which is out of scope for this conversation as should be all of yours – may benefit from scientific research on either side but this is not a part of my compensation.
@- gary gulrud says:
June 16, 2011 at 9:32 am
“From whence do you suppose the “energy from rising CO2″ to come, exactly?
Please do not waste our time.”
I expect it to come from the same place as the extra energy that has caused the significant warming since 1995. Long wave photons from the surface converted to thermal energy of the atmosphere.
Being confronted with ideas that conflict with your own may be uncomfortable, but it is rarely a waste of time. (Its one reason I am here-grin-)
I would like to say first thanks to Anthony and the rest of the team for cleaning up this thread. I was attempting to filter through what was being said and had a huge difficulty due to the hijacking that occurred…that being said:
Some thoughts on Leif’s work:
I really think its worth reading if no one has done so yet. Its rather well-thought out, not alarming and seems to agree with emperical evidence that we all know is probably true. Lets not dismiss it out of hand simply because we want the solar effects to be what drives the climate. I want to make this clear: We do not really realize what drives the climate. CO2 influences are minor to *(not seen since I really believe we still can not differentiate those effects from noise at this point in time.)
Let me be clear, without a doubt, I think everything contributes to our climate slightly, the question we must answer at some point is “what is the actual impact of every climate trigger.” I know most of us here are used to people with agendas and we tend to be rather critical of science in general. This is healthy at a certain stage, but we can go over-board. I don’t think anyone has yet, and I think its good to keep Leif on his toes, but remember to not cross the line.
Solar impacts will be seen regardless in the next 20 years. Whether its a small factor or major, we will know for sure with the TSI measurements. I think this is a good thing that can only advance what we know about the solar forcings on climate.
I stated earlier for instance that the worst case scenario is a 2C drop from where we are today. This is not supported by Leif’s work except in the most indirect sense.
I am going to post this link again:
http://www.leif.org/research/Does%20The%20Sun%20Vary%20Enough.pdf
I read through this and Leif is not making any claims that are not supported by the data. Its all speculation (I think slide 20 is indeed very important). We might be able to cool 2C Given the following:
1) Mara minimum versus Dalton or Oort. – I think the jury is still out what the minimum is going to be. Either caliber is possible at this point, so lets not jump to conclusions on this front quite yet.
2) Other climate factors that we do not understand. This is key, if other things soak up cooling (think of negative feedbacks) we might not cool at all. The data shown in slide 20 especially shows us that we might cool due to the sun, but the amount is not clear. Is it just .7C roughly? More or less? We don’t know.
But we do know that its possible that we could cool, and I think the major thing we tend to overlook which is a similar thing to what AGW believers or alarmists tend to get wrong is cloud cover and its large impact. I think this once again is the wild-card and we should be looking in this direction more for what the actual impacts of a solar minimum will be.
The data at the very least points us towards the fact that there might be a correlation between solar impacts and temp, but it also shows us that there are probably other factors that over-ride this. Lets not jump to conclusions without good data. And remember, clouds are still a wild-card for all intensive purposes. The research into cosmic rays and their relationship has helped us out a ton, but we are still not over the bridge as far as this goes yet.
In any regard, a quiet sun will be studied in detail for the next few decades, and we should put this issue to rest I hope. Only with good sceptical science (not the terrible site mind you) and a mind to the actual data will we solve the huge complex system of climate.
Lastly, a question for Leif…
What do you think this solar minimum entails for us? (I am asking in terms of temp. change…and I realize its nothing more then an educated guess, but I am curious what your thoughts are.)
I tend to think that this plus other factors will cause us to cool down by 0.6C roughly assuming MARA level min. or prob closer to 0.3C for dalton level over 50 years and (possibly) double that for 100+ years. Granted, this also is depended on other scenarios..so feel free to put caveats and everything else. Its a very difficult question I understand..
Laura says:
June 16, 2011 at 9:36 am
If Leif Svalgaard (used to be a luke proponent of AGW and doubtful of ANY solar influence on climate
Not quite my position. I believe that both AGW and the Sun have influence, but that they are small and not major drivers of the climate. I once put it this way: Effect = X * Sun + Y * Man + Z * (other natural causes). The issue is what X, Y, and Z are. AGW assumes Y is the biggest factor. Solar enthusiasts assumes X is the biggest factor. I believe Z is the biggest factor. You can categorize the beliefs this way (X,Y,Z), so AGW would be (x,Y,z), where capital letters [X] mean large influence and small letters [x] mean small influence. Solar would be (X,y,z) and I would be (x,y,Z). People that push (X,0,0) or (0,Y,0) or (0,0,Z) or (0,0,0) are not very reasonable.
BenfromMO says:
June 16, 2011 at 10:28 am
What do you think this solar minimum entails for us? (I am asking in terms of temp. change…and I realize its nothing more then an educated guess, but I am curious what your thoughts are.)
I would guess down 0.1C or less, due to the Sun. I could live with twice that, but have a hard time with anything more, for the reasons laid out in my talk [BTW given to an audience which was a mixture of rabid AGW and solar enthusiasts].
“Long wave photons from the surface converted to thermal energy of the atmosphere.”
Even immoderate Indies accept that GHGs, notably H2O, can retard cooling of the Atmosphere, but as the emissivity of dirt and green plants are each 1000 times that of this low-pressure gas the Atmosphere cannot heat the earth exept when warmer than the earth’s surface and only then by conduction given the foregoing.
Note that 40% of the Sun’s incoming radiation is IR and of that but 1%, a tiny fraction of the whole reaches the surface. If you want to argue that the captured outgoing energy can overwhelm the incoming energy it behooves you to demonstrate a positive feedback loop between the Atmosphere and the surface, the heat capacity of which is 3 orders of magnitude greater.
Good luck with that.
Moderate Republican says:
June 15, 2011 at 4:39 pm
The practice of quoting out of context, sometimes referred to as “contextomy” or “quote mining”, is a logical fallacy and a type of false attribution in which a passage is removed from its surrounding matter in such a way as to distort its intended meaning
DCA says at June 15, 2011 at 3:34 pm ““Gravity isn’t a useful theory because Newton was a nice man.”
That is an out of context quote, and is a thus a logically fallacy.
MR,
Since you claim the quote is “out of context”, you’re claiming you know the context which Gavin would know. You also made several comments on the Phil Jones thread yesterday defending Jones as Gavin did in the Wiki quote I gave yesterday. The thread was posted several days ago and few on this thread probably haven’t read.
You claim not to be Gavin but you do a good impersonation.
Here is the last comment you made: (which has been deleted)
Moderate Republican says:
June 15, 2011 at 5:54 pm
James Sexton says @ June 15, 2011 at 5:15 pm “1000 peer reviewed skeptical papers are also valid”
Please list the 1000 peer reviewed papers from mainstream and reputable sources that have withstood further review by the scientific community. Christy, Spencer, Lindzen all fail that test BTW.
Are you asserting Christy, Spencer and Lindzen all of who have all published papers should be withdrawn? You claim that many assertions are being made without citations but you continue to do just that.
Zzzzzz…
You need many more letters than there are in the Latin alphabet, Leif, to begin to describe all the factors that are resulting the Earth’s climate.
Hi Leif,
I’m curious, IF there is any indiriect influence from the Sun (anything, like variable volcanic activity or clouds, correlating with solar variations), do you consider it Sun or other natural causes?
What other natural causes can you think of? Earth’s orbital variations? Unforced variations? …
I believe X is the biggest factor, at least on decadal/centurial time-scales. I would categorize my belief as: (0.7, 0.1, 0.2). I estimated y = 0.1 not because of CO2, but because of any other possible anthropogenic effect (can not be completely dismissed).
Alexander Feht says:
June 16, 2011 at 11:02 am
Zzzzzz…
As usual, you bring nothing to the table.
Edim says:
June 16, 2011 at 11:16 am
What other natural causes can you think of? Earth’s orbital variations? Unforced variations? …
Orbital variations, but they should really be excluded on the time scale we are concerned with. On longer time scales they are way the biggest factor. Ocean circulation also comes to mind. Volcanic eruptions are high on anybody’s list.
Question. If a 0.2C decrease in temperature–or even a degree–is not a big deal to the alarmists, why does a temperature increase of the same 0.2C signify the end of the world as we know it?
DCA says @ June 16, 2011 at 10:56 am “Are you asserting Christy, Spencer and Lindzen all of who have all published papers should be withdrawn? ”
Of course not – they should be as with all the sources reviewed and challenged for veracity. (btw – your post is close to a strawman argument).
I may be wrong, but I believe that Lindzen major focus has been on water vapor and there are substantial doubts as to the validity of his theory on warming being offset by cooling-type clouds. (commonly referred to as Iris hypothesis)
“This Iris hypothesis has not been dismissed by the scientific community. It was rigorously examined by many scientists: at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, at the University of Washington; they said well okay, does this hypothesis fit the available data?
The bottom line is, no. It is not a convincing explanation of the available data that we have. And that’s how science should work, not by assertion, or eminence of position, but by testing theories and facts.”
Dr. Benjamin D. Santer
Climate research
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
I believe the above to be a transcription of the following conversation;
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/features/moving-by-degrees/live-video-event.html
There are other studies of this available that reached the same conclusion I just don’t have the references handy.
James Sexton says @ June 15, 2011 at 5:15 pm;
I looked at this link which I believe you provided;
http://www.populartechnology.net/2009/10/peer-reviewed-papers-supporting.html
and it appears to fall a good number short of near 1000 papers. In fact it appears to fall short of 500 papers. Further it appears that some of the entries would be considered a stretch to have academic relevance to the topic or require peer view of actual climate scientists. A sampling of these is below that likely benefit from further investigation;
Chemical Engineering Progress. Volume 105, Number 6, pp. 20-25, June 2009
Proceedings of the ICE – Civil Engineering
Chemical Innovation
Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society
Energy Sources
Regulation
Energy,
Energy,
Energy Policy,
Economic Affairs,
Energy & Environment,
Economic Analysis and Policy
Economic Analysis and Policy
Futures
Area (Geographical society)
Hi Kay – good question!
Kay says @ June 16, 2011 at 11:32 am “Question. If a 0.2C decrease in temperature–or even a degree–is not a big deal to the alarmists, why does a temperature increase of the same 0.2C signify the end of the world as we know it”
1) climate scientist is saying that “.2C is the end of the world as we know it”. That is kinda of a strawman, but in any case is the risk on much larger rises that that over time which is the concern
2) the solar forcing cycle, as references above is relatively short term, whereas forcing from CO2 and other GHG can last a long time.
“Following cessation of emissions, removal of atmospheric carbon dioxide decreases radiative forcing, but is largely compensated by slower loss of heat to the ocean, so that atmospheric temperatures do not drop significantly for at least 1,000 years. ”
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/01/28/0812721106.abstract
Leif Svalgaard says:
June 16, 2011 at 10:41 am
” I would guess down 0.1C or less, due to the Sun. I could live with twice that, but have a hard time with anything more, for the reasons laid out in my talk [BTW given to an audience which was a mixture of rabid AGW and solar enthusiasts].”
O.1c is just the estimated change within one full cycle, during first half it increases 0.1c and the second half decreases 0.1c. (of course) When a body is equally warmed and cooled the same duration of time the overall result is no change. If the cycle is left in the cooling half with no warming half over many decades this must change unless the equilibrium has already been met in just the first half cycle. What evidence is there that this reaches equilibrium with the direct affect on climate?
In this case above I could see a possibilty of 0.1-0.2c decline (at most) per cycle until reaches equilibrium. How this indirectly affects the ocean and cloud albedo in Z, would likely amplify it. There has only been two changes in climate over the past decade that we know about, has any posiblity in counteracting warming from CO2 gases. (little decline in solar activity and cloud albedo) Already these between them have stopped the warming at least for the time being.
The important (to me) point to determine is who can show the means (mechanisms) by which the MM was the cause of the LIA? Or who can show the means by which there was significant cooling due to any significantly lower than normal solar activity in history?
The potential for the sun going into a MM solar behavior now would be very scientifically interesting and we may gain important scientific results from studying it, but I see a lack of credible basis for ‘cooling concernism’.
John
Leif Svalgaard says:
June 16, 2011 at 10:33 am
“I believe that both AGW and the Sun have influence, but that they are small and not major drivers of the climate. I once put it this way: Effect = X * Sun + Y * Man + Z * (other natural causes). The issue is what X, Y, and Z are. AGW assumes Y is the biggest factor. Solar enthusiasts assumes X is the biggest factor. I believe Z is the biggest factor. You can categorize the beliefs this way (X,Y,Z), so AGW would be (x,Y,z), where capital letters [X] mean large influence and small letters [x] mean small influence. Solar would be (X,y,z) and I would be (x,y,Z). People that push (X,0,0) or (0,Y,0) or (0,0,Z) or (0,0,0) are not very reasonable.”
____
It actually sounds like we have a great deal in common in terms of our perspective, however, I would say that the certainty of knowing at any given time of x,y, or z being a given size is low…that is, I thnk that x,y, and z and change over time, and may also in fact affect each other. Such that, at a given time volcanism (which would be in class z) might be quite low, and perhaps Milankovitch cycles might also be in a fairly neutral position, and would also be in class z, and so, the net influence of z might overall be quite low, but during this time you could have a very active or inactive sun in just the right measure, either TSI, solar wind etc. so that during that time period class x is larger. Class y, the human influence could also change over time, depending on human activity. On the extreme end, should we be so foolish as to have a all-out thermonuclear war, you certainly can see how class y could become the largest of the three. The question of course, is truly how much does the 40% increase in CO2 beyond the range we’ve seen the past 800,000 years truly affect the overall strength of variable y.
Our place in space should be seen as a chaotic thing, much as climate and weather are. Impossible to model in anything beyond immediate Newtonian terms.
So . .
X=next to nothing
Y=bugger all
Z=Everything we don’t even know we don’t know.
Big leaps towards the “Unifying thing” are a waste of time. You eat an elephant a slice at a time.
That Fount Of Knowledge from Auntie Beeb, the esteemed Richard Black, has given us his considered opinion.
“Firstly, the research itself has been presented at one rather small and rather select science meeting – not, as yet, formally published and peer reviewed.
Soundings taken by dot.earth’s Andy Revkin suggest that not everyone in the solar physics community likes what they’ve seen – so publication could yet prove a hurdle.
Secondly, the predictions made about the next solar cycle would have to turn into reality – which might not happen, however sound the science.
Thirdly, even if all that happens, the Sun’s activity would have to diminish enough to overwhelm the man-made contribution to the greenhouse effect.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13792479
“The answer, Sir, is in the plural. And they bounce.”
(W.S.Churchill)
@- gary gulrud says:
June 16, 2011 at 10:51 am
“….. as the emissivity of dirt and green plants are each 1000 times that of this low-pressure gas the Atmosphere cannot heat the earth exept when warmer than the earth’s surface and only then by conduction given the foregoing.”
It warms the surface by slowing the rate of energy loss.
Bit like wearing a coat.
“Note that 40% of the Sun’s incoming radiation is IR and of that but 1%, a tiny fraction of the whole reaches the surface.”
You are using a rather wide definition of IR to get that result. Care to put some wavelengths on those assertions? For instance, what percentage of 16um IR reaches the surface compared to 18um?
Would you agree that at 15um the energy in the incoming solar radition is around 2000 times LESS than the emitted energy from the surface at 15um.
” If you want to argue that the captured outgoing energy can overwhelm the incoming energy it behooves you to demonstrate a positive feedback loop between the Atmosphere and the surface, the heat capacity of which is 3 orders of magnitude greater.
Good luck with that.”
No problem!
For over 90% of the incoming solar energy the atmosphere is irrelevent, there is no significant interaction.
However the energy emitted from the surface with its lower intensity and different spectrum is several order of magnitude greater at wavelengths that DO interact with components of the atmosphere than sunlight. The atmosphere is a significant factor in the surface cooling mechanism. Its not a case of ‘overwhelming’ the incoming energy, it is a case of having a significant influence on the rate of cooling by interacting with the outgoing, surface emitted IR.
Thats why the Earth is around 33degC warmer than the moon and unless you ascribe to the Gerlick/Miskolczi baloney is the basis for the ‘Greenhouse effect’.
Matt G says:
June 16, 2011 at 11:58 am
O.1c is just the estimated change within one full cycle
Provided it is a normal cycle. If the cycle shrinks to nothing, the change will be down 0.1C, so that would be the largest change I can think of.
R. Gates says:
June 16, 2011 at 12:06 pm
I would say that the certainty of knowing at any given time of x,y, or z being a given size is low…that is, I think that x,y, and z and change over time, and may also in fact affect each other.
since climate is on long time scales, the random changes of X, Y, and Z might wash out. Anyway, we can’t really deal with a moving target too much: imagine we were to assign different values to X, Y, and Z every day..
From Moderate Republican on June 16, 2011 at 10:01 am:
That makes twice now you’ve said you’re not Galvin when the particular actual name is Gavin, no “L” in it. Technically you have yet to assert that you are not Gavin, as in Gavin Schmidt.
You have added the qualification that you are not directly compensated by “…the climate science field of scientific inquiry.” Politicians may not be directy compensated by lobbyists and special interests, but their significant influence on the actions of the politicians through assorted forms of indirect compensation is often noted and troubling. “Not directly compensated” opens up the possibility of a large host of conflicts, such as public support of dire (C)AGW predictions while invested in carbon sequestering schemes, or inciting global warming fears while selling solar panels as a method of reducing personal carbon emissions.
Please consider modifying your statements to avoid undue suspicion.
G. Karst,
It’s been estimated that it takes about 15 years of data to see a trend. There’s been no significant trend since about 1995. There’s been a slight negative trend from most years after 1999 (1997?). Depending on how strong a trend is, it might only take 5 or so years after the start for it to be “significant”.
When one might expect a downward trend to start beats me.
Of course nobody knows if the TSI during a grand minimum is equivalent to TSI at the bottom of normal cycle, or if it is lower.
“For over 90% of the incoming solar energy the atmosphere is irrelevent, there is no significant interaction.”
On the contrary, I would assert that even the visible region is heavily refracted. Most of the UV, 20% of the incident energy, reaches the ground unmodified.
Cutting to the chase, back-radiation plays no part because the earth cools faster than the Atmosphere can heat the surface.
gary gulrud says:
June 16, 2011 at 1:13 pm
Most of the UV, 20% of the incident energy, reaches the ground unmodified.
No, most of UV is absorbed high in the atmosphere. http://www.leif.org/research/Solar-Heating-UV.png
Mark Wilson says:
June 16, 2011 at 1:03 pm
Of course nobody knows if the TSI during a grand minimum is equivalent to TSI at the bottom of normal cycle, or if it is lower.
If we assume that the L&P effect is that magnetic field does not concentrate into dark visible spots, variations of TSI which is normally composed of a darkening due to spots plus emission from the surrounding magnetic field areas [twice as much as the darkening] might miss the darkening effect [when there are no spots], so TSI during a Grand Minimum might be higher than TSI now.
“No, most of UV is absorbed high in the atmosphere.”
I stand corrected. So the overwhelming majority of the incident photons are re-emitted by the atmosphere on their way, if at all, to the surface.
June 16, 2011 at 12:47 pm said “that makes twice now you’ve said you’re not Galvin when the particular actual name is Gavin, no “L” in it. Technically you have yet to assert that you are not Gavin, as in Gavin Schmidt.
Good point! Good think this forum isn’t about spelling. If I was Gavin you’d think I’d be able to spell my name properly (although I’m sure there are folks here that would dispute that).
I am neither Gavin Schmidt or Galvin Schmidt, although my great grandmother was a Schmall which also starts with “S”.
My best guess is that less than .05% of employers total revenue is related to supporting technologies that are used in climate modeling, so while small it seemed reasonable to be clear that there was the possibility that revenue was there.
Anyone else care to make a similar financial disclosure?
Moderate Republican says:
June 15, 2011 at 4:39 pm
The practice of quoting out of context, sometimes referred to as “contextomy” or “quote mining”, is a logical fallacy and a type of false attribution in which a passage is removed from its surrounding matter in such a way as to distort its intended meaning
DCA says at June 15, 2011 at 3:34 pm ““Gravity isn’t a useful theory because Newton was a nice man.”
That is an out of context quote, and is a thus a logically fallacy.
MR,
You’ve dodged question twice now.
Since you claim the quote is “out of context”, you’re claiming you know the context of Gavin’s wiki quote who sure as hell knows.
What is the context you claim to know or are you making another “logical fallacy”?
IMO you may not be Gavin or Galvin ect. but you sure sound like a member the hockey team.
Moderate Republican says:
June 15, 2011 at 4:39 pm
The practice of quoting out of context, sometimes referred to as “contextomy” or “quote mining”, is a logical fallacy and a type of false attribution in which a passage is removed from its surrounding matter in such a way as to distort its intended meaning
DCA says at June 15, 2011 at 3:34 pm ““Gravity isn’t a useful theory because Newton was a nice man.”
That is an out of context quote, and is a thus a logically fallacy.
MR,
You’ve dodged the question twice now.
Since you claim the quote is “out of context”, you’re claiming you know the context of Gavin’s wiki quote who sure as hell knows.
What is the context you claim to know or are you making another “logical fallacy”?
IMO you may not be Gavin or Galvin ect. but you sure sound like a member the hockey team.
MR:
You use the term “Climate Scientist”, and you say that certain skeptics are not “Climate Scientists”.
Please share what you believe is appropriate qualifying criteria to be a “Climate Scientist”.
DCA says @ June 16, 2011 at 2:09 pm “Since you claim the quote is “out of context”, you’re claiming you know the context of Gavin’s wiki quote who sure as hell knows.”
Um, I provided the paragraph that you pulled the single sentence from from which provides context.
You seem very angry about something, but I fail to understand why.
Leif, following up on Ben and Laura’s questions, do you have any guesses at time frames? For example, do you expect the .1C fall to be gradual or more like a step change? Would you guess at cooling throughout a low activity period, or a move toward a state?
Oh, also important, for how long/over what approximate time period?
A .1C fall over less than 10 years would trump GHG warming over that period.
Moderate Republican says:
June 16, 2011 at 2:35 pm
DCA says @ June 16, 2011 at 2:09 pm “Since you claim the quote is “out of context”, you’re claiming you know the context of Gavin’s wiki quote who sure as hell knows.”
Um, I provided the paragraph that you pulled the single sentence from from which provides context.
You seem very angry about something, but I fail to understand why.
LOL Angry??? If I were angry I’d use a lot of bold font like you’ve done several times until you were asked by the mods to stop.
What we have here is: Argument By Pigheadedness (Doggedness):
refusing to accept something after everyone else thinks it is well enough proved. For example, there are still Flat Earthers.
Now thats three times you’ve dodged the my question about the context of Gavin’s Wiki quote and we still don’t the accurate context. I provided the original wiki quote and you pulled half of it out in your first reply. Now if your comment was deleted for more policy violations could you provide that “context” you claim you know and claim to have provided previously. I can’t seem to find it out of the dozens of comments you’ve made.
I believe Roger is accurate about your claim.
Roger Knights says:
June 16, 2011 at 4:52 am
It looks as though it’s MR who’s removed the context from the quote.
….and is a thus a logically fallacy.
Non sequitur. An out of context quote is a debater’s trick. There’s no logical flaw involved.
Leif Svalgaard says:
June 16, 2011 at 12:41 pm
Matt G says:
June 16, 2011 at 11:58 am
O.1c is just the estimated change within one full cycle
Provided it is a normal cycle. If the cycle shrinks to nothing, the change will be down 0.1C, so that would be the largest change I can think of.
R. Gates says:
June 16, 2011 at 12:06 pm
I would say that the certainty of knowing at any given time of x,y, or z being a given size is low…that is, I think that x,y, and z and change over time, and may also in fact affect each other.
since climate is on long time scales, the random changes of X, Y, and Z might wash out. Anyway, we can’t really deal with a moving target too much: imagine we were to assign different values to X, Y, and Z every day..
———-
In your last line you’ve just nicely illustrated the essence of the 3-body problem and the roots of chaos…
aaron says:
June 16, 2011 at 2:37 pm
Leif, following up on Ben and Laura’s questions, do you have any guesses at time frames? For example, do you expect the .1C fall to be gradual or more like a step change? Would you guess at cooling throughout a low activity period, or a move toward a state? Oh, also important, for how long/over what approximate time period?
This is all guesswork and speculation. My guess was under the ‘worst’ case scenario that we are indeed entering a Maunder-type minimum and pertains to the maximum drop over that period [what people 200 years from now would say that temps dropped during the Eddy Minimum due to the Sun]. If we are just entering a small cycle or two there will be a much smaller change that we could hardly see in the record [given all the other variability].
DCA says @ June 16, 2011 at 4:20 pm “Now thats three times you’ve dodged the my question about the context of Gavin’s Wiki quote ”
You still seem kinda angry.
Well it was there yesterday – evidentially was deleted at some point.
Here is the context in which that since sentence you pulled – out of context – is from.
“It’s obvious that the noise-generating components of the blogosphere will generate a lot of noise about this. but it’s important to remember that science doesn’t work because people are polite at all times. Gravity isn’t a useful theory because Newton was a nice person. QED isn’t powerful because Feynman was respectful of other people around him. Science works because different groups go about trying to find the best approximations of the truth, and are generally very competitive about that. That the same scientists can still all agree on the wording of an IPCC chapter for instance is thus even more remarkable.”
[snip]
Not sure why given your prior posts you would want to full context since it just brings up a conversation about how the we-don’t-believe-in-it-is-really-happening (no D-word there) blogosphere latched on the style of the emails when the substance of the emails after multiple independent reviews did not prove that the data was incorrect. (AP and others – citations upon request as I do not want to take up any more space here since I find this topic at this point to be a distraction from the sunspot conversation).
R. Gates says @ June 16, 2011 at 4:47 pm
R. Gates says:
June 16, 2011 at 12:06 pm
I would say that the certainty of knowing at any given time of x,y, or z being a given size is low…that is, I think that x,y, and z and change over time, and may also in fact affect each other.
since climate is on long time scales, the random changes of X, Y, and Z might wash out. Anyway, we can’t really deal with a moving target too much: imagine we were to assign different values to X, Y, and Z every day..
———-
In your last line you’ve just nicely illustrated the essence of the 3-body problem and the roots of chaos…
__________________
Are you suggesting that you cannot model anything accurately then?
Leif mistakenly assumes that all solar-driven temperature changes here on Earth are produced by changes in TSI. He, of course, ignores the seminal work of the late Charles D. Keeling (of the CO2 Keeling Curve fame) who at least had the guts to investigate the possibility that Lunar tides might have an impact here on Earth. The only intellectual leap that you have to make after that is to realize that the effect of the Lunar tides on the Earth’s climate are synchronized with the level of solar activity. This is where Leif gets weak at the knees.
Keeling and Whorf 2000, PNAS, 97, No. 8, pp. 3814 – 3819
Ninderthana says:
June 16, 2011 at 5:33 pm
Keeling at least had the guts to investigate the possibility that Lunar tides might have an impact here on Earth.
Keeling thought that the long 1800-yr temperature variation is astronomically determined via lunar tides and that that was the natural explanation of the MWP and the LIA. This is possible, but has, of course nothing to do with solar activity. As Keeling said ” it becomes pretty clear that if today’s natural warming trend is combined with the greenhouse effect, then we’ll soon see the effect of combined warming all over the world”. So he’ll expect continued global warming. You subscribe to that?
Ninderthana says:
June 16, 2011 at 5:33 pm
Keeling at least had the guts to investigate the possibility that Lunar tides might have an impact here on Earth.
Solar UV creates and maintains the ionosphere and just as in the oceans there are also solar and lunar tides in the ionosphere. Whenever a conductor moves in a magnetic field and electric current is produced, so there are currents in the ionosphere created not just by the solar wind, but by the solar and lunar tides. These currents create a [very small, about a thousandth of the main magnetic field] magnetic field observable on the ground. So each day a regular ‘tide’ is observed. It looks like this: http://www.leif.org/research/Lunar-Variation-Huancayo.png The solar tide is about five to eight times larger than the lunar tide, so is the spike you can see every day in the upper panel. But if you look carefully you can see that the shape of the spike changes with the lunar phase. This is because a lunar day [on the Earth] is a bit longer than a solar day, so the lunar tide ‘slides’ over the solar ones and sometimes add to the solar spike making it larger, and sometimes subtracts from the spike, making it smaller. In the lower panel you can see the difference in shape of the solar tide caused by the moon.
This effect was discovered in 1850 by Kreil in Prague. So, the lunar tides do indeed have a magnetic effect on the Earth of the order of 1/10,000 of the Earth’s field.
@- Leif Svalgaard
Would it be correct to say that if the SUM of X, Y and Z is constant the climate is constant, when the total of the three changes due to a change in any one factor the climate changes.
The main argument is – How much?
Moderate Republican “An analysis of solar trends concluded that the sun has actually contributed a slight cooling influence in recent decades (Lockwood 2008).”
Lockwood, 2008:
http://rspa.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/464/2094/1387.full
Most of the cooling in this paper appears to be attributed to volcanic effects.
Lockwood in 2009 stated: “If the Sun’s dimming were to have a cooling effect, we’d have seen it by now. ”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8008473.stm
But in 2010 Lockwood suggested that a quiet sun may put Europe on Ice. Perhaps he opened his eyes?
=========
Quiet sun puts Europe on ice
May 2010 by Stuart Clark
BRACE yourself for more winters like the last one, northern Europe. Freezing conditions could become more likely: winter temperatures may even plummet to depths last seen at the end of the 17th century, a time known as the Little Ice Age. That’s the message from a new study that identifies a compelling link between solar activity and winter temperatures in northern Europe.
[…]
Mike Lockwood at the University of Reading in the UK began his investigation because these past two relatively cold British winters coincided with a lapse in the sun’s activity more profound than…
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627564.800-quiet-sun-puts-europe-on-ice.html
=========
By including solar activity as an important parameter while ignoring CO2, Lockwood produced a miracle for modern climatology–an accurate prediction:
December 2010:
“BRITAIN’S winter is the coldest since 1683 and close to being the chilliest in nearly 1,000 years.”
http://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/view/169577/Winter-may-be-coldest-in-1000-years/
The MET, on the other hand, presumably based on the magical “forcing” imputed to CO2, predicted another “mild” winter:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/28/the-uk-met-office-winter-forecast-fail-or-faux/
izen says:
June 16, 2011 at 9:03 pm
Would it be correct to say that if the SUM of X, Y and Z is constant the climate is constant, when the total of the three changes due to a change in any one factor the climate changes. The main argument is – How much?
There is no demand that the sum add to 1. But before we begin to discuss such fine detail, the order of magnitude of X,Y, and Z [relative to some reference period] must be decided.
@- gary gulrud says:
June 16, 2011 at 1:13 pm
“Cutting to the chase, back-radiation plays no part because the earth cools faster than the Atmosphere can heat the surface.”
But if there were no atmosphere, (or no GHGs) it would cool faster still.
Are you aware of how the ‘Greenhouse effect’ works, or are you one of those that rejects any role for the atmosphere in affecting the temperature at the surface?!
Dr S says – {.so TSI during a Grand Minimum might be higher than TSI now.}
Samething Dr. G. Schmidt said recently.
Leif Svalgaard says:
June 16, 2011 at 8:10 am
tallbloke says:
June 16, 2011 at 5:20 am
I very much hope all concerned can trust the keepers of the record not to cook the books on TSI, because there are some eminent scientists who don’t have much faith in the person producing the figures, and believe he is agenda driven.
This is just crap. Nobody is cooking the books. And who is ‘that person’?
Here’s ‘that letter’ again:
http://tallbloke.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/acrim.jpg
The current platform (TIM/SORCE) shows a 4W/m^2 lower reading than expected when deployed, and this apparent aberration goes unexplained as far as I know.
All spacecrafts have undetermined offsets because the absolute level is hard to measure.
Right. And this is why there is a greater level of uncertainty in the splicing and extrapolation of the record than appears in the error bars on your page 20 TSI graph. Thanks for the TIMS info by the way.
Don’t get me wrong. I think you’ve done a great job with the lines of evidence and data available. I’m just ever mindful that there is enough flexibility in the interpretation due to uncertainty to admit of several ‘scenarios’.
Kwharizmi, The UK Met’s probabilistic forecasts don’t have anything to do with CO2 forcing . They are simply odds-based forecasts. Current conditions are compared with past seasons and regional indicators to produce an likelihood. That’s why they are never “right”….and are not the only forecast technique used.
tallbloke says:
June 17, 2011 at 1:00 am
Here’s ‘that letter’ again:
Froehlich is not the ‘keeper’ of the ‘record’.
And he has not [and cannot] change Willson’s data. All Froehlich does is to make his own private composite [called PMOD] of data using his own weighting of the available data [including Willson’s – which BTW does have problems and must be corrected before use. What Willson complains about is that Froehlich in so doing still calls the corrected series ACRIM. Had Froehlish called it, say, ACRIM* or something like that there would not have been a problem]. There is nothing wrong with that. PMOD is not ‘official’ or preferred in any way. You can use it or not.
And this is why there is a greater level of uncertainty in the splicing and extrapolation of the record than appears in the error bars on your page 20 TSI graph.
No, although the graph says TSI, it is really just 10-Be expressed in TSI units. The error bar is that of the 10Be ice core data. Nothing to do with TSI. And the spread in the level of [spacecraft] TSI is not ‘uncertainty’. The spread can be removed because we have overlapping data.
there is enough flexibility in the interpretation due to uncertainty to admit of several ‘scenarios’.
That uncertainty is already taken into account by me. I would not make a statement if I thought I went beyond what the data shows.
Regarding TSI, we only have accurate measurements of TSI for the last 30 years or so. During that time the sun was in a solar maximum. So we can’t really say much about how TSI varies over time yet.
Leif Svalgaard says:
June 16, 2011 at 1:44 pm
If that supposition were true, then TSI should go up during a normal cycle minimum. It doesn’t. The dark spots are caused by magnetic fields preventing plasma that has cooled from mixing with surrounding plasma. In that case, the loss of energy from the cooled plasma could easily be compensated for by the increase in output from the surrounding plasma which is now hotter, since it isn’t mixing with that afore mentioned cooled magma.
R. Gates says:
June 16, 2011 at 12:06 pm
I would say that the certainty of knowing at any given time of x,y, or z being a given size is low…that is, I think that x,y, and z and change over time, and may also in fact affect each other.
since climate is on long time scales, the random changes of X, Y, and Z might wash out. Anyway, we can’t really deal with a moving target too much: imagine we were to assign different values to X, Y, and Z every day..
———-
In your last line you’ve just nicely illustrated the essence of the 3-body problem and the roots of chaos…
———————————————————————————————-
So very true. That is why in the start I asked for nothing more then an educated guess. As far as climate goes, we really have very little clue on how different factors effect each other (hence the roots of chaos.) These are not linear variables that can be plugged in to tell a story, what you need is the entire picture.
Without getting into an argument, yes the solar influences might be nothing, might be 0.1c or might be 0.3C or more over a long time period. This depends on a number of other factors along with the exact factors of what hte Sun is doing.
Something that I thought appeared somewhat interesting, maybe Leif would like to make a stab at this, we tend to see slightly more volcanic activity during solar mins.
This might have an interesting impact, kind of like the indirect PDO effect on temperatures… The actual PDO impact on temperatures is mild and only seen in limited areas. (Of course people in CA which is effected will disagree and say that the state is the entire world…but I digress.)
Again, We are discussing small aspects and very small parts of a very chaotic system. Who knows if the correlation is nothing more then simple coincidence? Who knows if one causes the other (of course I doubt the Earth can effect the Sun .. haha funny right?), but this is more of a general statement for climate.
I have long said that the true answer to CO2 impacts on climate are not well understood enough to make a meaningful guess. The noise is so high at this threshold that what appears to be CO2 could be some effect we simply do not understand well enough or even have no idea it had an effect.
This does not apply to solar as much since we do have some empirical data in the form of good proxies. But in the end, there are many questions with solar mins that modern equipment might finally be able to answer. Think of it as one step closer to solving the chaotic problem of climate. What other effects does a solar min have besides the temp? This is the same question that is so difficult to answer in relation to CO2 as well…namely what other things does CO2 impact. In the end, I would guess we have seen roughly 0.2C at the most in CO2 induced warming, with most of the warming temperated by negative feedbacks…but there are other sensible conclusions to be had from the data besides that. I tend to think lower limits in IPCC are about as high as I would call sensical…
As for CO2 directly and by itself, I don’t think we can even begin to guess what the actual impact of this is. Just like my semi-educated guess on solar, I think we are simply guessing at this aspect as well. In 100 years, we might start figuring this out, but in 100 years I fully expect us as a society to move on to better forms of energy….We shall see, time makes fools of us all.
In any regard, this is interesting, I will be out of town for the weekend (I might try reading comments on my BB, but that might not work well, never tried it….)
Moderate Republican says:
June 16, 2011 at 5:22 pm
R. Gates says @ June 16, 2011 at 4:47 pm
R. Gates says:
June 16, 2011 at 12:06 pm
I would say that the certainty of knowing at any given time of x,y, or z being a given size is low…that is, I think that x,y, and z and change over time, and may also in fact affect each other.
since climate is on long time scales, the random changes of X, Y, and Z might wash out. Anyway, we can’t really deal with a moving target too much: imagine we were to assign different values to X, Y, and Z every day..
———-
In your last line you’ve just nicely illustrated the essence of the 3-body problem and the roots of chaos…
__________________
Are you suggesting that you cannot model anything accurately then?
———-
Not at all!
This notion systems that exhibit spatio-temperal chaos cannot be modeled comes from those perhaps who don’t understand the basics of chaos theory or somehow confuse deterministic chaos with randomness. The climate is hardly random (a notion many seem to hold), but it does vary based on multiple inputs which themselves can interact and vary over time with multiple feedbacks. Thus, simple linear models will not work and one needs to use more sophisticated means to understand how a the climate can vary in large ways over time with only small input changes year to year.
BenfromMO,
Excellent post…
izen says:
June 16, 2011 at 11:13 pm
Mauna Loa is linearly increasing, UAH/RSS flat. Were there a positive feedback relation between atmospheric CO2 and global temps the latter should be diverging in the other direction.
No relation is evident. Speculation has had its day, yet dogs return to their vomit.
BenfromMO – could you be so kind as to provide citations for the multiple conclusions assertions you make at June 14, 2011 at 11:52 pm?
I think many of us would be keen to review them.
Moderate Republican,
What assertions are you referring to? The 60 year ocean cycle is rather well known, look up data on the PDO. A simple search on WUWT will probably uncover about 10 different articles on it. The CAGW position is that the cooling from 50-75 was the result of other substances which in turn is rather weakly correlated, but ocean cycle data goes all the way back to 1850. There is also evidence of it in the proxies, but this evidence is rather weak to be honest…maybe the cycles are stronger today for some reason?
S. hemisphere temps? That is also well-known. Look at the charts. The coverage is obviously a lot less. The main thing here is that the S. Hemisphere does not appear to have a 60 year cycle…but I could go into it more, but thats a very complicated story so to speak.
Oceans hold a lot of heat and keep temperatures steady? Thats not really much of an assertion, its a fact that even rapid CAGW believers if I may call them that state.
So again, kind of curious where you are referring to?
I will probably move to the next thread which seems to have some mistakes in it (the story that is…) I am not completely sure I agree with the story being said there…its rather interesting though. I think this kind of science is necessary…I am sure since I am not a rapid believer in solar influences I might take some flak (-:
But that is what scientists go through.
Hi Ben – thanks for your response.
I just find it helpful to have a citation to reference since some of these topics are pretty complex and some of the conclusions drawn (generically – I’m not saying yours) are debatable.
Mark Wilson says:
June 17, 2011 at 6:05 am
If that supposition were true, then TSI should go up during a normal cycle minimum. It doesn’t.
It goes up from min to max.
Leif, are you saying that TSI is greatest during the low count portion of solar cycle?
Mark Wilson says:
June 17, 2011 at 2:31 pm
Leif, are you saying that TSI is greatest during the low count portion of solar cycle?
I was trying to make sense of your cryptic sentence: ” TSI should go up during a normal cycle minimum”
So we can’t really say much about how TSI varies over time yet.
I [and many researchers] think we can. Variations of TSI are caused by variations of the Sun’s magnetic field. That we know from how these things have varied the past 35 years. The Sun’s magnetic field is dragged out by the solar wind and impacts the Earth, causing variations of the Earth’s magnetic field, which we have measured carefully since 1835. It also causes variations of the cosmic ray flux at Earth, that in turn creates radioactive atoms [10Be and 14C] when colliding with air. These atoms settle in polar ice and in tree rings, where we can measure them. Measurements extend back more that 10,000 years. So we have reasonable knowledge of TSI that far back.
Maybe this will be the dawn of a new ice age. The human race needs a hard reset anyways.
So I’m very curious about something and I can’t find the original source of my thought, just yet. But I remember a few years ago that there was someone claiming that our soot production was dimming the amount of radiation reaching the earth and was the only reason Global Warming hasn’t spiraled out of control yet. When I read it, I remember thinking that their data looked pretty legit, that indeed the sun was “dimming” on the surface of the Earth, even though their conclusions about the cause seemed dubious. I’m wondering if their data on surface “dimming” matches observations from something like SOHO, over the same period, and if there is indeed a “dimming” that is related to what we’re seeing with loss of magnetic vitality on the sun. We certainly see a weaker solar wind lately, allowing more of those cloud forming cosmic rays in. What I’m hoping for is a cooling apocalypse where there is less radiation warming the earth, more cosmic rays bombarding the atmosphere, resulting out of control cooling that drops us 3-4 deg F and my dog and cat start living together – mass hysteria!
If anyone remembers or knows where that “dimming” research is and can point it out, I’d like to take a look at it again and see if there is some sort of correlation, particularly with the Penn & Livingston data, and just see if they chart together very well…