GISS finally concedes a significant role for the sun in climate

And the house of cards around AGW keeps falling!!! Gotta love the irony, AGU drops Gleick and then says: Hey! it’s the Sun Stupid!!!

Oh Lord, what on Earth is happening – excuse the pun, then again don’t! What with this, a Solar-hydro connection with the River Nile, the Wet Office recently finding a connection between winer weather & Solar activity (priceless). Whatever next? A connection between Earth’s climate & Solar activity? Surely not! Sarc off!

I’m delighted to see real science poke it’s head out of the pages of AGU publications. Let’s just hope it’s not a premature spring bloom.

This isn’t the first paper to find a link between solar activity and hydrology. Mauas et al. (Solar Forcing of the Stream Flow of a Continental Scale South American River, Physical Review Letters, 2008) found very strong links between stream flow of one of the world’s largest rivers and the 11 year solar cycle. Here is the Abstract:
“Solar forcing on climate has been reported in several studies although the evidence so far remains inconclusive. Here, we analyze the stream flow of one of the largest rivers in the world, the Parana ́ in southeastern South America. For the last century, we find a strong correlation with the sunspot number, in multidecadal time scales, and with larger solar activity corresponding to larger stream flow. The correlation coefficient is r = 0:78, significant to a 99% level. In shorter time scales we find a strong correlation with El Nin ̃o. These results are a step toward flood prediction, which might have great social and economic impacts.”
Figs. 2 and 3 are especially interesting, if you can get the article.

This is going to leave a mark!

As the AGW scam fails …. along comes new source of funding … the Maunder Minimum scare.
Indeed, the term “global warming” was originally coined in a paper trying to explain why it hadn’t cooled as predicted. (“Are we on the brink of a pronounced global warming?)
No doubt we shall soon see a new paper along the lines of: “Are we on the brink of a pronounced global cooling? (aka how sunspots have prevented the predicted global warming, and how sunspots now appear to be the future life-blood of all climate “scientists”.

FWIW, sunspots have decined substantially over the past 2 months, from a peak of 96.7 in 11/11 to 73.0 in 12/11 and now 58.3 in 1/12.
Double-bump peaks are not at all uncommon, but unless this turns around soon it would be the weakest peak since 1882 (95.8 in April).
(International counts from http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/SunspotCycle.shtml , at /greenwch/spot_number.txt )

So let’s see, more frequent flooding requires rain. Rain requires clouds. Clouds have a bond albedo in the vicinity of 0.7, compared to a mean albedo of around 0.3 for the Earth in general (including its average cloud cover). If even weak reductions in solar activity increase rainfall (and hence cloud cover), they must also increase albedo. Every 0.01 increase of albedo predicts a drop of roughly 1K in global average temperature. Solar activity is dramatically falling. NASA is directly measuring a corresponding increase in the Earth’s mean bond albedo via studies of Earthlight re-reflected from the moon’s dark face in the last through first quarter. And we haven’t even gotten to where the change can be nonlinearly amplified by modulating e.g. oceanic absorption and the decadal climate oscillations.
There is so much real science to be done here. Too bad there is an entire group of scientists who actively oppose doing it, and who have exercised a horribly disproportionate influence on both the journals and granting agencies. There are signs that the logjam is breaking — this paper is one of them. But we are far, far from being there yet.
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Excuse me, but I don’t think the AGW crowd gets it yet – Almost all of us believe the Earth is in a warming trend although there may be some who reject that too. The question is not “Does the climate change over time?” the question is “What drives climate change and to what degree?”
When I tell people that I question the amount that humans are doing to “warm” the Earth, I find they leap to believing I don’t understand the climate is changing. Off they go into rants about Venus and Flat Earth and etc.
Yup, I’m one of the two-thirds that would say “Yes.” to the question “Do you believe the Earth (planet) has warmed in the last 50 years?” But I would add to that – “I question the role of humankind in that warming.”
Of course that’s not ever asked as a follow-on question is it?
Mike

It seems that GISS is compartmentalizing their findings that are contrary to the AGW theory so that, when confronted, they can claim that the given finding was a regional study. They have no qualms, however, with cutting down one tree in Siberia and declaring that it’s tree rings can tell us all we need to know about global climate over the last 1000 years.

NICHOLAS
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hXv72I7nx7ZTg_QuI3Ix1c3i3uXw?docId=CNG.dca855da9e6c393c07dda475a1590504.e41
“Sixty-two percent of Americans agree that there is solid evidence that the Earth’s average temperature has been getting warmer over the past four decades”
Why wasn’t it higher? I have very little doubt that it’s warmer now than 1972 (ice age scare). I have no doubt that climate changes. What I have serious doubts of is the contention that burning fossil fuels adds enough CO2 to the atmosphere to increase the GHE (while simultaneously limiting radiant heat loss to space) enough to cause worldwide cataclysm! I also doubt that was an option on the survey.

Perhaps the Ancient peoples were smarter than people give them credit for. There may have been more to Sun “worship”, than simply a religious connotation.

John said @ February 29, 2012 at 8:00 am

This isn’t the first paper to find a link between solar activity and hydrology. Mauas et al. (Solar Forcing of the Stream Flow of a Continental Scale South American River, Physical Review Letters, 2008) found very strong links between stream flow of one of the world’s largest rivers and the 11 year solar cycle.
….
Figs. 2 and 3 are especially interesting, if you can get the article.

You can DL the paper here.

Robert Brown said @ February 29, 2012 at 8:19 am

There is so much real science to be done here. Too bad there is an entire group of scientists who actively oppose doing it, and who have exercised a horribly disproportionate influence on both the journals and granting agencies. There are signs that the logjam is breaking — this paper is one of them. But we are far, far from being there yet.

There definitely seems to be an increase in interesting (notCAGW) climatology papers over the last twelve months. I’d do a metastudy to quantify, but have other fish to fry at the moment.

There is much more to polling research than the answer. Whom did they ask, what did they ask, how many did they ask, how did they ask it, how representative was their pool of respondents compared to those who refused to respond, and even the tone of voice in a telephone or personal interview, etc., etc.

So, the actual forcing/feedback mechanism that translates small changes into large scale climate effects is not CO2-based, but is solar-based!
Of course, anyone could have told them that – including their colleagues in the real Earth Observing side of NASA:
http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/18073
My post uses brand new data from Soumi NPP to illustrate how clouds (water vapor) are the true governor on solar forcing. Each area of low/no cloud cover has both maximum incoming (SW) and outbound (LW) energy. Areas where there are thick clouds you get minimal incoming (SW – due to reflection) and minimal outbound. Therefore the balance is created through the clouds.
As the study shows, solar changes become a response in the hydroclimate (e.g., clouds):
“Holocene northeast US hydrological change is consistent with solar forcing
Small changes in solar forcing are amplified in our region by Arctic Oscillation”
Sun, Land, Sea and Wind interacting… Whodathunkit

As the AGW scam fails …. along comes new source of funding … the Maunder Minimum scare.
Personally — and I say this as one utterly unfunded in any way for any thing — I’d take that one seriously. The world has thrived during the 20th century warm period. Its population what, tripled? Quadrupled? Food production varied from “barely enough” to where we can feed pretty much everybody except those in overpopulated drought zones afflicted by religious war. A great deal of that food production occurs in e.g. Siberia and Canada and the northern US, where farmers have gotten used to long growing seasons (sometimes enough to get in two crops a year of some commodities). Increased CO_2 has a measurable and positive impact on plant growth as well, although honestly I doubt that is a major factor in crop productivity. It certainly doesn’t hurt.
One “year without a summer” in the 21st century NH — late or midsummer frosts all the way down to the latitude of e.g. Pennsylvania, including all of Canada, Siberia, and lot of the US midwest — could absolutely devastate food production not in third world countries but in first world countries. We are always at risk of such events because they can be precipitated by e.g. volcanic aerosols alone, given volcanic activity well within the established bounds of known variability (and utterly beyond our control). However, during the 20th century those events were modulating a general (solar + GHE) warming trend.
If it does indeed turn out that solar is 2x or even 3x more important than the GHE at establishing the mean global temperature, so that CO_2 becomes the minor modulator of solar variation instead of the presumed only modulator ignoring the impact of solar variation, we could indeed see a regression of 1-2K in global average temperature, on a decadal time scale. We could even see a steady decline back to Dalton or Maunder mean temperatures, where we are grateful for any slight positive modulation of those temperatures due to the GHE (even as the cooling oceans start to suck CO_2 out of the atmosphere again).
This may or may not be enough in and of itself to seriously impact mean crop productivity — I’m guessing some but not much, as farmers react to the growing season as dictated by last frost as part of their natural strategy anyway. It could, however, make us quite vulnerable to coincident events — Dalton minimum AND massive volcanic activity equals massive crop failures and an enormous dollar cost.
This is where climate research could pay for itself. The ability to predict local weather level catastrophes might well give us the means to anticipate them and perhaps ameliorate their impact.
Note well that your concern also ignores one very important thing. We can arguably influence total CO_2 concentration in our atmosphere by means of regulating our activity. We cannot have any impact whatsoever on the Sun or on volcanic activity. The confirmation of the solar hypothesis therefore has one absolutely critical effect on human public policy — it stops trying to pretend that everything that modulates the climate is our “fault” and that we can do anything about it!
This returns the scientists to their proper role — to prognosticators of a variable but potentially devastating future, rather than as sociopolitical engineers who divert vast sums of money on the basis of the illusion of control.
Control is what the whole thing is all about. It is what it has always been about. Only the illusion of control provides the excuse for essentially unlimited influence in global public policy decisions and investments. Remove the basis for control, and the whole thing collapses.
I’ve been predicting a Maunder style minimum for the next few decades and a consequent 1-2K reduction in global temperatures for around 15 years now, not as an actual scientist working in the field but as an actual scientist who has looked over the preponderance of relevant data produced by others to make his own best guess. I think the next fifty to eighty years are going to be remarkably cold, and that inside the next decade — possibly in the next five years — global temperatures will be unmistakably decreasing, and decreasing quite rapidly at that. The current solar cycle seems likely to be the lowest one in well over 100 years, and there is reason to believe — not terribly good reason yet, as there is so much we don’t yet understand, but reason — that the next cycle will be even lower. Given the probable coincident inversions in the PDO and perhaps NAO, we could indeed see a rather precipitous plunge as the polar latitudes get a lot colder due to reduced tropical mixing while the tropics themselves actually cool some due to higher albedo.
If and as the ocean starts to actively cool — as the great heat sink that IMO dominates global climate in so very many ways — CO_2 absorptivity will go up commensurately, sea levels will drop (thermal expansion), and we could actually invert the very feedback process associated with the GHE. As it is, sea levels are probably an almost perfect proxy for global temperature on any decadal or better timescale, as the Earth’s oceanic water is basically one enormous thermometer with nearly any perturbation in water supply irrelevant compared to thermal expansion.
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Robert Brown said @ February 29, 2012 at 8:47 am

Overall, these things seem to be providing considerable empirical support for the GCR modulation theory as being the primary driver of Earth’s climate on multidecadal and up timescales. That result, confirmed, would almost certainly strike out the “C” from the CAGW hypothesis, because then all the existing climate models would be forced to end the “omitted variable fraud” of leaving out a factor that could actually be larger than the actual GHE forcing from increased CO_2, and indeed could invert the interpretation of at least part of the increase in CO_2, making it more likely not to be of anthropogenic origin at all but rather oceanic CO_2 given off in response to solar forcing during the Grand Solar Maxima of the 20th century.

Bingo! for the first part of this. The part about net CO2 outgassing will only occur if the oceans are near saturation and I was recently assured by an oceanographer that the oceans are far from saturated. Phytoplankton and chemical processes work assiduously to remove dissolved CO2. The empirically determined lack of saturation is being used to drive the new acidic oceans scare.

Re – “NICHOLAS says: February 29, 2012 at 7:59 am
What is up with this? – More Americans believe in climate change: poll”
Most Americans (when polled) claim to believe in Jesus, and a simple majority even claim to believe that there was once an Earth covering flood in which all of the world’s species were preserved, two by two, in a big floating wooden boat the size of a Wal Mart ventilated by a window the size of the door of a microwave oven during the 5 inch per minute rains that fell on every square meter of the Earth’s surface (a rate sufficient to cover Mount Everest in only 40 days).
That doesn’t make it so.
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Anthony,
It appears that you’ve got a one-day error in your “Posts by date” feature for Feb. (e.g. today is Wed. 2/29, not Tue.)
REPLY: I think that’s a wordpress problem, will check, thanks for pointing it out. – Anthony

Leif Svalgaard says:
February 29, 2012 at 10:08 am
As usual, the periods found do not agree with most of the other ones being peddled, e.g. 172y, 179y, 60y, 22y, etc.
It’s climate “science” not science. 🙂
By the way, when you calibrate sunspotnumbers, are you going to calibrate cosmicray proxies too?

Garrett says:
February 29, 2012 at 9:15 am
“. . . the recent rise in temps.”
Beg your pardon, what recent rise in temps?
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_January_2012.png

Garrett: It’s not about global warming. Sorry to disappoint you all. It’s about the local effects of solar forcing. The global effects of solar forcing are already very well understood, and scientists came to the conclusion a long time ago that it is not the source of the recent rise in temps.

In reverse order, much about the global effects of solar forcing are not very well understood, and the conclusion to which you refer is not universally agreed upon by scientists.
More importantly, the “global effects” are the aggregation of all the local effects, because the earth does not have a uniform surface and does not have spatio-temporally uniform insolation. Rather, the sun shines brightly in some places, dimly in others, dimly in sunny places during cloudy rainy weather, and not at all at night. The “global climate” is a complex statistical summary of particular weather events distributed around the globe, but everything that actually happens is recorded at a locale and during a specific interval of time. If this particular local instance of solar forcing has analogous instances of solar forcing in enough locations (as claimed in peer-reviewed publications cited above), then it is “global”.

Solar forcing … or … GCR variations driving changes in cloud cover and precip?

The fellows at GISS are reading their tea leaves on the coming election. They feel that the sane people are likely to get elected; and their free lunch of appealing to the green crazies is coming to an end.
They rightly fear that in the day when NASA is cutting funds and departments, abandoning new Space Shuttles and robotic explorers, their useless global warming rants can be zero-funded, and they will find themselves on the street and unemployed.

MAVukcevic says:
February 29, 2012 at 8:47 am
Oh Boy!, that was a real “electromagnetic fart”! directed to those who still don´t believe the words “electro” and “magnetics” go together. 🙂

Watts, why don’t you discuss the NASA/GISS Research Letter Newsletter titled “Earth’s Energy Budget Remained Out of Balance Despite Unusually Low Solar Activity” and dated Jan. 29, 2012?
A summary statement:
“A new NASA study underscores the fact that greenhouse gases generated by human activity — not changes in solar activity — are the primary force driving global warming.”
To help you find your way, here’s the link:
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20120130b/
REPLY: Been there, done that Pierre. Why don’t you learn to use the search box on WUWT or Google?
If you had, you’d find this:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/31/jim-hansens-balance-problem-of-0-58-watts/
To help you find your way, it is in the upper right portion of the right sidebar.
-Anthony

Septic Matthew said @ February 29, 2012 at 12:09 pm

Garrett: It’s not about global warming. Sorry to disappoint you all. It’s about the local effects of solar forcing. The global effects of solar forcing are already very well understood, and scientists came to the conclusion a long time ago that it is not the source of the recent rise in temps.
In reverse order, much about the global effects of solar forcing are not very well understood, and the conclusion to which you refer is not universally agreed upon by scientists.
More importantly, the “global effects” are the aggregation of all the local effects, because the earth does not have a uniform surface and does not have spatio-temporally uniform insolation. Rather, the sun shines brightly in some places, dimly in others, dimly in sunny places during cloudy rainy weather, and not at all at night. The “global climate” is a complex statistical summary of particular weather events distributed around the globe, but everything that actually happens is recorded at a locale and during a specific interval of time. If this particular local instance of solar forcing has analogous instances of solar forcing in enough locations (as claimed in peer-reviewed publications cited above), then it is “global”.

Personally, I think the emphasis on “global” is a furphy. Climate seems to be a resolutely local phenomenon and is so described in ever so many dictionaries. My crops do not respond to global temperatures, they respond to local temperatures. Ditto for precipitation and wind. It’s true there occasional large lurches such as the Younger Dryas and the 8.2kYa event, but mostly the only thing that counts happens outside the back door. But then I do live in the Southern Hemisphere where average temperatures haven’t changed much for over a century.

Garrett says:
February 29, 2012 at 9:15 am
“How come when peer-reviewed articles come out, that seem to support the views of Mr. Watts and most people reading this site, does he and everyone else become so quick to accept the results of peer-reviewed papers? I mean, why don’t you pay attention to ALL peer-reviewed papers. You can’t just cherry-pick the ones you want.”
Unfortunately, the warmeist extremists have successfully undermined the spirit and letter of “peer review” to the point that it’s no longer generally a good measure of scientific excellence. Indeed, it’s often quite the opposite, when one has their fellow warmist extremists–also fully dependent on the continued flow of billions of dollars in grants of public funds to “research” this “catastrophic global warming”–act as the “peer reviewers” of each others papers. Incest much?
The greatest harm the warmist extremists have done to society with their self-serving and reckless rape of the scientific method for selfish purposes is NOT the billions dollars of public funds wasted–money that could have been spent on clean drinking water or vaccines or health care or literacy for the third world, in other words, spent on REAL problems of humanity.
No, their greatest harm is that they have effectively undermined the concept of the scientific method as a force for good in the eyes of the greater society. They’ve reduced the “scientific method” (as THEY apply it) to being no more than another extremist cult absolutely intolerant of being questioned or of alternative hypotenuses, and instead see it as a means for obtaining politically awarded research grants of millions upon millions of dollars and their own glorification at scientific conferences around the world created for the sole purpose of waxing their egos.
The scientific method (as PROPERLY applied) has been the single greatest philosophical force for human well being in the last several hundred years, and it has NOTHING to do with squashing alternative hypothesis, hiding/changing data, or the use of lying and fraud. In the course of a mere couple of decades the warmist extremists have managed to profoundly undermine this popular view of the scientific method by the actions of a bunch of self-interested, red-carptet-seeking, lying, fraudulent, data-creating/hiding, obfuscating pseudo-scientists.
Good going, you jerks.
THAT is why the warmest extremists are despicable. Because these so-called “scientists” are betraying true science for self-serving personal gratification, to keep their grants flowing, their “careers” sustainable, their suites at 5-star hotels at conferences around the world, their business class airfares to the premier tourist destinations of the planet, the standing applause from rooms full of similarly situated “scientists” and “bureaucrats” latched tightly to the breast of public funding of “global warming” or “climate change” or “global cooling” or whatever they are calling it these days.
It all calls to mind the so called “priests” who betrayed their religions for self-serving personal gratification. Absolutely disgusting, in both instances. And which of those two groups has caused the greater societal harm, has harmed the greater number of individuals, and has wasted the greater share of public purse?
Despicable. Despicable. Despicable.

No word from “the cause”? Too busy planning their next data manipulation/modification/creation/imagination?

“We propose that the Arctic/North Atlantic Oscillation (AO/NAO) can amplify small solar fluctuations…”
As for AO and the Sun, there is another mechanism proposed other than sunspot numbers. Please pay attention to this theory in this discussion.
Reference:
Ramos da Silva, R., and R. Avissar (2005), The impacts of the Luni-Solar oscillation on the Arctic oscillation, Geophys. Res. Lett., 32, L22703, doi:10.1029/2005GL023418.

@dahuang:Here the link to the paper
http://www.duke.edu/~renato/RamosdaSilvaandAvissarGRL2005.pdf