On Saturday I posted about this study from Pierre Gosselin at No Tricks Zone:
New Study Shows A Clear Millennial Solar Impact Throughout Holocene
Now we have another that suggests little effect. and shows a business as usual projected warming trend.
From the:
JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 117, D05103, 13 PP., 2012
doi:10.1029/2011JD017013
What influence will future solar activity changes over the 21st century have on projected global near-surface temperature changes?
- Past solar activity is used to estimate future changes in total solar irradiance
- The impact on future global temperatures is estimated with a climate model
- The Sun’s influence is much smaller than future anthropogenic warming
Gareth S. Jones
Met Office Hadley Centre, Exeter, UK
Mike Lockwood
Department of Meteorology, University of Reading, Reading, UK
Peter A. Stott
Met Office Hadley Centre, Exeter, UK
During the 20th century, solar activity increased in magnitude to a so-called grand maximum. It is probable that this high level of solar activity is at or near its end. It is of great interest whether any future reduction in solar activity could have a significant impact on climate that could partially offset the projected anthropogenic warming. Observations and reconstructions of solar activity over the last 9000 years are used as a constraint on possible future variations to produce probability distributions of total solar irradiance over the next 100 years. Using this information, with a simple climate model, we present results of the potential implications for future projections of climate on decadal to multidecadal timescales. Using one of the most recent reconstructions of historic total solar irradiance, the likely reduction in the warming by 2100 is found to be between 0.06 and 0.1 K, a very small fraction of the projected anthropogenic warming. However, if past total solar irradiance variations are larger and climate models substantially underestimate the response to solar variations, then there is a potential for a reduction in solar activity to mitigate a small proportion of the future warming, a scenario we cannot totally rule out. While the Sun is not expected to provide substantial delays in the time to reach critical temperature thresholds, any small delays it might provide are likely to be greater for lower anthropogenic emissions scenarios than for higher-emissions scenarios.
Dr. Leif Svalgaard comments to me via email:
Whatever one’s take, it is an item in the debate. There are some
problems with the TSI series they use, e.g. the PMOD series which we now know has a problem with non-compensated degradation. This has been admitted by the experimenters, see Slide 29 of
http://www.leif.org/research/The%20long-term%20variation%20of%20solar%20activity.pdf
There is also a problem with the long-term slope, but none of these are serious, the fact remains that TSI has not varied enough. The argument that there are other solar variables that are responsible falls flat, because they all in the end correlate strongly with the variation of TSI. That the effect is man-made is also on shaky ground because there are longer term climate variations long before CO2 increases.
I don’t disagree with Dr. Svalgaard that variance of direct forcing on Earth’s climate via TSI has been small, but that’s why many are looking in other places, such as UV effects and GCR modulation of cloud cover for example. TSI really isn’t the “total” solar irradiance in the truest sense, there are other effects from the sun that are just now being researched and are beginning to be understood. My view is that there is an amplification effect going on related to one or more solar effects. GCR cloud modulation theory might just be one of those amplifications.
The full paper is here: http://www.leif.org/EOS/2011JD017013.pdf
Let’s have at it then.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I never cease to marvel at how well climate models back-cast (see Figure 4), always oscillating perfectly through the centre of decades of ‘weather noise’ – yet as soon as they forecast anything, there is almost immediate divergence.
Drs. Jones & Lockwood
Future solar activity for the TSI projections:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/NFC7a.htm
It worked fine in the past and much better for the present (then some signed by the well known names).
You get the same effect by fitting a n order polynomial to a historic data set. You can make it fit past data to any desired degree.
Its ability to forecast is zero. Accurate back casting is NO indication of forecasting ability.
Thanks
JK
It’s from the Hadley Centre. So it is a rat dressed in a duck suit.
I require proof beyond reasonable doubt that changes in the main source of energy for the earth’s system have no effect. It’s completely counter intuitive and requires significant automatic negative/positive balances to be in effect to nullify solar variations. It just doesn’t wash.
Or as believe some colonials say ‘that dog don’t hunt’ 🙂
It’s called data mining.
Met Office Hadley Centre propaganda; nothing to see move on folks!
The model replicates the 20th century very poorly. How come they believe it will continue up, when it is already heading down? This is not even funny.
does anyone know how high in the atmosphere CO2 is “well-mixed?” in other words…where is the “atmospheric ceiling” in terms of mixing of CO2?
I wonder if there is an email in the still encrypted climategate set which has someone saying, “We must get rid of solar variation” too?
These non-man-made variabilities are very inconvenient for the alarmist crowd. They need papers that they can point to which allow them to deny reality. It does not mean that these papers are accurate or truthful. We know that the alarmist crowd are willing to sink to criminal deception to prove their case. What does this say for their ‘science’?
jim says: March 5, 2012 at 12:25 am
You get the same effect by fitting a n order polynomial to a historic data set. You can make it fit past data to any desired degree. Its ability to forecast is zero. Accurate back casting is NO indication of forecasting ability.
Absolutely. Any projection has to be based on some physical mechanism which is relative to the sun and the solar system. In here:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/NFC7a.htm
to extrapolate future solar magnetic activity orbital properties of the two gas giants with strongest ‘inert’ magnetic field are used.
There seems to be some circularity here. I thought that the IPCC in its wisdom had decreed that the late 20th C warming was caused by the impact of IR absorption by CO2 on radiatitive heat transfer, ignoring the quantised nature of this phenomenon and other contributory mechanisms such as forced convection . From then on the modellers have struggled mightily to justify this assumption, by relying on the assumed amplification effect of atmospheric water . As the models have been tuned to effectively rule out any other mechanism and specifically the impact of the sun’s behaviour on temperature rise (which is likely to involve more than simply TSI) , it is little wonder that the authors achieve that which they sought to prove,
Using this information, with a simple climate model
I stopped reading right there. A simple climate model? Like a linear equation? If a single climate model had already been validated, climate scientists wouldn’t be talking about missing heat.
“The Sun’s influence is much smaller than future anthropogenic warming.” The Hadley Centre have slipped up badly. That statement is a prediction, not a projection, and they can be held to account. If it was possible to conduct an experiment by which one first switched off AGW, then switched off the Sun to ascertain influence, I know where my money would be.
Why do I always get the impression that these people are coming from the line, “we know it isn’t the Sun, it can’t possibly be, so we’ll prove it!”? Remember folks, Lockwood is the one who claimed that a quiet Sun won’t affect the Earth’s temperature, because we would see it by now, back in 08/09.
To quote Monty Python, “It’s only a model”.
Hi there,
I think the key pharse in this discussion is the sentence from
Leif Svalgaard:
“The argument that there are other solar variables that are responsible falls flat, because they all in the end correlate strongly with the variation of TSI.”
And I confess, that I don’t understand what he means..
I don’t have a problem with “they all in the end correlate strongly with the variation of TSI”,
but why would they fall flat?
Just because we can measure a direct and fast response of a solar activity in form of the TSI, this does not tell us anything about a possible indirect or delayed response (for example the often mentioned cloud cover variation)
I ma quite sure Dr Svalgaard or other discussed this before, could someone point me the the relevant article?
Thx,
LoN
I always thought usage of simple models was disqualified by warmists ever since Dr. Spencer used them.
This research comes from the Hadley Centre, proponents of CAGW so I would expect their findings to follow their models that the sun is an innocent bystander with little input.
A case of research results following prejudices rather than observation.
I like the thinking behind this, ‘My god AGW is more powerful than the sun[god]’ nations will bow down before him and the naughty nation of the maple lead shall feel it’s wrath. Our god is so powerful the sun could shut down and we’d still warm up. Do not question me-these beliefs are settled /Sarc
I just think that given the state of the debate this seems a silly, self serving paper that explores unprsopective ground. I do not think anyone seriously puts it that the TSI varaiation might be a significant or dominant natural factor in the 20th century warming or previous temperature fluctuations. I have always taken it that there is some construct arising from cosmic rays being influenced by the sun’s activity, zodiacal dust, cloud formation as well as water vapour content at various critical parts of the atmoshphere ( in both vertical and in geographic position ).
That this comes from Hadley makes it look like another chair or table pulled down in desperation to frustrate the reality in hot pursuit of this AGW nonsense.
Look at the authors – they’ve been saying this for years, they’re saying it now, and they’d still be saying it if hell (or at least the N. Hemisphere) freezes over.
It’s “Hide the sunshine”.
We already know that TSI solar effects are amplified because that is what happened in the past. Period. Even the early AGW crowd, like Lamb recognise this. Its only a matter of time before this is appreciated, as the sun now wanes, so will the T.
Why do they show a linear trend to a clearly sinusoidal trend? Have climate scientists not progressed to these more complex functions yet?
andrew bolt has an excellent thread up in regard to the wonderful rains falling over most of australia, filling our dams and rivers, as they have done for millennia…
pity about the billions that have been wasted believing in (or pretending to believe in) the alarmist predictions…
The warmists’ straw man: “We never said it wouldn’t rain”
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/the_warmists_straw_man_we_never_said_it_wouldnt_rain/
Where is the UV, high energy and intermediate? Where is the proton and other high speed particle flux? Where is the radiofrequency and X-Ray and gamma ray fluxes?
TSI, of course it does not vary much, that’s why it is picked. Every other wave and particle and plasma is ignored, because these vary up to 15% on cycle. That’s why these are ignored. How much energy is supplied to earth by one single CME? How many CMEs per cycle?