Solar Cycle Driven Ocean Temperature Variations

Very interesting, thank you.

What the co2 driven global warming advocates don’t discuss is that if the ocean has started eating global warming since the trade winds changed during the negative phase of the ocean’s ~60 year multi-decadal cycles, they also emitted excess energy during their positive phase from 1975-2005. The implication is that the oceans are capable of storing energy on long timescales, and releasing it on long timescales too. And they store a lot of energy. The top two metres alone contain as much energy as the entire atmosphere above.
We know that the oceans keep the air temperature up over night as the release some of the energy the Sun poured into them during the day. We also know that there is a lag of a couple of months between the longest day of the year and the peak in surface air temperatures near coasts. This is thermal inertia and heat capacity at work. On longer timescales, we have recently confirmed that runs of El Nino events which release a lot of energy from the oceans are initiated on the falling side of the solar cycle, never on the upswing.
So we can go a stretch further and combine what we know. When solar activity falls, energy comes out of the ocean, not just over the period of the decline of a single 11 year solar cycle, but if the Sun stays low in activity terms, for many years. An integration of the sunspot number shows us that the ocean heat content rose all the way from 1934 to 2003. This is the real cause of ‘global warming’. A lot of excess energy is still retained in the upper ocean. We can expect the effect of a couple of low solar cycles to be softened by a proportion of that excess heat returning to space via the atmosphere warming it on the way.
In developing my understanding of the Earth’s systems, I developed a couple of very simple models to help me fathom the way the surface temperature stays fairly constant as the solar cycles wax and wane. Back in 2009, by analysing the data, I found that the global average sea surface temperature, the SST, stays fairly constant when the Sun is averaging around 40 sunspots per month. By calculating the running total departing from this figure in a simple integration I found that combined with the ~60 oceanic cycles (also solar influenced), I could reproduce the temperature history of the last 150 years quite accurately. By adding in a nominal forcing for co2 (or an allowance for the infamous ‘adjustments’ to the data), I was able to get a match to monthly data which has a Pearson R^2 value of 0.9.
Rog’s take which I agree with.

It is very clear that IR radiation has no effect on OHC or surface water temperatures and that Visible Light and UV light have major effects on OHC and Surface Water temperatures.
Therefore AGW has nothing to do with ocean heat content and ocean surface temperatures while the sun has everything to do with it.
OHC has just been responding to the extreme strong solar conditions 1934-2003 which have leveled off post 2005. OHC will follow.
IR penetration of surface ocean .1mm visible light /long UV light tens of meters. Seems pretty clear according to the data.

My mistake

http://www.climatedepot.com/2014/07/17/the-sun-has-gone-quietsolar-cycle-24-continues-to-rank-as-one-of-the-weakest-cycles-more-than-a-century/
Which is what I have been maintaining all along. I have a lot of company.

As the article in above post says past history shows us that (PROLONGED) minimum solar conditions have always corresponded with lower global surface temperatures. Data does not lie.
I am still waiting for someone to produce data that shows this fact not to be true.

http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=981
Applying a simple relaxation response to SSN ( as a general proxy of solar variabilty ) does seem to match most of the interdecadal changes in SST.
The ~decadal variation seems to be more likely of lunar origin than solar. This explains why SSN seems to sometime being phase but then drifts out, finally being in anti-phase before drifting back.
There is a notable divergence to the relaxation curve starting just before 1990. Which brings us back the aerosol changes:
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=902

http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=981
Applying a simple relaxation response to SSN ( as a general proxy of solar variabilty ) does seem to match most of the interdecadal changes in SST.
The ~decadal variation seems to be more likely of lunar origin than solar. This explains why SSN seems to sometime being phase but then drifts out, finally being in anti-phase before drifting back.
There is a notable divergence to the relaxation curve starting just before 1990. Which brings us back the aerosol changes:
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=902

I calculated the change in SW entering the troposphere after Mt. Pinatubo settled to be 1.8 W;m2 in the tropics ( 20S-20N ).
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=955
Inferring from the TLS plot, a similar magnitude effect from El Chichon, makes a change of 3.6 W/m2.
The ERBE data was less continuous outside the tropics and I have not done the same calculation. I would expect a notable difference in climate response outside the tropics.
Once averaged over 24h and the rest of the surface, this figure looks sufficient to account for most of the late 20th c warming.

Here is an overlay of TLS ( inverted ) and SST for southern hemisphere.
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=988
Having recognised the origin in the stratosphere changes, the same effect can be seen in SST, with temperature rise taking a few year adjust due to the thermal inertial of the oceans.

Bones: ” In addition, there are so few cycles in this short record that apodizing might suppress a lot of the signal being sought.”
I would tend to use dT/dt to remove the trend and an extended cosine window (apodiser) fn. that if flat for 80% and a cosine taper at the 10% on each end.

We have had contributors noting that TSI into the tropical ocean varies too little to be responsible for causing warm spells such as the MWP and the recent late 20th century warming. We have also had it pointed out that cloud production by the tropical ocean provides negative feedback that “caps” its temperature. It has also been noted that ocean circulation transports water warmed in the tropics poleward where it is cooled by various heat loss processes.
It has also been noted that solar UV output varies much more over the solar cycle than TSI, and that this variance greatly affects the temperature of the upper atmosphere via the ozone layer.
At http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/15jul_thermosphere/ it is noted that:
“When carbon dioxide gets into the thermosphere, it acts as a coolant, shedding heat via infrared radiation. It is widely-known that CO2 levels have been increasing in Earth’s atmosphere. Extra CO2 in the thermosphere could have magnified the cooling action of solar minimum.”
It appears that the sun’s warming effect upon the tropical oceans is very steady, but that its warming effect upon the polar atmosphere varies greatly. During periods of lesser solar activity the polar atmosphere cools, allowing greater loss of heat from the polar oceans. Increased cooling results in lower ocean temperatures. Increased CO2 in the upper atmosphere contributes to the atmosphere’s cooling effect upon polar oceans during lowered solar activity.
The long term effect would be that warm periods are not the result of increased solar activity, but that cool periods such as the LIA and Dark Age cool period result from lapses in solar UV (and solar wind) production.
SR

Pamela Gray says:
July 26, 2014 at 7:55 am
….
http://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/SeaSurfaceTemperature
………….
“The first automated method of gathering sst was by measuring water flowing through the input ports of ocean faring ships. While this method obtained a significant quantity of useful SST data there were some shortcomings. The depth of the input ports of different ships can vary greatly from ship to ship. In a stratified ocean these different depths can have different temperatures. This method also resulted in rigorous sampling along major shipping routes but a dearth of information about the vast majority of the world’s oceans.”
///////////////////////////
I have studied many hundreds of thousands, quite possibly millions of entries in ship’s logs (and weather routing agencies) regarding weather and sea state (including ocean temperature).
I have repeatably made this point that ship’s do not measure SST. The depth at which a ship draws water (from which the temperature is ascertained) varies greatly on the size, design and configuration of the vessel, as well as to whether it is sailing in ballast, fully laden or somewhere in between. Additionally, it will depend upon how the vessel is trimmed (usally trimmed to the stern but this could be 75cms to 3 m, or more). Even during the course of the voyage, the draft of the ship will alter (and hence the depth at which sea water is drawn) because of the consumption of stores (particularly bunkers from the double bottom), and possibly due to inherent changes in the cargo that is being carried (some cargos will tend to dry, some will evaporate light fractions). It is a constantly changing goal post.
For the main part, vessel will typically draw water from a depth of 2 to 17 metres, perhaps somewhere between 4 to 10 metres being most common. That is a very big range.
Further, ships are commercial assets and there may be commercial pressures that may encourage less than accurate record keeping. Weather conditions (including swell and current) may be exagerated to conceal a problem with the vessel’s performance.
Sea water temperature may be under stated or overstated. For example, a vessel’s engine may have a cooling problem, so inlet water temerature may be recorded slightly high. A vessel may be trading in tropical waters and her antifouling coating is suspect, again higher temperatures may be recorded so as to expallain the build up of marine growth and bottom fouling.
On the other hand, a vessel may be carrying a heated cargo. A heated cargo requires bunkers to be consumed for heating the cargo at some stage of the voyage. These cargoes are loaded ‘hot’ allowed to cool during the voyage (but not to fall below a certain minimum temperature), and then heated in preperation for discharge. It may be advantageous for the ship to under record sea temperatures so that it appears that the cargo is cooling quicker than it really is and therefore requires heating earlier and for longer, for which service the ship owner gets paid. So if sea water tempertaure is recorded on the low side, the ship owner may be able to claim for several days of bunker heating to the cargo which was not in fact carried out, since the warm ambient water through which the vessel was sailing kept the cargo warmer for longer.
If you look at vessels plying the same route, say 50 nautical miles apart, the declared sea temperatures can be quite different. Some of this might be due to natural variation, particularly the extent of currents, some might be due to the differences in design and trimming of the two vessels, but some of the differences may be due to commercial influence.
Now of course, I am not suggesting that every shipowner engages in such practice. Of course they do not, but commercial influence is a fact of life when quite substantial sums of money are involved.
The nub of it is that the SST derived from ship’s should be deemed to carry extensive margins of error, and that prior to ARGO there is no reliable data on ocean temperatures.
Further, it appears that when the latest adjustments were made to the ocean temperature data (HADSST3), they applied a decreasing temperature adjustment (you see this also with the land records, old data is adjusted downwards) because they considered there was a warming bias in the temperatures recorded by ships (an assumption based upon the premise that water is being heated by the pipework – which is false given the speed of flow of water through the engine), whereas the old data from ship’s temp records should be adjusted upwards to reflect the fact that ships are sampling not SST but rather ocean temperature at 4 to 10 metre depth below SST(as i say the range at which sampling is made is much wider). The warming bias caused by the water being heated in the inlet mainifold is an order of maginitude less than the cooling bias caused by the fact that the sea water is being drawn at depth and is not SST.
Data on ocean temps should be viewed with extreme caution. Prior to ARGO there is no good quality data. There are ssues with ARGO, apart from its short duration and sparce coverage, namely that when it came on stream, a correction was made to remove buoys which were showing ocean cooling (see http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/OceanCooling/page1.php ), and no studies have been carried out to ascertain whether there may be an inherent in built temperature due to the free floating natuire of the buoys that drift with the currents, which currents themselves have their own temperature profiles.
PS. Perhaps, I should just mention that a ship’s engine does not circulate water like a car through the radiator, but instead continuously draws fresh ocean water and dumps that water as soon as it has passsed through the engine. The volume of water passing through a ship’s engine is quite substantial due to the size of the machinery, and therefore is not significantly heated by the short period of time it spends in the inlet manifold.
.

I think the missing link could be duration of heating (or cooling) over several solar cycles.
I think of the solar cycles as periods of magnetic field turmoil causing structural turbulence on the solar surface allowing higher energy emissions as measured by TSI. These have a small heating effect on earth as well as higher UV related reactions such as ozone formation.
I think the effect of one cycle gets lost within the background noise. However, when we get periods of low activity and thus low TSI across several cycles, this represents many decades without the regular pulse of increased radiation. We have seen such periods associated with cooling in the past.
I strongly suspect that the latter half of the last century consisted not just high SSN and high TSI, but also an increase in the length of time the earth was receiving increased radiation.
If we regard the solar cycle as a pulse of warming radiation then the frequency, shape and amplitude are all important since collectively they define the amount of heating during a multidecadal period.
I assume that the effect of this heating on the oceans is the key factor and this is consistent with these timescales. So we are talking about the extra heat transferred to the oceans during a period of say 100 years with high TSI and lots of cycles compared with 100 years of low TSI and much fewer cycles. I suspect the difference could be significant.

bones says:
July 26, 2014 at 8:32 am
////////////////////
Bones
The point that Pamela makes (and upon which I expanded) is that prior to ARGO, there is no reliable data on SST.
Prior to about 1975, data was predominantly collected by buckets. but these were of differing design (some better insulated than others), and there was an unknown time factor that it took for the bucket to be drawn from the top of the ocean and pulled up on board and the a measurement taken etc. HADSST2 had the well known bucket adjustment which was supposed to compensate for that.
Post about 1975, the data has been predominantly collected by commercial ships, but these ships do not sample SST, but rather sample ocean temperature at a depth of between 4 to 10 metres below SST!!
HADSST3 has made an adjustment to the latter data, because it assumes that the ship’s data has a warming bias. It assumed that the sea water was being heated slighly by the pipework from the hull aperture through to the water inlet manifold where the temperature sensor is situated. However, the volume of water throughput is large, and there is in practice very little time for the water to be so heated. The adjustment failed to take account of the material fact which is that the water being measured is not SST, but is water drawn from depth (say somewhere between 4 to 10 metres below SST). This latter fact more than offsets any warming bias in the ship’s data. Ship’s data under records SST because the water is drawn at depth; it should be seen as having a cool bias.
I would not wish to average all the ships out but may be the average depth at which ocean water is drawn is 5 or 6 metres. Water at that depth, is considerably cooler than SST.
The amount by which the water is cooler because of the depth at which it is drawn, far exceeds the slight warming caused by measuring temperature with sensors at the inlet water manifold. Accordingly, HADSST should have made an adjustment to increase temperature post about 1975 to reflect that the water sampled was water drawn at depth and therefore cooler than SST. However, the adjustment was the very opposite. Far from correcting an error/bias, they have created a bigger one (in the wrong direction).
Your study is handicapped by the fact that there is no reliable good quality data on SST.
When you are looking for changes measured in hundredths or even tenths of a degree, it is an impossible task when the errors in the procedures adopted in sampling the temperatures is so great.
You can never splice different proxy sets together. The old bucket set is one set of data; the improved insulated bucket set, another set of data; the data from commercial ships’ a third different set of data; and finally ARGO a fourth different set of data. None of this data can be spliced to make one composite data set extending for some 60 years or so.
You could base your study on the commercial ship period, say 1975 to say 2003, but then you would not be looking at SST since this data does not sample SST.
You could base your study on the ARGO period (say 2003 to date). This does collect data on SST, but the duration of the data set is short. Further, it got off to a bad start as noted in my comment above.
The bucket method is so fundamentally flawed for detail work, that I would not wish to go near it, but of course, you could have used that data sets.
In summary, the data is hopeless, there are very wide error bands.
,

The arguments associated with Figure 5 (Ocean Heat Content 0-700 m) are weak because the data for OHC prior to 2003 are themselves weak, noisy, undersampled, and biased in their sampling.
There is an excellent post by Tisdale, ARGO-Era NODC Ocean Heat Content Data (0-700 Meters) Through December 2010(WUWT March 25, 2011), particularly the Animation 1, location of XBT temperature profiles for 250-500m 1979-2003. This animation makes clear that these temperature profiles are so heavily weighted to the submarine patrol areas of the north Pacific and North Atlantic that the southern hemisphere is woefully undersampled.
The entire anomaly of Figure 5 for the 0-700 m column is about 10*10^22 Joules = 100 ZJ. It takes 27.5 ZJ to raise the 0-2000m water column 0.01 deg C So it takes about 10 ZJ to raise the 0-700 m water column 0.01 deg C. Therefore, the 100 ZJ change in the 0-700 meter column in Figure 5 amount to about 0.10 deg C. With the temperature profiles of the southern hemisphere oceans so undersampled in the pre-ARGO era, I cannot believe we know the temperature anomaly of the worlds 0-700 m oceans an accuracy of less than 0.10 deg C. The error bars pre-ALACE, pre 1992 are larger than the signal.
So I think in Figure 5, you are searching for parameters to fit what someone else’s theory of what the OHC should be rather that what was accurately measured.

Just a couple of further thoughts on the idea I proposed at 10:02 above.
I’ve been using SSN as a proxy for TSI because it goes back further and though detection capability will have improved it doesn’t have all the complications of TSI measurement. I suppose I could have used radio flux but that only goes back to 1947. Based on a very crude assessment, the duration of SSN values of 75 and above have been higher during the period 1950-2000 that at any other time since SSN measurements started in 1750.
The second thought is that the modulation of GCRs by the solar wind is a potential albedo control mechanism as proposed by Svensmark. This albedo effect must also be enhanced by its duration and is therefore the combined effect of several solar cycles will affect the outcome.
The bottom line of my proposal is that multiple solar cycles of one extreme or the other show up in our climate record. Individual and mixed activity cycles are not noticed.

” Maybe the delay could be estimated first by cross correlation.”
Already did that in response to David Evan’s “notch” Peak correlation at a lag of just over 10y and again at 21y. ( NB. The 10y wiggle is not significant against red noise ).
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=958

Schoedinger’s cat: “I strongly suspect that the latter half of the last century consisted not just high SSN and high TSI, but also an increase in the length of time the earth was receiving increased radiation.”
The logical response to that is the cumulative sum. However, if there is a warming effect there will feedbacks that tend to cause SST to fall back once the deviation ceases. This may most simply be characterised as a relaxation to equilibrium response which leads to an exponential decay.
The result of such a response can be found by convolution with a suitable decay time constant.
The result is what I posted above. Apparently know one seemed to get the significance.
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=981

“””””…..bones says:
July 26, 2014 at 7:08 am
Leif Svalgaard says:
July 26, 2014 at 6:40 am
. . . The standard formula for this is dT/T = (dTSI/TSI)/4, which with an amplitude [=half from min to max] of 0.05% in dTSI/TSI gives dT/T = 0.0125% [of T=299K] = 0.036 C , so the variation of TSI is just what is needed.
——————————————–
Sorry Leif, the TSI variations are at the top of the atmosphere and that is where T must be taken as well…….””””””
Seems to me that Leif’s calculation is simply the small delta version of the Stefan-Boltzmann 4th power calculation, that presumes black body circumstances. And BB radiation laws tell us that the BB limit is the worst case.
So I don’t know what your gripe with Leif’s number is.
SB gives the worst case expectation, in the absence of positive or negative feedback interferences.
The fact that the global Temperature seems to NOT reflect even that small a TSI signal, suggests that a substantial negative feedback is at work.
Your claim that it matters where you take the signal, might be quite true. That simply confirms that other processes besides S-B are in play.
Dr. S’s calculation and figure are correct.
I don’t know why this is a problem; that this or that disturbance (TSI variation, or CO2 abundance changes or whatever), are occurring; but are not being manifested in climate changes.
Negative feedback cares not a jot, what the source of a perturbational disturbance is. Feedback (negative) fixes anything and everything; from Aerosols to Zspots, including TSI.

richard verney says:
July 26, 2014 at 10:13 am
bones says:
July 26, 2014 at 8:32 am
I took a detailed look at Hadley SST “corrections” over at Judith Curry’s a year or two back.
http://judithcurry.com/2012/03/15/on-the-adjustments-to-the-hadsst3-data-set-2
That covers many of the points raised here. It also compared the FFT of earlier and later SST and how the “bias correction” messed with frequency spectrum. A point I have also linked to here concerning the 9y lunar peak.

Some info on the “SFT“.

A terrific chart on data coverage for Ocean Heat Content from
Judith Curry, Ocean Heat Content Uncertainties, Jan. 21, 2014.
http://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/presentation6.jpg?w=1500&h=1158
Note the 0-700 meter curve shows. 20% global coverage in 1990, 40-30% from 1995-2003, and then rises to 70% with the advent of Argo.
Further note the definition of “coverage”: At least one temperature reading in each 1 x 1 deg bin per year, like measuring January, April, July, or October makes no difference when looking of 0.01 deg C changes to the world’s oceans. I think the source is Levitus 2012.

M Simon says:
I might also mention that some years back Climate Audit looked at SST measurements and covered a lot of the same caveats discussed here.
===
That was in relation to HadSST2 which was based on Folland’s folly: a 0.5 deg drop inserted in 1946. McIntyre was heavily critical of this kludge and it seems to have been heeded to some extent.
HadSST3 came out with a whole new raft of “corrections” in a jolly array of 100 permutations and the median of the 100 frigs which is what is usually taken to be “HadSST3”
This new version basically phased the same 0.5 C in over about 25 years so this it did not look so obviously wrong. The excuse being Folland was “right for the wrong reason”. In order to achieve the nice smooth slide in they ignored the ships records of what was engine-room intake or buckets and allocated their bucket and ERI bias “corrections” on a random basis to acheive what they considered to be the “correct” proportion of ERI vs buckets in each grid cell for a particular year.
ie. they ignored the written record and made it up as they saw fit.
I discussed all this in detail in the post at Curry’s blog, that I linked above.

M Simon , you talk of “gun decking” whatever that means, and making the data up if no one was watching. What do you think is the likelihood of an engine-room reading being logged as bucket and vice-versa?

Typical low-pass filters affect earlier data as well as later data which can be acceptable but is not physically possible
A relaxation response, as a weighted integral, has low pass properties but also introduces a lag as can be seen here compared to low-pass and lagged SSN.
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=998
I think this possibly what David Evans’ has picked and incorrectly interpreted as “notch-delay”. Finding a notch filter in nature is not easy. IMO he in misinterpreting his FT and is really seeing the presence of low-pass filtering, not a notch filter. The lag he is then having to invent to align the data is the lag that is created by a relaxation response.
The above plot shows a 20y relaxation is quite similar to an 11y low-pass with an 11y lag.
It is unlikely that the system can be accurately modelled with a single time constant response due to multiple ocean depths and other surface effects, each with a different response time. Some faster feedbacks are likely to be further attenuating the 11y periods.
However, for such a simplistic model it seems to catch general form of SST.
Here I show that tropical SST is very insensitive to changes in radiative forcing , this also means there will be little 11y signal visible. The cumulative effect may be mainly from SW component that penetrates deeper and bypasses the surface feedback mechanisms like evaporation and convection.
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=884

The period 1950-2000 had a series of cycles which were high in SSN and highest in the duration of SSN>75 compared with all SSN cycles that were logged since 1750. The average SSN over that period was about 52.
It is probably fair to use SSN as a proxy for TSI since the turbulence caused by the magnetic field generates the higher energy radiation.
Long periods of low solar activity are associated with cooling, as you know. All I am claiming is that the solar effect on climate is multi-cycle and therefore multi-decadal and related to cumulative heating or the lack of it. A mixture does not register apart from possibly a small net effect.

“…they predicted cooling for Norway during solar cycle 24 due to the short cycle 23.”
If there is a long term solar effect, it should have been dropping since before 1990 according to the relaxation idea but has been propped up by the volcanic effect. However, that current cycle is so weak ( as picked up by the late minimum ) that I think it’s going to start biting soon, Unless AGW saves us.
If there is not some clear cooling in the next 5 years, I may well be convinced that there is significant AGW.

Peter Sable:
In what way is that unexpected? What does FFT produce on that same sample?

Schrodinger’s Cat says:
July 26, 2014 at 10:02 am
“I think the missing link could be duration of heating (or cooling) over several solar cycles.”
That idea is the basis for my solar model, based on HADSST3, where solar input vs HadSST3 reveals the idea you presented, as you explained well too. You and everyone else talking about this, the author of this post, many others, are converging on the truth. As SC24 goes by with more and more low SSN days, when the solar “mini-max peak” is finally over and we’re really into a long solar min, the OHC will give it up and SSTs will drop, as HadSST3 depicts every solar cycle min, and we will bear witness together as it happens again. This time the warmists will have nowhere to hide, nowhere to run, no way out except to abandon their ship of foolishness.
I really appreciate Stan Robertson for going to such great lengths to prove this relationship exists.

Fig 1 looks very much like a chart of rolling averages of random numbers.

From Schrodinger’s Cat on July 26, 2014 at 2:03 pm:

The period 1950-2000 had a series of cycles which were high in SSN and highest in the duration of SSN>75 compared with all SSN cycles that were logged since 1750. The average SSN over that period was about 52.

You need to hang around Leif Svalgaard’s site and check out the work on the new sunspot number:
http://leif.org/research/
Basically, the Group Sunspot Number is crap, and the pre-1947 (or 1945) International (aka SIDC) SSN were too low, there is no Modern Grand Maximum. You can see the effect on the popular “Leif’s best guess TSI reconstruction” graph:
http://leif.org/research/TSI-Reconstruction-2014.png
As the 1950-2000 period was in reality not noticeably different from previous times in SSN and TSI, you should not look to the Sun as a driver of increased global warmth during that period.

kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
July 27, 2014 at 1:02 am
Basically, the Group Sunspot Number is crap, and the pre-1947 (or 1945) International (aka SIDC) SSN were too low, there is no Modern Grand Maximum. You can see the effect on the popular “Leif’s best guess TSI reconstruction” graph:
http://leif.org/research/TSI-Reconstruction-2014.png
As the 1950-2000 period was in reality not noticeably different from previous times in SSN and TSI, you should not look to the Sun as a driver of increased global warmth during that period.

Unfortunately most reading this blog will ignore your comment. Funnily enough, if you’d posted a similar comment on a warmist blog they would also have ignored it because the CAGW crowd rely on the Lean reconstruction in order to explain the early 20th century warming.

This article demonstrates how little we know. The question you pose and your suspicion that solar radiation plays a larger role than generally accepted has an intuitive feel for me, but then my intuition is often wrong. From what I can tell, the physics of radiation do seem to be poorly incorporated into climate models. As many visiting the WUWT may not have a radiation physics background, perhaps you could do a little basic education based on following. Going back to the basics always helps me.
1) Available Energy > the TSI provides us with a measure of the incoming energy, but does not tell us how that energy is deposited (absorbed) or distributed in the environment.
2) TSI measurement techniques/equipment > the question I have had for a long time is – are we measuring all of the available incoming energy and incorporating it in the TSI? The electromagnetic spectrum (EMS) is not the only source of available incoming energy, notably high energy particles being another source. Are EMS wavelengths shorter than 10E-12 measured and how so? We get a lot of those high energy photons and the energy transfer mechanisms are complex with the energy often going into the disruption of a nucleus that does not necessarily compute to eventual heat or radiation transfer. I have gathered that the entire EMS is measured with the TSI, but could use a confirmation of this. My root question is – are we missing something in our measurement of the TSI? I have a lot of faith in guys like Leif, but I still have in me a little of the Missouri “Show Me” and could use some reassurance on this topic.
3) Energy transfer > this is where I suspect we have the least knowledge due to the complexity of trying to figure out all the possible routes of energy depositions and energy conservation that eventually lead to what we call heat or lack thereof. We can readily observe the outcome with our thermometers and calorimeters. However different routes of energy deposition at specific wavelengths or particle energies could have an impact on the eventual outcome of greater, or lesser, molecular excitation. I wonder how much work we have put into this arena of study. As you noted, cloud cover and aerosols (just to name a couple things) will impact the energy transfer especially with re-radiated EMS that could be lost to space. These factors greatly complicate the whole energy conservation thing.
It takes a pretty big jar of hubris to think we have even the slightest clue yet.

bones & Pamela Gray
.”….inertia….. calculated over hundreds of years long.”
Thinking in these very long term ways has to be the key to unraveling this huge mystery of our climate. I could never understand why any solar change would have to show up in an immediate change of global temperatures. There have to be lag upon lag upon lag of unknown variables of unknown dimensions over unknown time scales.
Puzzles for the coming century. I love your very long term thinking.

sleepingbear dunes says:
July 27, 2014 at 5:50 am
” I could never understand why any solar change would have to show up in an immediate change of global temperatures. ”
————————————————————————————————————————-
Changes in insolation show up very quickly in temperatures. Think of the difference between winter and summer temps as latitude increases. However at the equator, the temperature difference is negligible. So clearly it is insolation that rules not tiny differences is TSI.

By staring long enough at a waveform of noise, and with intense calculation, one can recover the Rorschach signal in said noise.

Pamela Gray says:
July 26, 2014 at 9:43 pm
Thanks for the kind words Gary. Weather and climate is my lifelong hobby and I am such a nerd about it. But I am not nearly as schooled as other professional and amateur informative scientists who contribute posts and comments here at WUWT. The honor goes to them as I am only a grasshopper. I have spent pleasurable hours and hours learning a great deal from the likes of Anth***, Willis, Bob Tisdale, and Leif.
===================
As long as it doesn’t go to your red-head, it’s all good 🙂

FWIW, I Googled “ren comment bot” and discovered “Ren” was a handle used on the hackaday-dot-com site.
How are scientists like rabbits? They like to replicate.

Willis mentions the extraordinary stability of temperature over aeons as a reason for not accepting a significant solar influence on climate.
The answer is that although the sun alters global cloudiness and thus the proportion of solar energy entering the oceans the subsequent shifts in the climate zones are the negative system response which keeps outgoing radiation equal to incoming radiation.
For a water planet the adjustment mechanism even works if the top of atmosphere insolation changes as a result of a large change in solar power such as that since the early faint sun.
It is the weight of the atmosphere on the ocean surface that determines the amount of energy that the oceans can retain from whatever incoming radiation arrives from the sun by setting the amount of energy required to achieve the phase changes of water.
The oceans then determine air temperatures.

Willis said:
“If ocean cycles wander in and out of phase with the sun, that is prima facie evidence that one is NOT driving the other.”
A logical non sequitur.
The sun determines global cloudiness which then affects the proportion of TOA insolation that gets into the oceans.
Internal system variability sets up cyclical movements within the oceans and there is no reason why that internal variability need be synchronous with the initial solar variations given the thermal inertia of the oceans, possible lunar influence and separate interactions between the individual ocean basins.
Furthermore, as per Willis’s own Thermostat Hypothesis it is the variable ocean/atmosphere response that eventually negates the initial solar effects on global cloudiness.
Less clouds skews ENSO towards more El Ninos compared to La Ninas and El Ninos are a cooling effect for the system overall even if the middle latitudes get a little warmer from more poleward zonal jets whilst the energy flows through the air more quickly on its way from the oceans to space.
The circulation changes in air and oceans are a therefore a negative system response to the initial solar induced changes in cloudiness.
Climate changes as observed so far (within the interglacial) seem not to involve significant changes in global temperature, merely changes in the distribution of available energy with the largest effects in middle latitudes as the climate zones shift to and fro latitudinally.
Even during Ice Ages there seem to be similar climate shifts on an approxomate 1000 to 1500 year time scale but they don’t cause Ice Ages to begin or end so solar variability causing cloudiness changes would appear to fit the bill both within Ice Ages and Interglacials.

Gary Pearse says:
July 27, 2014 at 11:41 am
Excellent point Gary.

Ren is fine… Ren Hoëk is rather adventurous and intelligent. As long as Stimpson J Cat (Stimpy) doesn’t show up, because that’s when Ren gets emotionally brittle. Then it WILL get very annoying. 😉

Willis Eschenbach says:
July 27, 2014 at 12:48 pm
“First, I don’t understand the “60 year variation”, when the head post and my comment are both talking about 11 year cycles.”
So, you are looking for an even smaller effect. That merely reinforces the point.
“However, what there generally is NOT is a response to a cyclical signal that goes in and out of phase with the driven signal, regardless of the period lengths.”
For a linear system. Not all systems are linear.
I’m not telling you, you are wrong. I am telling you, you are levying constraints on the allowable system response without acknowledging them.

BTW, just so it is here somewhere, this is my opinion regarding what is going on, but I do not have the time or inclination to argue for it here today.

The UV changes during a solar cycle are very significant, even if the change in TSI is small. The UV will influence ozone production and other chemical reactions in the atmosphere.
The magnetic field will change enormously with a positive peak followed by a negative peak. The solar wind will change throughout and the neutron count received on earth will peak out of phase with TSI. So a great deal of change takes place. I’m not convinced that we fully understand the full implications for our climate.

Which is why believers in Green House Gas effect discuss anything but the actual calculation of the temperature of a volume of atmospheric air,
and you never : not ever – see them do it or be around when any such calculation discussions go on.
The Ideal Gas Law by specific application to all gases in atmospheric air, assigns one energy holding capacity;
that energy holding capacity is *identical for CO2, and Methane, and Nitrogen, and Oxygen, Argon.*
In real atmospheric temperature calculations done by real scientists who get repeatable instrument verified answers
there is no such “green house gas” calculation, which is why the believers in it can’t ever provide a formula for it.
It’s junk science which can not stand alonside the mathematical formula specifically forbidding it’s existence.
The Ideal Gas Law’s assignment of energy capacity called the Gas Constant is the mathematical constant that specifically forbids any, and all the claims of temperature based on infrared or any other color light handling by gases.
Go look it up. It’s a fie letter formula that can be thrown onto the desk with any believer of green house gas effect. Give him the instrumental measurements and tell hem to start calculating temperatures of volumes of atmospheric air.
Tell him to show you his calculations allowing for spectral handling.
He’ll have to find a reason to disrupt the situation because there is none.

ren says:
July 27, 2014 at 10:20 pm
“Willis I speak only that the changes in ozone over the polar circles lead to strong cooling of the oceans. Therefore, there will be fewer hurricanes.”
I agree with ren.
More ozone in the stratosphere above the poles warms the stratosphere and pushes down tropopause height.
That enables more frequent pulses of cold air towards the equator.
Since the length of the lines of air mass mixing is increased thus causing more clouds along the more meridional jet stream tracks less solar energy gets into the oceans to drive hurricane formation.
That proposition is consistent with Stan’s observations.

Stan needs the Gas Laws to work as they do in order to achieve the global cloudiness changes referred to in his article.
Only by expansion or contraction of the stratosphere relative to the troposphere differing at different latitudes can the necessary shifts in the climate zones be achieved and it is those shifts that cause cloudiness changes globally. Those changes are caused by top down solar effects.
Willis needs the Gas Laws to work as they do in order to achieve the changes in emergent phenomena that enable his thermostat hypothesis to work.
Only by differential expansion and contraction can density variations in the horizontal plane lead to the changes in convection that alter the timing and vigour of emergent phenomena locally and regionally. Those changes are caused by bottom up oceanic effects.
Climate change is the result of the ever varying net interplay between the top down solar and bottom up oceanic effects.

***
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
July 27, 2014 at 2:34 am
You need better examples of researchers who have found this tiny solar signal, who are not sharing the same flaws. I cannot now see any of those you cited as acceptable, thus your evidence that others have found as you are claiming is insufficient, and perhaps actually non-existent.
***
Yup. What you say has been said repeatedly & still hasn’t sunk in. Sigh….

During the most recent solar lull 2008-2010 TSI was off by .15%.
While the Maunder Minimum much longer and more severe then the recent short solar lull. Making it likely that TSI was off by amounts greater then .15% during the Maunder Minimum.

What has taken place in year 2005 is a complete change from active to inactive solar activity.
This change in my opinion will be more then enough to have another climatic impact just as is the case when one reviews historical climatic data.
My challenge remains- Which is show me the data which shows a prolonged solar minimum period being associated with a rising temperature trend or a prolonged maximum solar period being associated with a falling temperature trend.
I find no such data and the same result is going to happen as this decade proceeds.
Already solar activity is falling off and we are no where near the bottom of the solar cycle 24-solar cycle 25 minimum.
I think the data (especially post 2005/prior to 2005 ) supports the view that the sun can be quite variable and this variability can happen over a short period of time as is the case in the first decade of this current century.
Expect climate implications if this prolonged solar minimum keeps advancing going forward.

I just noticed this comment by Willis Eschenbach says:
July 27, 2014 at 7:39 am
“Finally, in the last half billion years the strength of the sun (using standard physics and the knowledge of stellar evolution) is estimated to have increased by 5%. IF the sun ruled the temperature we should have seen an increase in global temperature over that time of 5%, or about 15°C (27°F). Obviously, there is no sign of this in the geological record.”
The actual composition – earth’s atmospheric pressure is not known for sure. However, it is known that during the Cretaceous, the atmosphere was quite a bit thicker. It is likely that over time, the earth loses a little bit of atmosphere each year. Over hundreds of millions of years, that adds up.
Changes in thickness of the earth’s atmosphere obviously impact its thermal characteristics. Without knowing exactly how the atmosphere changed, it is not possible to make your analogy.

Don’t ask me about the cloud ratio to cloudless days around these parts of Wisconsin. I’m a driver and I see clouds every day these days. Not always all day, but clouds are more plentiful. Now why would that be. ha go figure. And people are calling them Fall like clouds.
Changes in the upwind crescent of the solar gravitiational focusing function?
no no no
Gee there’s Dr. S. better go back upthread and see what part of this could be nonsense.

Leif Svalgaard says:
July 29, 2014 at 6:22 pm
Carla says:
July 29, 2014 at 6:19 pm
But what about the Interstellar Magnetic Field reconnection with the Interplanetary magnetic field?
As I have explained to you a hundred times, the solar wind is supersonic and no magnetic influence can travel upstream, so no influence is to be expected.
——————————————————————
Except Dr. S. the distribution of outgoing solar wind isn’t what it used to be. The distribution isn’t the same when the heliospheric bubble is squashed…
And the volume filling from CME’s is there either.

But good to see you drop by Dr. S. and do appreciate your presence on these solar matters.
Had a question related to solar rotation and quiet portions in the rotation. But can’t remember it exactly right now..

Leif Svalgaard says:
July 29, 2014 at 6:55 pm
Carla says:
July 29, 2014 at 6:45 pm
Gee there’s Dr. S. better go back upthread and see what part of this could be nonsense.
Every little bit of it, Carla. The interstellar magnetic field cannot influence the interplanetary magnetic field in the inner solar system where Earth is.
————————————————————–
Well then, what about the solar gravitational function and how do the two field couple..?

Let us see how low each solar parameter goes going forward as we head toward the minimum of solar cycl24 and the beginning of solar cycle 25. I expect extremely low values.
My criteria will be met.

Pamela Gray: Here is the irony. If these tiny tiny amounts of solar variation somehow (of unknown mechanism) control the largest processes on Earth that create weather and climate, how do they so dismissively disregard tiny CO2 increases (of known mechanism)? Are not both propositions preposterous in the face of such a large hard to move Earth?
The irony has been oft noted, and it is worth noting again, as you did. The evidence does not seem to me to support either a strong belief in or strong dismissal of either partially known mechanism, since so many “other things” of the phrase “other things being equal” are unknown, conjectural, etc.
What makes the discussion interesting instead of vapid is the possibility that an effect that is small on the absolute scales may be large relative to the good or optimal range for agriculture, wildlife, ocean surface level (for humans) and so forth.
Figure 4 of the main post would be enhanced if accompanied by some measure of what the procedure would produce in a time series with no signal at all (i.e., standard errors of the estimates, confidence bands from simulations without a signal, and so forth.) The message here seems to be: If the signal is present at all, it is for sure small. Why the author believes that the method necessarily underestimates the signal is not explained ( ” Considering that the slow FT tends to understate the actual signal amplitude at low signal to noise ratios,”); considering that this problem has been reworked, I’d expect that any presentation has resulted from a method that is biased towards overestimating the effect.

Google will supply you any number of pictures of what an FFT of a sine wave looks like.
If your SFT doesn’t look like this, it is one indicator that you’re not doing things right.
http://kenrockwell.com/audio/sony/scd-xa777es.htm#
http://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&docid=EncfFU0JBplH8M&tbnid=Jsowk2j6vVbC9M:&ved=0CAUQjRw&url=http%3A%2F%2Fkenrockwell.com%2Faudio%2Fsony%2Fscd-xa777es.htm&ei=ejXbU-SQEML9oASygYGgAQ&bvm=bv.72197243,d.cGU&psig=AFQjCNGOU0s8OmhDVf13Vsbl-RFl-Fm3qQ&ust=1406961359048877
https://www.google.com/search?q=fft+of+a+sine+wave&client=firefox-a&hs=NtS&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&channel=sb&tbm=isch&imgil=gbUA43_7_uoBRM%253A%253BV6cUL-DK7ftPuM%253Bhttp%25253A%25252F%25252Fcnx.org%25252Fcontent%25252Fm12335%25252Flatest%25252F&source=iu&usg=__lZtJS9akodfMQFVqOAvpTBdzhwk%3D&sa=X&ei=SjXbU8rAFc69oQTF2oLQCQ&ved=0CCgQ9QEwAg&biw=1856&bih=1238#channel=sb&q=fft+of+a+sine+wave&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&tbm=isch&imgdii=_