My good friend Jim Goodridge, former state climatologist for California, came to visit yesterday to offer some help on my upcoming trip, as well as to talk shop a bit about the state of affairs on climate change.
He had previously authored a paper that I had hoped to present on his behalf at ICCC, but unfortunately it got excluded from the schedule by an omission. Yesterday he decided to rework that paper to bring out it’s strongest point.
One of the best and simplest ways of seeing the solar connection is to look at accumulated departure. Here is Jim’s essay on the subject:
Solar – Global Warming Connection
Jim Goodridge
State Climatologist (Retired)
jdgoodridge – (at) – sbcglobal dot net
March 22, 2008
Solar irradiance has been monitored from satellites for three sunspot cycles. The sunspot numbers and solar irradiance were shown to be highly correlated. Since sunspot numbers have been increasing since 1935 the irradiance must also be increasing.
The sun was once considered to be constant in its output, hence the term “Solar Constant”. Recent observations suggest that the sun is a variable star. Observations of solar irradiance have been made with great precision from orbiting satellites since about 1978. These observations are from Wikipeda: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_variation
They clearly indicate that the solar irradiance varies with the historic sunspot numbers:
Click for a larger graph
Click for a larger graph:
Using this relationship, 307 years of solar irradiance is easily inferred.
Sunspot numbers since 1700 were plotted as accumulated departure from average in order to compare them with weather variables. The sunspot number index indicates a declining trend for the 1700 to 1935 period and an increase from 1935 to 2008. The eleven-year cycle is clearly visible.
An increase in sunspot activity, and by inference, irradiance since 1935 is plainly indicated.
Moderators note: And I want to also call attention to these graphs, which shows the change in solar irradiance since 1611 and Geomagnetic activity over the last 150 years:
Clearly, solar geomagnetic activity has been on the rise. There will be more interesting posts on sunpots coming in the next week or two, stay tuned -Anthony
Anthony,
Try here, her new stuff is on page 13 and 14:
http://www.pages-igbp.org/products/newsletters/NL2005_3low_res.pdf
But let me warn you, this only concerns Irradiance, and I’m not sure if they are only talking about the visible and IR part of the spectrum. Foukal 2006 only dealt with luminosity and he was clear that his work did not include other factors that are listed in his abstract. There is also the cloud and cosmic ray stuff.
You guys also might consider that there are many things involved; exagerated temperature record, not just artificial warming of the present (such as bad temperature stations that you and I are well aware of, bad adjustments, and UHI) but also artificial cooling of the past. There are of course the oceans and the failure of climatologists to treat cold upwelling ocean water during La Nina (and other ocean situations like PDO) as a negative forcing as well as the opposite for El Nino.
So when you look for what has caused the warming, you might look for many things with small values rather than one thing with a large value. A tenth here and there as well as a few 100ths here and there can add up to the .77 degrees of warming in the past 150 years real fast.
Ref Graph #4:
For those with an interest in the visual arts, pls look at the graph for the period 1600-1700. All Dutch School [Rembrant, Vermeer, etc.] paintings one way or the other tell you “warm” was not the norm.
For those interested in the history of war: look up 1812 in the graph. Some 800,000 of Napoleon’s soldiers would tell you from their graves that the plains West of Moscow were not the place to be that year. If in doubt, pull out the appropriate Beethoven..
Solar minima anyone?
“The policy implications are enormous. The meteorological community at the moment is really just coming to terms”
The leaves blow cross the long black road
To the darkened skies in its rage,
But the white bird just sits in her cage, unknown.
White bird must fly or she will die.
White bird dreams of the aspen tree
With their dying leaves turning gold,
But the white bird just sits in her cage growing old.
White bird must fly or she will die,
White bird must fly or she will die.
The sunsets come, the sunsets go,
The clouds float by, and the earth turns slow . . .
Re: tetris,
That’s the Dalton Minimum, a few years later it combined with Mt Tambora to create the year without a summer.
May I sneak this little ray of sunshine, aka hope, in here, Anthony?
With catastrophe off the agenda, for most people the fog of millennial gloom will lift, at least until attention turns to the prospect of the next ice age. Among the better educated, the sceptical cast of mind that is the basis of empiricism will once again be back in fashion. The delusion that by recycling and catching public transport we can help save the planet will quickly come to be seen for the childish nonsense it was all along.
Climate facts to warm to
Christopher Pearson | March 22, 2008
The Australian
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23411799-7583,00.html
JM2, thanks for the explanation, the thing that still seems missing is the heat loss from the Earth which I would expect to also be proportional to its temperature. So the DE shoudl be more like
dT/dt=k1*solar spots – k2*T
That is partially modelled by accumulated difference in sunspots from the average, assuming that the losses are constant and that the average sunspot level is representative of some equilibrium condition.
As it happens figure 3 doesn’t seem that well correllated with e.g. GISS surface temperature (it suggests cooling between 1870 and 1940 and warming from 1940 to 2007) wheras the temperature time series has warming from 1900-2007 with a plateau from 1940 to about 1970. Perhaps a less simplistic model would give a better explanation of the observed data?
Flux Report from Louisxiv
Flux Density Values in sfu for 2300 on 2008.03.22
Julian Day No. 2454548
Carrington Rotation No. 2068,115
Observed Flux Density 0069.4
Flux Density Adjusted for 1 AU. 0068.9
URSI Serries D Flux Adjustment X 0.9 0062.0
When looking for a correlation between solar irradiance and temperature, I do not see any references to obital precession, axis tilt etc. Or is the time frame used too small for these other criteria to make a difference?
To keep the record straight, I don’t believe in climate prophets who base their predictions on “visions” or junk theories. Landscheidt made some predictions that turned out to be correct. What’s so surprising about that?
1. We know the sun is a major driver of the climate.
2. We know that the sun is not constant.
3. We know much solar activity occurs in cycles, e.g. Hale, Gleissberg, etc.
4. Thus this allows us to predict climate (warming/cooling) here on earth.
I’m not into conspiracies…
but I believe The AGW Proponents, the masterminds of this hoax, knew about these solar cycles a long time ago, and used them to launch their swindle. I think back in the early 80s, AGW proponents had foreseen, based on solar science, the warming peiod we are now in. But rather than telling the public about solar cycles, they decided to blame it all on human activity. They made it the ideal instrument to drive their socialist agenda. Margret Thatcher, in her attempt to break the power of the coal miners, simply played into their hands.
Maybe this warming period is ending sooner than they had hoped, and time has run out for these swindlers. Cooling may have started, and their hoax is about to end.
Who knows? By now they are probably rewriting the script to: “Global Cooling – the unanticipated result of human activity.”
If we see lots of AGW proponents jumping ship, it may mean cooling is on the way.
Tom in Florida:
Milankovitch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles
I believe we are at a peak.
Isn’t ‘average’ a rolling target? How do the data plot on a graph of total numbers? And, as someone uplist from here, how do today’s counting techniques compare to those used in centuries past?
AGWScoffer| There is a truth in your claim that Margaret T gave support AGW bandwagon as a way of justifying opposition to the UK’s coal industry and a way of supporting the nuclear industry. It backfired horribly.
Or is the time frame used too small for these other criteria to make a difference?
The time frame is kind of small for Milankovitch Cycles. (We are at the peak of the warm phase, however.)
AGWscofer Wrote;
“I don’t believe in climate prophets who base their predictions or ‘visions’ or junk theories./I’m not into conspiracies”
With reserve I think broadly speaking you have a opinion that many may agree with.
I would like to add my 2 cents worth, the original thought is something that is very, very elusive, theories are slowly built they don’t just happen, most are discarded for one reason or another, but many times ten ‘junk’ theories might be the bases of an acceptable one, reading a good cross section of what is posted on the Internet there are a lot of junk theories on different subjects that have in there murky background, substance.
There are several that could explain for example, why in the Hells Creek area of North Dakota fossils of crocodiles, have been found under glacier tracks. (and today not a climate for crocodiles) Northern Siberia was once semi tropical, Mammoths, horses, and buffalo’s roamed Alaska, New Zealand, before the late coming Maori’s ate most of them, had a race of peaceful fair skinned mainly redheaded people, (from where?) how has human DNA traveled the world in ancient civilizations ( thousands of years) why is there so many stories of floods in primitive cultures, all created by Hollywood ? We have to study, and when facts are not available some times proof starts with a junk theory, because then people trying to disprove the junk theory, find the real answer, if there was a history of the world, what we know about it today would not complete the first word. The biggest problem in all the sciences, is to speak out, it just does not happen, the main steam, is not into ideas that do not conform, even if there is no answer to the problem it is better to remain quite about that theory that you read on the internet than to be ridiculed behind your back.
Sunspot activity is related only to closed magnetic fields. Total geomagnetic activity may be a better indicator of climate effects than sunspot number alone:
http://sait.oat.ts.astro.it/MSAIt760405/PDF/2005MmSAI..76..969G.pdf
which brings up a second speculation. I know that earth’s
magnetic field has been weakening lately, and that we’re due for a magnetic pole switch in the next few millennia. Would
changes in earth’s magnetic field have any effect on cloud production from cosmic rays?- A. McIntire
REPLY: “Total geomagnetic activity may be a better indicator of climate effects than sunspot number alone.” Yes thats EXACTLY what I’ve been getting at.
I’ve just seen a documentary called “Saved by the Sun”. In it they theorize 3 ways the Sun might affect climate. They are as follows:
1. UV light: An increase in this causes an increase in ozone which, because its a GHG causes an increase in temperature.
2. Solar Wind: Increases in the solar wind causes more disruption to the normal east-west airflow causing warm air to flow towards the poles and vice versa. The net result being less heat is radiated into space resulting in global temp increase.
3. Magnetic field: Cosmic rays seed clouds so increases in magnetic field of the Sun decreases the amount of cosmic rays hitting the earth and therefore decreases the cloud cover and hence increases the temperature.
Now you might think that the program was proposing that recent warming wasn’t entirely due to CO2, but you would be wrong.
Throughout the program any reference to the Sun’s activity affecting climate was restricted entirely to the “historical climate” and not “recent climate”.
No reference whatever was made as to whether the Sun’s recent activity was high, low or average.
No reference was made as to whether predictions of the Sun’s future activity would be low, high or average
One of the last voice over quotes was:
This was immediately followed by a scientist (cant remember his name) stating the following:
Oops, forgot to close the blockquote after “…started with a vengence”. That last sentence is mine not the scientist’s
If the sun does go through a 100 year period of low activity it would probably take at least that long or longer to get back to where we are now climate wise
Bad URL to Climate facts to warm to.
Sorry; try this: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23411799-7583,00.html
Quote;
NASA-funded earth science researchers have discovered that during periods of increased solar activity much of the United States becomes cloudier, possibly because the jet stream in the troposphere moves northward causing changes to regional climate patterns.
End Quote;
See http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/07/010716112433.htm
The article is close to 7 years old, but may provide an answer as to why some attempts do find a sunspot/temperature linkage and others don’t. Areas well north or well south of the normal jetstream track wouldn’t be affected. Only those areas that are close to it would be affected by a slight north or south shift. Has anyone attempted to do a sunspot/temperature correlation by latitude? I assume the southern hemisphere has its version of the jet stream too. Any studies down there?
Alan Chappell
You said “Mammoths, horses, and buffalo’s roamed Alaska, New Zealand, before the late coming Maori’s ate most of them”.
This is is little wide of the mark. There have never been any Mammoth’s in New Zealand. Horses only arrived with European colonisation in the last 200 years. NZ has no native land based mammals larger than several species of small Bats. This was the case before and after the arrival of the Maori, except for the rats and dogs? they bought with them.
Down here we do have seals, one of the primary motivations for initial European colonisation.
The Maori exterminated a number of species of very large flightless birds (Moa some of which were larger than the Ostrich).
Cheers
Rob R
<blockquote cite =”G.J.M. Versteegh. Solar Forcing of Climate 2: Evidence From the Past. Space Science Reviews (2005) 120:243-286″>
“Few but well dated studies indicate an early, almost instantaneous, climatic deterioration in response to periods with rapidly decreasing solar activity.”
I found this in the referenced review paper laying out some of the results of studies that look at past climate and possible solar variability links.
The author also mentions a website that looks like a good source of info, although it was recently put down via a denial of service attack, looking through some of their broken webpages, I see promise. They look to be doing an amateur science collaboration for CO2 fertilization of plant growth. The website is
I’m doing the reading preparing a paper for a class. If I find anything else interesting I’ll try to post.
Reply to Robert R,.
Perhaps your reading problem is that New Zealand is upside down, please turn and check,it’s just 9 or 10 posts above, I wrote;
Mammoths, horses and buffalo’s roamed Alaska, ( comma) New Zealand, ( comer ) before the late coming Maori ate most of them, ( comma ) had a race of peaceful fair skinned mainly redhead people, ( comma )
Oxford Dictionary, “quote” comma (noun) the punctuation mark indicating a slight pause or break between parts of a sentence, or separating words or figures in a list.
The latest news about climate change is so alarming (the right wing would say alarmist) as to make many people want to plant their aching heads in the sand. Some scientists using advanced computer models now argue that if we want to stop the Earth from warming, the amount of carbon we should be emitting is … none. None? As in, zero? As in, shutting down the global industrial economy? After all, global energy demand is expected to accelerate until at least 2020. Yet attempts even to slow the rate of increase of carbon emissions have paralyzed world politics for more than a decade.
Damn, makes the people who erroneosly spam “no increasing solar trend 1950s,” as if that were very relevant, look like sodding mongaloid parrots.