NEW An update to this has been made here:
NOTE: This essay represents a collaboration over a period of a week via email between myself and Basil Copeland. Basil did the statistical heavy lifting and the majority of writing, while I provided suggestions, reviews, some ideas, editing, and of course this forum. Basil deserves all our thanks for his labor. This is part one of a two part series. -Anthony
Evidence of a Significant Solar Imprint in Annual Globally Averaged Temperature TrendsBy Basil Copeland and Anthony Watts
It is very unlikely that the 20th-century warming can be explained by natural causes. The late 20th century has been unusually warm.
So begins the IPCC AR4 WG1 response to Frequently Asked Question 9.2 (Can the Warming of the 20th Century be Explained by Natural Variability?). Chapter 3 of the WG1 report begins:
Global mean surface temperatures have risen by 0.74°C ± 0.18°C when estimated by a linear trend over the last 100 years (1906-2005). The rate of warming over the last 50 years is almost double that over the last 100 years (0.13°C ± 0.03°C vs. 0.07°C ± 0.02°C per decade).
Was the warming of the late 20th century really that unusual? In recent posts Anthony has noted the substantial anecdotal evidence for a period of unusual warming in the earlier half of the 20th century. The representation by the IPCC of global trends over the past 100 years seems almost designed to hide the fact that during the early decades of the 20th century, well before the recent acceleration in anthropogenic CO2 emissions beginning in the middle of the 20th century, global temperature increased at rates comparable to the rate of increase at the end of the 20th century.
I recently began looking at the longer term globally averaged temperature series to see what they show with respect to how late 20th century warming compared to warming earlier in the 20th century. In what follows, I’m presenting just part of the current research I’m currently undertaking. At times, I may overlook details or a context, or skip some things, for the sake of brevity. For example, I’m looking at two long-term series of globally averaged annual temperature trends, HadCRUTv3 and GHCN-ERSSTv2. Most of what I present here will be based on HadCRUTv3, though the principal findings will hold true for GHCN-ERSSTv2.
I began by smoothing the data with a Hodrick-Prescott (HP) filter with lambda=100. (More on the value of lambda later.) The results are presented in Figure 1.
Figure 1 – click for a larger image
The figure shows the actual data time series, a cyclical pattern in the data that is removed by the HP filter, and a smoothed long term low frequency trend that results from filtering out the short term higher frequency cyclical component. Hodrick-Prescott is designed to distinguish short term cyclical activity from longer term processes.
For those with an electrical engineering background, you could think of it much like a bandpass filter which also has uses in meteorology:
Outside of electronics and signal processing, one example of the use of band-pass filters is in the atmospheric sciences. It is common to band-pass filter recent meteorological data with a period range of, for example, 3 to 10 days, so that only cyclones remain as fluctuations in the data fields.
(Note: For those that wish to try out the HP filter, a freeware Excel plugin exists for it which you can download here)
When applied to globally averaged temperature, it works to extract the longer term trend from variations in temperature that are of short term duration. It is somewhat like a filter that filters out “noise,” but in this case the short term cyclical variations in the data are not noise, but are themselves oscillations of a shorter term that may have a basis in physical processes.
For example, in Figure 1, in the cyclical component shown at the bottom of the figure, we can clearly see evidence of the 1998 Super El Niño. While not the current focus, I believe that analysis of the cyclical component may show significant correlations with known shorter term oscillations in globally averaged temperature, and that this may be a fruitful area for further research on the usefulness of Hodrick-Prescott filtering for the study of global or regional variations in temperature.
My original interest was in comparing rates of change between the smoothed series during the 1920’s and 1930’s with the rates of change during the 1980’s and 1990’s. Without getting into details (ask questions in comments if you have them), using HadCRUTv3 the rate of change during the early part of the 20th century was almost identical to the rate of change at the end of the century. Could there be some sense in which the warming at the end of the 20th century was a repeat of the pattern seen in the earlier part of the century? Since the rate of increase in greenhouse gas emissions was much lower in the earlier part of the century, what could possibly explain why temperatures increased for so long during that period at a rate comparable to that experienced during the recent warming?
As I examined the data in more detail, I was surprised by what I found. When working with a smoothed but non-linear “trend” like that shown in Figure 1, we compute the first differences of the series to calculate the average rate of change over any given period of time. A priori, there was no reason to anticipate a particular pattern in time (or “secular pattern”) to the differenced series. But I found one, and it was immediately obvious that I was looking at a secular pattern that had peaks closely matching the 22 year Hale solar cycle. The resulting pattern in the first differences is presented in Figure 2, with annotations showing how the peaks in the pattern correspond to peaks in the 22 year Hale cycle.
Besides the obvious correspondence in the peaks of the first differences in the smoothed series to peaks of the 22 year Hale solar cycle, there is a kind of “sinus rhythm” in the pattern that appears to correspond, roughly, to three Hale cycles, or 66 years. Beginning in 1876/1870, the rate of change begins a long decline from a peak of about +0.011 (since these are annual rates of change, a decadal equivalent would be 10 times this, or +0.11C/decade) into negative territory where it bottoms out about -0.013, before reversing and climbing back to the next peak in 1896/1893. A similar sinusoidal pattern, descending down into negative annual rates of change before climbing back to the next peak, is evident from 1896/1893 to 1914/1917. Then the pattern breaks, and in the third Hale cycle of the triplet, the trough between the 1914/1917 peak and the 1936/1937 peak is very shallow, with annual rates of change never falling below +0.012, let alone into the negative territory seen after the previous two peaks. This same basic pattern is repeated for the next three cycles: two sinusoidal cycles that descend into negative territory, followed by a third cycle with a shallow trough and rates of change that never descend below +0.012. The shallow troughs of the cycles from 1914/1917 to 1936/1937, and 1979/1979 to 1997/2000, correspond to the rapid warming of the 1920’s and 1930’s, and then again to the rapid warming of the 1980’s and 1990’s.
While not as well known as the 22 year Hale cycle, or the 11 year Schwabe cycle, there is support in the climate science literature for something on the order of a 66 year climate cycle. Schlesinger and Ramankutty (1994) found evidence of a 65-70 year climate cycle in a number of temperature records, which they attributed to a 50-88 year cycle in the NAO. Interestingly, they sought to infer from this that these oscillations were obscuring the effect of AGW. But that probably misconstrues the significance of the mid 20th century cooling phase. In any case, the evidence for a climate cycle on the order of 65-70 years extends well into the past. Kerr (2000) links the AMO to paleoclimate proxies indicating a periodicity on the order of 70 years. What I think they may be missing is that this longer term cycle shows evidence of being modulated by bidecadal rhythms. When the AMO is filtered using HP filtering, it shows major peaks in 1926 and 1997, a period of 71 years. But there are smaller peaks at 1951 and 1979, indicating that shorter periods of 25, 28, and 18 years, or roughly bidecadal oscillations. There is a growing body of literature pointing to bidecadal periodicity in climate records that point to a solar origin. See, for instance, Rasporov, et al, (2004). A 65-70 year climate cycle may simply be a terrestrial driven harmonic of bidecadal rhythms that are solar in origin.
In terms of the underlying rates of change, the warming of the late 20th century appears to be no more “unusual” than the warming during the 1920’s and 1930’s. Both appear to have their origin in a solar cycle phenomenon in which the sinusoidal pattern in the underlying smoothed trend is modulated so that annual rates of change remain strongly positive for the duration of the third cycle, with the source of this third cycle modulation perhaps related to long term trends in oceanic oscillations. It is purely speculative, of course, but if this 66 year pattern (3 Hale cycles) repeats itself, we should see a long descent into negative territory where the underlying smoothed trend has a negative rate of change, i.e. a period of cooling like that experienced in the late 1800’s and then again midway through the 20th century.
Figure 2 – click for a larger image
Figure 2 uses a default value of lambda (the parameter that determines how much smoothing results from Hodrick-Prescott filtering) that is 100 times the square of the data frequency, which for annual data would be 100. This is conventional, and is consistent with the lambda used for quarterly data in the seminal research on this technique by Hodrick and Prescott. I’m aware, though, of arguments for using a much lower lambda, which would result in much less smoothing.
In Part 2, we will look at the effect of filtering with a lower value of lambda. The results are interesting, and surprising.
Part 2 is now online here
NEW An update to this has been made here:
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the LIA and MWP they say didn’t happen?
Thet were in posession of it as recently as 1995 but then they lost it.
But it was found recently, cleverly concealed under 390 tons of bristlecone pines.
I read this data from the peaks in figure 2:
1870 1937 1998
0.012 0.023 0.027
Assuming that the increase will be max 0.011 and min 0.004, thus repeating this sparse historical data, then the 2064 temp anomoly could be between 0.031 and 0.038 C. Likewise, the 2130 could be between 0.035 and 0.049 C. So if history repeats itself and these last two 66 year cycles are typical then the amount of warming over the next 122 years would be less than half of a tenth of a degree.
Raven, seeing as how the amount of warming, comparing the peaks like I am doing, has decreased, this may be more evidence that the warming ability of CO2 is overestimated. Warming of 0.011 when our emissions were low, as compared to warming of 0.004 after our emissions had been skyrocketing for 50 years, indicates that we have not had much of an impact.
John M Reynolds
Rico,
That was a very helpful exposition of your concern about the use of the HP filter. But I see no real difference between the kind of economic time series data we would use HP filtering for, and climate time series data. (If I haven’t said so before, though I think I have, there are lots of economic time series where we wouldn’t use HP filtering, because the underlying process is viewed as a random walk. So don’t misunderstand anything I’ve said to imply that HP filtering is used in economics will no regard to the nature of the time series data.) In submitting anything for peer review, I’m sure the case for using HP filtering on climate data will have to be argued more strenuously. For now, we prefer to let the results speak for themselves.
However, this point — “Moreover, it appears to me the results could be highly dependent upon the value of lambda, which essentially serves as the cut-off frequency.” — is very well taken. I am aware of the authors in the link you provided. You might likewise want to read this:
http://homepage.mac.com/eduley/_Media/hp224.pdf
which is basically making the same point. And this is the direction in which we are headed in Part II, which was clearly indicated at the end of Part I:
“I’m aware, though, of arguments for using a much lower lambda, which would result in much less smoothing.
“In Part 2, we will look at the effect of filtering with a lower value of lambda. The results are interesting, and surprising.”
So if I may say so, without sounding too impertinent, do give us a little credit here. And do not think that lambda will be an easy way to discredit the results. While one can quarrel about whether the value should be 7 or 100, around a particular value the results are rather robust. It isn’t a razor’s edged parameter where the results change dramatically with a small change in the parameter. As you say, it is something of a cutoff filter, where if you pick something too high, it will cut off and not reveal patterns that contain useful information. But the opposite side of the coin is that evidence of periodicities which persist when the lambda is set at a higher rate simply signify a stronger underlying signal, and that is too useful knowledge.
Let’s see how Figure 2 changes when we use a lower lamda, and what the inferences are that we might draw from the difference. That’s where we are going with Part II.
Basil
jmrSudbury,
I fear you may be doing what previously expressed concerns about, and are misreading Figure 2. That is not a pattern of absolute temperatures, it is a pattern of the rate of change in temperature over time, e.g. a time derivative, dx/dt. Or am I misunderstanding how you used the data? I just want you to be sure you understand what it is, in your use of it.
Basil
CA has an post awhile back that seems to show an 11 yr cycle in sea-level rate-of-change.
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1125
IT”S OFFICAL !
Scientists at “The Extream weather Conference” today in Hamburg told reporters (MSM) that Germany will have to spend 800 billion euros ( $!.2 trillion) in the next 50 years to combat global warming if it is too survive,
The antarctic ice will disappear in the next 2 decades as will the northern ice, polar bears are now dying as never before, and we must change to bio fuel in the next 5 years globally if we are to save the planet.
I am sure I have left out something but I was so dumbfounded listening to this “Scientific Press Release” it put me in shock !
Perhaps AGWscoffer can fill in the gaps, But when this’ kids stuff ‘ gets the ‘top story’ on the national news, what chances have the good guys got? The anchorman on the news channel is not going to say ” well all you dumb people listen here, the weather is going to do what it has done for the last 100 million years, no changes,”
That don’t give grandma a heart attack !
Thank you for correcting me. I thought it was another temperature anomoly graph. My mistake. Sorry for any confusion.
John M Reynolds
Basil (07:43:11): And this is the direction in which we are headed in Part II, which was clearly indicated at the end of Part I:
As soon as I submitted my last post I wished I had it back. My bad. Sorry about that. I think I’ll wait for Part II before commenting anymore.
Interesting, figure 2 has a similarity to the global ice coverage: http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.ice.area.withtrend.jpg but on a much longer scale. You did mention sinus rhythm. Maybe this is a good analog where the solar cycle is to temp, as seasonal cycle is to ice coverage?
polar bears are now dying as never before
Well, is that not true? Since the polar bear population has roughly tripled since 1950, does it not stand to reason that the number of polar bear deaths per year has also roughly tripled?
The antarctic ice will disappear in the next 2 decades
I must assume they meant sea ice? Well, 5/6 of it will disappear. (After all, it does that every year.)
What’s really interesting here is that while one would intuitively think the global ice coverage would be more of a sine wave, by combining the NH and SH ice coverages, the deep trough is the result of the SH going into summer, the upswing of the trough is the SH going into Fall (the NH has begun it’s melt phase) swinging up to a double peak. The SH ice cover is vastly more variable than the NH ice cover and so you get the deep trough in the summer and the notch cut out at the peak (NH ice cover decrease) in the SH winter. This analog may explain your figure 2 since just as both the SH and NH ice coverage are a sinus rhythm and 180 degree out of phase, the combining of two unequal size sine waves gives a new unique sine type wave. In fact this reminds me of Clilverd’s work on Solar Cycle prediction where he determined there are several harmonic waves within the series.
A Compilation of the Arguments that Irrefutably Prove that Climate Change is driven by Solar Activity and not by CO2 Emission
Dr. Gerhard Löbert, Otterweg 48, 85598 Baldham, Germany. March 6, 2008.
Physicist. Recipient of The Needle of Honor of German Aeronautics.
Program Manager “CCV, F 104G” (see Internet).
Program Manager “Lampyridae, MRMF” (see Internet)
Conveyor of a super-Einsteinian theory of gravitation that explains, among many other post-Einstein-effects, the Sun-Earth-Connection and the true cause of the global climate changes.
I. Climatological facts
As the glaciological and tree ring evidence shows, climate change is a natural phenomenon that has occurred many times in the past, both with the magnitude as well as with the time rate of temperature change that have occurred in the recent decades. The following facts prove that the recent global warming is not man-made but is a natural phenomenon.
1. In the temperature trace of the past 10 000 years based on glaciological evidence, the recent decades have not displayed any anomalous behaviour. In two-thirds of these 10 000 years, the mean temperature was even higher than today. Shortly before the last ice age the temperature in Greenland even increased by 15 degrees C in only 20 years. All of this without any man-made CO2 emission!
2. There is no direct connection between CO2 emission and climate warming. This is shown by the fact that these two physical quantities have displayed an entirely different temporal behaviour in the past 150 years. Whereas the mean global temperature varied in a quasi-periodic manner, with a mean period of 70 years, the CO2 concentration has been increasing exponentially since the 1950’s. The sea level has been rising and the glaciers have been shortening practically linearly from 1850 onwards. Neither time trace showed any reaction to the sudden increase of hydrocarbon burning from the 1950’s onwards.
3. The hypothesis that the global warming of the past decades is man-made is based on the results of calculations with climate models in which the main influence on climate is not included. The most important climate driver (besides solar luminosity) comes from the interplay of solar activity, interplanetary magnetic field strength, cosmic radiation intensity, and cloud cover of the Earth atmosphere. As is shown in Section II, this phenomenon is generated by the action of galactic vacuum density waves on the core of the Sun.
4. The extremely close correlation between the changes in the mean global temperature and the small changes in the rotational velocity of the Earth in the past 150 years (see Fig. 2.2 of http://www.fao.org/DOCREP/005/Y2787E/y2787e03.htm), which has been ignored by the mainstream climatologists, leaves little room for a human influence on climate. This close correlation results from the action of galactic vacuum density waves on the Sun and on the Earth (see Section II). Note that temperature lags rotation by 6 years.
5. From the steady decrease of the rotational velocity of the Earth that set in in Dec. 2003, it can reliably be concluded that the mean Earth temperature will decrease again in 2010 for the duration of three decades as it did from 1872 to 1913 and from 1942 to 1972.
6. The RSS AMSU satellite measurements show that the global temperature has not increased since 2001 despite the enormous worldwide CO2 emissions. Since 2006 it has been decreasing again.
II. Physical explanation for the strong correlation between fluctuations of the rotational velocity and changes of the mean surface temperature of the Earth
Despite its great successes, the gravitational theory of the great physicist Albert Einstein, General Relativity, (which is of a purely geometric nature and is totally incompatible with the highly successful quantum theory) must be discarded because this theory is completely irreconcilable with the extremely large energy density of the vacuum that has been accurately measured in the Casimir experiment.
Seaon Theory, a new theory of gravitation based on quantum mechanics that was developed eight decades after General Relativity, not only covers the well-known Einstein-effects but also shows up half a dozen post-Einstein effects that occur in nature. From a humanitarian standpoint, the most important super-Einsteinian physical phenomenon is the generation of small-amplitude longitudinal gravitational waves by the motion of the supermassive bodies located at the center of our galaxy, their transmission throughout the Galaxy, and the action of these waves on the Sun, the Earth and the other celestial bodies through which they pass. These vacuum density waves, which carry with them small changes in the electromagnetic properties of the vacuum, occur in an extremely large period range from minutes to millennia.
On the Sun, these vacuum waves modulate the intensity of the thermonuclear energy conversion process within the core, and this has its effect on all physical quantities of the Sun (this is called solar activity). This in turn has its influences on the Earth and the other planets. In particular, the solar wind and the solar magnetic field strength are modulated which results in large changes in the intensity of the cosmic radiation reaching the Earth. Cosmic rays produce condensation nuclei so that the cloud cover of the atmosphere and the Earth albedo also change.
On the Earth, the steady stream of vacuum density waves produces parts-per-billion changes in a large number of geophysical quantities. The most important quantities are the radius, circumference, rotational velocity, gravitational acceleration, VLBI baseline lengths, and axis orientation angles of the Earth, as well as the orbital elements of all low-earth-orbit satellites. All of these fluctuations have been measured.
Irrefutable evidence for the existence of this new, super-Einsteinian wave type is provided by the extremely close correlation between changes of the mean temperature and fluctuations of the mean rotational velocity of the Earth. (see the figure referred to in Section I.4). Einsteinian theory cannot explain this amazing correlation between two physical quantities that seem to be completely unrelated.
While the rotational velocity of the Earth and the thermonuclear energy conversion process on the Sun react simultaneously to the passage of a vacuum density wave, a time span of 6 years is needed for the energy to be transported from the core of the Sun to the Earth’s atmosphere and for the latter’s reaction time.
As can be seen, super-Einsteinian gravitation reveals the true cause of climate change.
“galactic vacuum density waves on the core of the Sun” err, what do you say to that?
I can’t get it out of my head that if Figure 2 is the temperature trend, then shouldn’t the tail end be negative already since the globe has been cooling recently? You can see that cooling in Figure 1. It has been publicized that 2006 was cooler than 2005 and that 2007 was only the 8th warmest, so it was cooler than even 2006. Or does the trend line not incorporate the most recent data similar to how 5 year average graphs miss the first two and last two years? The fact that Figure 2 has been on a sharp decline since 1998 indicates to me a leveling off of the temperature record (or is it the other way around). So if this cooling persists as the missing solar cycle 24 suggests, then the trend line will continue to fall.
What is the year of the last data points on Figure 2?
John M Reynolds
“I think you should read this paper if you haven’t already.”
“I think I’ll wait for Part II before commenting anymore.”
What’s the rush?
Grüß Gott Herr Dr Loeebert,
wirklich sehr interessant. Vor 3 Tagen haben wir in diesem Forum über Bienen diskutiert.
This theory you’ve presented I must say is completely new to me, and a very interesting one. Large rotational bodies in our galaxy causing vacuum density waves, as you call them, which effect solar activity and thus climate on earth is certainly highly plausible. I could imagine the galaxy wobbles too. Has this theory been published in scientific journals, or presented to cosmo-climatologists such as Dr Svensmark?
What magnitude of temperature decline do you expect to see in the next few decades? Will the earth’s rotational velocity decrease more than usual, or will it decrease an extent that has been normal in the past?
You absolutely should present this to MIT physicist Lubos Motl:
http://motls.blogspot.com/
I’d be very interested to hear his comments on this.
Finally it is also very surprising to find a German scientist who has a a “different” view on climate change. We need to get you alone in a room with Dr. Ramstorf!
PS Could you kindly provide additional links to this theory?
Anyone see this?
http://www.merinews.com/catFull.jsp?articleID=130951
John M Reynolds,
The data is annual, and the last year is 2007. What you are seeing in FIgure 2 is not the temperature trend, but the rate of change in the temperature trend. And it is the rate of change in the smoothed series, not the rate of change in the actual series. Here is the raw data, from 1990, being plotted in Figure 2:
1990 0.01422
1991 0.01434
1992 0.01556
1993 0.01829
1994 0.02145
1995 0.02414
1996 0.02586
1997 0.02690
1998 0.02597
1999 0.02361
2000 0.02187
2001 0.02034
2002 0.01812
2003 0.01543
2004 0.01277
2005 0.01060
2006 0.009040
2007 0.008408
What it shows is a “core trend” (the smoothed series) that is accelerating until it peaks in 1997, and then it begins to decelerate. We’re talking time derivatives here, dx/dt, not the trend itself.
Basil
Addendum, to John Reynolds
Look carefully at Figure 1. After 1997, do you see the smoothed series begin to slowly curve downward? When it reaches an inflexion point, and turns downward, the lines plotted in Figure 2 will cross the x-axis (zero).
Basil
Your cyclicities in the fig 2 graph are not solar, they are lunar. Measure the peak/trough/peak periods and 18.6 years (multiples and fractions), as peak to peak, trough to trough comes up several times.
This is the the lunar nodal period. The moon’s orbit is inclined to that of the earth around the sun by a tilt of 5.1 degrees. when the moon is at the extremes of the tilt in it’s orbit, it can be 10.2 degrees north or south of its extreme position every fortnight. A good description can be found at http://www.fourmilab.ch/earthview/moon_ap_per.html
The lunar apsidal period of 8.847 years also leads to cycles of ~58.8 years, ~29years and 4.43 years as the rather elliptical lunar orbit aligns with the sun at the annual perihelion and aphelion points of the earth-moon orbit around the sun.
The cycles are cumulative and have major effects on the ocean’s ability to store, retain and move heat around the planet.
Fish seem to be able to detect the changes, as do fishermen:
http://sharpgary.org/FisheryTimeline.html
especially:
http://www.fao.org/DOCREP/005/Y2787E/y2787e01.htm#TopOfPage
These gravitational minutiae coincide closely with new and full moons, and generate extreme tides, and affect ocean gyres, meridional atmospheric circulation and the length of day on earth due to tidal braking. The affects also influence the timing of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and the plate tectonics of the earth.
The sun, in contrast, is amazingly constant.
Chris Knight,
Make a note to yourself to revisit this lunacy after Part II. 🙂 (No personal slight intended. That’s an interesting argument you make. But in light of what we’ll post in Part II, it doesn’t hold. Or at least would have to be seriously modified.)
Basil
[…] came across this very brainy study named “Evidence of a Significant Solar Imprint in Annual Globally Averaged Temperature Trends” recently which raises some interesting evidence concerning climate change. I’m no scientist, […]
Thanks Basil. You may be under the impression that we are in disagreement when we are not. Thank you for confirming that Figure 2 is based on the smoothed line from Figure 1. By the way, a trend is the rate of change over time of absolute or averaged temperatures, so we actually agree on that. I don’t know why you are using the phrase “core trend” to denote the averages of absolute data as though it was a style, but now that I know how you use the word trend, I will be less confused in the future.
Thanks again for all your hard work. You are doing a great job.
John M Reynolds
Dr. Gerhard Loebert appears to be a plant, bait and switch. It is up to him to prove he isn’t. I am not saying 100% wrong but can’t find anything but blog posts everywhere. Don’t take it too seriously. LOD thing is interesting found stuff at NASA and other research sites. I think that may need some looking into. Anybody let us know if you find something on Dr. Gerhard Loebert.