First this news: The Ap Index continues to fall. While the January 2009 data is not out yet, the December 2008 data is and is an Ap value of 2 according to SWPC. While this number may be lower than other sources (Leif will fill us in I’m sure), I’m plotting it for consistency since I’ve been following the SWPC data set for well over a year now.
I’ve pointed out several times the incident of the abrupt and sustained lowering of the Ap Index which occurred in October 2005. The sun has been running at a lower plateau of the Ap index after that event and has not recovered. It is an anomaly worth investigating.
From the data provided by NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) you can see just how little Ap magnetic activity there has been since. Here’s a graph from December 2008 showing the step in October 2005:
Additionally David Archibald writes with a new idea on how to use the Ap Index to predict the maximum amplitude. See below.
In late January, I contributed a post predicting that the Ap Index would have a minimum of 3 in late 2009. There is a good correlation between the aa Index at minimum and the amplitude of the following solar cycle. This also holds for the Ap Index:
The Ap prediction results in a prediction of maximum amplitude for Solar Cycle 24 of 25. This would be the lowest result since the late 17th century.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/gallery/0,26637,5037340-5006020-10,00.html
Just what sort of evaporation rate do you see in that picture?
@Charles The Operator
Hi Charly,
you are doing a job here, indeed.
Have a good night.
[don’t forget to purge my message, it’s totally OT here]
Mary Hinge,
1. Fire doesn’t need high tempertures to propagate, it supplies it’s own high temperatures. Once the fire was started (by arson, apparently) it was self-sustaining.
2. If AGW causes extreme temperatures, then the U.S. (the country with the most reliable long-term temperature records) would be a significant negative data point in the AGW theory. Looking at the U.S. state temperature records shows the U.S. set 13 state temperature records between 1990 and August 2006 (the last date when I last looked) out of 89 set between 1906 and 2006. Since the former timespan is exactly 1/6 of a century, one would expect about 15 record temperatures, so the period of warmest global temperature shows less extremes that average. Even more telling is that only one of those was set since 2000.
So does AGW cause an increase in extreme temperatures. or not? Do the alarmists need to fudge their theory once again to explain away another discrepancy? If every missed prediction can be explained away, what would ever constitute a refutation?
Flanagan (13:58:14) :
“Tony, maybe it’s best to ask local about what they observe then: Kiribati Islanders Seek Land to Buy as Rising Seas Threaten
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601081&sid=a0kuXMsICBhg&refer=australia.”
Flanagan,
This is a typical example of a politician making an attempt to cash in on the AGW hype with support of the UN and the World Bank.
There is noting wrong with the sea levels. Look for a visual:
http://www.john-daly.com/
Flanagan
I merely read thoroughly the previous link you provided which does not provide the evidence you believe. Also please note the comments about the short time scales of the records and the considerable inaccuracy of satellites
As for your current link, the politics and the land use must be considered which is mentioned here.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/opinion/news/article.cfm?c_id=466&objectid=10498927
Mary Hinge
I enjoy your posts here-it is good to have another perspective otherwise we all sing from the same song sheet.
TonyB
KlausB (14:49:48) said;
“TonyB.
quite some impressions from weather & climate change in the 1930/1940ties could be derived from the stories from Arthur. W. Upfield. I’m assuming, that you are, indeed, from down under. If not, my assumption was wrong.”
No I am from England although I have a sister living in Australia. I am not aware of Arthur W Upfierld and shall read some of his work-thank you
TonyB
I realise that Mary seems to have deviated this thread from the original topic but…..
The big fires in Australia have certainly raised the AGW debate with links to CSIRO studies warning of bigger and more frequent bushfire events such as the one last week, which have now been apparantly vindicated.
However, one does need to look at facts over a period of time and not cherry pick from one measurement (eg: Mary Hinge on last months UAH spike and subsequent proof of no link to sunspot activity !)
The fact is that Victoria has not had a big fire event such as this for 26 years. Whilst it did experience it’s highest temperature on record of 46.4, the previous record was 45.6, set on January 13, 1939.
I’m sure in 1939 no one was talking about AGW
Just to assist Mary in her quest, I have provided Melbourne’s historical records for each day of January (warmest month on average) below..
January max temps for Melbourne (for each day of January)
1 40.4 1900
2 40.7 1900
3 41.6 1991
4 40.6 1976
5 39.0 1896
6 37.8 1964
7 40.4 1988
8 43.1 1939
9 40.3 1905
10 44.7 1939
11 42.9 1898
12 42.4 1867
13 45.6 1939
14 44.0 1862
15 40.5 1883
16 42.8 1908
17 44.2 1908
18 41.8 1959
19 43.6 1882
20 43.5 1875
21 43.3 1875
22 43.9 1860
23 43.1 1906
24 43.3 1982
25 40.2 1910
26 41.8 1981
27 41.5 1858
28 42.1 1858
29 41.5 1898
30 39.7 1879
31 43.7 1968
When you look at the data you will notice that only two daily records fall after 1985 and most records were set more than 100 years ago.
I’m not trying to either proof or disprove a point here, but thse records certainly do not lead to a warming conclusion !
KLausB
I have searched for Arthur W Upfield. This is a good site;
http://www.collectingbooksandmagazines.com/upfield.html
Bearing in mind the context in which I made my comments-that savage Australian weather is nothing new-I thought this piece from the site rather ironic;
“It’s generally agreed that his best novel is Death of a Lake in which the solution to the mystery is revealed when a lake dries up. Upfield himself considered Gripped by Drought to be one of his best and I agree.”
Truly nothing seems to change, no matter how much the members of the team believe it does.
I will try and get hold of one of his books-thanks for the tip
tonyB
Ron de Haan (06:50:19) :
Decreased solar radiation leads to more cosmic dust, which in turn has an effect of increasing the speed of the Earth’s rotation, creating a negative global atmospheric angular momentum. Take a look at what is going on with that. http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/map/images/aam/glaam.gif Notice how negative it has been during this time of reduced radiation
This is an interesting topic. Ian Wilson has done some work in this area and suggests the Earth’s rotation is linked with Solar rotation rates. I have been searching for months trying to find reliable current Solar rotation rates without much success. There is sketchy evidence during past grand minima that rotation rates varied.
Today I received some feedback from NASA with an email link to someone who may be able to help me, I will report back on any developments. I am surprised this data is so hard to get, you would think this is an area of high importance.
Mary wrote:
“I visit and contribute to this site to see if any reliable and plausable alternatives to AGW can be demonstrated and tested. So far there has been nothing that can be verified and substantiated but that may change, it’s called science.”
It is entirely possible to model the climate of the past century with no reference to greenhouse gases. One example is the paper by Tsonis et al. titled ‘Synchronized Chaos’ discussed here:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070801175711.htm
It is agnostic in that it models the observed climate changes without prescribing any causal factors.
In this sense it is subversive, as greenhouse gasses could then be responsible for difference percentages of the forcing depending upon how one models aerosols, albedo, water vapor and humidity feedbacks, etc.
OT. The magnetic field strength for region 1012 was estimated at 1989G [at poor seeing]
“John Finn (08:08:16) :
Wally (04:23:37) :
do not think the fall in UAH temperatures is going to be as large as David, but my (admittedly amateur) model does show some cooling over the next six months. It did correctly predict the small uptick in january.
What about February?”
January was predicted at 0.27 versus the 0.31 from UAH. Going forward their is a slight downtick, to 0.22 in february falling to 0.15 by April. Of course with a model with at best a ±0.2 C accuracy the two decimal points is a bit pointless. My model is going to get less and less real because I do not have any ongoing optical thickness values to put in. I am assuming constant for now. I checked with the SAGE II project and found out they stopped publishing their data in 2000 due to instrument issues and that is the latest data I have found. SAGE III is taking similar data but I have only found binary files I do not know how to read and I do not think those are publicly available.
To get back on topic, looked at a plot I had with the effect of Sunspots and it had them at about ±0.1 C, so not real big but something.
To get the facts straight (again) the police reckon two of the main six fires were started deliberately. Every year there are about 30,000 bush fires, of these about half are started deliberately. As I have tried (obviously in vain) to get through to you is that the scale of these fires was down to a combination of factors, that being the heat, drought and wind.
pyromancer76 (14:14:34) :
Is that your real name? If you don’t like discussions with people who may not share your views then too bad. The long winter evenings must just fly by for you.
Sigh… off course there is evaporation every summer, it’s just that there is greater evaporation in hotter temperatures. Do you not read a post before replying to it?
I’m sure if you keep looking at your
godsun then the spots will come. While your waiting why not check out this correlation between global mean temperatures and sunspots http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1870/plot/gistemp/scale:300Oh…there isn’t any…none at all…not a sausage…
Keep looking!
Which planet does that happen on? Not this one that I’ve ever seen. Sheesh!
Mary Hinge (11:46:18) :
I am not the first to say this here, but please do keep posting, Mary H. You come across as someone who holds their views genuinely. The last thing we want is for any genuine person who does not agree with the local “consensus” to be suppressed. [Disclosure : I have been banned from an AGW website for posting a scientific paper that disagreed with AGW.]
Strange how the satellite readings correlate well with meteoroligical stations.
I have downloaded the Global Surface Temperature data from the Hadley Centre (Hadcrut3 http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/diagnostics/global/nh+sh/monthly), and the UAH global LT satellite data (http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/public/msu/t2lt/tltglhmam_5.2).
I have then graphed them together. (I don’t have a website so can’t post the graph anywhere). They do indeed correlate well, in that they both go up and down at about the same time.
However, there are two noticeable discrepancies from a casual visual inspection of the graph :
1. The temperature trend is much greater in Hadcrut3 than in UAH. It has increased maybe 0.2 to 0.3 deg C more, in the ~30 years.
2. The UAH LT temperature seems to lag the hadcrut3 surface temperature by a few months.
I have not done a rigorous mathematical/statistical analysis on these, but if my visual inspection is correct then it raises a couple of issues wrt AGW:
As I understand AGW, it is primarily the CO2 that has got up to the LT that traps outgoing radiation, converting it into heat which then finds its way back to the surface. So, if AGW is correct, the LT should heat before the surface, not after, and the LT should heat more than the surface, not less.
I’m not inclined to place a lot of weight on this, because I have not done a proper study of it, but I would be interested if anyone would care to provide an explanation.
Hey .. on topic for a change, I was wondering what you folks thought about this: http://geomag.usgs.gov/downloads/pt2008.pdf
Figure 7 at the bottom seems to show that a corelation of sunspots to magnitism, .. meanwhile … this article, which I found listed in the references for the paper above could explain why volcanic activity added to low sun magneticism could alter our weather patterns, and over the long term our climate conditions. Please note this second paper mostly deals with earthside events to the atmosphere.. but indicates the sun also contributes to the whole deal.
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=5846&page=1
anyhow, Im in over my head.. but what I got from my research is that Anthony is right on in thinking that the magnetic index is the missing link between our sun and our climate changes.
its probably the most wildfire prone area’s on the planet.
nobwainer, the most bushfire prone place in Australia and probably the planet is Western Australia’s Great Southern Woodland. Bushfires burn pretty much continuosly there. One fire in the mid-90s burned continously for 2 years and consumed 4 million acres approximately.
Most Australians have never heard of the Great Southern Woodland or the fires, that’s because nobody lives there. So no one, least of all the media cares about the fires that are bigger than all the rest of the bushfires in Australia put together.
The only news of the fire in the 90s that made the media was 50,000 emus that died up against the vermin fence trying to escape the fire.
So as others have noted the problem in Victoria wasn’t the fires. It was the number of people living in the bush without adequate fire breaks, etc.
What caused the deaths was a deadly cocktail of people’s complacency, government pandering (to the Greens) and ineptitude, and Green zealotry.
Not everyone. There was a story this week about a man who was fined $50,000 a couple of years ago for cutting a firebreak around his house. His house survived while almost all the other houses in his area burned down.
Mary Hinge (13:16:45) :
“I look at other opinions, and more importantly, reliable scientific evidence. I have seen plenty of opinions, but that’s all they are, opinions (an excellent description of the AGW point of view). The scientific literature (i.e the reliable sources)(a subjective decision as to reliability?) do not sem to have too much in the way of convincing evidence that AGW is not happening(where is the empirical data that anthropogenic global warming is happening?). The overwhelmingly vast majority point to the fact it is happening(where is this vast and overwhelming majority of empirical data showing that anthropogenic global warming in occurring?). I visit and contribute to this site to see if any reliable and plausable alternatives to AGW can be demonstrated and tested(I visit this site to find any empirical data that may be made available that proves the AGW theory). So far there has been nothing that can be verified and substantiated but that may change, it’s called science(I agree. Perhaps Dr. William Gray can help with your dilemma: .http://icecap.us/index.php/go/political-climate/on_the_hijacking_of_the_american_meteorological_society/. Note particularly the appendix parts A and B).
Richard M @ur momisugly 14:51:21
It appears that life and particularly humans have flourished in warm periods and suffered during cold periods. As such, a logical mind would expect to see many more quality research papers telling us about the improvements to our lives if warming continues.
I have three basic arguments I use against AGW believers and they go like this. The first responds to your point quoted above. All three of these are quite shocking to the AGW believers as they are just so … so … so … outre!
1. A higher CO2 content in the atmosphere on a warmer Earth will be beneficial for life on Earth. A warm planet is a happy planet.
2. The planet is not heating; the oceans are not rising; the polar bears are not dying.
And the third, my favourite, that I’d love to be at the AAAS meeting to ask Al Gore:
3. Clearly you think the planet is too hot. How could do you want it?
Al Gore, planetary thermostat!
Mary Hinge (16:03:00) :
….
I’m sure if you keep looking at your god sun then the spots will come. While your waiting why not check out this correlation between global mean temperatures and sunspots http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1870/plot/gistemp/scale:300
Oh…there isn’t any…none at all…not a sausage…
Keep looking!
See http://web.me.com/wally/Site/Wallys_Climate_Blog/Entries/2009/1/31_A_closer_look_at_the_model.html
After subtracting effects of oceans and volcanoes from my model there does appear to be a sunspot effect. I will have to look at it some more. I also need a lot more cycles to say anything significant. Trying to correlate sunspot numbers to temperature records does not work because the effect is not huge or it has a significant lag say 10 to 12 years.
bluegrue (09:00:55) :
Allan M R MacRae (05:59:08) :
Excerpt:
“Only 8% members of the Scientific Research Society agreed that “peer review works well as it is.” (Chubin and Hackett, 1990; p.192)…
Sorry blue – Your reference did not work. Did you make this up?
>..which had nothing whatsoever to do with global warming and everything to do with capitulating to greenie idiots who insist on preventing by any means the proper management of Eucalypt
It is a mathematical fact that on Saturday the capital city of Melbourne broke its February temperature record by 3.2C (155 years of records) – the previous record was set just 26 years ago. It is a mathematical fact that the Victorian state record for February was broken by more than 2C – the previous record was set just 5 years ago. It is a mathematical fact that the fire danger during this event was the highest ever observed in Victoria. It is a mathematical fact that Melbourne and surrounds have experienced their longest drought on record, their hottest drought on record, their driest drought on record, their longest heatwave on record, their driest start to a year on record and their hottest day on record.
John you are out of your depth – you have no training relevant to this area have never published any relevant science. You are not an expert, and bluff doesn’t work against facts available to anyone who cares to look. Your rants against land clearing simply lays bare that you scepticism has nothing to do with science, but is rooted in your dislike for liberals and greens.
>The fact is that Victoria has not had a big fire event such as this for 26 years…
The fires in 2006/07 burnt the second largest area on record. The 2002/03 fires burnt the third largest area on record. The 2009 fires killed 4 times more people than any previous fire event.
How can anything on this site be taken seriously? How can so many people write confidently and be so wrong.
As for David’s predictions, lets revisit them in July. I trust he will eat humble pie and apologise and compensate those who will suffer the consequences of delayed action on climate change as a result of his work.
Take a look at inverse length of solar cycles correlated with temperature 1860-1980+ at this NOAA site:
http://www.oar.noaa.gov/spotlite/archive/images/sunclimate_3a.gif
>1. A higher CO2 content in the atmosphere on a warmer Earth will be beneficial for life on Earth. A warm planet is a happy planet.
A warmer planet will lead to massive increases in sea level (check with your local geologists about how high sea level was 120K ago when the planet was only slightly warmer). stably stratify the oceans sending the deep ocean anerobic (as happened in the end Permian extinction evet and suffocated deep ocean life), dry out the subtropics (as is happening on a global scale right now – yep Australia, SW USA, southern Europe, northern Africa are all getting drier), increase the severity of droughts , heatwaves , flood, fires. Oh, and CO2 acidification will stop the ability of corals to form from about 2050 – already this is evident in deep sea corals in the southern ocean and in shore reefs of the Great Barrier reef. Around this time the southern ocean krill will cease to have viable shells (don’t believe me put a few in a fish tank and elevate CO2 to 500ppm like the University of Tasmania recently did).
>2. The planet is not heating; the oceans are not rising; the polar bears are not dying.
The last decade has been a decade degree hotter than a century ago. The sea level correct for seasonal affected reached its highest level on record. The wiggle watchers have stopped watching as global temperatures have taken off in the last year – up 0.4C in just 12 months. Watch for some really high temperatures in the coming few years.
>3. Clearly you think the planet is too hot. How could do you want it?
When your economy, social structure, infrastructure, ecosystems are tuned to a certain climate and you change then you will suffer major consequences. Its the change that matters not the the average temperature.
I trust you will stop using these talking points in future.
REPLY: “I trust you will stop using these talking points in future.” Mr. Jones, let me make something perfectly clear. You don’t run this blog, I do. The decision about what topics to encourage and which to discourage is not yours to make, or even to suggest. – Take a timeout. I don’t want to see you here for at least 24 hours. – Anthony Watts