Examining SORCE data shows the Sun continues its slide toward somnolence

Hi,
I think Leif might differ but this could be a new grand minimum. Penn and Livingston look to be right more and more. However TSI does vary enough to correlate to cooling or warming. I do how ever think it is related to the Tropical Thunder storm regions and the link between the ionosphere and troposphere. A simple change of 2 to 3% in cloud cover is enough to explain the warming and cooling of the historical period.

I wonder why no one is crying that the sun is dying?
Seems like that would have been a new cry long ago.

I’m a geologist/mining engineer so I’m very much uninitiated in the field of solar physics except for the wonderful tutorial that I am exposed to on this blog almost daily. I’ve followed the drama of the failed forecasts of when cycle 24 is going to begin and heard of desperate researchers who are almost counting dust mites on instrument objective lenses.
It is certainly easy to see in your first SCORCE figure the damping of TSI variance with time. But also evident is the decline in intensity to 1360.7 watts. Is this particularly low? Normal? When you get a long quiescent period like the Maunder minimum, does the intensity continue to decline or does it flatten out and sit there for decades?

Everyone was thinking in dec 2012 when the Mayan calender ended that was going to be the year when we had a super sunspot year and the world would change. Well lets turn it around and say that in dec 2012 cycle 24 still wont hav started and yes things will change but not like some expected!! Hmmmm

John H (16:08:06) says :
“I wonder why no one is crying that the sun is dying?
Seems like that would have been a new cry long ago.”
It take too much creative energy and marketing chutzpah to tax and subjugate on the basis of a declining sun. AGW is so much better for that.

The first thing that strikes me when I see that top graph is the amplitude.
To be more precise, the waning of amplitude vs time.
I would like to see 1992 to 1997 for a comparison.
Is this to be expected, or is this just another example of the waning amplitudes we see in flux, ssn and gcr’s (last 2-4 mos)?
I am reminded of the behavior of a complex piece of equipment as the batteries slowly die out.
Those 3 data sets behavior is attention-getting.
Add TSI to the list and it gets in your face.
Really would like to hear from Dr. Archibald on this.

Oops. TSI, not TSE.

REPLY: There’s uptick is in 10.7cm flux (magenta) I don’t see much if any of an uptick in the TSI (dark blue) – Anthony
I see that, too. The amplitude falls of there as well.
What you might see on a oscilliscope hooked to a radio signal as the transmitting object goes beyond the range of reception.
Take that graph, run a straight line from the latest midpoint back across to the left. What do you see?

As the suggested main driver of climate wanes, so does the Global Warming.
More than just Antarctic Ice is spreading, so is the fall of Global Temps.
Do you suppose they will snap out of it should the Sun suddenly turn orange on a clear day? I have wondered to myself about that many times.
Exaclty what would a 180 from Global Warming 24/7 media blitz succumb to?

I wonder if there’s connections here.
TSI continues to drop, SST’s have peaked when the TSI was at the highest level in the last solar cycle and has dropped since, it also appears the SOI is now on a noticable upward trend (hit +10 today) since cycle 23 was winding down towards the minimum.
If these connections hold any weight, than the AGW house of cards really will be falling down.

On Leif’s graph the dotted blue line is not rising; in fact toward the end it is running along the tops of the readings, instead of the middle. The solid blue line runs along the bottom, and it is rising. So why is flux rising, and the TSI is just getting more still?
==========================================

[snip posted on wrong thread, no politics allowed on the surface of the sun]

Come on dark prophet!,
speak out again your lie,
tell us we are doomed,
tell us we will die,
of warm, heat, by our sins provoked,
old sun by your cry has been also scared
and caused a long and deep chill instead

d (16:34:39) :
Everyone was thinking in dec 2012 when the Mayan calender ended …

Actually, the Mayan calendar does not end in 2012, as much as it simply cycles and starts over again, as it has done 14 previous times. Mayan’s understood natural cycles very well.

I think I must be missing something. TSI appears to be about 0.05% lower than it was 5 years ago – and this is supposed to cool the climate. How exactly?

I believe TSI does not include the solar magnetic flux’s influence on the earth and this is also a critical factor. Tapping et al produced this paper in 2006
MODELLING SOLARMAGNETIC FLUX AND IRRADIANCE
DURING AND SINCE THE MAUNDER MINIMUM
which is worth a look
http://www.lps.umontreal.ca/~paquetteh/Maunder_SP.pdf

“John Finn (17:25:56) : How exactly?”
Don’t look for exact John. Even Einstein wasn’t exact.

I have speculated spectral shift of TSI, but that got me nowhere, and for good reason. Amplitude is the behavior of the day, so I’ll now defer to Amps.
Ain’t got no flow. Too contricted. Valve is jammed slighty ajar from closed.

kim (17:37:34) :
John Finn 17:25:56
Interesting that you ask how such a small deviation in TSI can have large climatic effects. That is the most important question, if, in fact, the sun directs the climate. We don’t know the answer and great prizes await those who figure it out. Leif is dubious about the connection because if the connection is through TSI then the magnifying effect of whatever is the connecting mechanism would introduce an unstable climate sensitivity, which we do not see.
So, instead of being apparently dismissive, start getting curious. What is the solution to this great question?
=====================================
Yes and in the mean time low temp records from 1880 are broken today.
So what is happening?
http://www.thestarphoenix.com/Record+cold+temperatures+Saskatchewan/1531746/story.html

“These data are plotted on the same scale as the SORCE data.”
Am I missing something? The horizontal scale sure looks different on the graphs for the two cycles.
The x-axis covers six years in the present cycle but ten years in the previous one.

Along the lines of my previous comment, it is worth looking at some of the recent papers by K.-K. Tung et al: http://www.amath.washington.edu/people/faculty/tung/publications.html (e.g., “Constraining Model Transient Climate Response using Independent Observations of Solar-Cycle Forcing and Response” or “Solar Cycle Warming at the Earth’s Surface in NCEP and ERA-40 data: A linear Discriminant Analysis”. It is also worth reading what Hansen et al at GISTEMP have to say about solar irradiance in their 2008 climate summary: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2008/

kim says:

What we do know is that it is not from CO2 because the rise in CO2 curve doesn’t match the underlying rise.

No? Looks like a pretty good match to me: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3039/2782192258_e2f6b5e758.jpg with a transient climate response (TCR) of ~2 K, which is right about at the center of the IPCC range for this parameter. Of course, this comes along with caveats regarding contributions from other forcings (e.g., both positive forcings from other greenhouse gases and negative forcings from aerosols) and other sources of climate variability that makes the actual determination of a TCR or equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) from the instrumental temperature record subject to quite large error bars. (Better estimates comes from paleoclimate events, such as the last glacial maximum, response to volcanic eruptions like Mt Pinatubo, and…best yet…combining all of these data together.)

Robert Wood (16:17:13) :
I agree with Jim. Temperature is surely most sensitive to the Earth’s albedo….. even in the Global Climate Models used by the warmenists.
How do they explain this remains static?
Maybe one of the Team can put me really to rights on this question.
That is probably the biggest fraud in the models. The generally accepted effect of a CO2 doubling just due to radiative forcing is only about 1 deg C, and this is with a lot of hand-waving. To “fit” the hockey stick observations, the modelers force unsubstantiated amplifiers into the models. The biggest one is the theory that as CO2 and temperature rise, clouds disappear so the albedo rises. I’m sure there are meteorologists who can easily disprove this theory based on temperature, humidity, and CO2 variations. I don’t think that the warmer tropics have significantly less cloud cover or that the high CO2 from autumn forested areas make clouds disappear.

Looks like some of the downward spikes correlate to hurricanes. Can someone overlay a “storm” graph on the tsi graph? Just curious.
REPLY: Hurricanes in no way have any effect here. This data is measured from satellite in space, the dips are sunspots like the monster dual spots in October 2003 – Anthony

Terry Jackson (18:06:37)
What happens in Alaska as far as winter temps directly affects both Canada and the US, as the cold Arctic air masses develop there and plunge south and west.
The first indication last fall was when the temps in Fairbanks plunged to -20F.
It got steadily worse as the season wore on. I would expect more of the same this year, and progress steadily towards an even colder winter.
Which is why I say time runs thin for AGW.
They must surely know it. With GCR’s a year behind solar activity, next winter’s shadow looms large.
Dead quiet solar activity hold little hope at that length of delay.

How can you have a ramping flux, but nothing else is happening?
I’m going to keep on guessing at this in a vacuum.
The flux is the voltage. The gauss of the spots & faculae are the amperage.
The voltage may rise in a cycle, but rise in isolation.
TSI, ain’t got no amperage, ain’t got no melody.
Today, the volume on the Solar Index was minimal. Shares traded at under $1, and papers were filed to request more time until deslisting occurs.

John Finn 17:25:56
Interesting that you ask how such a small deviation in TSI can have large climatic effects. That is the most important question, if, in fact, the sun directs the climate. We don’t know the answer and great prizes await those who figure it out.
John Finn,
I believe that the answer to your question is the Solar/Lunar Tides.
I am now convinced that the small variations in Solar insulation of
~ 0.1 % has an effect upon the world climate but that this effect is relatively
muted. In other words, I am asserting that if there is a mutiplicative
factor that amplifies the effects of the small changes in solar insulation,
it is not large.
The model I have develop argues that, on centennial time scales, the Earth’s climate is primarily driven by a combination of changes in the
Earth’s rotation rate and changes in the amplitudes of the lunar/solar tides.
This model asserts that the level of solar activity, the changes in the Earth’s rotation rate and the amplitudes of the solar/lunar tides are all driven by the same underlying mechanism.
I am arguing that the apparent synchronous variation between
the level of solar activity and the Earth’s average temperature is just that,
and APPRARENT synchronization. The two phenomenon just appear to
go up and down together. They are not strongly coupled.
Hence, my money is on the lunar/solar tides (and accompanying changes in the Earth’s rotation rate) as the link between level of solar activity and the Earth’s climate. These important linking factors negate the need to have a multiplicative factor to amplify the small changes in solar insolation.

Guillermo
Thanks for plotting the log of variance. That decline of about 1.5 orders of magnitude lower than the previous 1996 minimum appears to be a dramatic change.
The current cycle 23 is longer than the previous cycle 22.
Could there be a correlation of this decline in variance with the length of the cycle?
Note the decline in global temperature with increasing cycle length:
Reichel, R., P. Thejll, and K. Lassen (2001), The cause-and-effect relationship of solar cycle length and the Northern Hemisphere air surface temperature, J. Geophys. Res., 106(A8), 15,635–15,641.

It has previously been demonstrated that the mean land air temperature of the Northern Hemisphere could adequately be associated with a long-term variation of solar activity as given by the length of the approximately 11-year solar cycle. In this paper it is shown that the right cause-and-effect ordering, in the sense of Granger causality, is present between the smoothed solar cycle length and the cycle mean of Northern Hemisphere land air temperature for the twentieth century, at the 99% significance level. This indicates the existence of a physical mechanism linking solar activity to climate variations.

This may lead to a correlation between the decline in variance with the decline in global temperature where both correlate with the length of the cycle.
Anthony – regarding norman hasty’s comment, he may have meant the opposite – could the Forbrush dropouts be triggering storms?
i.e. sudden reduction in TSI – gives a sudden reduction in heating – causing a spike in cooling temperature gradient. Could that trigger storms?

John Finn
Remember that SORCE was put into service into service in 2003 which was not the peak of cycle 23. On the contrary, it was already on the downslope considerably. If normalization of previous measurements can be believed (and the data in the link below seems reasonable), the decrease is .16% – for those of us keeping track at home…
http://solar.physics.montana.edu/SVECSE2008/pdf/woods_svecse.pdf

Have a look on the recent measured albedo curve. The link is from Leif,
http://www.leif.org/research/albedo.png
It is from this paper: http://bbso.njit.edu/Research/EarthShine/literature/Palle_etal_2006_EOS.pdf
Albedo has large variations with respect to its effect in the models. If this variation were inserted in the IPCC models we would have cooling inevitably.

Why does the 12 month running average not go to the end of the data? Shouldn’t the 12 month running average be the current month and the last 11 months rather than the 12 months ending roughly 11-12 months earlier?

Leif 21:27:50
Nice explanation for my question about why the flux curve is rising but not the TSI curve. So, will there be a clue in the rising(eventually) of the rotational component curve as to whether the spots will disappear or not? Or is that presently unknown?
==============================================

John Finn (17:25:56) :
I think I must be missing something. TSI appears to be about 0.05% lower than it was 5 years ago – and this is supposed to cool the climate. How exactly?
FEEDBACK!!!!!

Some folks seem to be still trying to say TSI isn’t important because the change is so small. But the argument isn’t that this is a direct cause but that something is going on, as yet not understood, such that what the Sun does or does not do interacts with Earth and the Cosmos. There seem to be several ideas but none yet have pushed all the others aside.
The only thing that doesn’t seem to work is a direct CO2 forcing. One only has to consider any period before or after 1976-1998. How many years does an idea have to fail before you toss it away and move on?

“Pat (21:45:26) : New South Wales, Australia. Earliest snow in a decade…”
I thought they said Australia is burning?

I still think that we are dealing with a chaotic system. The beats of the system will not have much to do with the individual rhythms, there will be hills and troughs, that is the only prediction that can be made without running some sort of chaotic model ala Tsonis et al, taking in everything, from the the 7% seasonal change in the heating of the sun on the oceans to the evaporation rates,the ocean fluidity, the cosmic rays, plankton, etc. etc. It is not a simple harmonic oscillator solution. In such systems it is possible for small changes to induce large effects, but one cannot say offhand : “cause: effect”.

[I]Perhaps the FEEDBACK knows to leave that variation alone…[/I]
Maybe not . . . .only one pole was getting hotter.

Fuelmaker (18:54:58) :
Robert Wood (16:17:13) :
I agree with Jim. Temperature is surely most sensitive to the Earth’s albedo….. even in the Global Climate Models used by the warmenists.
How do they expalin this remains static?
Maybe one of the Team can put me really to rights on this question.
Perhaps, albedo magnitude, as it is measured nowadays, doesn’t include drag transfer coefficient and/or photon streams from the unexposed materials below the surface after the energy has been transferred by conduction from the subsurface to the surface.
It is a plausible explanation to your question because heat transfer in the subsurface has been often dismissed in measurements of the outgoing radiation. Until now, it has not been computed adequately, or its adequate measurement doesn’t fit into a focal idea. Kiehl and Trenberth only refer to it as “other sources”; however, the value included in their scheme related to the energy balance seems to have been deduced by simple subtraction, not from real measurements.

“Various parameters appear more important than CO2, like fluctuations of the intensity of the solar radiation on annual and century scale, which seem better correlated with heating effects than the variations of CO2 content.”
–Claude Allegre
-Institute of Geophysics, Paris

Perhaps the ratio of low versus high cloud albedo is the important factor. If I understand the cosmic ray cloud seeding theory, more low clouds should form in times of reduced magnetic activity as indicated by times of sun spot minima.

Heres one I did earlier
HADCRUT3V vs CO2 (1 year average)
http://img8.imageshack.us/img8/3634/tempvsco2.jpg
Quite a nice straight line really (it shouldn’t be of course)
And of course it does not say which came first.

John Flinn,
Are you familiar with the phrase “the area under the curve.”
Right now there is much less area under the curve compared to the previous several cycles and it is continuing.

I’m new to watching the Sun so I have a little question:
Plages appear to be associated with the formation of sunspots. We are also getting small sun spot specks appear in these plage regions. Is it possible to have a rising cycle towards a weak maximum dominated by an increasing number of plages and low contrast (invisible?) sunspot specks?

Hey Leif,
You mentioned the 27 day solar rotation a few times in this topic. What’s the significance of the solar rotation? Isn’t the Sun relatively homogenous?

Anthony,
This might make a wonderful thread!
http://motls.blogspot.com/2009/04/polish-nas-joined-climate-skeptics.html

Late to post but.
“The N.Pole isn’t responding.”
Doesn’t the ice core record (that we trust for temperature values?) show the N. Pole responding to climate change later than the S. Pole?
In addition to the excellent information given here, I suspect zeroed solar storms and reduced proton emission events permitting ozone recovery that reduces UV warming plays a (large?) part in the recent cooling.
The reducing volume of stratospheric cloud (offset by jet trails) may be significant to ozone recovery too.
Changing air currents must play a big role in the volume of ozone conveyed from high to low latitudes.
I’m looking, but any more info/opinion would sure be appreciated.
Reply: Read this post again and rethink your questions. ~ charles the moderator

Phillip Bratby (00:21:51) :
I think I must be missing something too.
You are.
The CO2 content of the atmosphere has gone up by about 100ppm, which by my reckoning is about 0.01% (I may have the math wrong).
Is this relevant? The CO2 concentration has gone up by ~30% and since it’s well accepted by pretty much all scientists (including Richard Lindzen, Roy Spencer, Jack Barrett etc) that CO2 is a ‘greenhouse gas’ which is responsible for the earth being warmer than it would be without it, this is possibly a more relevant figure. However, it is the climate forcing effect which is of real interest. The 100 ppm (~30%) increase in the past ~150 years results in an increased forcing of ~1.6 w/m2 – compared to the change in TSI forcing of around 0.2 w/m2 (averaged over the the earth’s surface).
But, to all those who responded with comments about CO2, please note that I never mentioned CO2.
And how exactly is that supposed to warm the climate enough to need to spend trillions to cure it?

Just read in a local paper that codfish population increases; this could correlate with the lower seawatertemperatures in their living areas. Therefore I would suggest to consider codfish , a temperature sensitive fish, as an indicator for de/in creasing seawatertemperatures comparable with the ARGOS seawatertemperature measurement system. Al this of course in relation with decreasing solar activity.

So, given that the oceans have a vastly greater heat capacity than the atmosphere, does anyone know what the “damping” effect (lag) may be on temperature/climate? I’m assuming there must be one; perhaps a few years, perhaps a decade or so.

I noticed the post from ‘anna v’ highlighting the albedo data on Leif’s site.
http://www.leif.org/research/albedo.png
What really stands out is the big dip in albedo which seems to coincide with the big El Nino event of 98, and subsequent warming. If this data is accurate then it would certainly seem to indicate a very significant driver in the earth’s climate. ie-ENSO phases.
It would be nice to see recent data post 2005.

Stark graphs. Furthemore my eyes detect, if anything, an element of accelerated decline in the current minimum.

The reader is now warned to put down your coffee before reading this PRESS RELEASE: Wednesday, October 20, 2004
Got that 2004?
One David Hathaway mentions 2010 as cycle 24 solar max. (I am not poking fun, is hard to deal with the unknown, but nevertheless is amusing in hindsight)
“Something strange happened on the sun last week: all the sunspots vanished. This is a sign, say scientists, that solar minimum is coming sooner than expected.
October 18, 2004: Six … long … years.”
This puts a different complexion on the *entire* SORCE dataset as showing the sun in an abnormal state. (in case you missed the quotes, is my comment)
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=15318

1. Maybe not feedback, but the climate is a chaotic system and linear or pseudo- linea mathmatics don’t necessarily apply.
2. Although the TSI change is small what about the far-extreme UV? This changes significantly more tha the visible part of the spectrum. Increase in energy deposited in the outermost region of the atmosphere surely reduces the effectiive temperatue gagdient across it (already non-linear) and so ultimately affects the heat treansfer from surface to outer space.
3.Can we see a plot of XUV radiation vs time over several solar cyvles?

One of the joys of a bibliophile is stumbling across passages like this: the past is prologue.
These two phrases caught my attention :
“”that tranquil eye which knoweth not envy”.”
“the copper brute with the firey face covered with black pimples.”
No “black pimples” today?
…-
“Notes From An African Diary*
In Africa I learned why those Scythian tribesmen, whose habits are recorded by Julian,
reserved their sharpest arrows to shoot at the sun.
To Julian, who was a sun worshipper, that was sacrilege.
Had I possessed a long-range gun on the journey to Lake Chad in the late summer of 1934,
I would willingly have sent a charge into “that tranquil eye which knoweth not envy”.
In Africa I hated the sun with an impotent fury, the fury that made Giovanni Papini,
before his conversion, speak of “the copper brute with the firey face covered with black pimples.”
On the spur of the moment, Youssef ibn Avrahim and I invented epithets even more expressive of our
helpless rage.”
*Pierre van Paasen
Days of Our Years
1903-1939

MA (04:04:36) :
anna v (22:32:17) : “I still think that we are dealing with a chaotic system…”
Have anyone ever opposed that?
Everyone who thinks that a direct cause:effect can be found concentrating on one of the input variables.
“In such systems it is possible for small changes to induce large effects”
And that means that we must prepare for that the butterfly CO2 can induce large effects, and don’t bother that much about the elephants in the room?
I was actually thinking of the small effect of TSI changes over the sun cycle as a small input. I consider that it is already demonstrated on this blog that the CO2 effect is irrelevant. H2O now, is another question. Though the perfect analogue chaotic model would include everything.

Bruce Armour (01:25:54) :
This article is interesting Bruce!
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2009/04/23_keiling.shtml

For those who have never seen this video on space weather/cosmoclimatology I’ll post the link once more :

I know this is just coincidence but my back is broad enough!
October 2007, step drop function appeared to occur in Solar output, Leif said it wasn’t unusual.
January 2008, global temps plummet 0.6°C or thereabouts. Worst winters in 20-30 years in northern hemisphere.
Solar Cycle 23 just won’t stop but keeps dragging out, Cycle 24 can’t get going. Nobody seems to have much of a real cluse when SC24 will start they keep extending the start dates every 6 months or so. When it does start it’s a damp squib!
Lousey summer weather in UK. Met Office says winter 08/09 will be as mild or milder than previous winters. Arctic summer melt didn’t break records & starts showing possible recovery. Stupid Brit half-wits keep trying to sail, canoe, walk to NP to prove it’s all melted, but keep running into ice that shouldn’t be there according to the warmists, genuine & disingenuine alike!
First October snows in 2008 for 75 years whilst UK government debates climate change bill. Coldest start to winter in UK for November for 20-30 years. 2009 coldest winter for 20 -30 years. All this is entirely in keeping with the Met Office’s understanding of Climate Change. Northern hemisphere winters significnatly colder than usual, or for around 30 years. 2009 globally cooler than 2008, 07, 06, 05 ,etc. Extended La Ninas, PDO shifts to cool phase, AMO shifts to cool phase.
Antarctic sea-ice at greatest recorded extent. Temps in Antarctica cooler. Whether it warms or cools in Antarctica it’s still in keeping with climate models as evidence of AGW.
Longest period for lack of Sunspots for almost 100 years since 1913. Cold weather records still being set on north American continent. Snows falling in the most unlikely places for the first time in living memory, or long periods of absence over 2007-2009.
Sun’s magnetic field output at 50 year low since records began.
Prof Mike Lockwood says no respite from AGW by Sun’s low output. (Expect to see hurried paper published showing Sun’s output has no effect on global climate whatsoever, never has done, never will, a best fit curve exercise.)
Surely one of these self-opinionated, two-faced, sanctimonious, duplicitous, nose in the trough taxpayer funded politicans somewhere around the world would ask the question whether if there isn’t something in it?
BTW I’m no expert but shouldn’t that period be the Suess Cycle @ c200years whereas the notional 88 year periodicity is the gleissberg cycle?

Thanks for the SORCE data report by Guillermo Gonzalez
When I went to the SORCE website a few weeks ago to check the TSI data and compare it to prior VIRGO satellite data, I found a major gap in the baseline between the VIRGO and SORCE TIM instrument data.
Then I came across this note on the SORCE website:
“Special Note on TIM (Total Irradiance Monitor) TSI Data
“”The TIM measures TSI values 4.7 W/m2 lower than the VIRGO and 5.1 W/m2 lower than ACRIM III.””
http://lasp.colorado.edu/cgi-bin/ion-p?page=input_data_for_tsi.ion#note
WOW! That’s a major difference and makes me question all prior non-SORCE/TIM data and their use in global warming models.
That difference is much larger than the 1 W/m2 variance between the solar cycles as measured by the older VIRGO TSI instruments.
If you go to the VIRGO site there is a page long, mind numbing, description of how they cobblel together data from different instruments using mathematical hammers to achieve the “final” TSI .. … Level 0 to Level 1, then Level 1 to Level 1.8, and finally from Level 1.8 to Level 2.0.
http://www.pmodwrc.ch/pmod.php?topic=tsi/virgo/proj_space_virgo#Data
Clearly TIM is simpler in design, more accurate, and provides direct TSI measurement.
A meeting in May 16, 2006 reviewed the different TSI instruments, but did not come to a conclusion rating one over the other. Open admittance that prior measurements are not as accurate as portrayed is a very sensitive scientific/political issue and silence appears safer than open debate.
TIM is the instrument of choice for future NASA flights.
I received this note from
Greg Kopp -TIM Instrument Scientist Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics
“We have been working with the TSI community on resolving these differences, starting with a NASA-organized community workshop at NIST a couple of years ago.
Since then, we have built a new facility to calibrate TSI radiometers against a NIST-calibrated cryogenic radiometer prior to flight, and have used this facility to validate the performance of the next TIM, which will launch in early 2010 on NASA’s Glory mission. Prior to the Glory/TIM, no flight TSI instrument has been validated end-to-end for irradiance under flight-like operating conditions.”

ralph ellis (02:10:11) :
…No Sunspots recently
…(Note the media lies here. A lack of sunspot activity caused the 17th century mini Ice Age, however our latest minimum has nothing to do with climate, and it is all manmade CO2. I have never seen such global deceit in my entire life.)
The theory of Sunspot activity driving ALL climate change.
http://bourabai.narod.ru/landscheidt/new-e.htm
Global Temperature vs Sunspot activity
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1978/offset:-0.1/plot/pmod/from:1978/offset:-1365.25/scale:0.2
…
Isn’t this shooting yourself in the foot????
Let’s assume xxx is the cause of GW and TSI is another modulation on that temp rise.
LOW TSI (currently) = lower temperatures – apparently true at present but then this is not explaining the CONSTANT rise over the last 30 years which must be caused by xxx.
LOW TSI has in your eyes pulled the risen temperature down to near average temps.
In the next solar maximum, whenever that occurs say 5 years time, the reduction will be removed and we will be on a new high. So there will be a total of 15 years (10 years colling as you stated + 5 more for TSI to reach maximum) of TSI cooling. This is 15 years where xxx effect has been increasing. It’s going to be very HOT. We must find what xxx is!!!!!
You make the assertion that TI is THE cause of temperature variation. Why does this evident 11 year cycle not appear on FFT plots of temperature.
http://img22.imageshack.us/img22/5025/cetssnavgfft.jpg
You then use a plot to prove this. Even this does not show the effect – Temperature shows a sinusoidal component added to a positive linear trend. The TSI shows a sinusoidal component without the trend (fortuitously over thie period you chose the TSI sinusois and the temp sinusoid are similar frequencies.
Take a look at this plot comparing temperature vs SSN and Temperature vs CO2. Which do you think has the most significant effect on temperature?:
http://img99.imageshack.us/img99/2553/hadcrutvsco2andssn.jpg

John Finn 17:25:56
Interesting that you ask how such a small deviation in TSI can have large climatic effects. That is the most important question, if, in fact, the sun directs the climate. We don’t know the answer and great prizes await those who figure it out.
Last night I have consulted with my pillow (it means that this issue was going round and round again in my subconscious). Well; this is my “pet” theory as Dr.Leif would put it:
Returning to BASICS It DOES has large climatic effects!
But attenuated and/or increased by:
Volumetric Heat Capacity
Air =0.001297 j cm3/kg
Water=4.186 j cm3/kg
3227 times
Material Thermal conductivity
Air at 0° C 0.024 W/m K 86.24 j/m K
Water at 20°C 0.6 W/m K 2160.00 j/m K
25 times
BOTH MODULATED BY CONVECTION This is where GWrs. are out of the picture

Sorry forgot to say that data is from march 1958 to july 2008

Frank K. (05:06:10) :
No one fully understands the underlying physics of the sunspot cycle.
A statement from NASA that some choose to ignore.

Ron de Haan (07:40:49) :
Frank K and Tim Channon,
Just enter the name Hathaway in the search field of WUWT.
You will know than that you are recycling “old news”
—
Yes, I know it old news, but it is good for all to review these predictions of yesteryear, in light of current events, just to emphasize the point that we don’t understand as much of the physical world as we think we do. This is a very important topic at this time as the US government is about to embark on policies attempting to “control” the climate of the earth based on incomplete evidence, controversial theories, and poorly understood physics (as expressed in the AOGCMs). And the scientists and policy makers advocating these policies are today as sure of themselves as Dr. Hathaway was back in 2004…

Bill -Figure T_est_05 shows this longer wave, with about a 50 year period. This used the FFT to filter & re-contruct the signal.
http://www.imagenerd.com/uploads/t_est_05-NVRm1.gif
Fig T_est_05 shows a fairly strong amplitude. It also shows that there is a peaking about the year 2000. This peaking around the year 2000 of this and other wave would suggest that the recent warm up could be due to the re-enforcement of several waves such as the 50 and 10 year wave.
The ~50+ year cycle seems to have a stong amplitude on both your sunspot data and east England temp.

Geoff Sherrington (04:36:50) :
The Discovery channel recently had a piece on putting small mirrors in orbit to reduce the amount of sunlight to counteract AGW from CO2. Of course no one discussed the effects of reduced sunlight on crops and such. Cures in this realm could be much worse than the “disease”. Since they think of a warmer more benign climate as being such “disease”.

All I know is that something is totally whack with the maple syrup supply. There isn’t any at Trader Joe’s. At Costco a container that used to sell for under $10 is currently $32. Is Spring so late in New England that the maple syrup run has changed?

OT, but to bill,
The straightness of your CO2 versus temperature line is just a function of the logarithmic formula and where we are on the CO2 line now.
The line is nearly straight starting in about 1985 (it isn’t before this date, it is exponential) and then it will stay almost linear till about 550 ppm (2070) and then it starts to flatten out.
It is just a characteristic of the logarithmic formulae and the position we are at now on the chart. This is, in part, why the IPCC says the trend should be 0.2C per decade because that is the near-linear trend that occurs for this time period in the theory.
You should convert your CO2 numbers to Ln(CO2) though – it won’t make much difference at this point.
http://img14.imageshack.us/img14/5721/newhadcrut3warming.png

Leif says:

You missed the point again. I must not be very good at making it. The issue was “FEEDBACK!!!!!”. If the feedbacks could amplify a variation a hundred times as small (0.05%), then they would have an enormous effect on the full 7% variation. And the solar cycle variation also happens cycle in and cycle out.

Ahhh, but these “feedbacks” also have a low-pass filter, so they are unable to see the relatively high frequency annual components …

Leif Svalgaard (07:40:23) :
The falling amplitude of TSI should give us a very clear picture of the level of strength of sunspots/faculae. Since the end of 2008, those spots have been visibly weak and greatly diminished in contrast.
Until we get some sort of halfway decent spots, the TSI is going to look like 80 grit sandpaper.

Martin Mason says:

I also don’t believe in positive CO2 feedbacks because time has shown that they have never happened.

First of all, I wouldn’t call them “CO2 feedbacks” because, unlike the feedbacks that the “skeptics” are proposing to amplify solar variations, these feedbacks are not specific to the mechanism of CO2 causing the warming. They are feedbacks that occur at least roughly the same for any source of warming.
Second of all, those who study paleoclimate generally seem to disagree with you on this point of what the past climate record shows http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/sci;306/5697/821 :

Climate models and efforts to explain global temperature changes over the past century suggest that the average global temperature will rise by between 1.5º and 4.5ºC if the atmospheric CO2 concentration doubles. In their Perspective, Schrag and Alley look at records of past climate change, from the last ice age to millions of years ago, to determine whether this climate sensitivity is realistic. They conclude that the climate system is very sensitive to small perturbations and that the climate sensitivity may be even higher than suggested by models.

Could Leif or someone equally knowledgeable please explain why the above chart shows a TSI currently at only 1361.
Previous reconstructions as discussed here:
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=1396&linkbox=true
indicate that during the recent warming we were at about 1366.
The difference is sizeable and a cause for concern.

Mother Nature is right. Stepping outside… almost May and there’s yet another cold front moved through with the howling Spring winds leaving behind a perfectly sunny day with a cold bite in the air and ice in the birdbath.
My how the years have chilled.
Haven’t been able to project a Tiny Tim since January. Good thing I looked.

The oceans are selling off its assets and no income from old source of cash!

Leif Svalgaard (10:14:22) :
“I guess one can devise a ‘feedback’ scheme that produces just what one wants to see in the data.”
You guess that? Wow, you’re really going out on a limb. LOL.
If it’s not an established fact that people devise feedback schemes produce what they want from the data, then there are no facts. Isn’t this what lies at the very core of the AGW debate?

There is some attachment to this, but I will be more interested in just the UV portion of the spectrum. I know that typicaly UV goes down 6% durring a minimum (trying to find out what it is for this minimum, but haven’t yet). Anoter thing most of us agree on is that GCR’s go up durring solar minimum. Now a question I have is what are the possibilities that lower UV’s translate to a rise in bacteria and virus’s (UV kills these) and an increse in GCR’s translates to an increse in new strains due to mutation. Could be a double whammy for infectious disease, ala the samonella outbreaks and the new swine flu. I know at this point I have no evedence, but there seems to be a plausable working theory, thought I would share 🙂

“I’ll put my trust in scientists who actually understand the difference between signal and noise in the data and who understand how to plot things so that don’t produce plots that would only be expected to show temperature (modulo noise) tracking CO2 levels if the climate sensitivity were 5X what the IPCC says it is.”
Who might those scientists be? Jim Hansen? Al Gore?

Leif Svalgaard (23:27:39) :
[i]I guess you missed the point: the variation from January to July is almost 100 times larger than the solar cycle variation of TSI…[/i]
I didn’t miss that Leif. So one is 100 times as strong and cycles in a year and the other cycles in maybe a 100 years?
Maybe if the southern hemisphere were the mirror image to the northern hemisphere maybe we could compare the temperature of Moscow North to Moscow South and know what you are talking about.

George Gillan (11:41:30) :
To what mechanism do you ascribe the yearly variations in climate (i.e. winter vs summer) – plain TSI difference, some feedback mechanism, some amplification mechanism, some other mechanism?
Leif Svalgaard (14:19:44) :
Summer/winter? northern hemisphere summer? The Earth’s axis is tilted 23 degrees, that gives you summer/winter. Nothing to do with the Sun.
Leif, you used my poor wording to dodge the question. So not ‘TSI’ but instead Received Solor Irradiance (I’m unsure of the official term), certainly affected by the Earth’s tilt. Nothing to do with the sun? Everything to do with the sun, of course. 🙂
Is it only the direct effect of the difference in solar radiation received, or is that effect increased by feedback, or amplified (but not by feedback), or some other mechanism?
The point of the question being the summer/winter effect compared and contrasted with the longer term (multi-year) variances in climate. How do the mechanisms at work compare? Of course the longer cycle ocean circulation patterns would not cause the winter/summer difference, but what of the various ‘feedback’ and/or ‘amplification’ mechanisms that people keep throwing around?
I hope I am being more clear this time.

I am not a scientist but read extensively on many scientific topics and understand statistics pretty well. I do not understand Lief’s explanation of how a 27 day solar radiation affects the amount of energy coming from the sun. Unless the sun preferentially develops sunspots and associated phenomenon in certain locations I would assume they develop randomly around the solar sphere (I understand that they develop nearer the poles and migrate to the center) and over time would develop equally at all spots, cancelling out any particular 27 rotation effect.

vukcevic (15:36:18) : I was trying to put fear of God into some of AGWs
Problem is…they believe in a Goddess, GAIA, and their most exalted preaching leader is HIM, the unnamable , that fatty alien who came from nowhere and who will take all their followers to a still unknown planet free of CO2.

[snip – The next person to mention SWINE FLU on this thread will be kicked off for 48 hours. STAY ON TOPIC – Anthony]

Leif Svalgaard (15:22:48) :
…
I’m talking about this:
http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-SORCE.png
The red curve is the TSI actually observed at and by the Earth since 2003. The blue curve is what TSI looks like at 1 AU, but this is not what the climate system sees. It sees the red curve. Now, I do not expect [and cannot explain – perhaps you can] why the red curve has no effect, and the blue has.
—
I like your stated ´simple´ dilemma which even can start to be explored without detailed physics.
To start; I don´t fully understand Leif´s statement that the oscillating red curve (observed by the Earth) has no effect [on the climate system, I assume]. Please explain.

Leif Svalgaard (15:22:48) :
[i]The red curve is the TSI actually observed at and by the Earth since 2003. The blue curve is what TSI looks like at 1 AU, but this is not what the climate system sees. It sees the red curve. Now, I do not expect [and cannot explain – perhaps you can] why the red curve has no effect, and the blue has. Explain and demonstrate quantitatively why that is in terms I [and others] can easily understand.[/i]
Leif it appears to me you are one suggesting the red curve has no effect. I merely suggested that the effect has not been measured and that the frequency of the cycle in question would have an effect on how much feedback you might receive from a given cycle.
Remove all the modifying factors then should not a TSI change of 1 over a 100 years equal a TSI change of 100 over one year? Is that well enough quantified?
The modifying factors could well change the amplitude of the net change though, with the higher frequency cycle not obtaining the same amplitude of the lower frequency cycle because of feedbacks extending into the next phase and moderating it.
I see that every day living at the edge of the Pacific Ocean. 50 miles inland the daily temperature range can be 60 degrees greater.
Seems to me the red curve annual cycle is already integrated into the climate system and may well explain some of the regular water cycles we see in the oceans. . . .some of which take years to play out and exhibit all sorts of frequencies or harmonics.
So in short I also believe the red curve has an effect. Its pretty hard to imagine how changes in TSI could have no effect. If you truly believe not perhaps you could explain how that would work. . . .some cosmic membrane that works like a water saving showerhead or something like that. . . .sounds rather cloudy.