Solar Scientist Ken Tapping: "No sign of the new cycle yet"

bill (02:04:47) :

If I understand you correctly then there are two (or more?) temperature effects on CO2 concentrations? and for some reason the do not exist together.
One is of the order of months and the other is of the order of 1000 years.
I think you are suggesting that currently we are under the influence of the monthly version (although presumably there may be a millenial effect that has not yet shown?)
What I find difficult to understand is why this effect (monthly) is totally absent from the ice core records. Why didn’t the CO2 level leap up by a few hundred ppm when the temperatures changed by a few deg C ? The younger Dryas is similarly not included in this monthly response. What has changed so drastically?
Can we agree that there are many sources of CO2?
One of them is the long turn over when ocean currents take CO2 rich cold layers and bring them up ( Cold PDO), this, from the ice records seems to be incremental (80ppm/100000) makes an undetectable change within our time frames.
Another source/sink) is the chemical absorption of CO2 by the surface levels of the Oceans as the temperature falls as well as the yearly biological absorption and exhalation by increasing growth during CO2 spurts and decreasing during lack. This happens in ppms whose changes we can detect. It is not simple and the science is not settled. These will not show in the ice core records 1) because there few biological sources where the cores are taken, 2) they are transient and follow closely ( within 6 months) the temperature so they would be a tiny perturbation.
In any case, I think the whole CO2 measurements business is ridiculous. It is comparable if we went to the top of Olympus, the Andes, the Rockies, the Alpset etc and recorded temperatures and called them world temperatures. Beck has shown long term records where levels of CO2 were quite high, and I am sure that if we measured CO2 with the density of temperature measurements this would become the norm. Even the idea of going to the coldest parts of earth, where nothing grows, and measuring CO2 (ice core) and calling it world standard is ridiculous. It is just a measure of CO2 in the ice regions, that is all.The AIRS plots have shown the seasonal variation of CO2 and the localization, not well mixed that is, but they are from over 5000 meters height. I am waiting for the data from the Japanese satellite which will be measuring surface sources and sinks to see if my intuition is justified. ( The US one blew up in smoke)

bill (05:04:25) :
I thought it was agreed that CO2 was globally mixed.
Only by the school of science by vote. AIRS plots say differently.
But the idea was that iceage-warm-iceage was over long period and should therefore show on these rapid response CO2 levels.
there is not the time accuracy in the icecore method to see such things. In addition very little biota in icebergs.
If you now do not believe the CO2 results from Ice cores then how can you say that CO2 change follows Temperature change and not vice versa?
I did not say I do not believe in the ice core measurements, I just do not believe that the magnitudes are reflecting the earth averages at the time. They are just that, measurements in the cold regions.
but if you accept satellite temperatures of upper atmosphere this is just what you are doing.
The whole fuss with CO2 correlations to temperature started with earth measurements of temperature, the sinful GISS. The record of satellite temperatures is too short to speak about any strong trends.

Leif – As I understand recent threads from the viewpoint of an interested spectator, rather than as a Physicist / Astronomer / Meteorologist, I gather that you theorize that reduced solar wind leads to a contraction of the heliosphere, which opens up the solar system to increased galactic/intergalactic cosmic ray exposure. The resultant increase in Earth atmospheric ionization provides increased sites for cloud droplet nucleation, and from there we are to get increased cloud cover.
It occurs to me that Tony Phillips over at SpaceWeather had spent last year beating his drum about the mysteries of noctilucent clouds. One of the mysteries is that the clouds had been reported more in the past few years. (Personally, I’ve only seen the phenomenon once – just last week. I understand that the ISS gets nice tangential views of them fairly regularly).
Since it might only take a very few percent of increase in Earth’s albedo to generate a modest heliogenic global cooling, could the increased cosmic rays be seeding an increase in very high altitude ice clouds, seen from the ground as increased Noctilucent Clouds over the past few years? Could this be another piece of the puzzle of global temperature cycles?

Leif Svalgaard (23:00:30) :
In defense of ‘models’: almost everything we do today goes ‘through’ a computer model, and the models are usually extremely good.
I must say that, having spent much of my life writing computer simulation models of one sort or other, that’s not how I see them at all. I think they’re far too seductive. They’re like Tomb Raider computer games (which are also simulation models). I think it’s far too easy for computer programmers to fall in love with the programs they’ve written, and believe them more readily then they should.
My latest just-for-fun simulation model has been a model of the solar system, implementing Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation and using a set of planetary locations and velocities I pulled off NASA’s Horizons website. It’s been a revelation to write and explore. And it’s been gratifying to see that my planet Earth goes round the Sun in about 365 days. Hurray, it works!!
I was feeling pretty self-congratulatory about my model solar system, until it got sucked into the barycentre spin-orbit-coupling debate we had here a month or so back, and my little model started being used to calculate the angular momentum of the planets. The sort of thing I’d never intended it to be used for. And I soon discovered that my output data was full of all sorts of noise and spikes that I’d never dreamed were there. What looked like a nice clean model was actually a noisy, clattering thing, like a mechanical orrery in which the copper, cog-driven planets were moving jerkily along their orbits, getting stuck here and there as they moved along. Boo!! It doesn’t work!!
It’s a familiar experience. I’ve been there dozens of times. Pride comes before a fall. And quite a few other people know this too:
The Formula That Killed Wall Street Mathematician David Li’s Gaussian copula formula will go down in history as instrumental in causing the unfathomable losses that brought the world financial system to its knees.
We build models of the world, or the solar system, or the atmosphere, or the economy, and our models aren’t very good. For a while we like to kid ourselves that they’re real cool, but one day to our chagrin we get to see that they really weren’t very good at all. With luck, we learn from our mistakes, and we build a better model next time, and it produces results which aren’t quite as wrong as last time.
Sorry Leif, but I just don’t believe computer model builders who demonstrate no humility. I don’t want to hear them tell me how good their models are. I want them to tell me how bad they are, how many assumptions are built in to them, how many guesses. I’d believe Jim Hansen if he said, “Look folks, my Global Climate Model is based on all sorts of assumptions and guesses, and the input data is kinda flaky, but this is what it told me.” But he doesn’t do that with his undocumented Fortran (and I’ve written plenty of that in my time too) which he doesn’t want to show anybody. He’s far too conceited. Just like me.
So, no, most likely the models aren’t extremely good. Most likely they’re all extremely bad. Every single last one of them. And that’s the assumption about them that we ought to start with.

rbateman (21:47:11) :
They tested it with a computer model.
I have no access to their paper, from the abstract:
“we present the first calculations of the magnitude of the ion-aerosol clear-air mechanism using a general circulation model with online aerosol microphysics.”
It seems they are relying on a GCM. These models can only fit cloud cover as spaghetti graphs. Nothing I have seen of these models inspire me with any confidence. Already there are no real errors calculated from them, only modeler’s intuitions. So they add a handful of new parameters to the soup and I am expected to believe they have done a solid error analysis when the whole packet does not have one?
I would not stop the CERN experiments on the basis of such studies.

Leif Svalgaard (20:31:23) : How much pride and hubris are there in calculating that you need 6452 tons of concrete for this or that bridge? And the number is usually correct.
How about this for hubris then? Not a concrete bridge, but the spanking new steel Millennium footbridge in London:
The bridge was completed at a cost of £18.2m (£2.2m over budget) and opened on 10 June 2000 (2 months late). Unexpected lateral vibration (resonant structural response) caused the bridge to be closed on 12 June for modifications…
The bridge was temporarily closed on 18 January 2007, during the Kyrill storm due to strong winds and a risk of pedestrians being blown off the bridge.
I agree about predictive and descriptive models. In the latter sort of model, you know – often very exactly – what the end result is supposed to be, and so you know right away when you get it wrong. In the former case, you don’t know what to expect, and it’s much harder to know if you’ve got it wrong.
My solar system simulation is a descriptive model. I know that the Earth is supposed to complete a single orbit in 365.25 days. When I’ve become confident that it’s a good enough descriptive model, I can start to use it predictively – for example, to see what would happen if new planet or star passed nearby. The switch from being descriptive to predictive only requires a slight change in the input data, to add an extra body.
I have actually read the paper, and that seems to be a prerequisite for criticizing it, don’t you think?
I wasn’t criticizing this paper. I was commenting more about what seems to me to be overweening confidence in computer models in general. And “confidence” – or “overconfidence” – would seem to be more a matter of psychology than science. If I was thinking about any computer simulation models in particular, it was the Global Climate Models which are being used predictively by global warming alarmists to foresee all sorts of catastrophic outcomes, when these models don’t seem to be very good at being used descriptively of our present climate. Getting the Millennium bridge wrong was embarrassing for engineers. Getting the climate wrong is likely to be several orders of magnitude worse than merely embarrassing.

Paul Vaughan (20:03:06) : Re: idlex (18:37:29)
Here, here! – an injection of reality is *just* what was needed to counter the nogo-slatka spin. (that’s bulgarian for “too sweet”)
Thank you. But misspelt compliments offer scant encouragement. “Here, here!” is what I shout when I call my dog. “Hear, hear!” is what I say when I agree with someone, and ask others to listen to him.
It’s easy to see how these misconceptions arise, when one word sounds exactly the same as another. There are, for example, a lot of people around these days who write about “towing the line”. I always wonder what it is they are supposed to be towing. What they really should be doing is “toeing the line”, which means obediently standing with one’s toes placed on a line (which was often the edge of a plank on a ship’s deck), as the members of a crew might do when assembled by a sea captain to witness the execution of some unfortunate malefactor or other – such as a persistent misspeller of English.

well that ascii graphic fell on its face so try this:
http://img2.imageshack.us/img2/5070/plotx.jpg