Svensmark: "global warming stopped and a cooling is beginning" – "enjoy global warming while it lasts"

UPDATED: This opinion piece from Professor Henrik Svensmark was published September 9th in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Originally the translation was from Google translation with some post translation cleanup of jumbled words or phrases by myself. Now as of Sept 12, the translation is by Nigel Calder.  Hat tip to Carsten Arnholm of Norway for bringing this to my attention and especially for translation facilitation by Ágúst H Bjarnason – Anthony

Catainia photosphere image August 31st, 2009 - click for larger image
Spotless Cueball: Catania observatory photosphere image August 31st, 2009 - click for larger image

While the sun sleeps

Translation approved by Henrik Svensmark

While the Sun sleeps

Henrik Svensmark, Professor, Technical University of Denmark, Copenhagen

“In fact global warming has stopped and a cooling is beginning. No climate model has predicted a cooling of the Earth – quite the contrary. And this means that the projections of future climate are unreliable,” writes Henrik Svensmark.

The star that keeps us alive has, over the last few years, been almost free of sunspots, which are the usual signs of the Sun’s magnetic activity. Last week [4 September 2009] the scientific team behind the satellite SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) reported, “It is likely that the current year’s number of blank days will be the longest in about 100 years.” Everything indicates that the Sun is going into some kind of hibernation, and the obvious question is what significance that has for us on Earth.

If you ask the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which represents the current consensus on climate change, the answer is a reassuring “nothing”. But history and recent research suggest that is probably completely wrong. Why? Let’s take a closer look.

Solar activity has always varied. Around the year 1000, we had a period of very high solar activity, which coincided with the Medieval Warm Period. It was a time when frosts in May were almost unknown – a matter of great importance for a good harvest. Vikings settled in Greenland and explored the coast of North America. On the whole it was a good time. For example, China’s population doubled in this period.

But after about 1300 solar activity declined and the world began to get colder. It was the beginning of the episode we now call the Little Ice Age. In this cold time, all the Viking settlements in Greenland disappeared. Sweden surprised Denmark by marching across the ice, and in London the Thames froze repeatedly. But more serious were the long periods of crop failures, which resulted in poorly nourished populations, reduced in Europe by about 30 per cent because of disease and hunger.

"The March across the Belts was a campaign between January 30 and February 8, 1658 during the Northern Wars where Swedish king Karl X Gustav led the Swedish army from Jutland across the ice of the Little Belt and the Great Belt to reach Zealand (Danish: Sjælland). The risky but vastly successful crossing was a crushing blow to Denmark, and led to the Treaty of Roskilde later that year...." - Click for larger image.

It’s important to realise that the Little Ice Age was a global event. It ended in the late 19th Century and was followed by increasing solar activity. Over the past 50 years solar activity has been at its highest since the medieval warmth of 1000 years ago. But now it appears that the Sun has changed again, and is returning towards what solar scientists call a “grand minimum” such as we saw in the Little Ice Age.

The match between solar activity and climate through the ages is sometimes explained away as coincidence. Yet it turns out that, almost no matter when you look and not just in the last 1000 years, there is a link. Solar activity has repeatedly fluctuated between high and low during the past 10,000 years. In fact the Sun spent about 17 per cent of those 10,000 years in a sleeping mode, with a cooling Earth the result.

You may wonder why the international climate panel IPCC does not believe that the Sun’s changing activity affects the climate. The reason is that it considers only changes in solar radiation. That would be the simplest way for the Sun to change the climate – a bit like turning up and down the brightness of a light bulb.

Satellite measurements have shown that the variations of solar radiation are too small to explain climate change. But the panel has closed its eyes to another, much more powerful way for the Sun to affect Earth’s climate. In 1996 we discovered a surprising influence of the Sun – its impact on Earth’s cloud cover. High-energy accelerated particles coming from exploded stars, the cosmic rays, help to form clouds.

When the Sun is active, its magnetic field is better at shielding us against the cosmic rays coming from outer space, before they reach our planet. By regulating the Earth’s cloud cover, the Sun can turn the temperature up and down. High solar activity means fewer clouds and and a warmer world. Low solar activity and poorer shielding against cosmic rays result in increased cloud cover and hence a cooling. As the Sun’s magnetism doubled in strength during the 20th century, this natural mechanism may be responsible for a large part of global warming seen then.

That also explains why most climate scientists try to ignore this possibility. It does not favour their idea that the 20th century temperature rise was mainly due to human emissions of CO2. If the Sun provoked a significant part of warming in the 20th Century, then the contribution by CO2 must necessarily be smaller.

Ever since we put forward our theory in 1996, it has been subjected to very sharp criticism, which is normal in science.

First it was said that a link between clouds and solar activity could not be correct, because no physical mechanism was known. But in 2006, after many years of work, we completed experiments at DTU Space that demonstrated the existence of a physical mechanism. The cosmic rays help to form aerosols, which are the seeds for cloud formation.

Then came the criticism that the mechanism we found in the laboratory could not work in the real atmosphere, and therefore had no practical significance. We have just rejected that criticism emphatically.

It turns out that the Sun itself performs what might be called natural experiments. Giant solar eruptions can cause the cosmic ray intensity on earth to dive suddenly over a few days. In the days following an eruption, cloud cover can fall by about 4 per cent. And the amount of liquid water in cloud droplets is reduced by almost 7 per cent. Here is a very large effect – indeed so great that in popular terms the Earth’s clouds originate in space.

So we have watched the Sun’s magnetic activity with increasing concern, since it began to wane in the mid-1990s.

That the Sun might now fall asleep in a deep minimum was suggested by solar scientists at a meeting in Kiruna in Sweden two years ago. So when Nigel Calder and I updated our book The Chilling Stars, we wrote a little provocatively that “we are advising our friends to enjoy global warming while it lasts.”

In fact global warming has stopped and a cooling is beginning. Mojib Latif from the University of Kiel argued at the recent UN World Climate Conference in Geneva that the cooling may continue through the next 10 to 20 years. His explanation was a natural change in the North Atlantic circulation, not in solar activity. But no matter how you interpret them, natural variations in climate are making a comeback.

The outcome may be that the Sun itself will demonstrate its importance for climate and so challenge the theories of global warming. No climate model has predicted a cooling of the Earth – quite the contrary. And this means that the projections of future climate are unreliable. A forecast saying it may be either warmer or colder for 50 years is not very useful, and science is not yet able to predict solar activity.

So in many ways we stand at a crossroads. The near future will be extremely interesting. I think it is important to accept that Nature pays no heed to what we humans think about it. Will the greenhouse theory survive a significant cooling of the Earth? Not in its current dominant form. Unfortunately, tomorrow’s climate challenges will be quite different from the greenhouse theory’s predictions. Perhaps it will become fashionable again to investigate the Sun’s impact on our climate.

Professor Henrik Svensmark is director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at DTU Space. His book The Chilling Stars has also been published in Danish as Klima og Kosmos Gads Forlag, DK ISBN 9788712043508)


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Graeme Rodaughan
September 10, 2009 11:47 pm

Refreshing. Now if only the Politicians were paying attention…

Stephen Wilde
September 10, 2009 11:48 pm

The main shifts in global air temperature trend seem to occur at approximately 25 to 30 years intervals when the oceans change phase. Even on shorter ENSO type interannual time scales we see a rapid and direct response in the air to ocean SST changes.
There is really not much correlation between observed climate changes and the progression of a single solar cycle which is surprising if the cosmic ray effect is at all significant.
There really doesn’t seem to be a shortage of particulates in the air in the first place.
I have difficulty with the Svensmark theory for those reasons but I am supportive of the idea generally. I just think that it is simply one of many modulating factors and not a primary driver.
I am open to persuasion on this issue and look forward to hearing the comments of others.

September 11, 2009 12:16 am

I have always believed we need a climate change plan A and a plan B, but all our focus has been in creating only the former. I do subscribe to the notion that the suns activity is the main driver of climate changes, either directly (surface temperatures) or indirectly (through warming of oceans etc)
I don’t know how previous solar activity (say in the MWP) is reliably calculated. If anyone can point me to a paper describing this, preferably with an accompanying graph that links the year/decade to the increased/decreased activity I would be greatful.
It would be interesting to overlay this activity over the rise and collapse of civilisations, and other less traumatic but still important events such as periods of relative feast or famine. I am sure this has been done, so again a link would be useful. I seem to remember Lamb did some work on this but I can’t remember in which of his many publications. The IPcc’s references are rather vague in this respect.
tonyb

oakgeo
September 11, 2009 12:24 am

Please get it professionally translated. I think I just had a freshman flashback.

REPLY:
If somebody has a source (and funds) to do this I welcome any better translations than Google. For now this will have to do. – A

tallbloke
September 11, 2009 12:26 am

“This means that projections of future climate is unpredictable. A forecast [that] says it may be warmer or colder for 50 years, is not very useful, for science is not able to predict solar activity.”
‘Astrological Numerologists’ will have to try to help science out then. 🙂
“But no matter how it is interpreted, the natural variations in climate then penetrates more and more.”
Go Henrik!

tokyoboy
September 11, 2009 12:28 am

In Japan the Democratic Party won a landslide victory at the general election on 30 August, and the to-be-prime-minister Yukio Hatoyama announced at a recent press conference that he wanted to aim at 25% curbing of CO2 emission by 2020 with respect to the level in 1990. This is quite embarassing to me, but I do now hope he just “wanted to aim” and not “promised to aim”, “by 2020” ant not during his prime ministership, and “if all the major emitting nations agree” (his words) which appears to be improbable for the moment……….

Johnny Honda
September 11, 2009 12:34 am

I know that the sun hours per day are measured since a long time. They have this glass balls (like the fortune teller…) and behind there is a stripe of paper. When the sun shines, the light burns a hole into the stripe of paper. I saw it in the 70ies the first time but it might exists already a long time ago.
It would be interesting to see a graph with the daily sunshine hour together with the activity of the sun.

Flanagan
September 11, 2009 12:36 am

A very mysterious mechanism indeed. And still not supported by any observation. Moreover, how is it the sun is “fading” since the 90ies and all we got is a warming? Even 20 years later? 2009 is not going to be a cold year, far from that. August and July were globally pretty hot and September seems to be setting a new record
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/amsutemps.html
check Channel 5
REPLY: “And still not supported by any observation.”
Baloney “Flanagan”.
Svensmark cites Forbush decrease events in the op-ed piece and the results. Here’s an essay on it:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/08/04/a-link-between-the-sun-cosmic-rays-aerosols-and-liquid-water-clouds-appears-to-exist-on-a-global-scale/
and here
http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2009/07/20/decreases-in-cosmic-rays-affect-athmosph
Why would you purposely misrepresent what Svensmark cites when an observation exists and was cited in the op-ed piece? There are times when I think maybe it is better that you take your opinions elsewhere, this is one of them.
Take a time out.
-A

mark twain
September 11, 2009 12:37 am

svensmark:
One can wonder that the international climate panel IPCC does not believe that the sun changed activity has no effect on the climate, but the reason is that they only include changes in solar radiation…
thats not true!
ipcc explains the warming up to 1950 with natural forces, inkl. sun aktivities!
(i m an ipcc skeptic, but we should not try to missinterpretate them…)

Tenuc
September 11, 2009 12:47 am

If only the climate of earth were so simple that major changes depended just on one factor. Unfortunately this simplistic view is wrong, and our chaotic climate depends on multiple interlinked mechanisms to keep it within the bounds of a few degrees of temperature variability we usually see.
The Svensmark theory may well be correct, but like CO2 caused AGW, I’m sure it will not turn out to be the sole mechanism. However, with Copenhagen around trhe corner, it’s good to see some publicity which shows the CO2 theory is very weak and perhaps help stop global Cap & Trade being adopted.

dorlomin
September 11, 2009 1:00 am

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/298/5597/1410

Changes in the global water cycle can cause major environmental and socioeconomic impacts. As the average global temperature increases, it is generally expected that the air will become drier and that evaporation from terrestrial water bodies will increase. Paradoxically, terrestrial observations over the past 50 years show the reverse. Here, we show that the decrease in evaporation is consistent with what one would expect from the observed large and widespread decreases in sunlight resulting from increasing cloud coverage and aerosol concentration.

So global dimming is another of the myths then?

September 11, 2009 1:03 am

What the Warmists forget (whether intentionally or not) is that this flatline of temperature (or even cooling) was not predicted by models. How could they predict it, because the models cannot be fed chaotics? Because of that, it shows that ANY future prediction, whether warming or cooling, is ridiculous. And I count-in this prediction of cooling. We CANNOT do that! Why has Svensmark not picked up anything from silly predictions of the Earth frying? We don’t know what the future climate will be, so what we SHOULD be doing is putting money into adaptation of whatever comes our way. It’s bizarre of some to think that we can warm the planet, but it’s equally bizarre to make predictions that we will be cooler too. A lack of sunspots may bring cooler temps, but maybe some other interaction will raise them – so they’ll be a balance. What it all means is that we don’t know, so why make our we do – either way? The econuts are too stupid to realise this, so let’s not follow their lead. We cannot predict next week’s weather with much certainty, certainly the Met Office here in England cannot get a 3-day forecast accurate over my town (I know because I’ve been monitoring it), so we should stop thinking that the Earth will warm or cool, and save money for whatever is thrown at us. Sooner or later we’re going to have to deal with a sizeable meteorite impact. Perhaps we should worry far more about that – with its effect on weather, climate, the money markets, food distribution, and disease & starvation.

UK Sceptic
September 11, 2009 1:05 am

If we are sliding into another LIA then is it possible we’ll see governments paying industry to pump out as much CO2 as it can?
On the other hand, the UK’s politicians are as dumb as rocks when it comes to science so they’ll keep reducing and sequestering until we all turn to lumps of ice or take a leaf out of Cromwell’s book.
Here’s a ray of hope from Cardiff University:
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/2009/09/10/public-losing-faith-in-climate-change-scientists-find-cardiff-researchers-91466-24659733/
The number polled is really too small to be of any great use and there is one glaring statistic that just doesn’t ring true. It has to be said that the finding of only 5% of those polled feel the media is too alarmist is most probably wrong. Nearly everyone I know thinks media alarmism is not only way over the top, it’s also patronising and stupid.

Alexej Buergin
September 11, 2009 1:08 am

Will they force Prof. Svensmark to leave Copenhagen at “Copenhagen” ?
He could meet Mitchell Taylor and Ian Plimer in Copenhagen (Louisiana) at that time.

Tiles
September 11, 2009 1:11 am

Flanagan – ever heard of thermal inertia? That could well explain continued warming in the face of a fading sun. I’m not sure whether the numbers would add up, however.

dorlomin
September 11, 2009 1:13 am

“Barry Foster (01:03:31) :
What the Warmists forget (whether intentionally or not) is that this flatline of temperature (or even cooling) was not predicted by models. ”
Curious, this is not what I have been told, I have always understood that natural variability can cause temporary decreases in temperature. I guess we have different sources. Perhaps you could produce a quote that states what you have said this clearly?

mark twain
September 11, 2009 1:17 am

@Barry Foster (01:03:31) :
you are right.
but we are not able to stop climate simulations, this process has just started. off course we have many problems with that, because so many thinks are not predictable, sun, pdo, nao indizes etc. for the ozean circulations eg. we should have a better look at the arctic region. like 2007, there was a real minimum in sea icecover, but is there only more absorbtion in solar radiance? what about the heat content of an ice free part of the ozean and one sea ice covered for the month september (sun angle very low, high reflection by ozean water, almost the same as old ice and high energie flux from the ozean to the atmosphere, much “deeper” as with an ice hat).
chances in deep water circulation will be affected by such processes, eg….

NS
September 11, 2009 1:31 am

dorlomin (01:13:20) :
“Barry Foster (01:03:31) :
What the Warmists forget (whether intentionally or not) is that this flatline of temperature (or even cooling) was not predicted by models. ”
Curious, this is not what I have been told, I have always understood that natural variability can cause temporary decreases in temperature. I guess we have different sources. Perhaps you could produce a quote that states what you have said this clearly?
————————————-
You want him to produce a quote of what he just said? Doesn’t make a lot of sense. Can you produce a model that matches observations? A hypothesis that matches facts? Those are reasonable requests.
Also the underlying logic of your statement actually matches the statement by B.Foster, ie. that there is an underlying monotic trend of warming through CO2 – your point presumably being that we are just experiencing a “temporary blip” and that normal (warming) service will be resumed at some to be determined date in the future.

Morgan T
September 11, 2009 1:32 am

Let me give a helping hand here, regarding the Swedes he is refering to the war in 1658. It was so cold that the straight between Copenhagen and Malmoe froze and not only that the ice was so thick that the whole Swedish army with all their equipment marched over to Demnark, this was of course a total surprise for the Danish.

Alexej Buergin
September 11, 2009 1:34 am

“WUWT & Flanagan: Take a time out.”
Yes, the big C (Cryosphere) is on everybody’s mind and gets some people in a foul mood. In a few week we will look back and smile, citing Henry Miller (Quiet Days in Clichy): “It was a period when C was in the air.”

dorlomin
September 11, 2009 1:44 am

“You want him to produce a quote of what he just said? ”
Sorry there is not editing function here. I would like him to produce a quote that backs up this statement: “What the Warmists forget (whether intentionally or not) is that this flatline of temperature (or even cooling) was not predicted by models.”

Mick
September 11, 2009 1:46 am

Folks,
all this science is OK, but I’m afraid it’s irrelevant. One can’t defeat a paranoid religion with logic and common sense. Or argument.
The AGW is ideologically driven and politically executed religion of the green/left alliance. Unfortunately the ignorant public has a mob mentality,
the loudest megaphone wins.
Call me pessimist, I can’t see how civilisation (western) can get out of this 🙁

Allan M
September 11, 2009 2:00 am

Graeme Rodaughan (23:47:21) :
“Refreshing. Now if only the Politicians were paying attention…”
Well our UK’s (Brown) Prime Minister’s favourite trick when someone disagrees with him, is to turn to the person next to him and start a conversation. I don’t suppose he is atypical, just an extremist.
If only it were not a forlorn hope.
……….
Other fellow: “Well, Woody Allen once said that 80% of life is just showing up.”
PM Brown: “And I think the other half is paying attention.”

Patrick Davis
September 11, 2009 2:21 am

“Mick (01:46:48) :
Folks,
all this science is OK, but I’m afraid it’s irrelevant. One can’t defeat a paranoid religion with logic and common sense. Or argument.
The AGW is ideologically driven and politically executed religion of the green/left alliance. Unfortunately the ignorant public has a mob mentality,
the loudest megaphone wins.
Call me pessimist, I can’t see how civilisation (western) can get out of this :(”
I can. It’s called war.

September 11, 2009 2:27 am

dorlomin (01:44:14) :
James Hansen’s testimony to the Senate?
Anything by Gavin Schmidt

jmrSudbury
September 11, 2009 2:31 am

“UK Sceptic (01:05:16) :
If we are sliding into another LIA then is it possible we’ll see governments paying industry to pump out as much CO2 as it can?”
CO2 levels are already higher than the worst case scenario that the ensemble of models put forth. There is no need to add extra CO2. It obviously has little effect.
John M Reynolds

Allan M
September 11, 2009 2:32 am

Mick (01:46:48) :
“Folks,
all this science is OK, but I’m afraid it’s irrelevant. One can’t defeat a paranoid religion with logic and common sense. Or argument.
The AGW is ideologically driven and politically executed religion of the green/left alliance. Unfortunately the ignorant public has a mob mentality,
the loudest megaphone wins.”
But not forever. The ignorant public have a lot of common sense, and, although it takes a long time, they see through the sham (or scam). They do so much more now here in the UK. As Dick Lindzen said: “Ordinary people see through this, but the educated people are very vulnerable.” He must be the balancing optimist.
I have wondered why the greenie’s leaders, mostly the toffs here (not forgetting the US’s imported toffs), are so much in bed with the socialists. It seems a strange alliance. Maybe it comes from the old adage: “my enemy’s enemy is my friend.” The capitalists have given both lots a bloody nose, and fed an increasing population, and given us a prosperous lifestyle, etc.. The future problem may be that if they win as allies, they will have to fight it out between themselves later, and as always to the detriment of the general public.

September 11, 2009 2:35 am

The other global warming effect:
UK ‘could face blackouts by 2016’
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8249540.stm
Or possibly whiteouts?

Flanagan
September 11, 2009 2:43 am

I’m sorry but, 1st, this op-ed does not cite an evidence – it just states them without any reference whatsoever. Moreover, in every study by Svensmark, including the last ones, the author somewhat “forgets to mention” the absence of trend in solar radiation and other indicators between the 50ies and the 90ies – strangely corresponding to a rapid average warming. This is apparent in the link Anthony gave me to the WUWT post:
– When a forbush decrease takes place, the water content of some clouds changes by 7% corresponding to a 10%-20% decrease of cosmic ray counts
– after a few days, the water content comes back to normal levels
again, there’s no proof that cosmic rays substantially influence the composition of clouds over long periods of times, especially as compared to other parameters like the ocean average temperature. If you prefer, this is weather, not climate.

Fred Lightfoot
September 11, 2009 2:44 am

i am 69 years old (a good year) I was born in New Zealand and had my 21st birthday in Antwerp Belgium, (studying petroleum engineering). In 1963 I flew from Europe to NZ, (4 days, now 24 hours). I have worked all my life in the Petroleum Industry, and if a Country has oil I have been there, you never find oil on main street, it’s always in the back of beyond, which gives me a different outlook than 90% of the other people. Weather (not climate) is one of the greatest of our worlds wonders. IT’S LOCAL !
I was in Stavanger Norway and on the tow of the Shell Brent Delta to the Brent field in the Northern North Sea, Shell spent millions and years on weather research before designing these platforms, as the zone has some of the most treacherous seas in the world. The water gap ( the distance from high tide calm water to the underside of the platform ) was designed for the 100 year wave. In the first winter the 100 year wave hit 84 times.
In Siberia winds of 152 km an hour and temp. of -47°C arrived with such precision that we used to run a sweep stake.
”Lightning never strikes twice”, but the top of the oil derrick in the jungle of Sarawak was hit 8 times in 30 minutes.
On an ex whaling mother ship converted into a drill ship (48,000 tonnes) off the coast of Indonesia in a tropical storm with 8 anchors out and in a ‘’storm mode” we where dragged 4 miles off location.
On a jack-up drilling rig on tow from Singapore to Sri Lanka with 2 tugs we went backwards for 24 hours.
In the desert of Saudi Arabia in 1996 with temp. in the mid 30’s C we went down to 18°C and 10 inches of hail in about half an hour.
Now we get politicians (failed lawyers) offering mega $ for research to ”prove” that us humans are in charge of the climate, if these 25-39 IQ ”humans” went and experienced the world, (not visiting the local Hilton) and realized how big our planet is and how small the human presence is we would not be trying to get milk from butterflies.

John Silver
September 11, 2009 3:23 am

“Svenskerne overraskede Danmark med at gå over isen”
should not be translated to:
“Swedes [were surprised to see Denmark to freeze over in ice]”
It is this thing that he refer to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_across_the_Belts
Typical of the LIA.

September 11, 2009 3:24 am

Personally, I would love to see Svensmark be correct and that AGW is not a concern because then we can rest knowing that there is, for the most part, nothing we can do about it.

NS
September 11, 2009 3:29 am

dorlomin (01:44:14) :
“You want him to produce a quote of what he just said? ”
Sorry there is not editing function here. I would like him to produce a quote that backs up this statement: “What the Warmists forget (whether intentionally or not) is that this flatline of temperature (or even cooling) was not predicted by models.”
————————————-
I hate to get in this game as it is your hypothesis the burden of proof is on you. But here’s a graph anyone can google it I think it’s off a pro-AGW site:
http://deepclimate.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/ar4-a1b-a2.gif
Here’s one off the millions of presentations of the IPCC:
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/presentations/briefing-bonn-2007-05/causes-projections-climate-changes.pdf
None of this is cherry-picked I just did a quick google before lunch……….
I mean, give us something to work with here – the models predict nothing, the science is tenuous at best relying on the infamous feedback process that has demonstrably never occurred. The whole hypothesis seeded on 1 guy’s mis-understanding of Venus’ atmospheric dynamic.
Now mass-hysteria, greed, laziness and massive incompetence – those are things that we *know* occur.

Mike McMillan
September 11, 2009 3:34 am

I can’t quite see why the Svensmark cloud theory is so controversial.
All the early subatomic particle observations were done with cloud chambers, so we know cosmic rays can seed clouds. We know that clouds increase albedo and thus have a cooling effect. Just because the correlations with climate aren’t bulletproof doesn’t mean they aren’t there, and doesn’t mean they don’t make a contribution to cooling and warming.
Take a look at public enemy #1. The CO2 chart climb is as steady as you get, but the global temperature it’s supposed to be driving seem pretty oblivious to it. Even the usually reliable sea level rise has flattened while CO2 just keeps on going up. About the only things keeping pace with CO2 are the GISS adjustments.

dorlomin
September 11, 2009 3:39 am

paulhan (02:27:36) :
Anything by Gavin Schmidt
——————————-
So the sun gets reflected out. These aerosols acted as a kind of sunshade over the planet that caused the planet to cool. Our group (though this is before my time), before this cooling happened, did the calculations with their model, and predicted that the cooling would reach a maximum of about half a degree in about two years time. Lo and behold, such a thing happened.
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/schmidt09/schmidt09_index.html
Sorry I interupted a rant there didnt I. Back to normal programming, a few invectives about socialism, religion, Gore, Mann….. you all know the drill.

DaveF
September 11, 2009 3:48 am

I don’t quite understand why Professor Svensmark says it looks like the Sun is going into a Grand Minimum like in the Little Ice Age. Since the Mediaeval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age lasted around 500 years each, isn’t it reasonable to expect the present warm period to last 500 years as well? I expect there were minor variations in temperature during these periods similar to what we’ve seen in the last hundred years, so wouldn’t the most likely explanation of the current temperature drop be that we’ve entered a thirty-year period like the fifties and sixties followed by a return to the temperatures of the nineties and so on? Or have I missed something?

Stefan
September 11, 2009 3:55 am

dorlomin (01:13:20) :
I have always understood that natural variability can cause temporary decreases in temperature.

Is there a reference that defines “temporary” ?
I think there should be one. The future is full of possibilities, so predictions are inherently vague. If the prediction didn’t come true today, maybe it will come true tomorrow, or the day after, and so on. So anybody making a prediction can always defend their prediction on the basis that just because it hasn’t happened yet, doesn’t mean it isn’t going to happen. (And whilst this is reasonable, perhaps it is not useful.)
At some point though, we begin to wonder that the predicted outcome isn’t going to happen inside a timeframe that matters. Global warming might be “temporarily” masked by “natural variability” for 10 or 20 years. Well, what if in 20 years we discover that it continues to be “masked” for another 20 years… we’re now talking about a timeframe so far into the future that we’re trying to plan for a world that we simply don’t understand because so many other things could have changed in the meantime.
People focus so much on the climate–what will biotech be like in 20 years? Are we using specially designed bacteria to do everything from clean our clothes to clean up radiation and produce energy?
Who can say? What relevance do our mitigation actions have now to a world so different? See, someone needs to define what “temporary” means in these climate debates, what “temporary” means for practical purposes.

September 11, 2009 4:01 am

Svensmark: When the Sun is active its magnetic field shields better against the cosmic rays from outer space before they reach our planet […] As the sun’s magnetism has doubled its strength during the 20th century
(1) The cosmic ray intensity has shown no trend since accurate measurements began in the early 1950s
(2) The Sun’s magnetic field has not doubled in the last 100 years. It is now precisely where it was 108 years ago.

RR Kampen
September 11, 2009 4:04 am

(small correction)
Svensmark is quite correct. Summer (June, July, August) 2009 was globally colder than summer 1998 (though warmer than all others).
September is currently trying for the record. Warmest, of course.

Mark Fawcett
September 11, 2009 4:22 am

Just recovered from passing out whilst reading the following on the BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8249668.stm
Including: “Twice as many people now agree that “claims that human activities are changing the climate are exaggerated”.
Four in 10 believe that many leading experts still question the evidence. One in five are “hard-line sceptics”.

And: Half of the people surveyed believed the media was too alarmist.
Now it’s that last paragraph I particularly like – MSM really, really doesn’t like the thought of losing its audience…
Cheers
Mark.

Chris Schoneveld
September 11, 2009 4:24 am

The proof of the pudding is, of course, that cloudiness has decreased during periods of warming and increased during the last 8 years of moderate cooling, but that is the one climate metric that has not been measured with any degree of accuracy. Unfortunately, there is not even the slightest indication that there is a correlation between cloudiness and global temperatures, as far as I am aware of. Even a correlation between global temperatures (let alone cloudiness) and solar activity has always been refuted by Leif.

rbateman
September 11, 2009 4:25 am

Stephen Wilde (23:48:17) :
There is really not much correlation between observed climate changes and the progression of a single solar cycle which is surprising if the cosmic ray effect is at all significant.

It is NOT correlated, it is associated. There is no 1 on 1. What Henrik is describing is the cosmic food chain. It starts, for our purposes, at the galactic level, proceeds then to the Solar System level, and then to the Terrestrial level.
When the Sun goes quiet, we here on Earth experience more of the effects of Galactic influence, which is never quite totally overriden by the Sun. The patch cord does not end at the Sun.
The IPCC’s man-centered universe is as backwards as the Dark Ages, feeding on ignorance and fear of the place we live.
Someday, we will be able to predict both the climate and the solar cycles, but not if the IPCC manages to control science first.
As for the top of the food chain, we are still at it discovering the makdeup, diversity and structure of the Galaxy our solar system careens through.

Robert
September 11, 2009 4:32 am

As it became common knowledge that AGW would cause increased wildfires, mudslides and risk of earthquake, I moved from California to New Orleans.
After Katrina it had become obvious that AGW had caused stronger and more frequent hurricanes, so I moved again, to Maine.
But not long after that, when we learned that the seas would rise 20 feet I moved to inland Texas, on a hill.
And as it became apparent that millions would soon die from the heat, I relocated to Nome, and just in time too.
And now I suppose you think I should move to Ecuador ahead of the glaciers formed by the coming “Not so Little” ice age. Well I’m here to tell ya buddy, I’m sticking with the IPCC, and my igloo, and to hell with all your scientific data – I’m going with the models, they’ve saved me many times before.

rbateman
September 11, 2009 4:35 am

Leif Svalgaard (04:01:53) :
(1) The cosmic ray intensity has shown no trend since accurate measurements began in the early 1950s

Put your hand over the left side of that graph and cover up everything prior to 1990 and look again. Ask yourself a question: Where have you seen that slope recently?

Jim, too.
September 11, 2009 4:37 am

Leif’s summary graph has taken a subtle turn over the past months that I find interesting. The dashed lines (which represent some ‘average’ function) for the F10.7 and Sunspot curves were giving a reasonable indication that a minimum was likely reached in both measures.
Lately, though, the average for the F10.7 data has recurved to the downside while the sunspot ‘average’ has also lost it’s minimum and has flat-lined.
http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-SORCE-2008-now.png
I am not implying anything really except that what has been a very quiet sun seems to have become even more quiescent the past few months. This truly is a fantastic opportunity to study the sun with the finest instruments ever available, at such a minimum level of activity. At any other, more ‘normal’ solar activity level, the opportunity to compare the relationship to climate and sun would be made that much more difficult.
Apologies to Leif if anything I presumed is overstating…
J2

September 11, 2009 4:42 am

“On June 3, 1999, the European Space Agency announced that the Sun’s magnetic field is getting progressively stronger. Thanks to the unprecedented overview of solar magnetism provided by the ESA-NASA spacecraft Ulysses, a team at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford has been able to work out the recent history of the Sun’s magnetic behavior. According to calculations by British scientists, the strength of the Sun’s magnetic field has doubled during the Twentieth Century alone. This finding may help to clarify the Sun’s contribution to climate change on Earth. The hydrogen → helium fusion model does not explain this phenomenon.”
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2009/arch09/090909polarity.htm

Nick Yates
September 11, 2009 4:45 am

Leif Svalgaard (04:01:53) :
Svensmark: When the Sun is active its magnetic field shields better against the cosmic rays from outer space before they reach our planet […] As the sun’s magnetism has doubled its strength during the 20th century
(1) The cosmic ray intensity has shown no trend since accurate measurements began in the early 1950s
(2) The Sun’s magnetic field has not doubled in the last 100 years. It is now precisely where it was 108 years ago.

If only WUWT could get Henrik Svensmark to discuss this here with Dr Svalgaard. It would be so interesting.

Mark
September 11, 2009 4:45 am
Charlie
September 11, 2009 5:01 am

The latest addition to my repertoire of quotes:
“..I think it is important to recognize that nature is completely independent of what we humans think about it.”.
— Professor Henrik Svensmark, director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at DTU Space.

September 11, 2009 5:01 am

It’s always refreshing when things make sense. The whole concept that changes in the sun might not affect the earth temp is extraordinarily hard to accept. The cool thing is we get to see for ourselves what happens next.

Philip_B
September 11, 2009 5:04 am

dorlomin (01:44:14) :,
The onus is on you to produce a model prediction that disproves his claim that no model predicted the flatlining of temperatures.
Producing a quote means nothing.
Otherwise, there are 2 issues here.
1. Have the models predicted temperatures over the last 10 years?
Clearly the models haven’t been remotely close to an accurate prediction of the last 10 years temperatures.
2. Have temperatures over the last 10 years disproved in a scientific sense the climate model predictions?
Lucia at the Blackboard concludes that they have, but you should read her blog to see exactly what she says.

Editor
September 11, 2009 5:07 am

I have no way of knowing whether Dr. Svensmark is correct about cosmic rays and clouds but he is definitely not correct about poor harvests causing a 30% decline in Europe’s population during the Little Ice Age. That phenomenon was caused by something called the Black Death, a bubonic plague spread by flea carrying rats that started in China, spread across Asia and reached Constantinople about 1346. By 1347 it had hopped a ship to Genoa and by 1351 nearly half the population of Europe was dead. European population did not reach it’s pre-plague level until just about 1500, at which point it was about just slightly larger than the population of Europe at the height of the Roman Empire.

Editor
September 11, 2009 5:11 am

Nick Yates (04:45:09) :
Hmmmm…. Svalgaard, Archibald and Svensmark…. a three way conversation I’d pay to watch…. I’d pray real hard for the brains to be able to follow them….

Mark
September 11, 2009 5:12 am

I get tired of people saying that since solar activity “peaked” in the 1990’s and yet temperatures peaked later than that then solar activity can’t be a major factor on influencing the climate. First, as many here have said, no one is saying that solar activity is the ONLY driver of climate – only that its effect has been understated (and as a result the guesstimate of CO2 effect has been overstated). Other key factors that must be considered in trying in interpret temperature changes over the last 30 years include changes to oceanic temperature phases (PDO, AMO) and the major volcanic events such as El Chichon and Pinatubo. The other key thing to keep in mind is that climatic reaction to solar activity is not instantaneous due to the thermal inertia of the oceans. What is interesting is that if you look at cosmic ray activity from a cumulative perspective factoring in intensity changes and DURATION of these changes, it is clear that there is a strong correlation between the direction of global temperature change and solar activity (as inversely related to cosmic ray activity). The following plot shows the cumulative differential between the point-in-time cosmic ray activity at Oulu and the average over the displayed time period.
http://www.geocities.com/mcmgk/Cumulative_CR_Inverse.jpg
What is clear from this plot is that an in increase in temperature from 1960’s to the 2000’s is very evidently correlated with the cumulative inverse of cosmic ray activity, noting the temperate peak that we might have otherwise seen in the early 1990’s was wiped out by the Pinatubo event. Given that, one would expect that temperatures (other than the 1998 super El Nino) would have peaked in the 2000’s (which they have done) and would now be dropping off (which they are doing). Once the current El Nino fades, expect temperatures to continue their drop!

Mark
September 11, 2009 5:15 am

As to how well the CO@ fanatics models have done:
http://theresilientearth.com/files/images/hansen_forecast_1988-2.jpg

Andrew Miceli
September 11, 2009 5:15 am

Nick Yates (04:45:09) :
If only WUWT could get Henrik Svensmark to discuss this here with Dr Svalgaard. It would be so interesting.
I could not agree more.

Tom in Florida
September 11, 2009 5:18 am

rbateman (04:25:47) :
“The IPCC’s man-centered universe is as backwards as the Dark Ages”
Quote of the decade!

September 11, 2009 5:20 am

Mark Fawcett (04:22:26) :
And: Half of the people surveyed believed the media was too alarmist.
Half of the American public believes the Earth and the Universe is only 6000 years old.
Stephen Wilde (23:48:17) :
When the Sun goes quiet, we here on Earth experience more of the effects of Galactic influence, which is never quite totally overriden by the Sun.
The solar modulation is only a few percent, and the Galactic influence does not vary on a time scale of centuries or faster.
rbateman (04:35:31) :
Put your hand over the left side of that graph and cover up everything prior to 1990 and look again. Ask yourself a question: Where have you seen that slope recently?
http://www.puk.ac.za/fakulteite/natuur/nm_data/data/nmd_e.html
Don’t want to cherry pick data. Look at what we’ve got [and remember that you have to look at many stations as there are small variations from station to station – for many reasona, one being that it is just hard to maintain a constant calibration over decades]
Jim, too. (04:37:00) :
Leif’s summary graph has taken a subtle turn over the past months that I find interesting.
There were some activity back in May and June. That jacks up F10.7 and it takes 3 to 4 months for that to die away, which it seems to have done by now. Hence the seeming downturn.
Børge Svanstrøm Amundsen (04:42:33) :
According to calculations by British scientists, the strength of the Sun’s magnetic field has doubled during the Twentieth Century alone.
Those same scientists now know that the doubling didn’t happen.
Nick Yates (04:45:09) :
If only WUWT could get Henrik Svensmark to discuss this here with Dr Svalgaard. It would be so interesting.
He won’t, as Al Gore won’t either.
Jeff Id (05:01:28) :
It’s always refreshing when things make sense
Evolution has shaped us so, that we are very good at accepting false positives: it is better [falsely] to think that those shadows in the bushes are a tiger, than to just dismiss them as ‘fluff’.

vg
September 11, 2009 5:22 am

I.ve slowly become a convinced denier of AGW. I think Flanagan must definitely be allowed to stay on… he’s our best argument

Ron de Haan
September 11, 2009 5:22 am

Anthony, why don’t you contact Svensmark directly and ask him to respond.
This subject is too important with too many questions.
You can find his contact data and his publication here:
http://www.space.dtu.dk/English/Staff/Sun_Climate.aspx?lg=showcommon&id=38287&type=publications

Stefan
September 11, 2009 5:29 am

Mick (01:46:48) :
I have wondered why the greenie’s leaders, mostly the toffs here (not forgetting the US’s imported toffs), are so much in bed with the socialists. It seems a strange alliance.

There’s a general polarity opposites, between the group and the individual. When thinking about problems, people can be biased against one or the other. Some people believe poverty is the result of an unfair system, so they want to reform the group’s institutions, to make the world more fair. Sometimes people believe poverty is the result of the individual’s lack of character and fortitude, lack of ambition, lack of ethics, and so they want to change the group’s institutions to become more about rewards for success and punishment for failure.
Where the greens are allied with the socialists is in their common belief that the system is bad, the system is unfair, the system is allowing greedy individuals to harm the environment, and exploit fellow man. So they are in favor of tighter regulation, and they are in favor of strong governments that will keep greedy reckless businesses in check. And because those businesses are selling products to consumers, and those consumers for the most part don’t seem willing to abandon buying cars and eating meat, then even the principle of democracy is becoming suspect, and places like China start looking more attractive to greens, because China has the authority to make the people follow its directives.
What the greens fail to notice however, is that authoritarian “social order” can serve any number of priorities. It can serve empire building, it can serve warmongering, it can serve any group goal, really. There is nothing inherently green about being authoritarian. And groups can also organise in far more interesting ways than simply becoming authoritarian top-down power structures.
I think the greens that follow the authoritarian model are in for a nasty shock.

Ron de Haan
September 11, 2009 5:29 am

Robert (04:32:09) :
“As it became common knowledge that AGW would cause increased wildfires, mudslides and risk of earthquake, I moved from California to New Orleans.
After Katrina it had become obvious that AGW had caused stronger and more frequent hurricanes, so I moved again, to Maine.
But not long after that, when we learned that the seas would rise 20 feet I moved to inland Texas, on a hill.
And as it became apparent that millions would soon die from the heat, I relocated to Nome, and just in time too.
And now I suppose you think I should move to Ecuador ahead of the glaciers formed by the coming “Not so Little” ice age. Well I’m here to tell ya buddy, I’m sticking with the IPCC, and my igloo, and to hell with all your scientific data – I’m going with the models, they’ve saved me many times before”.
Very funny Robert.
I am sure you will die from “natural causes”.

Johnny Honda
September 11, 2009 5:44 am

@ Scott Mandia
I looked at your website. It starts with a “wisdom”:
“What’s the use of having developed a science well enough to make predictions if, in the end, all we’re willing to do is stand around and wait for them to come true”
Aha, predictions. They are difficult, especially when they are about the future. Now let’s look who is spreading wisdom like this:
“Nobel Laureate Sherwood Rowland (referring then to ozone depletion)”
And what happend concerning all the ozone predicitions? Did you check it? Do you know that the Ozon hole is still here, and as big as always, instead the FCKW concentrations in Antarctica decreased?
What about all the people who should be fried because of the naughty hole in the sky? All the billions with skin cancer?
If people had checked the story with the Ozone hole, the climate-change story would never have happend.

Nogw
September 11, 2009 5:53 am

Fred Lightfoot (02:44:03) : Wisdom 100% pure:
Now we get politicians (failed lawyers) offering mega $ for research to ”prove” that us humans are in charge of the climate, if these 25-39 IQ ”humans” went and experienced the world, (not visiting the local Hilton) and realized how big our planet is and how small the human presence is we would not be trying to get milk from butterflies

Flanagan
September 11, 2009 5:54 am

Well Leif, I made exactly the same comment as you concerning the absence of trend since the 50ies. But only one comment out of two gets published (at least in my case).

September 11, 2009 5:59 am

Dolormin. Thank you for your reply (and thanks to others who have replied for me), but I don’t think I could put it any better than Philip_B. I have been following climate change in earnest since 2003 – and have read very much on the subject. I have seen many graphs predicting (from a point back) what the coming temperatures would be up to 2000 and beyond. I haven’t seen a single graph (from a model) predicting that we would be at the anomaly right now. If you have then kindly give us all the web address, as I obviously missed it. Climate is COMPLETELY unpredictable – either way, in my opinion based on all that I have read. There are too many checks and balances and things we clearly don’t understand about how the chaotic climate system works. At this stage of our knowledge, to state that we will either warm or cool is preposterous in the extreme. I laugh every time I see a Warmist talk of future climate – and laugh also at those who say we will cool. They’re very brave, or stupid. You decide.
PS Sorry if I cannot reply quicker, but I don’t have access to my PC in my work.

Ron de Haan
September 11, 2009 6:01 am

rbateman (04:25:47) :
Stephen Wilde (23:48:17) :
There is really not much correlation between observed climate changes and the progression of a single solar cycle which is surprising if the cosmic ray effect is at all significant.
“The IPCC’s man-centered universe is as backwards as the Dark Ages, feeding on ignorance and fear of the place we live.
Someday, we will be able to predict both the climate and the solar cycles, but not if the IPCC manages to control science first”.
rbateman,
How right you are.
The populations of the West are brainwashed by their Governments.
People are told that we have to return to other, less ambitious and material values, eat less meat, show more respect for Government and Government Officials.
In the mean time our politicians state we have to invest more money in education.
That’s what they say, but they don’t.
Germany spend 7 billion Euro’s in a cash for clunkers project but has no budget
for education.
Billions have been invested in spin and manipulation.
Bilions more are spend to lure the corrupt leaders of the Third World countries into a the Cimate Change Scam and stop the development of their populations for decades to come and deprive them from cheap food and energy.
The skeptic opposition is infiltrated by people who take the lead in the discussions but support the insane Carbon Taxation.
This is a frontal attack on human civilization.
Fortunately most people in the West are fed up with Government Meddling and spending. Even if people lack the knowledge or even the interest for the Climate debate, they don’t want to lose their freedom.
If this hoax is stopped however, it has to be stopped in the USA.
If the USA rejects the Climate Bill, we have bought more time and time is our side.

Bill McClure
September 11, 2009 6:08 am

Fred Lightfoot (02:44:03) :
Fred , The weather on my Missouri farm is tame compared to what you have seen! But I agree with you the AGW people seem to experience weather from the evening news. After years of listening to weather forcasts I greatly appreciate the improved accuracy we have today. If the weather forcast says it will be dry for three days if can cut hay and get it baled without it getting wet half the time. It used to be any forecast past 24 hours was usless. My point is this 3 day forecasts are barely accurate enought to use as aplanning tool, a weekly or 14 day forecast is a poor guide , but a 3 month forecast is judged aganst history. Anything longer is wishfull thinking.

Nogw
September 11, 2009 6:08 am

It seems that some hearts beat secretly thanks to CO2 feedback…

Johnny Honda
September 11, 2009 6:09 am

, you have a “fan-website”, did you know that?
There is a guy who is whining about most articles here and calls this “blog” the funny name “open mind”
http://tamino.wordpress.com/
I can see absolutely no sign of “open mind” in this website

Bob H.
September 11, 2009 6:10 am

Stephen Wilde (23:48:17) :
The main shifts in global air temperature trend seem to occur at approximately 25 to 30 years intervals when the oceans change phase. Even on shorter ENSO type interannual time scales we see a rapid and direct response in the air to ocean SST changes.
There is really not much correlation between observed climate changes and the progression of a single solar cycle which is surprising if the cosmic ray effect is at all significant.
I wouldn’t expect to see a correlation between a single solar cycle an climate changes, but then if one looks at the oceans as a large resistor/capacitor pair and the atmosphere as a small resistor/capacitor pair, a better correlation may be possible. Let me explain, since the ocean has an enormous capacity to store energy, it cannot change very quickly, hence little correlation would be observed. A single solar cycle is simply too short a time span. The oceans serve as a low-pass filter, absorbing higher frequency events. Because of the limited surface area of the ocean (compared to its volume) it would release energy at a limited rate (the resistor). Hurricanes and tropical storms are essentially a short to the upper atmosphere, hence a higher energy release. The atmosphere has only a small capacity (small capacitor) compared to the ocean (large capacitor) and will respond to changes more quickly (high-pass filter). This would be the daily weather. How galactic cosmic rays (GCM) affect the formation of clouds, and the newly discovered interaction between the solar wind and the magnetosphere affect the weather and climate is yet to be seen.
The analogy presented above is undoubtedly overly simple, and new research is adding to our knowledge every day, but it could be modeled, probably with better accuracy than the current global climate models than the IPCC uses.

Mike Lewis
September 11, 2009 6:11 am

Leif Svalgaard (04:01:53) :
(2) The Sun’s magnetic field has not doubled in the last 100 years. It is now precisely where it was 108 years ago.
This is way outside my area of expertise (if indeed I even have one) but thought this might be what Dr. Svensmark was referring too? AOMF is average open magnetic field.
“We can see that both models exhibit increase of AOMF approximately by a factor of two in the first half of 20th century, confirming thereby the known results (see, e.g., Lockwood et al. 1999).”
Source: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=2&url=http%3A%2F%2Fjournals.cambridge.org%2Fproduction%2Faction%2FcjoGetFulltext%3Ffulltextid%3D288617&ei=k0mqSoynDKD8tgeywMCiCA&usg=AFQjCNHAYfOF_moOWZdQUcOI24uvwuRRgQ

An Inquirer
September 11, 2009 6:16 am

mark twain (00:37:15): ” . . . ipcc explains the warming up to 1950 with natural forces, inkl. sun aktivities!”
Could you supply a reference that supports your statement?

Invariant
September 11, 2009 6:19 am

Leif Svalgaard (04:01:53) : The Sun’s magnetic field has not doubled in the last 100 years. It is now precisely where it was 108 years ago.
Yes. However, the accumulated or integrated effect of the Sun’s magnetic field shows an increasing trend the last 100 years, and I would argue that this matters more than the instant value. If you take your HMF B data (http://www.leif.org/research/HMF-1835-now.xls) and calculates this function,
T_est = 0.007640*cumsum(HMF_B-5.7848)-0.4470;
you will see what I mean. The implication is that values of HMF B lower than 5.7848 reduce global temperature while values of HMF B greater than 5.7848 increase global temperature. The reason for the increase is that shorter cycles tend to contribute more since they usually have shorter intermediate periods where HMF_B is below 5.7848. Now, I do not take this speculative toy model literally. My main point is that any integral of solar activity (HMF B, TSI, …) may lead to the conclusion that the global temperature could increase more with solar cycle 22 and 23 than other cycles and decrease with solar cycle 14 and 15. I am not saying that Svensmark is correct, what I am saying is that we cannot say that he is wrong – he may be close.

Patrick Davis
September 11, 2009 6:23 am

“Ron de Haan (06:01:30) :
Fortunately most people in the West are fed up with Government Meddling and spending. Even if people lack the knowledge or even the interest for the Climate debate, they don’t want to lose their freedom.”
If that were true why do these “meddling and spending Govn’ts”, it appears, continually get re-elected? UK New Labour, been there 10 years now. I expect that will change simply because Bliar gave up and Brown, unelected, took over. Australian’s voted for KRudd747 because of the involvement in the Irag/Afgahnistan wars, lead by Bush, supported by Howard (and Bliar). Unfortunately, in Australia, too many people “support” AGW. That’s the second biggest reason why KRudd747 won.

Peter Sørensen
September 11, 2009 6:27 am

Leif,
You write that the solar magnetic field has not doubled in the last 100 years. I found this article from Nature :http://www.ukssdc.rl.ac.uk/wdcc1/papers/nature.html
Acording to this article the solar magnetic field has doubled since 1901

A Wod
September 11, 2009 6:34 am

An article by frethack on the Naked Scientists website says that there is a correlation between ITCZ (Inter Tropical Convergence Zone) and solar activity in its effects on the Gulf Stream. It is not work that the IPCC has taken account of. Unfortunately the accompanying figures are not visible on my computer.

Oliver Ramsay
September 11, 2009 6:48 am

dorlomin (01:44:14) :
“You want him to produce a quote of what he just said? ”
Sorry there is not editing function here. I would like him to produce a quote that backs up this statement: “What the Warmists forget (whether intentionally or not) is that this flatline of temperature (or even cooling) was not predicted by models.”
—————
Dorlomin, I don’t think you understand this statement. You should not ignore the subject and verb of the main clause. You are demanding that someone corroborate his statement that “Warmists forget…” . In light of our awareness of what models predict, your quote from Gavin demonstrates that warmists forget.

Jon Jewett
September 11, 2009 6:49 am

Robert (04:32:09) :
“I relocated to Nome, and just in time too”
Uhhhh, I hate to tell you this, but…..
Those gold strikes that were found in the hills north of Nome? That’s the old beach line. Placer deposits formed from gold washed out of the hills. When the gold got washed down to the beach line, wave action caused the gold to settle to the bed rock.
So, you may want to move above the locations of those old gold strikes ’cause that’s where global warming will put sea level. As I recall, they were some 200 feet above the present site of Nome.
But then, there are also some ancient beach lines about the same distance UNDER the water there. That’s where global cooling will put the beach line.
You pays your money, you takes your choice.
(I spent a summer anchored off of Nome working for the Marine Minerals Technology Center expedition to find sea floor placer deposits back in ’67.)
Regards,
Steamboat Jack

September 11, 2009 6:55 am

Thanks for the hat tip Anthony 🙂 My first.
“Svenskerne overraskede Danmark med at gå over isen”
Means
“The Swedes surprised Denmark by walking across the ice”

Ken S
September 11, 2009 6:55 am

“Flanagan (00:36:42) :
A very mysterious mechanism indeed. And still not supported by any observation. Moreover, how is it the sun is “fading” since the 90ies and all we got is a warming? Even 20 years later? 2009 is not going to be a cold year, far from that. August and July were globally pretty hot and September seems to be setting a new record
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/amsutemps.html
check Channel 5″
I look forward to reading Flanagan’s nonsense!
I wish he commented every day; good laugh of the day!
Enough said by me!

LarryD
September 11, 2009 6:56 am

FYI: Sunlight recorders
This is a Campbell-Stokes recorder (developed in 1879) http://data.piercecollege.edu/weather/duration_sunlight_recorder.html
A Giles recorder http://www.flickr.com/photos/59874422@N00/2034574063/

Don S.
September 11, 2009 6:58 am

@Fred Lightfoot: A great read, Fred. Your oilfield life was more adventurous than my military one. I don’t know if you realize that your account of the various situations you encountered is way too specific with regards to temperatures, wind speeds, wave heights, hail depths and lightning strikes.
You see, Fred, everything in climate research is postulated from proxies for actual events. In this way it is possible to model the temperature of an area with a 1600K radius with a single temperature reading and forecast the temperature 100 years hence to an accuracy of one one-hundredth of a degree C. Your reports of actual events, should the dates become known, would destroy no end of GCMs in which taxpayers are heavily invested.;-)
You’re a breath of fresh air, sir.

dorlomin
September 11, 2009 7:05 am

Barry Foster (05:59:33) :
Dolormin. Thank you for your reply (and thanks to others who have replied for me), but I don’t think I could put it any better than Philip_B. I have been following climate change in earnest since 2003 – and have read very much on the subject. I have seen many graphs predicting (from a point back) what the coming temperatures would be up to 2000 and beyond. I haven’t seen a single graph (from a model) predicting that we would be at the anomaly right now.
—————————————————–
Graphs?
http://www.eoearth.org/media/draft/f/f5/IPCC_AR4_WG1_ch10_fig10.26.jpg
None of the graphs I have seen have shown what will happen, they have only produced estimates of what might happen within a range of confidence. If and when they break out of the range of variability of the graph, then they will have a problem. Not showing the idiocyncratic movements dont tell us anything.
Models aside, back to basics. The earth is warmer than it should be due to its atmospehre, a phenominem known as the greenhouse effect.
CO2 is a well understood greenhouse gas.
CO2 has been building in the atmosphere as the sinks have been exceeded by the output of human activities.
All things being equal this should be a positive forcing on the temperature.
The range of that forcing is where the debate is. Not over modelers personalities, not over politicians, not over how people are using the science for for….. its the climate sensitivity to CO2.
Real skepticism is being conservative about the climate sensitivity and being conservative about every new proposed forcing.
Skepticism is so easy and natural for a scientist. Jumping on board the Svennsmark train with both feet is not skepticism……

dorlomin
September 11, 2009 7:06 am

” Not showing the idiocyncratic movements dont tell us anything. ”
should have read “That they are not showing the idiocyncratic movements of the climate does not tell us anything. “

Nogw
September 11, 2009 7:13 am

Ron de Haan (06:01:30) :
If this hoax is stopped however, it has to be stopped in the USA
…waiting cavalry…but if it doesn’t appears, then what?
What about Russia and China?, do their scientists/politicians believe in this global warming/climate change creed?
In general we could say that it comes from those who we pay to work for us, so in the whole world it should be forbidden, for any elected official, to change establishment unless specifically authorized by us, their employers.
Because only they, because of not having to struggle for daily living, have the time and leisure enough to concoct petty theories and pretend god’s part playing.

tallbloke
September 11, 2009 7:16 am

Leif Svalgaard:
“According to calculations by British scientists, the strength of the Sun’s magnetic field has doubled during the Twentieth Century alone.”
Those same scientists now know that the doubling didn’t happen.

Quite right Leif. They now estimate that it was a 79% increase rather than a 100% increase.

William
September 11, 2009 7:22 am

Philip 05:04
Be careful about how you represent Lucia’s work. It does not invalidate GCM predictions yet. It will take another 10-15 years of data to do that and the temperatures we are now experiencing could very well be a pause before further increases.
It’s clear that our understanding of all that effects our climate is small and still growing. Don’t be ignorant to the fact that man has changed and continues to change the face of the earth and continues to pump CO2 into the air and pollute the water. You may want to read up at this site: http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/
The net effect of man changing the globe is that we are changing climate directly and by what we pump into the air. The changes may not be the catastrophe’s the IPCC predicts but don’t doubt for a minute that they are ocurring.
Thanks
William

Ron de Haan
September 11, 2009 7:28 am

Scott Mandia (03:24:55) :
“Personally, I would love to see Svensmark be correct and that AGW is not a concern because then we can rest knowing that there is, for the most part, nothing we can do about it.”
Scott Mandia,
You are really incredible.
You master the art of writing a ton of crap in a single sentence.
“If AGW is not a concern and we are heading for a new ice age we can rest?”
If Svensmark is correct, we will have a serious problem feeding the world’s population.
Cooling, look at our history, is a much bigger threat to humanity than any warming.
But the biggest threat for all of us right now is the political objective that lies behind
the AGW/Climate Change Doctrine.
So, wake up to the facts and start using your brain.

Patrick Davis
September 11, 2009 7:33 am

“tallbloke (07:16:12) :
Leif Svalgaard:
“According to calculations by British scientists, the strength of the Sun’s magnetic field has doubled during the Twentieth Century alone.”
Those same scientists now know that the doubling didn’t happen.
Quite right Leif. They now estimate that it was a 79% increase rather than a 100% increase.”
And that is still an estimate. Estimates are like “golbal average temperatures”, they are meaningless.

Steven Hill
September 11, 2009 7:35 am

It’s easy to see that man better start looking into where we can grow enough food during the future cooling period and not wasting time on the stupid AGW politics.
But than again, I think were on the slope towards change that cannot be changed by any man.

Dell Hunt, Michigan
September 11, 2009 7:36 am

The Good News: Global Warming is over.
The Bad News: Global Warming is over.
And after one of the coldest winters and coolest summers here in Michigan this past year, global warming is bound to be missed.

Chris Schoneveld
September 11, 2009 7:36 am

Leif Svalgaard (05:20:47) :
“Nick Yates (04:45:09) :
If only WUWT could get Henrik Svensmark to discuss this here with Dr Svalgaard. It would be so interesting.”
He won’t, as Al Gore won’t either.”
This very, very close to an ad hom. quite uncharacteristically for Leif.

RR Kampen
September 11, 2009 7:38 am

“Indeed, global warming stopped and a cooling is beginning. No climate model has predicted a cooling of the Earth, on the contrary. This means that projections of future climate is unpredictable, writes Henrik Svensmark.”
So clever. Future climate is unpredictable but Svensmark knows ‘a cooling is beginning’ 🙂

September 11, 2009 7:39 am

@ Robert (04:32:09) :
After Katrina it had become obvious that AGW had caused stronger and more frequent hurricanes, so I moved again, to Maine.
Atlantic hurricane frequency follows a natural 20 to 30 year cycle. The current “active” cycle began in 1995. According to Vechi, et. al. (2008) warmer sea-surface temperatures have likely contributed to more intense hurricanes and will continue to do so into the future. Of less certainty is whether or not the frequency of hurricanes is being influenced by global warming. More research is needed to test this hypothesis. I would read Dr. Gray’s opinions on this as he is quite the authority on hurricanes.
Vecchi, G.A., Swanson, K.L., & Soden, B.J. (2008). Whither hurricane activity?. Science. 322, 687-689.
@ Johnny Honda (05:44:28) :
I hope that this discussion doesn’t turn into an ozone hole debate. The link to human activities and ozone loss is very well established. After the Montreal Protocol and subsequent revisions, there are certainly fewer CFCs that end up in the stratosphere to destroy ozone. CFCs take decades to centuries to be removed so it is no surprise that there is still a thin ozone. The latest predictions for a recovery are discussed in the link below:
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2006/ozone_recovery.html
This is also the problem with greenhouse gases, esp. CO2. If you believe greenhouse gases are contributing to the modern day global warming (of course I do and most here do not) then even with mitigation the long-term residence of CO2 will still cause warming long after these remedies are in place.
@ Johnny Honda (06:09:32) :
I had assumed that Tamino’s Open Mind bloge was well known here. In my opinion, he has the best blog out there when it comes to actually analyzing data. For example, he smashed the article from McLean, de Freitas and Carter that claimed to show how ENSO might be causing the trend in global warming. See:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/07/24/old-news/
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/08/04/influence-of-the-southern-oscillation-on-tropospheric-temperature/
After Tamino’s rebuttal of this journal article, many others showed the same problems with the concluding comments about NSO and trends. The bottom line is this is how science works. Papers get published, experts look at the claims and the data, and either accept it or rebut it. Talk is cheap when it is not supported by data nor discussed in the peer-reviewed literature.
I would be very careful if you intend to tap Tamino’s bees nest. You will likely be coming to a gun fight armed with a knife.

September 11, 2009 7:41 am

The politicians haven’t got the balls for it! The green votes/taxes are too much!

RR Kampen
September 11, 2009 7:43 am

Dell Hunt, Michigan (07:36:10) :
“And after one of the coldest winters and coolest summers here in Michigan this past year, global warming is bound to be missed.”
Michigan warming has held up for half a year, would be the correct assertion.
Michigan, or even the US, is not the globe.
As depicted here, http://data.giss.nasa.gov/work/gistemp/NMAPS/tmp_GHCN_GISS_HR2SST_1200km_Anom0603_2009_2009_1951_1980/GHCN_GISS_HR2SST_1200km_Anom0603_2009_2009_1951_1980.gif , Holland had a warm summer – the 9th in a row – as had most of the Northern Hemisphere (by contrast, most of the Southern Hemisphere had a mild winter). I’m the wittness for Holland.

Mr. Alex
September 11, 2009 7:44 am

*sigh*… Flanagan and his thermageddon…
Who cares if 2009 is still hotter than 18xy? Temperatures can still be currently decreasing. Think about it, when you get to the top of the hill and go past the peak (in temp example: 1998), you start going down the hill.
Initially you are STILL near the top, even though you are now cooling (going down); i.e. 2009 is only a mere 11 years down the slope, we are still on top but not going any higher.
It seems as though the experts got it flat wrong with SC 24.
The critical latitude of 22 degrees was reached and we got one spot.
It is absolutely amazing that just 5 years ago sunspot activity was touted as the highest in 1000 years and today it is weak and not a single person knows exactly what’s next.

September 11, 2009 7:47 am

dorlomin (07:05:19) :
The earth is warmer than it should be due to its atmospehre, a phenominem known as the greenhouse effect.

Yep, atmosphere being the key word.
However, the atmosphere is composed of nitrogen and oxygen mainly, which heat us after being heated by the surface being heated by the sun.
Temperature on other planets depends on received Sun energy and their atmospheric pressure, not depending what the atmosphere is composed of. Earth is in line with other planets.
Heat capacity of the atmosphere is misinterpreted as “greenhouse effect”, that is the root problem of all that climatological computer model alchemy.
Has the water vapor/CO2 itself been responsible for (wrongly calculated) +33K, deserts should be much colder than tropics and Arctic should experience strongest warming as their atmosphere is dry; neither is true.

Mark
September 11, 2009 7:53 am

William: “The net effect of man changing the globe is that we are changing climate directly and by what we pump into the air. The changes may not be the catastrophe’s the IPCC predicts but don’t doubt for a minute that they are ocurring.”
Yep, mankind has an impact on his environment! Get over it! The question is whether CO2 emissions represent a crisis that must be dealt with at immense cost (and most likely to little effect!)

September 11, 2009 7:55 am

It must be annoying for Svensmark if their mechanism – which is almost certainly one of the most important insights of climatology in decades – is being largely ignored because of a paranoid politicized cult that prefers the explanations with a big potential to influence politics over the explanations that are supported by the objective evidence.
Nice article.

Gene Nemetz
September 11, 2009 7:58 am

“Indeed, [you could say] that the clouds on Earth originated in space.”
Unusual concept to the average mind I think.

Gene Nemetz
September 11, 2009 7:59 am

Mike McMillan (03:34:03) : The CO2 chart climb is as steady as you get, but the global temperature it’s supposed to be driving seem pretty oblivious to it….About the only things keeping pace with CO2 are the GISS adjustments.
Nice way to put it.

Ron de Haan
September 11, 2009 8:00 am

Fred Lightfoot (02:44:03) :
Fred, thanks for your great posting.
I enjoyed the read very much.

September 11, 2009 8:01 am

Scott A. Mandia (07:39:41) :
I hope that this discussion doesn’t turn into an ozone hole debate. The link to human activities and ozone loss is very well established. After the Montreal Protocol and subsequent revisions, there are certainly fewer CFCs that end up in the stratosphere to destroy ozone. CFCs take decades to centuries to be removed so it is no surprise that there is still a thin ozone.

I am not so sure.. the AGW come just in time to cover the ozone scientific blamage:
http://www.junkscience.com/sep07/Chemists_poke_holes_in_ozone_theory.htm
http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070924/full/449382a.html
This is also the problem with greenhouse gases, esp. CO2. If you believe greenhouse gases are contributing to the modern day global warming (of course I do and most here do not) then even with mitigation the long-term residence of CO2 will still cause warming long after these remedies are in place.
I see it is a belief. I believe its effect is indistinguishable from natural effects.
Btw, recent study suggested the “long-time residence” of CO2 is close to 10-15 years.

JamesG
September 11, 2009 8:03 am

Blimey the mainstream scientists have moved on to consider natural variation as important but their drones are still endlessly repeating the old excuses.
Oh sure, Gavin Schmidt hind-cast aerosol cooling with his model. In fact he had guessed a reason for the cooling because the CO2-causes-everything hypothesis couldn’t explain it, then he manipulated the input parameters on the model until they matched the 20th century. A remarkably easy thing to do is hind-casting when you have so many flexible parameters because you know exactly what to aim for. However a hindcast is not a prediction and never will be. Neither does it show any skill. Anyone who suggests a model hind-cast shows skill should get out of the computer modeling business.
Of course all that was before the discovery of the sea temperature bucket adjustment farce by Jones (some time after McIntyre) which made such a curve-fitting exercise look really silly. And it was also before Swanson explained on realclimate.org that the dip was more than likely from natural variation.
Mind you, it must be difficult to keep up with all these contradictory handwaves that climate scientists just keep pulling out of their rear end but you should try to keep up to date.

Gene Nemetz
September 11, 2009 8:04 am

Mark Fawcett (04:22:26) : Just recovered from passing out whilst reading the following on the BBC:
But they had to have this hackneyed statement in the article, their rallying call :
The survey, by Cardiff University, shows there is still some way to go before the public’s perception matches that of their elected leaders.
I wonder if even they are tired of it all.

Ron de Haan
September 11, 2009 8:05 am

Patrick Davis (06:23:39) :
“Ron de Haan (06:01:30) :
Fortunately most people in the West are fed up with Government Meddling and spending. Even if people lack the knowledge or even the interest for the Climate debate, they don’t want to lose their freedom.”
If that were true why do these “meddling and spending Govn’ts”, it appears, continually get re-elected? UK New Labour, been there 10 years now. I expect that will change simply because Bliar gave up and Brown, unelected, took over. Australian’s voted for KRudd747 because of the involvement in the Irag/Afgahnistan wars, lead by Bush, supported by Howard (and Bliar). Unfortunately, in Australia, too many people “support” AGW. That’s the second biggest reason why KRudd747 won.
Patrick,
I can not speak for the Brits, but the latest EU parliament election has been devastating for the left.
The upcoming elections in the Netherlands will wipe the current ruling parties of the map.
Believe me, people are fed up and the genie is out of the bottle.

Gene Nemetz
September 11, 2009 8:06 am

Chris Schoneveld (04:24:49) :
It appears the theory is moving on without Lief.

Ron de Haan
September 11, 2009 8:09 am

Nogw (07:13:24) :
Ron de Haan (06:01:30) :
“If this hoax is stopped however, it has to be stopped in the USA
…waiting cavalry…but if it doesn’t appears, then what?”
In that case I will come to Agentina and we start a smuggling operation importing cheap gasoline from Venezuela.

September 11, 2009 8:10 am

Anthony, I can translate the piece if you’d like. My address is rikard at the trygghetsvakten dot se domain.

David Corcoran
September 11, 2009 8:15 am

Flanagan (02:43:48) :
– When a forbush decrease takes place, the water content of some clouds changes by 7% corresponding to a 10%-20% decrease of cosmic ray counts
– after a few days, the water content comes back to normal levels
again, there’s no proof that cosmic rays substantially influence the composition of clouds over long periods of times, especially as compared to other parameters like the ocean average temperature. If you prefer, this is weather, not climate.

Svensmark has demonstrated a link, you admit the link, but dismiss it as just weather. Isn’t climate a collection of weather?
Flanagan (05:54:34) :
Well Leif, I made exactly the same comment as you concerning the absence of trend since the 50ies. But only one comment out of two gets published (at least in my case).

I’m given to understand that weather is rather complex and hard to predict. How can ANYONE who purports to be reasonably intelligent assume that any single mechanism discussed must be the primary, sole driver of weather & climate, with all other factors fading to insignificance? That would be absolutely idiotic. Svensmark has discussed GCRs as a climate factor, He has not claimed that it’s an overwhelming driver.
But you know who makes that sort of claim all of the time? The good folks at Real Climate. They attribute everything to CO2, and dismiss any other influence on global climate as minuscule in comparison. Every day of the week and twice on Tuesday. Yet Hansen’s predictions from 30 years ago were way too high, so were the ones from 20 years ago. And the ones 10 years ago? Even worse. Considering the trillions that stopping CO2 production will cost, isn’t it reasonable to ask that some sort of accurate 10-year prediction be demonstrated first? (or whatever time period that would be considered more than “weather”… never can get a definition from an alarmist on that).

Gene Nemetz
September 11, 2009 8:17 am

Robert (04:32:09) : Well I’m here to tell ya buddy…I’m going with the models, they’ve saved me many times before.
I went with a few models too, as girlfriends. They didn’t save me from anything. They were good to look at though—for a while. But it was like chocolate ; great at first, but you get sick of it after a while and don’t want it anymore. It just goes to show you how reliable models, climate and/or human, are.
I’m looking for low maintenance girls now.

Mark
September 11, 2009 8:17 am

“Flanagan (00:36:42) :
A very mysterious mechanism indeed. And still not supported by any observation. Moreover, how is it the sun is “fading” since the 90ies and all we got is a warming? Even 20 years later? 2009 is not going to be a cold year, far from that. August and July were globally pretty hot and September seems to be setting a new record
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/amsutemps.html
check Channel 5″
Indeed, it’s called an El Nino!
http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/people/klaus.wolter/MEI/table.html
http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/people/klaus.wolter/MEI/rank.html

Bob Shapiro
September 11, 2009 8:17 am

oakgeo (00:24:32) :
“Please get it professionally translated. I think I just had a freshman flashback.”
My guess is that you mean “edited” rather than translated. The text as displayed needs only a few tweaks to make it grammatically correct. So, here’s one possible edited version; others are welcome to try reediting.
———————————–
While the Sun Sleeps
Henrik Svensmark, Professor, DTU, Copenhagen
Global Warming has stopped, and a cooling is beginning. But, no Climate Model has predicted a cooling – quite the contrary. This means that future climate is unpredictable, writes Henrik Svensmark.
Over the last few years, the Star which keeps us alive has had almost no Sunspots, which are the usual signs of the Sun’s magnetic activity.
Last week, the team behind Sohosatellitten (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) reported that the number of sunspot-free days suggests that solar activity is heading toward its lowest level in about 100 years. Everything indicates that the Sun is moving into a hibernation-like state, and the obvious question is whether it has any significance for us on Earth.
If you ask the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which represents the current consensus on climate change, the answer is a reassuring “nothing.” But, history and recent research suggests that that view probably is completely wrong. Let us take a closer look at why.
Solar activity always has varied. Around the year 1000, we had a period of very high solar activity, which coincided with the Medieval Warm Period. It was a period when frosts in May (in Copenhagen) were an almost unknown phenomenon and of great importance for a good harvest. Vikings settled in Greenland and explored the coast of North America. China’s population doubled over this period. But, after about 1300, the Earth began to get colder, and it was the beginning of the period we now call the Little Ice Age. In this cold period, all the Viking settlements in Greenland disappeared, Sweden were surprised to see Denmark freeze over in ice, and the Thames in London froze repeatedly. More serious were the long periods of crop failure, which resulted in a poorly nourished population. Because of disease and hunger, the population was reduced by about 30% in Europe.
It is important to note that the Little Ice Age was a global event. It ended in the late 19th century as an increase in solar activity began. Over the past 50 years, solar activity has been the highest since the Medieval Warm Period over 1000 years ago. And now, it appears that the Sun is heading once again toward what is called a “Grand Minimum” such as we saw during the Little Ice Age.
Some have tried to explain the correlation between solar activity and climate through the ages as a coincidence, but it turns out that, almost no matter what time period is being studied – not just the last 1000 years – that correlation is there. Solar activity over the past 10,000 years has fluctuated repeatedly between high and low, with the Sun being in “Sleep Mode” approximately 17% of the time, each episode followed by a cooling of the Earth.
One can wonder that the IPCC does not believe that the Sun’s changing activity has no effect on the climate, but the reason is that they only include changes in solar radiation.
Looking at radiation only would be the simplest way by which the Sun could change the climate – a bit like turning up and down the brightness of a light bulb.
Satelite measurements of solar radiation have shown that the variations are too small to cause climate change, but many have closed their eyes to a second, much more powerful way that the Sun is able to affect Earth’s climate. In 1996, we discovered a surprising influence of the Sun – its impact on Earth’s cloud cover. High energy accelerated particles from exploded stars, the Cosmic Radiation, are helping to form clouds.
When the Sun is active, its magnetic field shields more effectively against the cosmic rays from outer space before they reach our planet. These changes regulate the Earth’s cloud cover, which can turn the Earth’s temperature up or down. High solar activity produces fewer clouds, and the Earth gets warmer. Low solar activity gives Earth inferior shielding against cosmic rays, which results in increased cloud cover and hence a cooling. As the Sun’s magnetism has doubled in strength during the 20th century, this natural mechanism may be responsible for a large part of Global Warming during this period.
This also explains why most climate scientists are trying to ignore this possibility. They in fact favor the idea that the 20th century temperature rise is due mainly to human emissions of CO2. If the Sun has influenced a significant part of warming in the 20th century, it means that CO2’s contribution necessarily must be smaller.
Ever since our theory was put forward in 1996, it has undergone very sharp criticism, which is normal in science.
First, it was said that a link between clouds and solar activity could not be correct because no physical mechanism was known. But in 2006, after many years of work, we managed to conduct experiments at DTU Space, where we demonstrated the existence of a physical mechanism. Cosmic radiation helps to form aerosols, which are the seeds for cloud formation.
Then came the criticism that the mechanism we found in the laboratory was unable to survive in the real atmosphere, and therefore had no practical significance. But that criticism we have just emphatically rejected. It turns out that the sun itself is doing what we might call natural experiments. Giant solar flares can have the cosmic radiation on Earth dive suddenly over a few days. In the days after the eruption, cloud cover falls by about 4 per cent. And the content of liquid water in clouds (droplets) is reduced by almost 7 per cent. Indeed, you could say that the clouds on Earth originated in space.
Therefore we have looked at the sun’s magnetic activity with increasing concern, since it began to wane in the mid-1990s.
That the sun could fall asleep in a deep minimum was suggested by solar scientists at a meeting in Kiruna in Sweden two years ago. As Nigel Calder and I updated our book “The Chilling Stars” therefore, we wrote a little provocative passage, “we recommend that our friends enjoy Global Warming while it lasts.”
Indeed, Global Warming has stopped, and a cooling is beginning. Last week, it was argued by Mojib Latif from the University of Kiel at the UN World Climate Conference in Geneva that cooling may continue through the next 10 to 20 years.
His explanation was natural changes in North Atlantic circulation and not in solar activity. But no matter how it is interpreted, the natural variations in climate then penetrate more and more.
One consequence may be that the sun itself will show its importance for climate and thus test the theories of Global Warming. No climate model has predicted a cooling of the Earth – quite the contrary.
This means that projections of future climate are unpredictable. A forecast that says it may be either warmer or colder for 50 years, is not very useful, since science is not able to predict solar activity.
So in many ways, we stand at a crossroads. The near future will be extremely interesting and I think it is important to recognize that nature is completely independent of what we humans think about it. Will Greenhouse theory survive a significant cooling of the Earth? Not in its current dominant form. Unfortunately, tomorrow’s climate challenges will be quite different than greenhouse theory’s predictions, and perhaps it agin will become popular to investigate the sun’s impact on climate.
Professor Henrik Svensmark is director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at DTU Space. His book “The Chilling Stars” has also been published in Danish as “Climate and the Cosmos” (Gads Forlag, DK ISBN 9788712043508)

tallbloke
September 11, 2009 8:20 am

Patrick Davis (07:33:36) :
“tallbloke (07:16:12) :
Leif Svalgaard:
“According to calculations by British scientists, the strength of the Sun’s magnetic field has doubled during the Twentieth Century alone.”
Those same scientists now know that the doubling didn’t happen.
Quite right Leif. They now estimate that it was a 79% increase rather than a 100% increase.”
And that is still an estimate. Estimates are like “golbal average temperatures”, they are meaningless.

Estimate was a poorly chosen word. The difficult process of gaining useful and valid information from the data is still a worthwhile effort, despite uncertainty.
Unless you are of the opinion that we should throw our hands in the air and sit down in ignorance?

Johnny Honda
September 11, 2009 8:21 am

@Scott A. Mandia
thanks for the Link. There it says:
“But the researchers show that the ozone hole has not started to shrink a lot as a result. The scientists predict the ozone hole will not start shrinking a lot until 2018. By that year, the ozone hole’s recovery will make better time.”
So my point is confirmed!
Maybe you should also read in “Nature” Vol. 449 the Article “Chemists poke a hole in ozon theory”
“I would be very careful if you intend to tap Tamino’s bees nest. You will likely be coming to a gun fight armed with a knife”
Oh, I’m so scared, I will have troubles sleeping tonight!
Everything that Tamino in his blog “Narrow Mind” does (but I didn’t read all his stuff), is using Hansen’s corrupted GISS temperature to “proof” that WUWT is wrong.
And the fact that he said once something correct, has no meaning, even a broken clock shows twice a day the correct time.

Ron de Haan
September 11, 2009 8:21 am

Robert E. Phelan (05:07:08) :
“I have no way of knowing whether Dr. Svensmark is correct about cosmic rays and clouds but he is definitely not correct about poor harvests causing a 30% decline in Europe’s population during the Little Ice Age. That phenomenon was caused by something called the Black Death”.
Robert, please read the article correctly:
Quote:
“But more serious was the long periods of crop failure, which resulted in a poorly nourished population, because of disease and hunger population was reduced] by about 30 per cent in Europe”.
Because of disease and hunger the article states.
About cosmic rays, look at the graph posted by Harold Ambler:
Harold Ambler (05:22:10) :
http://cosmicrays.oulu.fi/webform/query.cgi?startdate=1964/08/11&starttime=00:00&enddate=2009/09/11&endtime=15:35&resolution=Automatic%20choice&picture=on

David in Davis
September 11, 2009 8:21 am

Fred Lightfoot (02:44:03) :
You really should write a memoir, not to prove that weather is local, just to share your experiences of ~50 years of adventure in the oil biz. Sounds like you have quite an interesting tale to tell to us armchair adventurers and probably many astute observations of how things really work in parts of the world that most of us are so isolated from. Get at it! (please)

September 11, 2009 8:26 am

@ Ron de Haan (07:28:52) :
Next time I will write “sarcasm” in quotes next to a comment so that it is well understood to be just that.
I have certainly not read all of your posts on WUWT, but are you this concerned for the welfare of the world’s population if in fact, as most experts suggest, AGW is occurring? If you are truly the humanist you claim to be then you should be concerned either way.
I know this comment doesn’t really add to the discussion but sometimes a guy just has to defend himself. I think it should be clear by now that the reason I post here (and on many other blogs) is because I am very concerned about our future and am willing to take the potshots in order to reach a few folks who I believe are being misled.

Ron de Haan
September 11, 2009 8:35 am

RR Kampen (07:38:28) :
“Indeed, global warming stopped and a cooling is beginning. No climate model has predicted a cooling of the Earth, on the contrary. This means that projections of future climate is unpredictable, writes Henrik Svensmark.”
So clever. Future climate is unpredictable but Svensmark knows ‘a cooling is beginning’ 🙂
RR Kampen,
I do not understand why you make this rather patronizing remark but
if you make a quote, please quote all the remarks made by Svensmark about the cooling, the climate models and the sun.
Because now you are placing his remarks out of the context.
I would be careful with that, especially because this is not a scientific report but as Anthony stated at the beginning of the article:
“Translation is from Google translation with some post translation cleanup of jumbled words or phrases by myself. In cases were the words were badly jumbled or didn’t quite make sense I inserted [my interpretation in brackets]”.

Sandy
September 11, 2009 8:36 am

“I would be very careful if you intend to tap Tamino’s bees nest. You will likely be coming to a gun fight armed with a knife.”
All that Tamino cites as peer-reviewed sources are peer-reviewed by the same old cronies chasing all the political funding they can get.
Ultimately this coming NH winter will end Global Warming once and for all, ask the fjord ponies.

Gene Nemetz
September 11, 2009 8:37 am

Mark (04:45:49) :
simplified drawing of the theory from your link :
http://www.sciencebits.com/files/pictures/climate/crcFig2.jpg
Something I think some don’t realize is that the cosmic ray level is not a constant. It varies, higher and lower. So just watching the sun to evaluate how much of cosmic rays are getting into the earths atmosphere and seeding clouds isn’t enough. You have to factor in cosmic ray levels.
And good luck trying to get a perfect handle on that!
The fact still remains that cosmic rays form aerosols–“the rest are details”.

Niels A Nielsen
September 11, 2009 8:44 am

Scott A. Mandia (07:39:41) : “I would be very careful if you intend to tap Tamino’s bees nest. You will likely be coming to a gun fight armed with a knife”.
What do you think happens at the ‘Open Mind’ when it suddenly turns out that Tamino is the guy waving a knife against a visitors gun? A fellow blogger, Lucia Liljegren, was recently banned from posting at his blog because she pointed out a problem in one of Taminos analyses…
Tamino: “Lucia appears to have the skill to figure this out. But rather than do the work, she prefers to come here and plant that idiotic “violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics” meme that we’ve all heard a thousand times from more denialist idiots than the planet has room for. She’s a petulant child, one who won’t be commenting here again.]”
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/08/17/not-computer-models/
She did the work at her blog and it of turned out that Lucias questions were more than justified. Tamino obviously sensed his defeat and banned her from posting rather than adress her relevant questions. Go to Lucias blog and search posts tagged ‘Tamino’. The case is an eye opener to an open mind.

George E. Smith
September 11, 2009 8:49 am

“”” Tenuc (00:47:50) :
If only the climate of earth were so simple that major changes depended just on one factor. Unfortunately this simplistic view is wrong, and our chaotic climate depends on multiple interlinked mechanisms to keep it within the bounds of a few degrees of temperature variability we usually see.
The Svensmark theory may well be correct, but like CO2 caused AGW, I’m sure it will not turn out to be the sole mechanism. However, with Copenhagen around trhe corner, it’s good to see some publicity which shows the CO2 theory is very weak and perhaps help stop global Cap & Trade being adopted. “””
I don’t think anyone; including Dr Svensmark has ever suggested that his theory is a complete explanation of “climate change”.
Does the term “natural variability” mean anything to anyone ?
Svensmark’s cosmic ray thesis, is simply one component of “natural variability”; that is all he is saying.
And Frank Wentz (RSS) et al “How Much More Rain will Global Warming Bring ?” SCIENCE July-7-2007 pretty much points to the negative feedback control loop that depends solely on the physical properties of H2O; and that is what holds earth’s temperature range in a comfortable range, that is NOT controllable by humans.
So sad that basic problem solving logic skills aren’t taught in school any more.
George

Stephen Wilde
September 11, 2009 8:52 am

Stephen Wilde (23:48:17) :
When the Sun goes quiet, we here on Earth experience more of the effects of Galactic influence, which is never quite totally overriden by the Sun.
The solar modulation is only a few percent, and the Galactic influence does not vary on a time scale of centuries or faster”
Leif,
That was not my comment. It was from rbateman.
I agree with you about the sun on shorter time scales and only disagree on century or multi century time scales.

Ron de Haan
September 11, 2009 8:53 am

Luboš Motl (07:55:34) :
“It must be annoying for Svensmark if their mechanism – which is almost certainly one of the most important insights of climatology in decades – is being largely ignored because of a paranoid politicized cult that prefers the explanations with a big potential to influence politics over the explanations that are supported by the objective evidence.
Nice article”.
Thanks Luboš, I could not agree more.

RR Kampen
September 11, 2009 8:53 am

Re: Gene Nemetz (07:59:31) :
Mike McMillan (03:34:03) : “The CO2 chart climb is as steady as you get, but the global temperature it’s supposed to be driving seem pretty oblivious to it….About the only things keeping pace with CO2 are the GISS adjustments.”
“Nice way to put it.”

Disagree. The rise in [CO2] is not the only thing driving global temperature. It is only by far the most important. But there is no reason to believe the rise should be strictly linear. Just as there is no reason to believe that year-to-year temperature variability was always zero before 1900.
If CO2-levels were at those of 1900, 2007 and maybe 2008 should have become close to the coldest on record: deep solar minimum + powerful La Niña + two volcanoes. Instead they made it to the top 10% warmest. Stronger evidence for GW is hard to get by.

wws
September 11, 2009 8:56 am

I hadn’t ever wasted time on Tamino’s blog before, so I looked at it. Funny, he seems to have dedicated almost every post to complaining about WUWT. The number of views and traffic here must be driving him crazy.
I have a feeling he took the fall of the “Green Jobs Czar” pretty hard.
REPLY: Actually what is going on is that he’s acting out his anger over his inability to do something about the thorough falsification that he’s been getting by Lucia over his two box model. Since he can’t refute her conclusions about his failure and his violating the second law of thermodynamics, he attacks what he considers to be an easy target to prop up his ego. His pattern is quite predictable. He did the same thing with the Ian Jolife incident, and when McIntyre took him to task here and here. He couldn’t refute either of those so he let loose a barrage of angry posts about me and WUWT readers. He calls Lucia a petulant child, but can’t come to grips with the facts of the situation. While he does make some valid points, his approach is totally angry and antisocial. I find his posts amusing and yet sad. – Anthony

Phil's Dad
September 11, 2009 8:59 am

Graeme Rodaughan (23:47:21) says “Refreshing. Now if only the Politicians were paying attention…”
We are Graeme.
Coupled with solar wind effects, iris effect, basic irradiance and cosmic ray interference it starts to add up to a meaningful and repeated if unpredictable influence. Ocean currents may effect only short-term patterns (i.e. 1-100 years) but still have to get that heat from somewhere. Volcanic activities cause pinpricks in the record. Other factors, including man’s activities could just be generating further noise. Since even the range of sensitivities of any of these is unknown, projection is futile.
UK Sceptic (01:05:16) repeats the often heard “…the UK’s politicians are as dumb as rocks when it comes to science…”
We know, that’s why we are paying attention.
Incidentally, I was disappointed that “The survey also found that: 39% thought leading experts still questioned the causes of climate change”. It is a fact that some of them do. Why do 61% not believe an easily demonstrable fact?
Mick (01:46:48) “Folks, all this science is OK, but I’m afraid it’s irrelevant…Unfortunately the ignorant public has a mob mentality, the loudest megaphone wins…”
Half right Mick. Science by itself will not win the argument although making the public less ignorant is eventually the solution.
This is a facts verses hyperbole war rather than a religious one. (You cannot actually disprove a pure religion – and why would you want to?)
Just keep making sure the facts are heard.
To Fred Lightfoot (02:44:03)
Sir, with all that you have said I respectfully agree. Time for change.
(Unless you will accept silk as milk from butterflies – OK I’m pushing it)
While we are on butterflies – the butterfly effect (see how I did that) means that all of us effect the climate every time we step on a blade of grass, eat a morsel or take a breath. Everyone in this country and on every nation on earth. Including those who are not talking to us at the moment. That – times about 7billion – is what we need to “control” to moderate anthropological effects. While we are waiting for that to happen – prepare for the worst (either way) and live with it.
(PS Moths – I know)

RR Kampen
September 11, 2009 8:59 am

Ron de Haan (08:35:58) :
“RR Kampen,
“Because now you are placing his remarks out of the context.”
Knowing some of his writings, I doubt that.
“I would be careful with that, especially because this is not a scientific report…”
Okay, you may be right; but then my remark is not for Svensmark but for the quote I took.
As for the translation, no worries. I can read Danish and the translation of the quote I took is correct.

September 11, 2009 9:03 am

Scott A. Mandia (07:39:41) should really get some sort of prize for packing so much misinformation into his posts. For example:

“If you believe greenhouse gases are contributing to the modern day global warming (of course I do and most here do not) then even with mitigation the long-term residence of CO2 will still cause warming long after these remedies are in place.”

May I deconstruct? Thank you:
I can’t recall anyone here taking the position that greenhouse gases have no effect. But by attempting to re-frame the argument that way, Mandia tries to corner skeptics. That doesn’t work here, as he is finding out.
The real question is, how little effect does CO2 have [and keep in mind that the alarmist contingent has hung their hats on CO2 as the trigger for runaway global warming; rarely do we hear from them about other GHG’s like H2O, etc.] The climate’s sensitivity to CO2 is much lower than the UN/IPCC/alarmist crowd admits. The planet is clearly telling us that CO2 is an insignificant player in global temperatures. So who should we listen to? Scott Mandia? Or Planet Earth? I prefer to listen to the one with no agenda.
And: ‘modern day global warming’?? What is that supposed to mean?? What Mandia is trying to do with that sentence is convey the false impression that natural climate variability has ended, and global warming caused by CO2 has taken over. Wrong. It’s all natural variability, just as it was when CO2 was twenty times higher than it is now.
Next, ‘long term residence of CO2’ has been pretty well falsified, despite some frantic alarmist attempts to prop up the claims of 200+ year persistence. Again: Wrong. Studies of carbon isotopes from the South Pacific nuclear tests have shown a very short CO2 persistence. Physicist Freeman Dyson has written on this, and gives a CO2 residency time of about twelve years. Since CO2 persistence in the atmosphere is so short, there can be no hidden “heat in the pipeline” from it. So who to believe, Prof Freeman Dyson? Or Scott Mandia? That’s an easy one, isn’t it?
And constantly referring to the truly disreputable “Tamino” is just an appeal to a fake authority. Why is Tamino so filled with jealousy, hatred and bile toward WUWT? Simple: because Tamino didn’t even make the semi-finals in the Weblog Awards: click. He’s way down on the Wikio list, too [WUWT is #2]. And that other government-run, censoring echo chamber, realclimate, got only one-tenth the votes of WUWT. Those alarmist sites failed for one simple reason: the truth is not in them, and people know it.
I had to laugh at Mandia’s impotent barking: “…be very careful if you intend to tap Tamino’s bees nest. You will likely be coming to a gun fight armed with a knife.” Tamino is a despicable worm, who avidly reads this site every day, consumed by envy and hatred. He sits in his echo chamber cave, waiting to pounce on anyone’s post that doesn’t kiss up to him with unwarranted flattery. Like most alarmist sites, Tamino heavily censors all but the most pro-AGW, adulation filled posts. [Contrast Tamino’s constant commenting about WUWT on his site, with the lack of concern seen here. The subject of Tamino comes up rarely, like Mandia’s reference to Tamino today. Otherwise, nobody pays attention to Tamino, and that galls him no end.]
Mr. Mandia’s misplaced worship of “Tamino” is not arguable, since it is only his opinion. But it should be pointed out that Mandia gets to post here as often as he likes — while numerous posters here have commented over the years that their polite, well-meaning, science oriented posts were deleted by Tamino simply because they didn’t track the Party line, or butt kiss him sufficiently. Mandia has picked a pretty insecure HE-RO to worship.
Have I tapped Tamino’s beehive hard enough with those statements? Should I be worried about Tamino’s response?
Nah. He’s a wuss.

George E. Smith
September 11, 2009 9:07 am

“”” Juraj V. (07:47:14) :
dorlomin (07:05:19) :
The earth is warmer than it should be due to its atmospehre, a phenominem known as the greenhouse effect. “””
That is an absurd statement.
The earth is exactly as warm as it should be; and it stays exactly as warm as it should be 60 seconds per minute, 60 minutes per hour, 24 hours per day, 365 1/4 days per year, and year in and year out for the last 4.5 or so billion years; it has never deviated from being as warm as it should be.
That man in his idiocy continues to think it should not be as warm as it is, is where the whole problem lies.
George

Chris Schoneveld
September 11, 2009 9:08 am

Fred Lightfoot (02:44:03):
You must have been an ex-Shell colleague of mine.
Your telling stories will be construed by the alarmists as a proof that climate change is playing havoc with our fragile world.

September 11, 2009 9:10 am

Hello all!!
I have been in hiatas from the wuwt wourld, but I should add, I was recently speaking to a class of high school algorites,and brought this webpage up on the big screen.
(I was brought in as the counter debate to global warming)
It was like shooting fish in a barrel.
The group was comprised of some very promising young minds, and were at once stupified by the powerful arguments for intelligent debate.. and FACTS!! that are here to be found.
by the debates end.. the teacher and organizer literally cursed me(sigh, i dare say I might have provoked it) but the majority of the kids were listening.
I left to the sounds of intense debate of the FACTS, and was delighted that it was entirely do to the posts here, and they no longer thought the science was decided.
To all that post the amazing articles here, and the sharp minds that comment on them, I say well done.

MattN
September 11, 2009 9:19 am

In 5 years, it will be obvious to anyone with a brain that AGW-theory is dead. I expect Gore, Hansen and possibly Mann to be the lone holdouts. (Just wait!!! It’ll be back as soon as this Ice Age is over!!!)

Ron de Haan
September 11, 2009 9:25 am

Scott A. Mandia (08:26:35) :
“@ Ron de Haan (07:28:52) :
Next time I will write “sarcasm” in quotes next to a comment so that it is well understood to be just that.
I have certainly not read all of your posts on WUWT, but are you this concerned for the welfare of the world’s population if in fact, as most experts suggest, AGW is occurring? If you are truly the humanist you claim to be then you should be concerned either way.
I know this comment doesn’t really add to the discussion but sometimes a guy just has to defend himself. I think it should be clear by now that the reason I post here (and on many other blogs) is because I am very concerned about our future and am willing to take the potshots in order to reach a few folks who I believe are being misled”.
Scot,
Well Scott,
I have read your spin postings and now you are doing it again.
You truly master the verbal skills to a level that would make a second hand car sales man blush from envy.
Don’t waste your AGW Consensus mantra and your “humanist” act on me you shameless AH.
If you’re real objective is to warn people who you believe are misled and need your protection, you are wasting your time on this blog.

September 11, 2009 9:27 am

Dorlomin. I have no time for error bars – they are too wide. If we cannot say with ANY certainty what the temperature will be then why bother? As a layman, I find such error bars a nonsense, and didn’t realise until a while ago that science worked on such things. I take your point that the current flatline/cooling might be a “idiocyncratic movement”, then again it might not be!
Yes we understand that the Earth is warmer than it would otherwise be without its Greenhouse Gases, but we do not know what will happen when we increase one – and one that is very minor to water vapour. We don’t know if we’ll have a positive effect (as the science says) or whether, for example, we’ll have increased cloud cover leading to cooling. Like I said, we appear to have checks and balances within the climate system that we do not understand.
I must be a ‘real sceptic’ then – according to your criteria, because although I’m not really a sceptic of CO2 forcing, I am a sceptic of what will result. We don’t understand what happens within the climate system, and we’re only just realising what part ocean currents may have played in recent warming – more learning then!
Scepticism SHOULD be easy and natural for a scientist, but it would appear that many scientists are taking correlation as causation, and worse – starting out with a pre-conceived notion, and then trying to prove it correct. Surely, this is not science? In the past week we had a scientist (a scientist!) saying “Maybe the Earth is trying to tell us something”. Lovelock’s bizarre comments in the past have left me breathless, but this?
I think we will one day fully understand how the climate system works, but I believe that day to be decades into the future – seriously. If you remove the ’98 El Nino there has been no statistically-significant warming since 1995. That’s a long time, Dorlomin! What we’re experiencing is nothing unusual at all – nor unprecedented. But returning to my original point, we really have no idea, and we should stop making out we do. I see no warming to be worried about at all (certainly not here in England!) and a decadel rate of 0.12 within the troposphere isn’t going to keep me awake at nights. At some point the Warmists are going to have to re-evaluate their convictions, and start back-peddling. We’ve seen this week some saying we’re in for 20 years of cooling before man-made warming returns! Oh dear! Some just don’t get it, do they? Cooling is natural – warming is man-made. Has science come to this?

MattN
September 11, 2009 9:34 am

“If AGW is not a concern and we are heading for a new ice age we can rest?”
This statement alone makes me want to reach through my monitor and strangle someone. Rest? Are you kidding me? How about we get to work on how to feed 7+billion people as the planet cools, once farmable land becomes too cold to grow anything, and crops begin to fail worldwide? How about we divert the trillions of $$$ spent on AGW research to that?
Life would be quite a bit more pleasant if the warming would continue…..

September 11, 2009 9:35 am

On the Tamino point, I commented there, and found his attitude, shall we say ‘odd’. I certainly wouldn’t be comfortable in his presence. It’s okay to get annoyed, but it’s quite another to brow-beat someone with angry, childish ranting. Ungentlemanly.

September 11, 2009 9:36 am

Flanagan wrote:
A very mysterious mechanism indeed. And still not supported by any observation. Moreover, how is it the sun is “fading” since the 90ies and all we got is a warming? Even 20 years later? 2009 is not going to be a cold year, far from that. August and July were globally pretty hot and September seems to be setting a new record
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/amsutemps.html
check Channel 5

Very cool site. I check a number of the gaphs, not only comparing Sept 2008 to Sept 2009, but all the years from 1998 to this year. Even though it looks like Sept will be hotter than last year, it’s still very middle of the road compared to the bulk of Septembers past.
——————————————————————–
Scott, please keep posting here. Even though we are maybe on opposite sides on this issue, I have noted you are always very civil in your comments. We need more of that.
We are all concerned with the well being of the human race. We just happen to view the perceived threat of global warming and solutions to the perceived problem as disingenuous, politically motivated, and in the end, more detrimental to humanity than if we did nothing and let it happen, if it’s really happening at all. Most here believe that recourses would be better served on projects that fix levees here in California or provide potable water to Africa (I applaud Sting and the Police for donating to that cause instead of global warming).
In a philosophical sense, AWG walks hand in hand with the notion that we live on a fragile planet that is destine to be destroyed by us. It’s the “delicate balance” vs the “rough and tumble” philosophy of the nature of life on the planet. I favor the rough and tumble POV in lieu of the Gaia orthodoxy, a remnant of the 60’s hippie movement. As I always say, the only thing worse than a hippie, is a hippie with a college degree!!! (just kidding)
Have to go work now.
Mike

Ron de Haan
September 11, 2009 9:40 am

Smokey (09:03:01) :
Thanks Smokey,
You have done a better job than me.

tallbloke
September 11, 2009 9:41 am

Phil’s Dad (08:59:07) :
the butterfly effect (see how I did that) means that all of us effect the climate every time we step on a blade of grass, eat a morsel or take a breath. Everyone in this country and on every nation on earth. Including those who are not talking to us at the moment. That – times about 7billion – is what we need to “control” to moderate anthropological effects. While we are waiting for that to happen – prepare for the worst (either way) and live with it.

I won’t be accepting ‘control’ from politicians anytime soon, especially when I see they don’t ‘control’ themselves. Human beings, whatever their numbers, are a natural part of the Earth scene, and attempting to ‘control’ their taking breaths or their steppings on blades of grass on the back of a dud theory is asking for an ass kicking.

Phil's Dad
September 11, 2009 9:44 am

johng (07:41:32) says “The politicians haven’t got the balls for it! The green votes/taxes are too much!”
I accept the cowardly label – I use a pseudonym here because even being seen to consider “skeptical” views can affect my job as a European politician with an environment brief. I hope I will not lose too much respect from you for that – I am trying to spread common sense from inside the bunker.
Nevertheless if it is “green votes” that we are chasing than educating the masses is still the solution, which is why this site is so valuable. The green vote comes from green voters, not politicians.
That’s why I think the BBC statement highlighted by Gene Nemetz (08:04:59) so odd.
“The survey, by Cardiff University, shows there is still some way to go before the public’s perception matches that of their elected leaders.”
Political fact of life 1) Leaders are elected to represent / serve the public. Their “perception” can therefore only lag that of the public. Hopefully, not by too much.

September 11, 2009 9:45 am

I have to agree with Fred Lightfoot above, in a career spanning 36 years on the Emergency Services in South Africa and in the UK, I have witnessed “1,000 year floods” at 5 year intervals in one location, 100 year storms at three and four year intervals in another. Weather doesn’conform to “modelling” and any “model” is as good as the data fed into it. As a “Fire Engineer” my experience with models is that they are, at best, indicators, and at worst outright garbage. Very few are available (without the use of a super computer) capable of running the extremely complex interactions necessary to get an accurate result for a complex building, so they model one room at a time and extrapolate the results to give a snapshot. Change one parameter, or mistype one small piece of data and the model is slewed dramatically. If that result is then used to feed into other models …..
And as for “smoothed” data – it gives a “smoothed” result which may or may not be a reflection of reality. The AGW and IPCC campaign is about getting hands into research wallets – and far to many politicians haven’t the courage to admit they have been “blinded by science” and by the propaganda campaigns run by Fiends of the Earth and Greenstrife on behalf of their friends who feed them with the image they want to present.
It is refreshing to see this sort of article is available – even in a bad translation!

Gary Hladik
September 11, 2009 9:50 am

Fred Lightfoot (02:44:03), thanks for your comment. I come to this site, in part, for down-to-earth stories like yours. The last paragraph seems like a good candidate for Quote of the Week.

Vincent
September 11, 2009 9:50 am

Ron :
“If you’re real objective is to warn people who you believe are misled and need your protection, you are wasting your time on this blog.”
So true. Most people I imagine are fed up with such misuse of the science and pointing to propaganda websites as “evidence”. People are fed up with hand waving statements such as “I see the evidence in AGW” without bothering to even say what this might be. Ignorance is excusable, but pompous ignorance is just annoying.

The Diatribe Guy
September 11, 2009 9:53 am

My only issue is the claim that “no climate model has predicted global cooling.”
This may be true of the climate models put together by “experts” or the ones that get press, but a simple bloke such as myself has offered a best-fit adjusted sine wave (and double sine-wave) against the HadCrut data and showed that this basic model projects that we have recently hit the warming peak and are now going to cool for the next 20 years or so.
Does it take a gazillion different mechanisms and crunch them on supercomputer? No. It’s a recursive analysis that uses less than a half-dozen parameters and takes a mere few minutes to crunch away on an excel spreadsheet.
And if i had to bet on my results versus the models showing runaway warming, I’d bet on the sine-wave fit.
But these kinds of analyses are just too simple for academia to take them seriously.
In my career as an actuary, I’ve never been burned yet by trying to simplify the complex in making my projections. I have, however, been burned trying to add complexity in an attempt to improve accuraccy.

TJA
September 11, 2009 9:54 am

Flanagan,
When you close your mind to logic, you lose power to persuade. Read it several times and think about what is wrong with the following statement logically in terms of the climate and space weather as a whole. I can’t make you see it.
“again, there’s no proof that cosmic rays substantially influence the composition of clouds over long periods of times,” – Flanagan

Johnny Honda
September 11, 2009 9:55 am

The more I read on Tamino’s blog “feeble mind” (sorry for more publicity for this), the more I question his physical knowledge:
“Global temperature responds to changes in the energy flow of earth’s climate system. When more energy flows through the system the planet heats up; with less energy flow the planet cools down
Changes in the energy flow constitute climate forcings. We know of many, including greenhouse gases, solar changes, ozone, snow albedo, land use, aerosols (both from volcanoes and from industrial processes), etc.
By adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere more energy flows through the system?? The energy flow through the system is not changed by greenhouse gases. There is a diagram on Wikipedia with the energy flows through the atmosphere, there everybody can see, that the greenhouse effect doesn’t change the energy flow at all.

Phil's Dad
September 11, 2009 9:55 am

tallbloke (09:41:12) says “I won’t be accepting ‘control’ from politicians anytime soon, especially when I see they don’t ‘control’ themselves. Human beings, whatever their numbers, are a natural part of the Earth scene, and attempting to ‘control’ their taking breaths or their steppings on blades of grass on the back of a dud theory is asking for an ass kicking”
You make my point for me. What some have set out to control just doesn’t want to be controlled.
A different plan for the future is required. (Suggestions on a post card…)

Stephen Wilde
September 11, 2009 10:02 am

“Phil’s Dad (08:59:07) :
the butterfly effect (see how I did that) means that all of us effect the climate every time we step on a blade of grass, eat a morsel or take a breath. Everyone in this country and on every nation on earth. Including those who are not talking to us at the moment. That – times about 7billion – is what we need to “control” to moderate anthropological effects. While we are waiting for that to happen – prepare for the worst (either way) and live with it.”
Crikey,that’s a far more alarmist position than that of even the most enthusiastic CO2 acolyte !!!
No wonder politicians of that ilk leap upon alarmist theory as a godsend to help with a far more aggressive and concealed agenda.
Not content with limiting our CO2 emissions this politician thinks the world is so sensitive to the presence of humanity that we are looking over a precipice to destruction with every breath.
Where did these guys come from ?
They don’t represent anyone I’ve ever met in daily life yet they got elected somehow.
If the real problem is population, pollution and resource depletion (and it is) then let them be honest about it and not hide behind the irrelevance of CO2 emissions.

Chuck near Houston
September 11, 2009 10:03 am

Smokey – “Have I tapped Tamino’s beehive hard enough with those statements? Should I be worried about Tamino’s response? Nah. He’s a wuss.”
Nice response to Mandia re: Tamino. But I think I’d like to add just one thing: If one refers to someone they disagree with as a “petulant child” – well then doesn’t that say all you really need to know? I mean, who talks like that (aside from the Burns character in the Simpsons)?

September 11, 2009 10:03 am

RR Kampen (08:53:46):
“The rise in [CO2] is not the only thing driving global temperature. It is only by far the most important.”
Mr Kampen goes on to say that we would all be freezing if not for increased CO2. But that doesn’t logically follow at all.
It is an example of an argumentum ad ignorantiam: the fallacy of assuming something is true simply because it hasn’t been proven false. In this case, it is a baseless assumption — unless you take the UN/IPCC’s sensitivity number as being real. But the UN’s number has been consistently wrong, as even they admit in each new assessment report. It is illogical to take it as a fact that CO2 forcing is the biggest cause of global warming. What about the Sun? And the oceans? Does a minor trace gas trump their effects?
Every subsequent IPCC Assessment Report has ratcheted down their assumed climate sensitivity number. But as of AR-4, their number is still way too high. You don’t have to believe me; the planet herself is telling us that.
CO2 has been well over ten times higher than it is now, for hundreds of millions of years at a time. During much of that time temperatures were the same as today, and sometimes lower.
Carbon dioxide may have a minuscule effect on temperature, but that tiny effect is overwhelmed by other effects. If that were not the case, there would be some proven correlation between CO2 increases and temperature increases. But as we know, CO2 rises after temperature rises. That wouldn’t happen if CO2 was causing global warming.

Power Grab
September 11, 2009 10:06 am

@ George E. Smith (08:49:21)
“…So sad that basic problem solving logic skills aren’t taught in school any more.”
OT, but I wanted to encourage you…my child is taking “advanced studies” in junior high and they are spending a lot of time this semester learning to use logic. I have seen 2 or 3 “matrix logic” assignments that quite impressed me.

Chris Schoneveld
September 11, 2009 10:11 am

Smokey (09:03:01),
Brilliant!

P Wilson
September 11, 2009 10:12 am

To Scott Mandia:
there is a little test of whether there is a heat print detectable in the atmosphere at night. When thermal imaging cameras are used to detect persons, it shows them as packets of light, in human form of course. Anything that doesn’t emit radiation doesn’t show up,. The re-radiation of heat from earth is exceedingly small. This is the re-radiation that we are told is captured by c02. What is captured is a nearly non-existent pool of heat, and by no means all of that heat. just a small fraction of it. Climatically, its pretty irelevant. There may be acase for cloud cover keeping in heat at night and keeping temperatures cooler in the day. In physics, the radiation re-emitted by a body is determined by its temperature only, so normal temperature objects, don’t give off radiation (which is why the print doesn’t show up on thermal imaging cameras).
It would be a different matter if the earth, like us, could radiate low level heat for co2 to trap. At present it doesn’t. Even if c02 were the all powerful forcing that its made out to be, there’s precious little heat for it to trap

Martin Mason
September 11, 2009 10:14 am

Mandia, I for one would prefer that you took your patronising attitude on to one of the AGW echo chamber sites like Open Mind and Real Climate where it’ll be appreciated far more than it is by me at least. We have the ability on here to think. If you want to convince us that AGW is real please explain why in the past we have had CO2 levels far in excess of todays without runaway warming, why we have had cooling for long periods last century and again now when CO2 has risen apace, why there is no tropical mid tropospheric hot spot and why Antarctica isn’t warming. How about why the AGW religion has developed only on the back of predictions from models that have the predictive capabilities of astrology and on theoretical CO2 forcings that are patently not replicated in the real world that some of us live in. The AGW house of cards is falling down and maybe your real reason for coming here is to reposition yourself for this and to be seen to be on the sensible side of the debate? Please, start educating us on why we have got it so wrong.

P Wilson
September 11, 2009 10:15 am

addendum: ie. the 2nd law of thermodynamics

Johnny Honda
September 11, 2009 10:20 am

Did you know that our little friend Scott Mandia is a denier of the Medival Warming Period? He seems to like little jokes, isn’t he a funny guy.

Editor
September 11, 2009 10:22 am

Ron de Haan (08:21:37) :
Ron, I’m usually in agreement with you, but don’t try splitting hairs with me on this one. The Black Death had nothing to do with poor harvests or the Little Ice Age. Europe’s population was not reduced gradually by worsening harvests and debilitating diseases, but rather 40% died in a span of less than five years from a vicious disease. In killing it made no distinction between the well-fed and the starving. If Dr. Svensmark wants to prophecy doom, he needs to find more accurate examples. In 1347 Europe’s population was approximately 75 million. By 1351 it was 40 million. By 1400 it was 45 million

Mr. Alex
September 11, 2009 10:25 am

Scott A. Mandia (07:39:41)
“You will likely be coming to a gun fight armed with a knife.”
perhaps a sharpened hockey stick will suffice instead…

Editor
September 11, 2009 10:26 am

got to be careful which buttons I click on…. to finish this rant… by 1500, in a mere century, the population nearly doubled to about 80 million. This is NOT the picture Dr. Svensmark paints, so don’t insist that because he mentioned disease he was accurate…. sheesh, Ron, you’re picking up some of Flanagan’s bad habits.

Stephen Wilde
September 11, 2009 10:28 am

Tamino says:
“Global temperature responds to changes in the energy flow of earth’s climate system. When more energy flows through the system the planet heats up; with less energy flow the planet cools down.”
Now if we were to amend that to read ‘changes in the RATE of energy flow” Tamino would be mighty close to my analysis but then he would have to consider two new parameters namely:
A varying rate of energy flow from ocean to air
and
A varying rate of energy flow from surface to space.
Then he would have to compare the change in rate of flow effected by a little more CO2 with the natural changes in rate of flow created within the oceans and within the air.
He would see that the CO2 effect is truly miniscule in comparison to the natural changes in rate of flow.
Finally he would have to consider whether a change in the rate of flow limited to the air alone could possibly have any effect on the rate of flow coming naturally from the oceans and he would have to accept that it cannot because air cannot heat water due to the process of evaporation which ensures that any attempt of air to heat water just increases evaporation which is a net cooling process.
I won’t hold my breatrh.

September 11, 2009 10:32 am

@ Johnny Honda (08:21:17) :
Everything that Tamino in his blog “Narrow Mind” does (but I didn’t read all his stuff), is using Hansen’s corrupted GISS temperature to “proof” that WUWT is wrong.
Lucy’s post showing Arctic temperature plots includes this statement about the data: All data comes from NASA GISS or CRU originally.
So do we use GISS or not?
@ Sandy (08:36:31) :
You state: All that Tamino cites as peer-reviewed sources are peer-reviewed by the same old cronies…
You could certainly accuse ME of doing that but not true for Tamino. Tamino is brilliant at analyzing and interpreting data. As an example, see his analysis of arctic warming that appears to starkly contrast Lucy Skywalker’s assertions about no warming trend.
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/09/11/arctic-analysis/
Yes, Tamino does not mince words but his data analyses are hard to ignore and he justn’t just talk the talk – he walks the walk. Regarding the civility of his comments, I think Tamino’s words are certainly nicer than a few regular posters here.
@ sonicfrog (09:36:38) :
Thanks. Most comments to me here have been fairly civil. It is appreciated and much more constructive than emotional outbursts.

September 11, 2009 10:37 am

John Silver (03:23:22) :
“Svenskerne overraskede Danmark med at gå over isen”
should not be translated to:
“Swedes [were surprised to see Denmark to freeze over in ice]”
It is this thing that he refer to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_across_the_Belts
Typical of the LIA.

Hardly typical since your cite refers to it being the “coldest winter in living memory”, and had it been typical perhaps the Danes wouldn’t have been taken by surprise?

Phil's Dad
September 11, 2009 10:40 am

Stephen Wilde (10:02:13) jumps to a conclusion which I am perhaps guilty of leading him to.
He says “Not content with limiting our CO2 emissions this politician thinks the world is so sensitive to the presence of humanity that we are looking over a precipice to destruction with every breath.”
I do believe that everything we do has consequences but I do not for one minute think that they need to be destructive.
The point I was trying rather back-handedly to make is that it is unrealistic to think that we can control enough climate forcing parameters to pin-point a desirable world temperature and enforce it.
Just controlling mankind is impossible over any meaningful timescale – let alone the other factors which may well be more relevant.
My position is nearer to your later statement “If the real problem is population, pollution and resource depletion (and it is) then let them be honest about it and not hide behind the irrelevance of CO2 emissions.”
To be clear; I do not think the policies currently in place or being proposed have any realistic chance of controlling world temperatures. Nor am I sure it would be desirable even if they were. Far better to be prepared to adapt to what actually happens.

Michael T
September 11, 2009 10:44 am

@ Barry Foster (05:59:33) :
Well said, Barry.
As a mere geologist, I have learned a heck of a lot recently about climate and weather, mainly by following WUWT. There has been an awful lot to learn and much of it rather difficult physics (for me). I have moved from being a sceptic to being a ‘coolist’ to being an ‘I’m really not too sureist’ – in fact, I believe that most of us here might say that the more we’ve learned the less we know about the complex relationships that exist between the various potential drivers of climate except for one thing – IT AIN’T CO2. Get used to it, Al!

fred wisse
September 11, 2009 10:48 am

thank you very much mr fred lightfoot
Your description of reality is really the essence of the climate-discussion ,are we humans capable of changing the world that we are living in ? Are we so powerful that we are able to change the circumstances given by the cosmic order or how else you wish to describe this phenomenon ?
I do believe the agw-crowd has fallen prey to the temptation to be able to control the power of mother nature or any other description of forces that are well beyond our control ! It is comparable to childish dream to be the centre of the universe and to be the master of your fate or fortune . In essence everything we possess was once given to us and can always be taken from us . life is a gift and the climate we are living is also a gift and to declare ourselves so important that we are creating our own climate is an insult , where humbleness and gratefulness should be more approriate.
In life everybody is kept more or less accountable for his deeds , why shall the agf-crowd not be kept accountable for their actions to curb the private life of so many of their fellow-men ?
I know that what i am saying is not completely applied science , but i do believe that the real climate discussion is neither applied science and i thank you alexander for your efforts to bring it back on track !
Some day you will succeed .
Good luck

Michael Hove
September 11, 2009 10:53 am

SOHO-23: Understanding a Peculiar Solar Minimum.
http://www.soho23.org/
The SOHO Science Working Team has scheduled the twenty third in the series of successful SOHO workshops to focus on the topic of the unusual minimum of solar activity that has persisted in 2007, 2008 and 2009. SOHO-23 is scheduled for 21-25 September 2009, at the Asticou Inn in Northeast Harbor, Maine.
Is anyone that posts to this blog going to this conference? I am very interested in a summary of the presentations.

September 11, 2009 10:58 am

Fred Lightfoot: Thank you for your observations. Your experience with the water gap and 100 year waves made me laugh. I suspect it might say more about research and engineering standards than climate though.
As a Kiwi, this reference may not mean much to you, but I think Jerry Jones has the same problem with Cowboy Stadium.

dorlomin
September 11, 2009 11:03 am

Barry Foster (09:27:24) :
Dorlomin. I have no time for error bars – they are too wide. If we cannot say with ANY certainty what the temperature will be then why bother? As a layman, I find such error bars a nonsense, and didn’t realise until a while ago that science worked on such things
—————————
Words fail me. Do you really have such a limited grasp over the basics of studying physical systems.

dorlomin
September 11, 2009 11:11 am

Martin Mason (10:14:31) :
Mandia, I for one would prefer that you took your patronising attitude on to one of the AGW echo chamber sites like Open Mind and Real Climate where it’ll be appreciated far more than it is by me at least. We have the ability on here to think
————————————
So you thin you are not an echo chamber? And you think that you are so much more gifted than many of the worlds most famous scientists?
Listen mate, the history of science is chock a bloc full of controvosies where very intellegent people looking at the same evidence came to different conclusions. Try out of africa vs multiregional evolution or wave vs particle in classic physics, big bang vs steady state or the host of alternative models in physics at the moment.
The people on the wrong side of those debates were not stupid, following religous cults or falsifying evidence for grant money.
They were sincere, hard working and often brilliant. Just like the people who won the debates.
“If you want to convince us that AGW is real please explain why in the past we have had CO2 levels far in excess of todays without runaway warming,” Try the lifecycle of stars, they get hotter as they get older.

gtrip
September 11, 2009 11:17 am

All this talk about Tamino, is that a singular named person like Cher or Madonna? Who exactly is he/she as I don’t see any information on the Open Mind site.

dorlomin
September 11, 2009 11:20 am

fred wisse (10:48:01) :
thank you very much mr fred lightfoot
Your description of reality is really the essence of the climate-discussion ,are we humans capable of changing the world that we are living in ? Are we so powerful that we are able to change the circumstances given by the cosmic order or how else you wish to describe this phenomenon
————————————
The Ozone hole goes a long way to suggest we are.
———————————–
I do believe the agw-crowd has fallen prey to the temptation to be able to control the power of mother nature or any other description of forces that are well beyond our control !
———————————–
Not control, affect. CO2 is uncontroversial in its role as a greenhouse gas. Adding it to the atmosphere will have an effect. The debate is how much and if it is really enough to be concerned about.
And the real debate for humans is whether the effect will have an impact on agriculture, if so then we have a problem if not then the skeptics like Lomborg suggest we have more pressing problems to engage with. Here in lies the debate.

Philip Foster
September 11, 2009 11:20 am

Here is a slightly more tidied up version – Philip Foster
From the http://www.wattsupwiththat.com website
This opinion piece from Professor Henrik Svensmark was published September 9th in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Translation is from Google translation with some post translation cleanup of jumbled words or phrases by myself. In cases were the words were badly jumbled or didn’t quite make sense I inserted [my interpretation in brackets]. Hat tip to Carsten Arnholm of Norway for bringing this to my attention. – Anthony Watts.
While the sun sleeps
HENRIK SVENSMARK,
Professor, Danish National Space Centre, Copenhagen
Indeed, global warming stopped and a cooling is beginning. No climate model has predicted a cooling of the Earth, on the contrary. This means that projections of future climate are unpredictable, writes Henrik Svensmark.
The star which keeps us alive has, over the last few years, had almost no sunspots – which are the usual signs of the sun’s magnetic activity.
Last week, the scientific team behind the Soho satellite (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) reported that the number of sunspot-free days suggest that solar activity is heading towards its lowest level in about 100 years. Everything indicates that the Sun is moving into a hibernation-like state, and the obvious question is whether it has any significance for us on Earth.
If you ask the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), representing the current consensus on climate change, the answer is a reassuring ‘none’. But history and recent research suggests that the IPCC is probably completely wrong. Let us take a closer look at why.
Solar activity has always varied. Around the year 1000, we had a period of very high solar activity, which coincided with the medieval warm period. It was a period when frosts in May was an almost unknown phenomenon and of great importance for good harvests. Vikings settled in Greenland and explored the coast of North America. For example, China’s population doubled over this period. But after about 1300, the earth began to get colder and it was the beginning of the period we now call the Little Ice Age. In this cold period all the Viking settlements in Greenland disappeared. Swedes [were surprised to see Denmark covered in ice], and the Thames in London froze repeatedly. But more serious were the long periods of crop failure, which resulted in a poorly nourished population. Because of disease and hunger [the population was reduced] by about 30 per cent in Europe.
It is important to note that the Little Ice Age was a global event. It ended in the late 19th century and was followed by an increase in solar activity. Over the past 50 years solar activity has been at its highest since the medieval warm period 1,000 years ago. And now it appears that the sun is heading towards what is called ‘a grand minimum’ such as we saw in the Little Ice Age.
The correlation between solar activity and climate through the ages has tried to be explained away as coincidence. But it turns out that almost no matter what time period is studied, not just the last 1000 years, there is a correlation: Solar activity has repeatedly over the past 10,000 years has fluctuated between high and low. Actually, the sun over the past 10,000 years spent approx. 17 percent of the time in a sleep mode, with a cooling of the Earth following.
One can wonder why the IPCC believes that the changing activity of the sun has no effect on the climate, but the reason is that they only consider changes in solar radiation.
Just radiation would be the simplest way by which the sun could change the climate. A bit like turning up and down the brightness of a light bulb.
Satellite measurements of solar radiation have shown that the variations are too small to cause climate change, but the IPCC has closed its eyes to a second, much more powerful way, the sun is able to affect earth’s climate. In 1996 we discovered a surprising influence of the sun: its impact on earth’s cloud cover. High energy accelerated particles of exploded stars, the cosmic radiation, are helping to form clouds.
When the Sun is active its magnetic field shields the earth better against the cosmic rays from outer space before they reach our planet, and by regulating the Earth’s cloud cover the sun can turn up or down the temperature. High solar activity produce fewer clouds and the earth gets warmer. Low solar activity reduces the shielding against cosmic radiation, and this results in increased cloud cover and hence a cooling. As the sun’s magnetism has doubled its strength during the 20th century, this natural mechanism may be responsible for a large part of global warming during this period.
This also explains why most climate scientists are trying to ignore this possibility. They in fact favour the idea that the 20th century temperature rise is mainly due to human emissions of CO2. If the sun has influenced a significant part of warming in the 20 century, it means that CO2’s contribution must necessarily be smaller.
Ever since our theory was put forward in 1996, it has received a very strong criticism, which is normal in science.
First it was said that a link between clouds and solar activity could not be correct because no physical mechanism was known. But in 2006, after many years of work, we managed to conduct experiments at the Danish National Space Centre, where we demonstrated the existence of a physical mechanism. The cosmic radiation helps to form aerosols, which are the seeds for cloud formation.
Then came the criticism that the mechanism we found in the laboratory was unable to survive in the real atmosphere and therefore had no practical significance. But this criticism we have just emphatically refuted. It turns out that the sun itself is doing what we might call ‘natural experiments’. Giant solar flares can cause the cosmic radiation on earth to decrease suddenly over a few days. In the days after the eruption cloud cover falls by about 4 per cent. And the content of liquid water in clouds (droplets) is reduced by almost 7 per cent. Indeed, [you could say] that the clouds on Earth originated in space.
Therefore we have been looking at the sun’s magnetic activity with increasing concern since it began to wane in the mid-1990s.
That the sun could fall asleep in a deep minimum was suggested by [solar scientists] at a meeting in Kiruna in Sweden two years ago. As Nigel Calder and I updated our book “The Chilling Stars” therefore, we wrote a little provocative comment, “we recommend our friends to enjoy global warming while it lasts.”
Indeed, global warming stopped and a cooling is beginning. Last week, it was argued by Mojib Latif from the University of Kiel at the UN World Climate Conference in Geneva that cooling may continue through the next 10 to 20 years.
His explanation was natural changes in North Atlantic circulation and not in solar activity. But no matter how it is interpreted, the natural variations in climate then penetrates more and more.
One consequence may be that the sun itself will show its importance for climate and thus test the theories of global warming. No climate model has predicted a cooling of the Earth, on the contrary.
This means that projections of future climate are unpredictable. A forecast [that] says it may be warmer or colder for 50 years is not very useful, for science is not able to predict solar activity.
So in many ways we stand at a crossroads. The near future will be extremely interesting and I think it is important to recognize that nature is completely independent of what we humans think about it. Will the Greenhouse theory survive a significant cooling of the Earth? Not in its current dominant form. Unfortunately, tomorrow’s climate challenges will be quite different from the greenhouse theory’s predictions, and perhaps it will again become popular to investigate the sun’s impact on climate.
Professor Henrik Svensmark is director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at the Danish National Space Centre Space.
His book “The Chilling Stars” has also been published in Danish as “Climate and the Cosmos” (Gads Forlag, DK ISBN 9788712043508)

Nogw
September 11, 2009 11:31 am

dorlomin (11:20:02) : Fill one bottle to the top of CO2, close it. Then fill another with water, close it. Then heat them both with a infrared lamp during 30 minutes, then let them cool for five minutes. Check the temperatures. See?
THEY have cheated you, and you will feel it in your wallet very, very soon.

rbateman
September 11, 2009 11:36 am

Leif Svalgaard (05:20:47) :
No specific trend has been stated. That was yours to discover.
As for cherry picking, the exploration of possibilities does require a starting point. Else we cease to explore.
Fair treatment assigns probabilites to the rise, continuance or fall of a vector.
Cherry picking is a biased conclusion trap, but so is the avoidance of exploration. In both cases, new learning is stifled.

September 11, 2009 11:46 am

Michael Hove (10:53:33) :
SOHO-23: Understanding a Peculiar Solar Minimum.
Is anyone that posts to this blog going to this conference? I am very interested in a summary of the presentations.

Yes, I’m giving an invited talk. Go to the link you provided http://www.soho23.org/ and click on ‘Scientific Program’

Sandy
September 11, 2009 11:48 am

Scott
“You could certainly accuse ME of doing that but not true for Tamino. Tamino is brilliant at analyzing and interpreting data. As an example, see his analysis of arctic warming that appears to starkly contrast Lucy Skywalker’s assertions about no warming trend.
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/09/11/arctic-analysis/

Very pretty work by Tamino using the massaged Giss data. That Tamino’s graphs are so different from Lucy’s which are unadulterated show you just how important it is that the raw data is manipulated by venerable scientists.

September 11, 2009 11:49 am

“As a Kiwi, this reference may not mean much to you, but I think Jerry Jones has the same problem with Cowboy Stadium.”
Are you referring to their summer training-field “tent” that collapsed?
To Phil’s Dad: You’ve got my vote if you run in Texas (and you can come out of the AGW closet).

September 11, 2009 11:50 am

rbateman (11:36:55) :
No specific trend has been stated. That was yours to discover.
Then you lost me. I don’t know what you meant. Perhaps I’m too ‘literal’ and don’t follow flowery generalities too good.

Mr. Alex
September 11, 2009 11:52 am

dorlomin (11:11:14) :
“Try the lifecycle of stars, they get hotter as they get older.”
So you are implying that the much higher CO₂ levels in the distant past kept the Earth warm enough to support diversifiation and explosion of life & prevented the Earth from perhaps freezing over, which would otherwise have happened due to the cooler sun which could not provide enough energy to prevent snowball Earth from occurring?
Try this; CO₂, unlike the sun, does not radiate energy which can heat the Earth, sorry “mate”.
“Smokey (09:03:01) ” – Respect!

Richard M
September 11, 2009 11:52 am

Flanagan (02:43:48) :
“I’m sorry but, 1st, this op-ed does not cite an evidence – it just states them without any reference whatsoever. Moreover, in every study by Svensmark, including the last ones, the author somewhat “forgets to mention” the absence of trend in solar radiation and other indicators between the 50ies and the 90ies – strangely corresponding to a rapid average warming. This is apparent in the link Anthony gave me to the WUWT post:
– When a forbush decrease takes place, the water content of some clouds changes by 7% corresponding to a 10%-20% decrease of cosmic ray counts
– after a few days, the water content comes back to normal levels
again, there’s no proof that cosmic rays substantially influence the composition of clouds over long periods of times, especially as compared to other parameters like the ocean average temperature. If you prefer, this is weather, not climate.”
Now you’re getting it. This is exactly how folks should view anything related to climate. It’s nice to see Flanagan using skepticism. Now, if he was only smart enough to utilize this techinique on AGW.

September 11, 2009 11:53 am

Chris Schoneveld (04:24:49) :
Unfortunately, there is not even the slightest indication that there is a correlation between cloudiness and global temperatures, as far as I am aware of.

Let me share some graphs from climate4you webpage:
http://www.climate4you.com/images/TotalCloudCoverVersusGlobalSurfaceAirTemperature.gif
http://www.climate4you.com/images/LowCloudCoverVersusGlobalSurfaceAirTemperature.gif
http://www.climate4you.com/images/HadCRUT3%20and%20TropicalCloudCoverISCCP.gif
Even a correlation between global temperatures (let alone cloudiness) and solar activity has always been refuted by Leif.
Even a greenhorn like me knows, that period of regular freezing of northern Adriatic, Thames and even sea between Sweden and Denmark occurred coincidentally with Sun minimum; on the other side, MWP or last 60 years overlays with series of strong sun cycles, like Modern minimum which is ending now.
To refute distant MWP is old trick, but to refute also relatively recent and well recorded LIA is plain laughable.

September 11, 2009 11:54 am

Stephen Wilde (08:52:08) :
I agree with you about the sun on shorter time scales and only disagree on century or multi century time scales.
My comment was about the solar modulation of cosmic rays, not of climate. Do you disagree with the time scales of cosmic ray modulations, too?

September 11, 2009 11:56 am

Well… We can wait and see… I see no other course of action at this point in time… While I do not agree that CO2 is the main driver of climate I am not convinced that radiation from space is either. I guess in the end I am a skeptic on both theories at this point in time. I simply do not have enough information… I do agree that CO2 will warm the earth a modest amount, however I am skeptical that it is ‘runaway with feedbacks’. It may well be that cloud formation is a major component of the system as well but we just do not have enough knowledge yet to truly understand our climate system.
I know weather is not climate but still until I see us accurately be able to predict one I don’t know that I am going to believe anything about the other. The main reason is simulations RELY on trends to compute what will happen next with assumptions working on the result. If you write into a computer program that as CO2 increases then temperature increases guess what happens in the simulation as CO2 increases?
hope he is wrong… Winter is a pain, I like my food.

Nogw
September 11, 2009 11:57 am

This story of “global warming” and its main characters would make a great fiction book, such as The Da Vinci’s Code, because it involves all needed ingredients: secret societies, a church, fanatic followers….etc,etc…just imagine!
It would make, also, which is surprising, a sensational comic story…just imagine:
Super Al fighting against the deniers or Super Al against the hidden WUWT deniers’ fortress, or “The trains of Jim”, etc,etc.

David in Davis
September 11, 2009 12:09 pm

Phil’s Dad (09:55:41) :
“What some have set out to control just doesn’t want to be controlled.
A different plan for the future is required. (Suggestions on a post card…)”
Not sure if you are soliciting suggestions as to addressing blades of grass metaphor, but here is my view for what it may be worth:
The way to slow or even eventually reverse the exploding world population and it’s severe effects on the natural environment is to provide people with the means to raise themselves from poverty. It is a well know phenomenon that as the standard of living rises, the birth rate goes down. You need look no farther than Japan, an island of extremely limited resources which has provided its population with a standard of living so high that its low birth rate now threatens its ability for the young (too few) to care for the old (too many). Also true of western democracies which largely solve this problem by importing the poor from underdeveloped countries who through their high birth rate and low wages, maintain the standard of living of the citizenry.
OK smartypants, you say, how do we do that? Well, first, it’s not by having the world bank throw money at their corrupt politicians (a redundancy – no offense intended to yourself. Nor is it likely to happen by the well intentioned efforts of NGOs, missionaries, and the Peace Corps although all of those organizations certainly make a positive difference in the lives of individuals.
It is by providing or assisting them in the development of a source or sources of cheap, widely distributed, and dependable electrical power by which they can have the benefits of native industries, clean drinking water, sewage treatment plants, irrigation, and on and on.
But abundant coal reserves are polluting so we should discourage that, you say. So is their oil, and besides WE need their oil, you say. So what to do?
Well, if I had to pick just one, it would be thorium nuclear power – AKKKK!, the N word! (disclosure – I own some thorium related stock and intend to buy more). That’s dangerous to children and other living things, you say, and it will lead to terrorists having nuclear weapons. Luddite-ism, I say, based fears of 1950’s soviet reactor technology, post soviet failure to properly safeguard nuclear weapons, and a minor release of radioactive gas at TMI, also outmoded reactor technology. If you are European, you know that nuclear power is safe, clean, and protectable. No power source is completely safe, completely clean, or without adverse environment impacts, even (especially) the so-called renewables.
Why thorium? Most abundant, most anti-proliferative, high energy density, most amenable to passive safety systems, and eats the nuclear waste and decommissioned weapons grade uranium and thorium for lunch. Plus its waste is orders of magnitude shorter in half-life than Ur and Po. Non-pressueized thorium molten salt reactors, proven in concept at Oak Ridge 30 years ago, but so far undeveloped for commercial use have many potential advantages over present pressurized reactors and operate at a temperature nearly ideal for the production of hydrogen, already touted as the motor fuel of the future. Plus they can potentially be mass produced in small and medium power sizes (physical and wattage) that are ideal for locating close to where the power is needed rather than having to be distributed by long distance power lines through sensitive habitats.
Its the future (IMHO). India is already developing thorium cycle reactors.

September 11, 2009 12:10 pm

dolormin:
“So you think you are not an echo chamber?”
That’s exactly right. WUWT is not an echo chamber, it is more a peer review site than anything. Ideas are argued until the truth is sorted out when possible. Tamino, RC, climateprogress, etc., are echo chambers.
Why? Because they censor skeptical posts, no matter how polite or strictly science related. They only agree with each other, that AGW is gonna getcha. If you disagree, your post will never see the light of day. The exception is if your post is so scientifically invalid that they can have fun deconstructing it. But if you intelligently disagree, like Lucia you will be permanently barred from the site.
That’s an echo chamber. WUWT, on the other hand, allows all points of view — as your own posts prove.
Now you know the definition of an echo chamber.
Next, you say: “And the real debate for humans is whether the effect [of higher CO2] will have an impact on agriculture, if so then we have a problem…”
Entirely wrong. You have it backward. CO2 does have an effect on agriculture. A very beneficial effect. More CO2 is better. Here you go:
click1
click2
click3

September 11, 2009 12:13 pm

tallbloke (07:16:12) :
Quite right Leif. They now estimate that it was a 79% increase rather than a 100% increase.
Why do we need to go through this every time? First they said ‘doubled in the last 100 years’. When we pointed out that it didn’t: http://www.leif.org/research/Reply%20to%20Lockwood%20IDV%20Comment.pdf they changed it to ‘the first 50 years’ [because it has now come back down again]. Then they include data for the year 1901 which they have acknowledged is wrong. Then they cherry pick the lowest point and the highest point and calculate the changes using those, and finally it is quote wrong to use percentages for such a change [e.g. how many percent that the sunspot number changed between solar minimum and maximum?]. The issue was that the HMF now is just was it was 108 years ago and that there have not been any century-long change. Since we have simply plotted their data [green curve] as they generously gave us together with ours [blue curve], it is quite evident that we all agree on this: http://www.leif.org/research/Heliospheric-Magnetic-Field-Since-1900.png, so why do you always squirm over this? ‘The science is settled’ as far as this is concerned 🙂

tallbloke
September 11, 2009 12:20 pm

Phil’s Dad (09:55:41) :
tallbloke:
attempting to ‘control’ their taking breaths or their steppings on blades of grass on the back of a dud theory is asking for an ass kicking”
You make my point for me. What some have set out to control just doesn’t want to be controlled.
A different plan for the future is required. (Suggestions on a post card…)

How about the politicians concerning themselves with minimizing beurocracy and letting the rest of us get on with real life? Payment to politicians will be on the basis of the number of laws they repeal. 😉

September 11, 2009 12:23 pm

Chris Schoneveld (07:36:59) :
He won’t, as Al Gore won’t either.”
This very, very close to an ad hom. quite uncharacteristically for Leif.

I don’t know… Since when is just mentioning someone next to Al Gore an ad hom? 🙂
The point was that if you are at one pole of a very polarized issue, such debates are usually not of much use, as the pole sitter has too much tied up in his viewpoint.

Phil's Dad
September 11, 2009 12:24 pm

Tom in Texas (11:49:38) “To Phil’s Dad: You’ve got my vote if you run in Texas (and you can come out of the AGW closet).”
Believe me Tom if I were running in Texas I would long since have declared my position on AGW.
(Loved the Rangers against the Indians by the way)

Frederick Michael
September 11, 2009 12:30 pm

Flanagan (00:36:42) :
A very mysterious mechanism indeed. And still not supported by any observation. Moreover, how is it the sun is “fading” since the 90ies and all we got is a warming? Even 20 years later?

It’s 10 years since the 90’s, 20 years since the 80’s and 30 years since disco. Right?

Allan M
September 11, 2009 12:36 pm

Phil’s Dad (10:40:48) :
“Stephen Wilde (10:02:13) jumps to a conclusion which I am perhaps guilty of leading him to.
He says “Not content with limiting our CO2 emissions this politician thinks the world is so sensitive to the presence of humanity that we are looking over a precipice to destruction with every breath.”
I do believe that everything we do has consequences but I do not for one minute think that they need to be destructive.
The point I was trying rather cack-handedly to make is that it is unrealistic to think that we can control enough climate forcing parameters to pin-point a desirable world temperature and enforce it.
Just controlling man-kind is impossible over any meaningful timescale – let alone the other factors which may well be more relevant.”
So the modellers imagine they can understand the inscrutable, and the politicians (some) imagine they understand enough to control mankind. About the same level, I suspect. Perhaps we live in chaotic systems, and are chaotic systems, because there is an important function here. What makes you (or some others) imagine (the same word again) that we have the knowledge or the wisdom or the understanding or the judgement to bring about an ideal society by control? Why can’t we settle for just some administration of what is actually here?
As for too many people; can you name for me, one other species on the planet which limits its numbers and impact because of some crazy idea about its power to wreck the place? As Philip Stott said, “the planet is tough as an old boot.” If nature knows best there are exactly the right number of people on the planet doing what needs to be done. And I am fed up with tree huggers claiming an exclusive right to speak for nature because they “feel” (this does not include you, necessarily).
If you could just tell me of a eugenicist who believes themself to be from the inferior part of the race, I would be more willing to listen.
Please excuse any exaggerations; I hope they are not extrapolations.

September 11, 2009 12:43 pm

Tom in Texas: No I was referring to the big screen video displays that keep being hit by punters. I think Jerry had the same (short-sighted) engineers as Mr. Lightfoot’s oil company.
Cheers, Mark in Texas

Phil's Dad
September 11, 2009 12:44 pm

To David in Davis (12:09:02).
I agree with the spirit of what you say but I am a “p11B” man myself.

Phil's Dad
September 11, 2009 12:46 pm

tallbloke (12:20:08) :
Works for me

Ron de Haan
September 11, 2009 1:07 pm

Juraj V. (11:53:49) :
To refute distant MWP is an old trick, but to refute also relatively recent and well recorded LIA is plain laughable”.
Juaj V.,
I like what you are saying but we are missing out on the volcanic wild card.
This too played quite a role in several extreme events that took place during the LIA.

Gene Nemetz
September 11, 2009 1:08 pm

Phil’s Dad (08:59:07) :
I can see you are versed. Are you becoming the Senator Inhofe of England? He has made so good presentations to the Senate.

September 11, 2009 1:12 pm

Dolormin. I’m an engineer, not a scientist, so I cannot work with the 95% error bars that scientists allow themselves http://rankexploits.com/musings/2008/ols-with-pumped-up-error-bars-is-crude-the-ipcc-2-ccentury-still-falsified/. If I did, I’d be covering myself (very well, admittedly) if someone died as a result of something I designed or constructed. Surely it’s better to say, ‘We don’t have much of a clue, really”? I live in England. Like I said before, we have the infamous Met Office. Their predictions really are dire – and wrong most of the time. Let me tell you why. They CANNOT predict what the weather will be over my city with any certainty. They know this, and I know this. So they predict it for a region around my city BUT cover themselves by saying that “Some areas may have rain” Do you see what they did there? They’re covered! If I get rain, but my sister 20 miles away doesn’t then they’re correct. If it’s the reverse, they’re correct. If we both get it, they’re still correct! Based on this pathetic level of prediction they award themselves with an 80%+ ‘predicted-correct’ tag. Like I said, I cannot afford such error bars. I couldn’t design a walkway and say ‘There’s a good chance that it won’t hold 100 people all at once, but there’s a chance it will’! I would have to say a maximum number of people. As I said, I didn’t realise that science worked with wildly varying degrees of UNcertainty. I’ll tell you something else. As an atheist I used to look down on the religious because they believe something for which there is no evidence. And here was I, a man who bases his working life on science, aloof in the knowledge that theories would be tested and conclusions drawn. When I look at the utter debacle of what passes for climate science I am appalled. They are dragging down all the other sciences with them – and I’ve read that many geologists are furious with the claims made by climatologists. They’ve seen rapid warming and cooling in rocks – completely natural. Here in England we have the Central England Temperature (CET). From 1696 to 1732 the temperature in England rose 2.2 degrees C, was wholly natural in origin, and was over twice the warming we are experiencing now. I can no longer look down on the religious. I tell you this Dolormin, if we do get a period of 20 years of cooling, then science itself will suffer. People already remember the scares of the past, like a coming ice age, acid rain, the millenium bug, bird flu, world starvation (by now), ozone depletion, and swine flu. They will start to laugh at scientists and their error bars. What good is a prediction if you build-in a huge ‘get-out’? For how much longer do you think the media will be the messengers for crackpot theories on ‘icecaps melting’? Not for long, my friend, not for long.

dorlomin
September 11, 2009 1:18 pm

Smokey (12:10:57) :
dolormin:
“So you think you are not an echo chamber?”
That’s exactly right. WUWT is not an echo chamber, it is more a peer review site than anything. Ideas are argued until the truth is sorted out when possible. Tamino, RC, climateprogress, etc., are echo chambers.
—————————————————
Please dont be so modest. You are more than that. You are the guardians of science in an age of religous fervour. An uncensorsed beacon of light saving science from the “scientists”. Give yourselves (yet) another pat on the back!

dorlomin
September 11, 2009 1:19 pm

Mr. Alex (11:52:19) :
dorlomin (11:11:14) :
“Try the lifecycle of stars, they get hotter as they get older.”
So you are implying that the much higher CO₂ levels in the distant past kept the Earth warm enough to support diversifiation and explosion of life & prevented the Earth from perhaps freezing over, which would otherwise have happened due to the cooler sun which could not provide enough energy to prevent snowball Earth from occurring?
Try this; CO₂, unlike the sun, does not radiate energy which can heat the Earth, sorry “mate”.
—————————————-
So why did it not freeze? 🙂

Gene Nemetz
September 11, 2009 1:20 pm

Mike McMillan (03:34:03) : The CO2 chart climb is as steady as you get, but the global temperature it’s supposed to be driving seem pretty oblivious to it….About the only things keeping pace with CO2 are the GISS adjustments.
Despite the hackneyed response to my earlier comment on this quote I still think it was nicely put by Mike McMillan.
i.e. :
About the only things keeping pace with CO2 are the GISS adjustments.
(bolds by me 😉)

Ron de Haan
September 11, 2009 1:25 pm

Talking about the Volcanic Wild Card:
http://volcanism.wordpress.com/2009/09/11/shiveluch-erupts/
Shiveluch erupts 11 September 2009
Posted by admin in Kamchatka, Russia, Shiveluch, activity reports, eruptions.
Tags: Kamchatka, Russia, Shiveluch, volcanic activity reports, volcanic eruptions
trackback
Reports from Russia indicate that a large eruption of Shiveluch began yesterday. A bulletin from the Kamchatka Volcanoes Emergency Response Team (KVERT), issued at 22:35 UTC on 10 September warns that ‘Ash explosions > 10 km (>32,800 ft) ASL from the volcano could affect international and low-flying aircraft’. According to the bulletin, ’strong explosions’ occurred between around 14:19 and 14:55 UTC on 10 September, with seismic data indicating ash plumes reaching 15000 metres above sea level; if ash plumes are indeed reaching 10-15 km altitude, then this is a sizeable event. The bulletin reports that according to seismic data ‘10 volcanic events (ash explosions and hot avalanches or pyroclastic flows) occurred at the lava dome from 16:33 till 20:25 UTC on September 10′. Whether the activity is still continuing is not clear, and there are no visual or satellite images of this event because of cloud cover.
End of message.

Jack Simmons
September 11, 2009 1:36 pm

Robert E. Phelan (05:07:08) :

I have no way of knowing whether Dr. Svensmark is correct about cosmic rays and clouds but he is definitely not correct about poor harvests causing a 30% decline in Europe’s population during the Little Ice Age. That phenomenon was caused by something called the Black Death, a bubonic plague spread by flea carrying rats that started in China, spread across Asia and reached Constantinople about 1346. By 1347 it had hopped a ship to Genoa and by 1351 nearly half the population of Europe was dead. European population did not reach it’s pre-plague level until just about 1500, at which point it was about just slightly larger than the population of Europe at the height of the Roman Empire.

The two are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Poor diets lead to weak immune systems as well as poor hygiene. Just read some of the accounts from POW camps run by the Japanese, Russians, and Nazis.
You are correct in bringing up the plague contributing to the die offs in Europe at the time.

jlc
September 11, 2009 1:42 pm

“This very, very close to an ad hom. quite uncharacteristically for Leif”
Not at all uncharacteristic for the smug, sanctimonious and omniscient Lief.

September 11, 2009 1:49 pm

Dolormin. More divergence between models and reality – this time on ocean temperatures. http://icecap.us/images/uploads/argodata.jpg

September 11, 2009 1:50 pm

Johnny Honda (09:55:37) :
The more I read on Tamino’s blog “feeble mind” (sorry for more publicity for this), the more I question his physical knowledge:
“Global temperature responds to changes in the energy flow of earth’s climate system. When more energy flows through the system the planet heats up; with less energy flow the planet cools down
Changes in the energy flow constitute climate forcings. We know of many, including greenhouse gases, solar changes, ozone, snow albedo, land use, aerosols (both from volcanoes and from industrial processes), etc.
By adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere more energy flows through the system?? The energy flow through the system is not changed by greenhouse gases. There is a diagram on Wikipedia with the energy flows through the atmosphere, there everybody can see, that the greenhouse effect doesn’t change the energy flow at all.

Actually it’s your physical knowledge that’s in doubt, in the absence of greenhouse gases the earth would be ~33ºC cooler, which is a significant drop in ‘energy flow through the system’.

Jack Simmons
September 11, 2009 2:02 pm

Stefan (05:29:17) :

What the greens fail to notice however, is that authoritarian “social order” can serve any number of priorities. It can serve empire building, it can serve warmongering, it can serve any group goal, really. There is nothing inherently green about being authoritarian. And groups can also organise in far more interesting ways than simply becoming authoritarian top-down power structures.
I think the greens that follow the authoritarian model are in for a nasty shock.

North Korea is an excellent example. Not only have all businesses and consumers been brought under control, there are very few green house gases being generated. People live very simple lives there, in harmony with nature. As there is very little food, people must scour the hills looking for anything edible. Very few cars, very little electricity, no wasted resources on consumer goods. Even the military must put up with very little fuel to run jet fighters and tanks.
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/country/country_energy_data.cfm?fips=KN
Now contrast this worker’s and environmentalist’s paradise with those profligate cousins down south:
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/country/country_energy_data.cfm?fips=KS

RR Kampen
September 11, 2009 2:07 pm

The Diatribe Guy (09:53:44) :
“But these kinds of analyses [fitting a sine curve, RR] are just too simple for academia to take them seriously.”
In fact, for a finite number of data it is possible to fit a polynomial curve of degree [number of data] +1 that fits absolutely exactly.
Obviously projections of this model will show true runaway warming (if you chose the number of data points to be uneven).
Using powers of sine and/or cosine you can also make an exact fit. They ‘prove’ that in the long run there can be no climate change, just a repetition of waves or wave-groups – unless you take an infinite number of terms in the model (which can never be calculated, then).
I’m guessing now you can understand why academia wouldn’t want to use such simple models.
They contain no physics and therefore they cannot contain any predictive value. They contain no knowledge.

rbateman
September 11, 2009 2:07 pm

Leif Svalgaard (11:50:13) :
There is nothing flowery about looking at a section of data and asking yourself “where have I seen this slope before?”, and it is not cherry picking until one proclaims it is “This” and cannot be anything else.
The range of time/space is deliberate.
You have given me tasks just like this, but you gave it unbiased and let me draw my own conclusions.
So I am returning the favor…and not attempting to pre-color it with what I see.

September 11, 2009 2:10 pm

rbateman (14:07:38) :
“where have I seen this slope before?”,
Assuming that you
and it is not cherry picking until one proclaims it is “This” and cannot be anything else.
The range of time/space is deliberate.
You have given me tasks just like this, but you gave it unbiased and let me draw my own conclusions.
So I am returning the favor…and not attempting to pre-color it with what I see.

September 11, 2009 2:13 pm

rbateman (14:07:38) :
where have I seen this slope before?
Assuming that you are referring to cosmic rays, I have seen these curves many times before. I don’t see anything that is not what I would expect, so am still a bit lost.

E.M.Smith
Editor
September 11, 2009 2:26 pm

Flanagan (00:36:42) : A very mysterious mechanism indeed. And still not supported by any observation. Moreover, how is it the sun is “fading” since the 90ies and all we got is a warming?
Hooo HaaaHoha hik… What a hoot! And you really believe this stuff?
Flanagan, whatever you are smoking, I want some! (But only on Fridays, I need to be “straight” by the time markets open Monday…)
So, you expect a few giga-tons (tera-tons? peta-tons?) of matter to have an instant response to delta energy generation? Let me loan you a tiny bit of clue: It can take hundreds of years for LIGHT to move up a few layers in the sun. A decade or so is darned near “instant” in things that big and with that scale.
And oh, BTW, your “warming” is false as well. The books are cooked. I know, I’ve read the recipe and documented just exactly how the books are cooked. GIStemp measures ASPHALT growth at AIRPORTS as they move from Siberia to Brazil. Nothing more. (Well, maybe a little bit more, there is that one line of code that warms 1/100 of all records by 1/10C due to bad programming style – I guess it does measure “Bad Hacking” too…)
2009 is not going to be a cold year, far from that.
Too late. It already is. Hundreds of children dead in Peru from early onset snow. Crops ripening slowly in Canada and late planting from persistent snows. Argentina talking about a complete embargo of wheat exports due to cold induced crop failure (they are one of the few major exporters in the world in normal years…) Exceptional skiing started in New Zealand and Australia, the list goes on.
But no problem, you want to drink that cool-aid, fine with me. Just don’t expect the rest of us to join in. We know what’s in it, and it isn’t pretty:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/gistemp/
August and July were globally pretty hot and September seems to be setting a new record
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/09/08/gistemp-islands-in-the-sun/
Can explain why you think it is hotter “globally”. Hint: It has to do with putting a lot of thermometers on the tarmac on tropical islands during the growth of the Jet Age then using them to say that the surrounding water is the same temperature. Yes, it really does that. 2 islands ‘warm’ and area teh size of the entire U.S.A. No, boxing, gridding, anomalies et.al. can not save you from this – THIS is from the post anomaly boxing gridding step. It’s over.
Now here is a tiny little experiment for you. Go to the Marshall Islands (as in the picture in the link). Lay on the tarmac at 2 pm for an hour. Then go jump in the ocean. Which is cooler?
Don’t think this is a reasonable thing? Think the thermometer will be far far away from the tarmac? Look at the picture. There isn’t any far far away from the tarmac at that airport!

crosspatch
September 11, 2009 2:27 pm

he to-be-prime-minister Yukio Hatoyama announced at a recent press conference that he wanted to aim at 25% curbing of CO2 emission by 2020 with respect to the level in 1990. This is quite embarassing to me

I would find more embarrassing the statements of his wife that she had been abducted by aliens, take to the planet Venus and that it was “very green there”.

September 11, 2009 2:33 pm

The newest CO2 Report by Viscount Monckton just came out: click
It covers some of what’s discussed in this thread, and has some nice graphs.

Stephen Wilde
September 11, 2009 2:36 pm

Phil’s Dad (10:40:48)
Thanks for the clarification. I see your position more clearly now and don’t disagree with what you say.
However, please reduce interference instead of constantly increasing it at public expense. We really do not want all the supervision and regulation being cack handedly foisted on us.
A few hundred British officials effectively managed the Indian subcontinent for 300 years with the consent and help of most of the locals who preferred our rule of law to the previous tribal warfare.
Why do we need so many of you chaps these days with all of you with little to do except invent new obstacles for everyone else ?
Sorry for going too much off topic but if we have a politician here he needs to be told.

E.M.Smith
Editor
September 11, 2009 2:43 pm

dorlomin (01:13:20) :
“Barry Foster (01:03:31) :What the Warmists forget (whether intentionally or not) is that this flatline of temperature (or even cooling) was not predicted by models. ”
Curious, this is not what I have been told, I have always understood that natural variability can cause temporary decreases in temperature. I guess we have different sources. Perhaps you could produce a quote that states what you have said this clearly?

Different subject to the sentences…
What the AWG Believers say is it is possible to have temporary cooling. What the MODELS predict (pardon, project, like projectile v..) is rising temps. So the MODELS are bunk since they cannot predict (or project) a cooling trend. Oh, and they are fed on broken temperature series from GIStemp et.al. G. in G. out …

E.M.Smith
Editor
September 11, 2009 2:58 pm

Robert E. Phelan (05:07:08) : I have no way of knowing whether Dr. Svensmark is correct about cosmic rays and clouds but he is definitely not correct about poor harvests causing a 30% decline in Europe’s population during the Little Ice Age. That phenomenon was caused by something called the Black Death, a bubonic plague
But that plague spread, in part, due to the poor nutritional status of the population. Plague did not just evolve overnight as a new species… The outbreak of plague had causes too…

Henrik Svensmark
September 11, 2009 3:01 pm

Dear Anthony,
Nigel Calder has been so kind to translate my article. It is a good translation.
Best wishes,
Henrik
Published 9 September 2009 in Jyllands-Posten, Denmark’s best-selling newspaper.
Translation approved by Henrik Svensmark
While the Sun sleeps
Henrik Svensmark, Professor, Technical University of Denmark, Copenhagen
“In fact global warming has stopped and a cooling is beginning. No climate model has predicted a cooling of the Earth – quite the contrary. And this means that the projections of future climate are unreliable,” writes Henrik Svensmark.
The star that keeps us alive has, over the last few years, been almost free of sunspots, which are the usual signs of the Sun’s magnetic activity. Last week [4 September 2009] the scientific team behind the satellite SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) reported, “It is likely that the current year’s number of blank days will be the longest in about 100 years.” Everything indicates that the Sun is going into some kind of hibernation, and the obvious question is what significance that has for us on Earth.
If you ask the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which represents the current consensus on climate change, the answer is a reassuring “nothing”. But history and recent research suggest that is probably completely wrong. Why? Let’s take a closer look.
Solar activity has always varied. Around the year 1000, we had a period of very high solar activity, which coincided with the Medieval Warm Period. It was a time when frosts in May were almost unknown – a matter of great importance for a good harvest. Vikings settled in Greenland and explored the coast of North America. On the whole it was a good time. For example, China’s population doubled in this period.
But after about 1300 solar activity declined and the world began to get colder. It was the beginning of the episode we now call the Little Ice Age. In this cold time, all the Viking settlements in Greenland disappeared. Sweden surprised Denmark by marching across the ice, and in London the Thames froze repeatedly. But more serious were the long periods of crop failures, which resulted in poorly nourished populations, reduced in Europe by about 30 per cent because of disease and hunger.
It’s important to realise that the Little Ice Age was a global event. It ended in the late 19th Century and was followed by increasing solar activity. Over the past 50 years solar activity has been at its highest since the medieval warmth of 1000 years ago. But now it appears that the Sun has changed again, and is returning towards what solar scientists call a “grand minimum” such as we saw in the Little Ice Age.
The match between solar activity and climate through the ages is sometimes explained away as coincidence. Yet it turns out that, almost no matter when you look and not just in the last 1000 years, there is a link. Solar activity has repeatedly fluctuated between high and low during the past 10,000 years. In fact the Sun spent about 17 per cent of those 10,000 years in a sleeping mode, with a cooling Earth the result.
You may wonder why the international climate panel IPCC does not believe that the Sun’s changing activity affects the climate. The reason is that it considers only changes in solar radiation. That would be the simplest way for the Sun to change the climate – a bit like turning up and down the brightness of a light bulb.
Satellite measurements have shown that the variations of solar radiation are too small to explain climate change. But the panel has closed its eyes to another, much more powerful way for the Sun to affect Earth’s climate. In 1996 we discovered a surprising influence of the Sun – its impact on Earth’s cloud cover. High-energy accelerated particles coming from exploded stars, the cosmic rays, help to form clouds.
When the Sun is active, its magnetic field is better at shielding us against the cosmic rays coming from outer space, before they reach our planet. By regulating the Earth’s cloud cover, the Sun can turn the temperature up and down. High solar activity means fewer clouds and and a warmer world. Low solar activity and poorer shielding against cosmic rays result in increased cloud cover and hence a cooling. As the Sun’s magnetism doubled in strength during the 20th century, this natural mechanism may be responsible for a large part of global warming seen then.
That also explains why most climate scientists try to ignore this possibility. It does not favour their idea that the 20th century temperature rise was mainly due to human emissions of CO2. If the Sun provoked a significant part of warming in the 20th Century, then the contribution by CO2 must necessarily be smaller.
Ever since we put forward our theory in 1996, it has been subjected to very sharp criticism, which is normal in science.
First it was said that a link between clouds and solar activity could not be correct, because no physical mechanism was known. But in 2006, after many years of work, we completed experiments at DTU Space that demonstrated the existence of a physical mechanism. The cosmic rays help to form aerosols, which are the seeds for cloud formation.
Then came the criticism that the mechanism we found in the laboratory could not work in the real atmosphere, and therefore had no practical significance. We have just rejected that criticism emphatically.
It turns out that the Sun itself performs what might be called natural experiments. Giant solar eruptions can cause the cosmic ray intensity on earth to dive suddenly over a few days. In the days following an eruption, cloud cover can fall by about 4 per cent. And the amount of liquid water in cloud droplets is reduced by almost 7 per cent. Here is a very large effect – indeed so great that in popular terms the Earth’s clouds originate in space.
So we have watched the Sun’s magnetic activity with increasing concern, since it began to wane in the mid-1990s.
That the Sun might now fall asleep in a deep minimum was suggested by solar scientists at a meeting in Kiruna in Sweden two years ago. So when Nigel Calder and I updated our book The Chilling Stars, we wrote a little provocatively that “we are advising our friends to enjoy global warming while it lasts.”
In fact global warming has stopped and a cooling is beginning. Mojib Latif from the University of Kiel argued at the recent UN World Climate Conference in Geneva that the cooling may continue through the next 10 to 20 years. His explanation was a natural change in the North Atlantic circulation, not in solar activity. But no matter how you interpret them, natural variations in climate are making a comeback.
The outcome may be that the Sun itself will demonstrate its importance for climate and so challenge the theories of global warming. No climate model has predicted a cooling of the Earth – quite the contrary. And this means that the projections of future climate are unreliable. A forecast saying it may be either warmer or colder for 50 years is not very useful, and science is not yet able to predict solar activity.
So in many ways we stand at a crossroads. The near future will be extremely interesting. I think it is important to accept that Nature pays no heed to what we humans think about it. Will the greenhouse theory survive a significant cooling of the Earth? Not in its current dominant form. Unfortunately, tomorrow’s climate challenges will be quite different from the greenhouse theory’s predictions. Perhaps it will become fashionable again to investigate the Sun’s impact on our climate.
Professor Henrik Svensmark is director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at DTU Space. His book The Chilling Stars has also been published in Danish as Klima og Kosmos Gads Forlag, DK ISBN 9788712043508)

Mike Abbott
September 11, 2009 3:02 pm

Scott A. Mandia (07:39:41) :
I would be very careful if you intend to tap Tamino’s bees nest. You will likely be coming to a gun fight armed with a knife.

Lucia from the Blackboard recently came to Tamino’s bees nest and blasted him with a bazooka. I’m referring to her apparent proof that one of his analyses violated the 2nd law of thermodynamics. She was permanently banned from his board.

David in Davis
September 11, 2009 3:10 pm

Phil’s Dad (12:44:14)
Well between us then, we’ve now solved most of the world’s problems without even leaving the room. Thanks for being a politician who seeks and considers views outside the party line. I hope you can find a way to steer your less enlightened fellows away from Luddite dogma. I’m trying to convert my friends one mind at a time, but not ready to go public either. I might find myself swinging from the UCD water tower. All praise to the Swenmarks (and Watts’, Pielkes, and McIntyres and McKittricks, et. al.) of the world be they right or wrong. A scientist’s first duty is to be skeptical; maybe it should be a layman’s and politician’s, too.

E.M.Smith
Editor
September 11, 2009 3:23 pm

Ron de Haan (06:01:30) : If this hoax is stopped however, it has to be stopped in the USA.
It won’t be. It will be stopped in Russia, China, and India.
Russia only bought into Kyoto since they got paid to play by western europe sending them ‘offset’ dollars since their industry collapsed with the USSR and they could count it is “CO2 reduction”. Copenhagen will not have that “juice” for them, and their scientists are already calling “bunk” on AGW. China is only going to do what improves the riches and power of China. THAT is blowing off AGW “mitigation” but asking for western money anyway. India is in roughly the same position, but more importantly, there is no effective way to control India; so they will ask for western money too and assert their right to continue growing as is.
The end result is that with about 1/2 the world population and about 3/4 the economic growth saying “no thanks”, the effort will collapse.
The only real question is how impoverished the west becomes as we go down the path.
The “3rd world”, Russia, et. al. have their hands out. China has the door open to industry, as does India. The money and factories will run that way until the flow dries up. Then they will politely inform us that AGW is no longer of interest to them, but would we like to buy any cars, food, coal, toys, tools? Oh, no money to buy? So sorry…
Think this is fantasy? China is busy buying resources all over the world. Trading U.S. Treasuries for future delivery of oil (200 $B to Petrobras IIRC), coal and minerals (Australian and Brazilian miners), etc. Hit the biz news, the deals are published. They have absolutely NO intention what so ever of reducing production nor energy use. Ever.
So, frankly, the USA is irrelevant and a “write off” with the UK just a bit further down the road ahead of us in the race to bankruptcy. (California is already there. We have AGW laws galore, but no jobs and industry is packing up and moving to China and Brazil… gee just like my investment money…) Mainland Europe is a bit lagging largely due to their protectionist economics, but that barrier can not stand forever. Not against China.

dorlomin
September 11, 2009 3:38 pm

E.M.Smith (14:43:52) :
What the MODELS predict (pardon, project, like projectile v..) is rising temps. So the MODELS are bunk since they cannot predict (or project) a cooling trend. Oh, and they are fed on broken temperature series from GIStemp et.al. G. in G. out …
————————-
Do they now. All of them? And your source for this statement is………
Or is it what you want to believe?

tallbloke
September 11, 2009 4:25 pm

dorlomin (15:38:22) :
E.M.Smith (14:43:52) :
What the MODELS predict (pardon, project, like projectile v..) is rising temps.
Do they now. All of them? And your source for this statement is………
Or is it what you want to believe?

Graphs?