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
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)
Sponsored IT training links:
Interested in CISA certification? We offer complete collection of dumps questions to successfully pass NS0-163 and 642-566 exam.
Joel Shore:
You make a logical error when you say of the ‘Missing Hot Spot’,
“And, even if this disagreement is not a data artifact, it wouldn’t directly say anything about the cause of the warming (e.g., whether or not it is due to greenhouse gases) because the prediction of such a “hotspot” is independent of the mechanism causing the warming.”
Sorry but that is patent nonsense. The ‘Hot Spot’ is either
(a) an expected effect of anthropogenic global warming (AGW)
or, as you assert,
(b) an expected effect of global warming induced by any mechanism.
But the absence of the Hot Spot disproves AGW in either case.
In Case (a) the absence of the Hot Spot is clear demonstration of the absence of significant AGW (quod erat demonstrandum).
In Case (b) the absence of the Hot Spot is clear demonstration of the absence of significant global warming by any mechanism (quod erat demonstrandum). But AGW is a warming mechanism and, therefore, there is no AGW.
Anyway, your assertion that any mechanism of warming would cause the Hot Spot is an error. If you want a full explanation of that error it is in our NIPCC report or for convenience you can see my brief explanation on pages 5 and 6 of my item at
http://climaterealists.com/attachments/ftp/Heansen-Obama_letter_comments.pdf
So, the only possibilities concerning the failure to observe the Hot Spot are
1. there is no significant AGW
or
2. the data that would show the hot spot is erroneous.
The Hockey Team has attempted to discredit the data that would show the hot spot but has failed in this attempt to date. Until there is clear reason to reject the data then the only scientific conclusion which can be drawn is that there is no significant AGW.
However, everybody knows that B*** S*** baffles science where AGW is concerned.
Richard
Invariant says:
Why do you believe it is surprisingly sensitively dependent on solar activity and yet surprisingly insensitive to the known forcing due to increases in greenhouse gases?
ron from texas says:
So, whose predictions from 1988 did better than Hansen’s?
Could you fill us in on what basic physics and what observed behavior of CO2 is violated?
By what measure? According to Wikipedia, the movie opened May 24, 2006. The HADCRUT3 ( http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/hadcrut3gl.txt ) anomaly for May 2006 was +0.338 C. The latest value available (July 2009) is +0.499 C. If you prefer UAH L2T data ( http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt ), then the May 2006 had an anomaly of -0.01 C and the latest value available is +0.23 C. (Since May 2006 was a particularly low value for the UAH data, I could be extremely generous and give you the value in November 2006 when the DVD of the movie was released, but that only gets you up to +0.29 C.)
Of course, specific monthly values are sort of silly anyway and a more sensible approach would be to look at longer-term averages. But, even if we look at the values over the whole year, we find the HADCRUT anomaly for 2006 was +0.422 C while that for this year so far is +0.418 C (and will almost surely finish higher now that an El Nino has developed and is expected to persist).
I honestly haven’t a clue where you got your claim from and can only guess that it is from some source that gave a one month snapshot from the depths of last year’s La Nina and is now hopelessly out-of-date and was never really very meaningful to begin with.
Richard Courtney says:
No. It is not. Even assuming the particular data that you choose to show is right, all that is missing is an amplification of warming in the UPPER troposphere of the TROPICS. The warming is still occurring at the surface and at altitude all across the globe. It is simply not being amplified at higher altitudes in the tropics.
I will admit to you that this would mean there is something wrong with the models. However, imagining that the models fail to get a basic piece of physics involving convection wrong in such a way that it is wrong only over multidecadal time scales but is right at time scales on the order of a year (which is still a much longer time scale than that over which the convective effects operates) is rather difficult to engineer. In fact, I have yet to see a mechanism proposed that would explain this. That, along with the fact that the data for multidecadal trends at altitude in the tropics are all over the map depending on whose data set you believe, makes it likely that it is the data that is the problem.
I imagine that your Figure 2 there (which is ultimately borrowed from the IPCC AR4 WG1 Figure 9.1) must make a pretty convincing case to someone who doesn’t know how to read a contour plot. However, those of us who do will note that the resolution of the contours is simply not good enough to see the structure of the warming for other mechanisms (because their presumed contribution to the 20th century warming is too small). For example, for solar that plot shows the tropic surface has warmed somewhere between 0 and +0.2 C while at altitude it has warmed between +0.2 C and +0.4 C, which is compatible with any amplification factor between 1 and infinity! (The pattern seen for the sulfate aerosols, by the way, also illustrates amplification…particularly in the IPCC figure where there is an additional shading that your plots seems to have eliminated…although in this case it is amplifying the cooling effect, which is what one expects given the moist adiabatic lapse rate theory mechanism that I mentioned.)
Gavin Schmidt has made a plot with the solar forcing artificially increased so that the vertical structure caused by solar forcing is visible and the result is shown here: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/12/tropical-troposphere-trends/ As you can see, the only way that one can distinguish between the two by the structure of the warming is that solar causes warming of the stratosphere while greenhouse gases cause cooling of the stratosphere. As you are no doubt aware, the data show stratospheric cooling and the cooling is so large that it is robust against any possible corrections in the data. (In fact, the same warming corrections that tend to bring the radiosonde data in better agreement with the models in the troposphere actually also improve the agreement in the stratosphere, which before correction is cooling even a little more rapidly than the models would predict.)
The Maunder Minimum
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=HfdG-HPiBdMC&pg=PA33&lpg=PA33&dq=weather+during+the+maunder+minimum&source=bl&ots=LcJ3R1P0E9&sig=ZvwHQEIP-suygtWe1rcSKvKQqE8&hl=en&ei=guKuSseMOoGangOerqm5BQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4#v=onepage&q=weather%20during%20the%20maunder%20minimum&f=false
Joel, nothing but standard warmist/catastrophist B/S I’m afraid and doesn’t answer any of my questions. I ask for concrete proof that Man Made CO2 is causing the small rise in temperature that we’ve seen since the LIA and you offer nothing except the standard :”agreement by scientific bodies”. All of these bodies have only one thing in common and it isn’t good science, it is that they receive government funding which ensures that they toe the line, none puts forward a credible case for AGW. You say that a trend of 10 years isn’t significant (it’s actually closer to 15 years) and yet the whole AGW myth is based on warming with associated CO2 rise from from 1970 to 1995. You also acknowledge that AGW (at best a very small effect) is now being overwhelmed by natural drivers, is this a bit of having your cake and eating it? When the temperature goes up it is AGW when it goes down natural forcing overwhelms AGW for this period. I believe that the forcing effect of CO2 in an actual situation is unproven and that the current CO2 rise being caused only by ACO2 is also dodgy. That is the point that we skeptics make, the whole AGW theory is weak and now the planet is agreeing with us. Cast aside your blinkers, start using your obvious intelligence positively and question your beliefs. Start by reading Ian Plimer’s Heaven and Earth.. If that fails come and wash the dishes with my wife, she understands more about real world climate than the IPCC, seriously.
Repeat afater me, no warming for 15 years despite tortured data to show otherwise, recovering Arctic ice, robustly icy Antarctica, no upper troposheric hotspot, no historical link between CO2 and temperature, no worsening weather events, no sea rise that would finger AGW, unbelievably healthy and multiplying Polar Bears. In the face of this the Polically driven Juggernaut rolls on completely unsupported despite most of the scientific community, the general public and in reality most politicians believing it to be false.
Please Americans, toss out this monstrous C&T, lets see Copenhagen become the laughing shop that it patently is and lets get back to sence and science.
Sorry, Joel, what is your take on these quotes from the UN/IPCC?
The only way of saving the world may be for industrial civilisation to collapse, deliberately seek poverty and set levels of mortality.
We have to ride the theory of Global Warming even if it’s wrong.
A Global warming treaty must be implemented even if there is no evidence of global warming.
Unless we announce disaster no one will listen.
Seriously, this is what MMGW (Oh sorry, climate change) is all about and it needs sheep to implement it. Unfortunately they have made sheep out of scientific bodies and scientists themselves. Are you part of the solution or part of the problem?
Joel Shore (18:39:19) :
Richard Courtney says:
In Case (b) the absence of the Hot Spot is clear demonstration of the absence of significant global warming by any mechanism (quod erat demonstrandum). But AGW is a warming mechanism and, therefore, there is no AGW.
No. It is not. Even assuming the particular data that you choose to show is right, all that is missing is an amplification of warming in the UPPER troposphere of the TROPICS. The warming is still occurring at the surface and at altitude all across the globe. It is simply not being amplified at higher altitudes in the tropics.
I will admit to you that this would mean there is something wrong with the models. However, imagining that the models fail to get a basic piece of physics involving convection wrong in such a way that it is wrong only over multidecadal time scales but is right at time scales on the order of a year (which is still a much longer time scale than that over which the convective effects operates) is rather difficult to engineer.
Joel I would heartily agree with those who say you are no troll. You seem to sincerely believe what you say.
The problem is that belief should not be an attribute of checking facts against theories. Admittedly it plays a role as we are human, but we should watch out against it.
Yes, models can get it right is some places and be completely wrong in others, and when you program them in the computer they will come out with your prejudices.
An example from my field is the parton model invented and promoted strongly by the admittedly incomparable genius Feynman, it was correct for the bulk of the data studied at the time, it was wrong in deep inelastic whence the evidence for gluons and QCD came . A radical rethink of all microcosm physics was necessary just because of that disagreement.
You have a tendency when coming against a contradiction with data to say: yes, but….
All AGW supporters do that, instead of scrapping their model and starting to think of the problem from scratch. It was the same with the epicycles model of the universe of that time, which btw was not really wrong as much as irrelevant: a fit to the data. The more data, the more epicycles and understanding of what was happening was delayed until the middle ages and Copernicus. AGW theories are at the epicycle stage, with Gavin coming out with a new twist every time the data disagree with his video games. ( another way of saying that with four parameters you can fit any function with five an elephant).
This reminds me so much of a Monty Python skit: For example, given the premise, “all fish live underwater” and “all mackerel are fish”, my wife will conclude, not that “all mackerel live underwater”, but that “if she buys kippers it will not rain”, or that “trout live in trees”, or even that “I do not love her any more.” This she calls “using her intuition”.
Hi Joel,
so the two periods in the record you show where there was a warming in excess of 1.7C/decade are from 1974-1984 and 1992-2002. Lets look at these.
The first goes from the trough following an el nino event at the end of a thirty year cooling period to the peak of the 1983 el nino.
The second includes the big el nino spike of 1998.
It also includes the cooling from the Pinatubo eruption in 1991.
Invariant (14:56:17) :
John Finn (14:20:58): You need to look elsewhere to explain why warming stopped and cooling started.
In 1963 Lorenz told us that our climate is sensitively dependent on the initial conditions. I suspect that our global temperature may be surprisingly sensitively dependent on the various forms of solar activity.
Except there appears to be very little evidence for it. Perhaps all will be revealed in the next few years.
masonmart (23:09:37) :
Naural forcings like summer and winter will affect temperatures but just because the winter is colder than summer does not make the earth head to an ice age.
If insolation is fixed and outgoing radiation (albedo and LWR) is constant temperatures will still vary over short periods.
BUT all you are doing is sloshing around the same amount of “heat”. the world does not heat or cool.
Change incoming vs outgoing radiation and the world cools or heats over a long time period. There will still be temperature variations over annual and longer periods. Sometimes up and some times down.
If incoming vs outgoing is a fixed 0.01% greater then there will still be ups and downs but in enough time and FIXED difference the world will cook. Luckily outgoing is not fixed – albedo, blackbody, etc. provide negative feedback to help maintain fixed global temp. This is not 100% negative feedback such that constant temp is maintained (1% increase in incoming radiation is not matched by 1% increase in outgoing) Change incoming (e.g. insolation) or outgoing (e.g. GHGs) and there will therefore be a corresponding but small change to temp but it will not be an instant response (c.f. a low pass filtered square wave in electronics).
Most here say it is a government/scientific conspiracy. I would really like to know
1 what governments expect out of following AGW (it isn’t popularity! More taxes=loss of next election).
2 What researchers expect. Funding will only last a few years until AGW is disproved (in your view) then their names will become a source of derision like Charles Dawson (piltdown man). I would suggest that most scientists would not aim for this ending.
Joel Shore:
I congratulate you on the best ad hom. of the day when you say to me concerning the Missing Hot Spot:
“I imagine that your Figure 2 there (which is ultimately borrowed from the IPCC AR4 WG1 Figure 9.1) must make a pretty convincing case to someone who doesn’t know how to read a contour plot. However, those of us who do will note that the resolution of the contours is simply not good enough to see the structure of the warming for other mechanisms (because their presumed contribution to the 20th century warming is too small).”
That is a good insult but a bad argument.
Firstly, as you admit, the figure is from IPCC AR4 but with added annotation. Please explain why you think the IPCC included the figure if, as you assert, it is meaningless because “the presumed structure [of other mechanisms] is too small”.
In reality, IPCC WG1 included that figure because it explains the model-predicted patterns of warming from the various forcing mechanisms.
Secondly, the Hot Spot is missing and it is that pattern of warming which is the ‘fingerprint’ of the effect of the AGW mechanism. Please note that the Hot Spot is a model prediction that in the tropics at altitude the warming will of 3 times the warming at the surface. So, a claim that the data is inadequate to show the Hot Spot is a claim that the data is very inadequate to show surface warming. But you have replied;
“The warming is still occurring at the surface and at altitude all across the globe.”
Rubbish! The warming is NOT occurring “at altitude” according to the data. Indeed, the fact that the data shows slight cooling at altitude in the tropics is the subject we are discussing.
And my post you replied pointed out to you that if it is claimed the data is not adequate to show the warming at altitude then that same data cannot be adequate to show the much smaller warming at the surface.
So, I can and do “know how to read a contour plot” but you deny the plot shows what it does. And you attempt to justify your denial with an ad hom..
I give your reply to me an A+ for humour but a C- for factual content.
Richard
It is a fascinating thread, but it seems the arguments can be summed up thus:
AGW: look closely it is warming!
skeptic: i’m looking closely and i see no warming
AGW: no no you’re looking too close, stand further back
skeptic: i’m standing further back and i see no warming
AGW: no no you’re standing too far back, come closer
skeptic: ok i’m closer now and i see no warming
AGW: no no now you’re too close again, stand further back
…
Joel Shore (18:05:33): Why do you believe it is surprisingly sensitively dependent on solar activity and yet surprisingly insensitive to the known forcing due to increases in greenhouse gases?
I have not said that “the sun is surprisingly insensitive due to increases in greenhouse gases”.
John Finn (02:46:17) : Except there appears to be very little evidence for it. Perhaps all will be revealed in the next few years.
Indeed. A solid temperature drop would be fine.
Stefan (07:24:42) :
It is a fascinating thread, but it seems the arguments can be summed up thus:
AGW: look closely it is warming!
skeptic: i’m looking closely and i see no warming
AGW: no no you’re looking too close, stand further back
skeptic: i’m standing further back and i see no warming
AGW: no no you’re standing too far back, come closer
skeptic: ok i’m closer now and i see no warming
AGW: no no now you’re too close again, stand further back
…
Very funny Stefan, but I prefer the following approach:
Eliminating the Anthropogenic Global Warming Scare:
1. Increase in atmospheric CO2 drives Global Temperatures:
Not True:
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/MSUCRUCO2.jpg
2. Heats the oceans
Not true:
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/argodata.jpg
. 3. Causes sea level rise:
Not True
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/
4. Our ice caps are melting:
Not True
North Pole
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm
North Pole Temps from 1950 until now:
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
South Pole
Not True: Ice extend at record high
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.anom.south.jpg
5. Increase in Hurricanes
Not True:
http://icecap.us/index.php/go/joes-blog/hurricanes_and_the_northeast/
In short, the entire AGW?Climate Change Scare is based on spin and lies.
Bill:
You say:
“Change incoming vs outgoing radiation and the world cools or heats over a long time period. There will still be temperature variations over annual and longer periods. Sometimes up and some times down.”
But that is not how the world is observed to behave.
Firstly, the Earth is constrained within close limits of global temperature in each of two stable states; viz. glacial and interglacial. And its temperature has been the same within narrow bounds in each of those stable states throughout the ~2.5 billion years since the Earth gained an oxygen-rich atmosphere. And the Earth’s surface has had liquid water throughout that time. But heating from the Sun has increased by about 30% over that time. If that additional radiative forcing from the Sun had a direct effect on temperature then the oceans would have boiled to steam long ago.
Clearly, the climate system contains very strong constraints that keep global temperature within close boundaries in each of the two stable states.
And I wonder why an increase to radiative forcing of at most 0.4 per cent from a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is supposed to threaten catastrophe when ~30 per cent increase to radiative forcing from the Sun has had no discernible effect.
But the global temperature does constantly vary within the boundaries of its stable state. Its present state is the interglacial state and has been for ten millenia. At issue is why the global temperature varies within the boundaries.
The climate system is seeking an equilibrium that it never achieves. The Earth obtains radiant energy from the Sun and radiates that energy back to space. The energy input to the system (from the Sun) may be constant (although some doubt that), but the rotation of the Earth and its orbit around the Sun ensure that the energy input/output is never in perfect equilbrium.
The climate system is an intermediary in the process of returning (most of) the energy to space (some energy is radiated from the Earth’s surface back to space). And the Northern and Southern hemispheres have different coverage by oceans. Therefore, as the year progresses the modulation of the energy input/output of the system varies. Hence, the system is always seeking equilibrium but never achieves it.
Such a varying system could be expected to exhibit oscillatory behaviour. And it does. Mean global temperature (n.b. global and not hemispheric temperature) rises by 3.8 degC from January to July and falls by 3.8 degC from July to January each year.: see
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/anomalies/index.php
Please note that the highest global temperature is when the Earth is furthest from the Sun during each year and, therefore, it is an empirical fact that mechanisms within the climate system have much more effect on global temperature than “Change incoming vs outgoing radiation “.
(Incidentally, I wonder why some people think a rise of global temperature of 2 degC would pass a catastrophic “tipping point” when global temperature rises by nearly double that during each year and recovers within the same year, and it does this every year).
Such oscillations could induce harmonic effects which have periodicity of several years. Indeed, it would be surprising if such harmonic effects did not occur. Of course, such harmonic oscillation would be a process that – at least in principle – is capable of evaluation. And assessment of that process may indicate frequencies of observed oscillations (i.e. NAO, PDO, etc.).
It is interesting to note that there is an apparent oscillation with a frequency of ~60 years because mean global temperature is estimated to have cooled from ~1880 to ~1910, then warmed to ~1940, then cooled to ~1970, then warmed to 1998, and has cooled since then. It is tempting to speculate that this ocillation is a harmonic effect.
However, there may be no process because the climate is a chaotic system. Therefore, the observed oscillations (i.e. NAO, PDO, etc. and the 60 year oscillation) could be observation of the system seeking its chaotic attractor(s) in response to its seeking equilibrium in a changing situation.
Very importantly, there is an apparent ~900 year oscillation that caused the Roman Warm Period (RWP), then the Dark Age Cool Period (DACP), then the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), then the Little Ice Age (LIA), and the present warm period (PWP). All the observed rise of global temperature in the twentieth century could be recovery from the LIA that is similar to the recovery from the DARC to the MWP. And the ~900 year oscillation could be the chaotic climate system seeking its attractor(s). If so, then all global climate models and ‘attribution studies’ utilized by IPCC and CCSP are based on the false premise that there is a force or process causing climate to change when no such force or process exists.
Furthermore, harmonic oscillation and chaotic attractor seeking may both occur.
It is interesting to consider why some people want to believe in man-made global warming when there is no evidence of any kind for it and much evidence denies it: e.g. see
http://www.tech-know.eu/uploads/AGW_hypothesis_disproved.pdf
I think they stick to their belief because my comments in this posting are considerations of reality, but AGW-supporters prefer to consider virtual reality.
Richard
Invariant (09:04:27) :
John Finn (02:46:17) : Except there appears to be very little evidence for it. Perhaps all will be revealed in the next few years.
Indeed. A solid temperature drop would be fine.
Don’t bet on it.
Richard Courtney (1004:40)
Nice description, Richard and helpful to me.
I’ve been trying to square my agreement with Leif over short term inadequacy of observed solar variability with my disagreement with him over longer time scales and I needed a ‘bridge’ such as that 900 year oscillation that you mention.
Heretofore I’ve been assuming that oscillation to be solar induced but there could just as easily be an internal climate oscillation on that time scale.
If it is an internal oscillation then there is no need to continue disagreeing with Leif on time scales of 1000 to 10000 years.
It seems clear to me that there are internal oscillations originating from the interaction between sun and ocean. That accommodates all the variables you mention as causative features.
It is also clear that they operate on different time scales from interannual ENSO events to PDO phase changes to that 900 year cycle.
Depending on the state of the oceans as regards their rate of energy release to the air all else follows as the air adjusts the rate of energy transfer from surface to space to maintain stability between glacial and interglacial epochs.
Critical to the maintenance of that stability are the latitudinal shifts in the air circulation systems which always occur in response to ocean variability.
Addiionally, if the sun has increased it’s power by 30% yet the system has retained stability then I would venture that nowadays the speed of the hydrological cycle is proportionately faster than it was when the sun was cooler.
That looks like a highly likely explanation to me. It fits all current observations and basic physics and potentially deals a fatal blow to AGW because any process capable of that would deal with extra energy in the air by the most miniscule of adjustments which we could never hope to measure.
Any comments ?
Richard S Courtney (10:04:40) :
Such a varying system could be expected to exhibit oscillatory behaviour. And it does. Mean global temperature (n.b. global and not hemispheric temperature) rises by 3.8 degC from January to July and falls by 3.8 degC from July to January each year.: see
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/anomalies/index.php
The difference in TSI between January and July is 90 W/m2 giving a temperature difference of 7.6 K, so the 1.5 W/m2 solar cycle variation gives 7.6/90*1.5 = 0.13K, about the order of magnitude we have deduced many times before [perhaps twice because of ‘feedbacks’].
Stephen Wilde (11:12:02) :
Heretofore I’ve been assuming that oscillation to be solar induced but there could just as easily be an internal climate oscillation on that time scale.
If it is an internal oscillation then there is no need to continue disagreeing with Leif on time scales of 1000 to 10000 years.
I think we can agree on this.
Stephen Wilde (11:18:51) :
Addiionally, if the sun has increased it’s power by 30% yet the system has retained stability then I would venture that nowadays the speed of the hydrological cycle is proportionately faster than it was when the sun was cooler.
Perhaps the 50 times as much CO2 also had something to do with it. Speculating about billions of years is premature.
Hi world ocean – remember to read the article and cool down/fall back to 1985 heat level in – say – 5-10 years? 😉 :
Global Ocean Heat Content:
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/
November 5, 2008 Correcting ocean cooling:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/OceanCooling/
Quote: “…
According to the float data on his computer screen, almost the entire Atlantic Ocean had gone cold. Unless you believe The Day After Tomorrow, Willis jokes, impossibly cold.
…
He was supposed to fly to Colorado that weekend to give a talk on “ocean cooling” to prominent climate researchers. Instead, he’d be talking about how it was all a mistake.
…
What we found was that ocean heating was larger than scientists previously thought, and so the contribution of thermal expansion to sea level rise was actually 50 percent larger than previous estimates.”
…”
Richard S Courtney says:
It is not the IPCC’s fault that their figure has been used by you to try to illustrate things that it was not designed to illustrate. For their purpose, they chose to use the same scale of contour ranges for all of the different forcings so that the relative magnitudes of the various forcings was apparent. The disadvantage of this is that it does not allow one to see details of the geographic and altitudinal structure of the warming for the weaker forcings, which for the IPCC’s purposes was okay but for your purposes is not.
The models predict such a pattern whether the warming is due to AGW or something else, like solar, as Gavin’s run illustrates. Therefore, it is silly to claim it is a ‘fingerprint’ of the AGW mechanism. If everybody had the same fingerprint, the technique of using fingerprints to determine who the criminal is would not be very effective.
Now the cooling of the stratosphere is indeed a “fingerprint” of the AGW mechanism (at least in distinguishing it from solar irradiance changes; I’m not sure what spontaneous changes in cloud cover or other proposed mechanisms would show). And, cooling of the stratosphere is what the data clearly show.
As for the data being inadequate, it is the weather balloon data that is inadequate. The surface data is fortunately much more plentiful and better controlled. (Even the weather balloon data is adequate for showing the fluctuations in temperature on timescales of a few years or less; it is only when one tries to pull multidecadal trends that are very sensitive to any artificial secular trends in the data that it gets dicey.)
Below 200mB, the data you show generally shows warming in the tropics and other data sets do too, many moreso. (There was a time when the UAH T2LT data set showed cooling in the tropics but that was due to an error that has now been corrected.) Even if there is no amplification of the warming at the surface (i.e., an amplification factor of 1), that does not mean there is cooling; it simply means the warming is the same further up as it is at the surface.
I don’t have any opinion on whether you can’t read a contour plot or whether you can but are hoping that others cannot. However, my point still stands that the contour plots that you show for mechanisms like solar don’t have the resolution in temperature necessary to determine what the expected amplification factor is for that forcing as you go up in the tropical troposphere with any reasonable accuracy. This is why Gavin ran the models with an artificially large solar forcing so that one can see that the pattern of amplification occurs for that forcing too.
Bill, I believe the World government via the UN theory more and more. Otherwise the ability of National government to raise revenue as it sees fit via carbon taxes is too much for them to resist,
Masonmart says:
So, basically, it is a big massive conspiracy and you can’t trust scientists and scientific organizations specifically charged with providing the U.S. government sound scientific advice like NAS. Do you really think that’s logical?
I personally prefer non-fiction to fiction. (See here for some links to discussions of the fantasies of Plimer: http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/ )
Why should I repeat after you when I spent a large amount of time addressing some of these points and you refuse to respond in any way except to repeat them again like a mantra.? And, by the way, at least with HADCRUT3, you are only going to get a negative trend line if you look over something of almost precisely 11.5 year or less than a decade. You ain’t going to get it over 15 years. And, you are going to find that even though 1998 is the warmest year in that record (due to the massive El Nino), the next 7 warmest years have all occurred since 2001.
These quotes are from the IPCC according to who? Do you have cites?