Leif Svalgaard writes in comments:
We plan to submit tomorrow to JGR the following…
http://www.leif.org/research/IDV09.pdf (preprint)
…showing the run of the heliospheric magnetic field since 1835 [not a typo]. I plan to discuss the whole peer-review process here on WUWT, complete with nasty comments by the reviewers and our responses. This will be an illustration of the peer-review process as it unfolds. Should be interesting.
I’ll say. I’ve taken some of the most interesting graphics and put them up for WUWT readers, along with the abstract.
IDV09 and Heliospheric Magnetic field 1835-2009
Leif Svalgaard1 and Edward W. Cliver2
Stanford University, HEPL, Cedar Hall, Via Ortega, Stanford, CA 94305-4085
Space Vehicles Directorate, Air Force Research Laboratory, Hanscom AFB, MA 01731-3010
Abstract.
We use recently acquired archival data to substantiate and extend the IDV index of long-term geomagnetic activity, particularly for years from 1872-1902 for which the initial version of the index (IDV05) was based on observations from very few stations. The new IDV series (IDV09) now includes the interval from 1835-2009, vs. 1872-2004 for IDV05. The HMF strength derived from IDV09 agrees closely with that based on IDV05 over the period of overlap. Comparison of the IDV09-based HMF strength with other recent reconstructions of solar wind B yields a strong consensus between the series based on geomagnetic data, but significant lack of support for a series based on the 10Be cosmic ray radionuclide.
The reconstructed data in the graphic below, from the paper, is quite interesting. Currently, we appear to be at the lowest point in the record.
Click for larger images.
Here’s the comparison with the Be10 isotope record:
I hope that there will be a good discussion of just what is meant by peer review. I’ve just been reading a comment by Stevo on the Bishop Hill blog which seems to me to have the right idea.
The basic function of peer review is to filter out papers of no interest to the journal’s readership. Basic checks are done to see that the results are new, interesting, clearly and completely enough presented to replicate, and not obvious nonsense. It is NOT and never has been a check on the result’s correctness. The function of journals is not to present settled science, to the extent that science is ever settled. (That’s textbooks.) Journals present work in progress – hypotheses and experiments – for others to try to find errors in them, or to extend and improve them. Journals are simply a filtering/sorting mechanism to enable researchers to find work of interest to them quickly.
If so, then complaining that something hasn’t been published as a peer-reviewed paper in a reputable magazine simply means that the reviewers didn’t think it was interesting or relevant enough to be published.
Leif,
I’m an engineer, Tau Beta Phi and all that, and, I can follow most intelligent arguments, but, I must say this climate prognostication is beyond my ability to understand. I appreciate those that do this for a living. While my exposure to statistics is limited, having only taken three or four courses in the subject, what I see here reminds me more of Linear Algebra and Fourier Transforms.
That said, in 2007, I felt that something was changing with the climate. I explored, I locked on to sunspots, back in 2007. I graphed and I collated but I could find no relation. I eventually found these sites WUWT, Climate Audit and so forth.
So my question is, should I reject a gut feeling for over two years, that says the climate is cooling or accept the intelligentsia, saying its warming?
IMacfunk (05:47:09) : “But then he was a Norse of a different colour.”
Brillian, IMac!
Leif,
Thanks for that.
In mid-May 1999 we had the solar wind “shut off” event. AFAIK thats not been seen since or before (in the instrument era). Correct?
Eyeballing the graph only, that seems shortly (months anyway) before DVI peaked. What’s the current hypothesis for why it happened?
I’m willing to give you credit for defining the law. Others have followed it, but they dared not define it in public.
Janice (07:38:19) : “This is so completely Off Topic that I’m sure it should get snipped before it even gets posted. …
I’m pleased it was not snipped, Janice… the moderators know class when they see it. Nice!
Leif Svalgaard (17:37:22) : “It is a ~100-yr wave and we point it out mainly to pay lip-service to people that think it is important.”
Great work Leif. Congrats on this research!
Although….a few semantics. A few blogs ago, you castigated me for referring to the Milankovitch cycles as “waves.”
I responded that they ARE “waves”, in a sense. It just takes thousands of years to get from trough to crest.
Glad to see you admitting to a ~100 year wave here.
Disturbances can be instantaneous….over seconds….decades….centuries….millenia or even millions of years, but all “disturbances” or waves….cross over space or time.
Reminds me of Hotrod’s interesting comparison of the striking resemblance of the 1998 global temperature spike (the steep-walled “disturbance” as shown on a graph) to the steep-walled “rogue” 100-foot wave that hit the Draupner Rig….both of them perhaps related to quantum physics…but that is another subject.
Remember that thread?
Anyways…great job on your research…godspeed on much more.
Just glad to see you admit that some of your previous language on the subject of “waves” was a little hyperbole.
Hey…we’re all human….
CHRIS
Norfolk, VA, USA
DVI should read IDV 🙂
Also, if I’m reading Table 2 correctly, peak was aoa 2001.5 so maybe not so interesting after all.
robr, given your educational background, you are aware of the water cycle. Follow the jet streams back to the oceans, and you will find the source of what brings temperature variations to the land masses. Meaning, that warming can’t be related to CO2 because longwave radiation cannot warm the oceans, and a lack of CO2 longwave radiation cannot cool it down. Warming the oceans with longwave radiation would be like trying to heat up a pan of water by breathing on it.
If climate is what you are worried about, get out your gps. Your gps tells you what climate you are in. Ocean sourced weather will wriggle your climate a bit, but if you live in a desert, you will be relatively dry and mostly warm. If you live in a temperate forest, you will be relatively wet and cooler.
And yes, this is 5th grade science. It really is that simple. The Sun keeps us relatively warm with or without sunspots (along with greenhouse gasses), while the Earth itself cools us off by sending excess heat out into space through the rather swiss-cheese like atmosphere. Like the swirling atmosphere surrounding other planets in our system, it is not well-mixed, and barely functions as a blanket. It’s more like an old moth-eaten blanket.
If what you are worried about is the coastal forest of Oregon drying up in a CO2 heat wave, don’t. The only way that would happen is if the Oregon coast forest moved inland and landed on the leeward side of a mountain ridge.
E.M.Smith (00:48:30) :
TitiXXXX (23:10:49) : I am not sure I get the “Tomorrow” on the timeline: is it to be submitted or is it accepted already?
The “tomorrow’ was in a comment posted ‘yesterday’ since it is now after midnight in California so it is ‘tomorrow’ ‘today’ already, but you will likely be reading this after I go to bed which will be even more ‘tomorrow’ than now, thought it is still technically ‘today’ since now is tomorrow as I type but will be yesterday when you read this unless is it the day after tomorrow when it will be the day before yesterday.
Clearer now? 😉
Thanks E.M., for clearing that all up. Now could you tell us how Marty McFly went back to the future? Also whether astronauts do or don’t get older or younger when they cross the international date line multiple times per day? Oh, and if one crosses said date line east to west at 12 am on the cusp of his 40th birthday, thus losing said birthday day, does he then never turn 41 since he never turned 40?
Thanks in advance for your assistance on these important issues.
David
robr (19:25:28) :
So my question is, should I reject a gut feeling for over two years, that says the climate is cooling or accept the intelligentsia, saying its warming?
Accept what the data says. If they are ambiguous, then we don’r know. Right now, I don’t know which way it is going. It is, however, not in doubt that we have had some Global Warming the past couple of decades. We have had that many times before.
Aligner (19:34:43) :
In mid-May 1999 we had the solar wind “shut off” event. AFAIK thats not been seen since or before (in the instrument era). Correct?
not that extreme, but there have many ‘drop outs’ almost as deep.
Eyeballing the graph only, that seems shortly (months anyway) before DVI peaked. What’s the current hypothesis for why it happened?
DVI ?
savethesharks (20:13:56) :
A few blogs ago, you castigated me for referring to the Milankovitch cycles as “waves.”
There is a definite physical difference between a cycle and a wave. A wave is something that has a direct cause from forces acting on the medium, while a cycle may be anything that varies periodically. An example of a cycle would be the distance between Mars and Jupiter. If you plot that you will definitely see cycles, but they are not waves in anything. The Milankovich cycles are the sum of several independent other cycles none of which are waves and cannot be said to be a wave. The distance between the Earth and the Sun varies cyclically, but it would be a perversion of the term to say that the Earth executes a wave motion around the Sun. You may, of course, adopt the Humpty Dumpty approach and declare as he did: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
Aligner (20:24:10) :
Eyeballing the graph only, that seems shortly (months anyway) before IDVI peaked.
Months? the scale of the graphs is in ‘years’. We don’t to IDV by the month.
Crossed post, never mind. Good info regarding the dips. Thank you.
“The Milankovich cycles are the sum of several independent other cycles none of which are waves and cannot be said to be a wave.”
Yes but on a graph they are a wave.
And they are indeed a disturbance….because they modulate their surroundings: Ice age on, Ice Age off.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Looks like Stereo might be picking up on another new SC24 spot. Look at the stereo behind images and there’s a new area of disturbance in the southern hemisphere.
savethesharks (21:25:52) :
Yes but on a graph they are a wave.
OK, Humpty Dumpty 🙂
With the updated Heliospheric Magnetic field 1835-2009 we can now state for certain the magnetic field collapse is much worse than we thought.
Leif Svalgaard (20:49:42) :
There is a definite physical difference between a cycle and a wave. A wave is something that has a direct cause from forces acting on the medium, while a cycle may be anything that varies periodically. An example of a cycle would be the distance between Mars and Jupiter. If you plot that you will definitely see cycles, but they are not waves in anything. The Milankovich cycles are the sum of several independent other cycles none of which are waves and cannot be said to be a wave. The distance between the Earth and the Sun varies cyclically, but it would be a perversion of the term to say that the Earth executes a wave motion around the Sun. You may, of course, adopt the Humpty Dumpty approach and declare as he did: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
Savethesharks has it right, a wave is like a cycle but it has modulation over the whole time period, not an off then on again situation. There is clearly a wave pattern happening in the HMF signal that will be repeating. You will have to answer questions on this if your paper is accepted. The are consequences to the outcome.
Gentry (21:36:02) :
Looks like Stereo might be picking up on another new SC24 spot. Look at the stereo behind images and there’s a new area of disturbance in the southern hemisphere.
Its not a sunspot yet, it will probably need a little more juice before it can appear on the continuum in a few days time.
Leif Svalgaard (16:24:52) :
tallbloke (14:20:18) :
sorry to be a pedant, but here’s what you originally said:
“We can determine B from IDV (blue curve), from the sunspot number Rz (green curve)”
This means that we have several ways of determining B. If we determine B from IDV we get the blue curve, showing the B determined from IDV [but, of course, not IDV]. If we determine B from Rz we get the green curve, showing the B determined from Rz [but, of course, not Rz].
That’s fine, and I get it. It’s tricky when just supplied with a graph and not it’s original caption or context. And you are told the green curve is the sunspot number.
this all came about, because you said “The sunspot numbers seem to agree better with their version” without having any foundation for that statement [which is false as we all now know]. I hope you are agreeing with me that their version does not agree better with the sunspot number.
Actually Leif, what is evident to me from the three numerical examples in your preceding post, is that your formula 4.3+0.3*SQT(Rz) overestimates B for low amplitude cycles and underestimates B for high amplitude cycles. This indicates to me that the relationship is non-linear, even at the second order, and that the formula you present is not based on anything physical, but is an arbitrary ‘best fit’ with your B curve.
I suspect that with a small tweak to the arbitrary formula, a B curve could be produced from the sunspot number which agreed with Lockwood’s B amplitude for cycle 14 and the intervening cycles to cycle 19 just as well as yours.
It’s all good though, the curve produced by Cliver and yourself, and that produced by Lockwood et al gives us a ball park for the relationship, and I’m not trying to detract from your achievement or the increasing concordance of the results.
Trust me dude….I would not be Humpty Dumpty to your face. 🙂
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Geoff Sharp (22:41:50) :
Savethesharks has it right, a wave is like a cycle but it has modulation over the whole time period
A wave can be a one-time thing [e.g. a tsunami], a cycle cannot as it has a continuance. But the other aspect is more important, for a wave there must be something [some physical object] that does the waving. Cycles don’t need that [e.g. my example of a graph of the distance between Mars and Jupiter].
And thanks Geoff for the props.
Waves are weird things when spanning the space of time.
It is easy to call a wind-generated wave on the ocean such.
Takes a little bit more to admit that some disturbances are not instantaneous, but they take months (ENSO), decades (AMO) , centuries (172 year Landscheit cycle), millenia and one hundred millenia (Milankovitch), even hundreds of millions years (passing though Milky Way “feeder bands”).
True…these are waves on a graph…but not visible to our normal observation….
Just takes much, much LONGER to go from trough to crest.
WAY longer than our human compartmentalizations allow.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Leif Svalgaard (17:14:21) :
2. What was the ultimate source of the funding? Public finance, foundation trust fund, private finance, etc.
Dr. Cliver is a US Govt. employee. My research is funded by me, helped along by a 100 Trillion Dollar contribution, see: http://www.leif.org/research/donors.htm
Lol. I’ll double Smokey’s contribution.
And my offer of help with transcribing the old yearbooks to digital format to assist in hurrying the reconstruction back to pre 1800 still stands.
Leif Svalgaard (23:13:13) : “…for a wave there must be something [some physical object] that does the waving.”
Uh huh….and the complex physical processes that “do the waving” in the case of the Milankovitch cycles.
Ice age on. Ice age off.
Something is doing the waving.
Maybe not a “physical object”, but a physical process.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA