The Sun Defines the Climate – an essay from Russia

Hmmm, maybe sunspots cool and faculae warm.
============================

At long last, there’s something for a Russian to be proud of…
Wait a minute. “Habibullo Abdussamatov” is a pure Tatar name, not a Russian one! It’s a Muslim conspiracy against the global warming! “Beck” also sounds a lot like a Muslim last name. Glenn Beck must be a member of the same conspiracy. Everything is clear now! I shall immediately inform George Soros of this insidious attack by Saudi-financed enemies of the Obama Climate Change.
Meanwhile, it’s snowing hard in New Mexico. Merry Christmas.

Very interesting contribution.
Curious to find out what the warmists are going to say against it.
Wait, is he a dedicated climate scientist?
Oops, is it peer-reviewed?
I’m loving it.

timetochooseagain (07:43:19) :
There is a bitter discussion on that issue, but the 200 years oscillation appears also in Prof. Leif Svalgaard graphs, as we have seen in the discussion held here in WUWT in another thread.

Congratulations Anthony!, this one will be the longest threads ever.
Prof.Abdusamatov also points out that Mars and other planets had its 1997-98 El Nino warming!

Habibullo Abdussamatov, Arctic ice, Richard Lindzen, Copenhagen’s reassessment, Roger A. Pielke Sr., How not to measure temperature part 91, sun spot, the Vikings and Greenland, Bob Carter, 350 PPM of CO2, October temps, Roy Spencer, Ocean Heat Content diverge from GISS projections, with some fun to boot—and that’s just on the front page, from only the last four days no less.
How is WattsUpWithThat not 2009 Science Blog of the Year??
p.s. I understand the magnitude of the Yamal story at ClimateAudit. That would be the single most important science story of the year! (so far) But this blog is best for the overall year. There is not even a close second! Look at all the science here!

Its surprising the quality of work Russian scientists can still produce on their diet of borscht and potatos. Perhaps ours of unrefined sugar and red meat is a great evil.

jaypan (08:03:44) :
Very interesting contribution.
Curious to find out what the warmists are going to say against it.
Wait, is he a dedicated climate scientist?
Oops, is it peer-reviewed?
I’m loving it.
He runs the Astrometry project on the Russian half of the International Space Station too. He’s not on a soap box on the street, or teaching in an obscure community college. I think you’d love that too.

gary gulrud (08:30:05) :
Its surprising the quality of work Russian scientists
They beat the USA with Sputnik. Now they’re beating the USA in study of the sun.
(I am also aware of the many science disasters in Russia. The US has had far less of them. That in itself is a wonderful victory for the US.)

I expect Leif taking a day off just to spend it here…

In the 1970s, we only had very coarse measurement methods. Those methods would have tended to behave as a de facto low pass filter. The methods that came on line at the end of the 1970s gave us a finer level of discrimination and vastly increased the ability to discern higher frequencies. These statements apply to both EM energy and to temperature. The earlier coarser measurements hinted at long, long term cooling and the 1970s Ice Age scare was a result. Later, with the finer measurements, we started to get tricked by the little wiggles of ENSO, PDO, as well as the shorter period signals in terms of solar and cosmic EM and photonic energy. This led to the AGW scare, given the timing of the finer abilities coming on line just as we lapsed from a negative to positive PDO, from a negative to postive ENSO, and, a mere couple years after that, a rising solar activity level. We need to take a step back and proactively apply a low pass filter to everything. We may be quite disturbed by the result.

Leif … I would be more than interested in the views of Dr. Abdussamatov regarding your comments. Do you converse with him at all?
Jon

Russian science is policy driven. Kind of like Western science.

Seems a bit all over the place to me.
Does anyone have the a link to the referenced Borisenkov paper? What method does he use to determine that a 200 year cycle exists?
What’s the justification for the following statement?
The data on changing solar intensity that we will collect over about six years will enable an extrapolation to past and future periods and development of a more precise scenario of future climate change.

As for cooling, or getting very cold, we are having some of it right now. Southern California’s crops will freeze tonight after an Arctic blast that brought 50 mile per hour cold winds with gusts to 80.
Meanwhile, CO2 continues to increase.
One can only imagine how cold it would be if not for all that Global Warming.

I e-mailed Abdussamatov and invited him to join this discussion. Hope he does

Forget about average global temperatures. Forget about ice caps melting and Polar Bears floating across the Atlantic on ice cubes. Forget about rising sea levels, droughts, increased hurricanes, floods and on and on. Also forget about sunspot cycles or El-Nino and La-Nina, or whatever the hell else has been thrown into the mix as a distraction because none of it matters, none of it is relevant. All we have to do is drill down and focus on one thing only.
That one thing is CO2.
It is claimed that humans are responsible for Climate Change because of our CO2 emissions and that we need to have limits imposed because we need to reduce our emissions of CO2.
So first simply ask yourself this:
Can CO2 trap in heat?
Answer: NO, nothing traps in heat, substances can only absorb and re-emit heat but they cannot trap heat.
Next question, does CO2 absorb heat more strongly than the other gasses in the atmosphere?
Answer: NO, CO2 is only 0.03811% of the atmosphere and remains as solid ice up to a temperature of 194.65 K
Nitrogen and Oxygen which make up 99% of the atmosphere on the other hand, begin to melt at temperatures as low as 50-60 K and so are much stronger absorbers of heat and at the same time, make up most of the atmospheric gasses.
This puts the effect of CO2 into context. CO2 cannot trap heat as no gasses in the atmosphere can. CO2 is a tiny proportion of the gasses in the atmosphere, so tiny in fact that compared to Oxygen and Nitrogen it is barely noticeable. The effect of such tiny amounts of CO2 being a much weaker absorber of heat than Nitrogen and Oxygen, also show that the warming effect of CO2 is insignificant.
So the final question is, are we responsible for Climate Change through our CO2 emissions?
Answer: NO WE MOST DEFINITELY ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR CLIMATE CHANGE.
Take that to Copenhagen!
If you would like to know more about the AGW fraud and carbon tax, download this free .pdf book
[snip – self promotion ]

Alexander Feht (07:57:35) :
Meanwhile, it’s snowing hard in New Mexico.
Ahh, that usually happens in October. Global cooling is a straw man. 😉

It may just be me, but I get the impression Lief sells himself as the one true credible solar scientist?
It’s just an impression, just my opinion, but does Lief himself believe in other credible solar scientists?

So here we come to the value of a good peer review, because for us who are not competent solar scientists the questions are too many to be able to resolve: methods of measuring past solar irradiance and error bars on the measurements, why such large changes etc are too esoteric for a blog like this.
Maybe we would gain in understanding if Leif and dr Abdussamatov had an interchange here, and maybe not.
At least the Russians are proposing a direct measurement to test their hypothesis about the size of the sun, and do not rely just in reanalyzing old data.

Waiting for the “heavy weights” to come in.

Temperatures should be progressive upward to be accepted, as far as they remain conservatively at the same level or being un-progressively downwards they are surely politically biased.

Abdusammatov has been consistent in his opinions as to what drives climate change – not so the rest of the Russian science establishment. Until 2004, they were pretty sceptical – but then Putin saw the advantages of joining the carbon credit schemes and selling the carbon dioxide they were not emitting because of a failing economy to the West. For a while, academicians like Yuri Izrael, Vice Chair of IPCC for a while, would state their views – like – ‘the main driver of global warming has been natural cycles’ until Putin had a quiet word and persuaded Yuri as to the virtues of controlling the climate and preventing global warming – with a nice fat grant to Yuri’s institute. He reported last month in Russian Hyrdrology and Meteorology on the results of his study: of all the control techniques, injecting sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere is the preferred technology – simple and relatively cheap.
I have read Abdusammatov’s paper – also wondering how it fitted with Leif’s analysis – but wish it had a peer-reviewed source!

Phillip Bratby (13:26:08) :
OT, but the Science Museum count has suddenly gone to :
* 778 counted in so far
* 5317 counted out so far
Have they removed multiple entries?
It’s natural variation and the ‘counted in’-s will take over soon.

“”” Sophistry in politics (11:59:50) :
Forget about average global temperatures. Forget about ice caps melting and Polar Bears floating across the Atlantic on ice cubes. Forget about rising sea levels, droughts, increased hurricanes, floods and on and on. Also forget about sunspot cycles or El-Nino and La-Nina, or whatever the hell else has been thrown into the mix as a distraction because none of it matters, none of it is relevant. All we have to do is drill down and focus on one thing only.
That one thing is CO2. “””
Well SIP, it seems you don’t have a very good understanding of what “heat” in the atmosphere really means. The temperature of gases is determiend by the mean energy (due to mechanical oscillations) of the individual molecules in the gas. In effect, every single molecule is one of Mother Nature’s (Gaia) thermometers. That mechanical energy is kT/2 per degree of freedom per molecule, which we can also represent as (mv^2)/2 for a particle velocity of (v).
A GHG molecule such as CO2, constitutes one out of every 2577.3 atmospheric molecules, and in the wavelength range from 13.5 to 16.5 microns or thereabouts, CO2 molecules can capture photons, which excite a particular bending mode of oscillation in the excited molecule. But the CO2 molecule is surrounded by about 13.7 layers of ordinary atmospheric molecules, mostly N2, O2, and Ar, so the excited CO2 molecule is likely to encounter one of these ordinary gas molecules, and as a result the excitation energy is going to get distributed in collisions with the ordinary gas molecules, and that will result in a general increase in the temperature of the ordinary atmospheric gases.
Only at very high altitudes does the mean free path get long enough compared to the mean lifetime of the CO2 excited state, so the molecule can spontaneously re-emit a photon containing the exciting energy.
So you are correct, that we cannot trap the LWIR energy and stop it from escaping; but we sure can harass it and delay that escape. For however long, we manage to delay the escape of a LWIR photon from earth into outer space, the sun continues to pour in more solar energy, which results in raising the temperature; and the longer we delay the outgoing radiation, the higher the temperature rise due to additional solar heating. I know that is not the traditional way of viewing the “Greenhouse” effect; but it is a perfectly valid way to represent the consequences of molecular absorption spectra.
The atmospheric gases in turn, by reason of their non zero (K) temperature, also emit LWIR radiation, which also will follow approximately the T^4 total spectral emittance of the black body radiator model.
So it is not productive to deny that resonant spectral absorption by certain molecules present in the atmosphere, even in small amounts, can and does result in increasing the local temperature of that gas.
If a dove hunter stands in a field, and only shoots the doves that he sees take to the air within the effective range of his shotgun, it isn’t wise to assume that dove hunters don’t have any effect on the dove population because they are few and far between, and their capture range is limited.
I have no idea what the capture crossection of CO2 is for 15 micron
(82.7 meV) LWIR photons; but it isn’t zero by a long shot.
The question is not whether CO2 can capture LWIR energy; it can; but is that significant compared to that captured by H2O molecules, which are much more plentiful; and can it prevail over the propensity of H2O to form clouds, which block sunlight from reaching the ground, and so results in surface cooling.
If the earth’s atmosphere contained no H2O molecules, this planet would be a frozen ball, even with its present 388 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere.
But if it was the CO2 that was completely absent; I suspect the only difference we would note other than the absence of life on earth, would be that the average global cloud cover would be a little bit lower. The temperature would not be much differnt, since it is fully regulated by the physical properties of H2O, the Sun’s TSI, and the present earth orbit.

Vincent (11:17:41) :
“Russian science is policy driven. Kind of like Western science”.
I often wonder if the entire AGW scam is designed as pay back for the Russians losing the Cold War twenty years ago!

Here is a link to Abdussamatov’s research plans and instrumentation (scroll to bottom) and a repeat of the above paper plus a bit more:
http://www.gao.spb.ru/english/astrometr/index1_eng.html
his photo: http://www.gao.spb.ru/english/astrometr/abduss07.jpg

Peter Taylor (13:28:58) :
until Putin had a quiet word and persuaded Yuri as to the virtues of controlling the climate
Did Putin also speak with the Mayor of Moscow?
“Moscow Mayor Promises a Winter Without Snow
…the mayor of Moscow promises to keep it from snowing…the mayor’s office will hire the Russian Air Force to spray a fine chemical mist over the clouds before they reach the capital, forcing them to dump their snow outside the city…Controlling the weather in Moscow is nothing new…The plan was unsurprisingly rubber-stamped this week by the Moscow City Council…The air force will use cement powder, dry ice or silver iodide to spray the clouds from Nov. 15 to March 15…”
http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20091017/wl_time/08599193082200

Ron de Haan (14:34:07) :
Stalin is polished up again and the Old Empire rising
More surprinsingly would be the return of Monarchy.
See:
http://mat-rodina.blogspot.com/

What will the warmists say against it?
Well, one response might be … In particular, the notion that climate is one-dimensional — which is to say, that it is totally described by some fictitious global mean temperature and some single gross forcing a la increased CO2 — is grotesque in its oversimplification. I must reluctantly add that this error is perpetuated by those attempting to ‘explain’ climate with solar variability. Unlike greenhouse forcing, solar forcing is so vague that one can’t reject it.
However, acting as though this is the alternative to greenhouse forcing is asking for trouble.
Oh, wait, that was Richard Lindzen.
How about “His views are completely at odds with the mainstream scientific opinion,” said Colin Wilson, a planetary physicist at England’s Oxford University. Amato Evan, a climate scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, added that “the idea just isn’t supported by the theory or by the observations.”
or more succinctly from Charles Long, a climate physicist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratories in Washington
“That’s nuts,” Long said, “It doesn’t make physical sense that that’s the case.”

After doing some other work, I have to side with Leif here that the Sun does not vary enough in order to change temperatures on Earth by very much.
There is a reason that it is very hard to tease out a solar cycle impact in the temperature record. It is so small that it can’t really be found.
Using the Stefan Boltzmann equations, even if the solar irradiance varied by 4 Watts/metre^2 (the maximum decline estimated for the Maunder Minimum versus the more recent 1 to 2 Watts estimates), this lowest estimate would only reduce temperatures at the surface by about 0.2C
The Sun has to vary more that it seems to do, or there has to be more impact from the solar wind, magnetic field or varying EM spectral output than has been demonstrated; for it to make much difference to surface temperatures.
Solar insolation can be higher or lower at the poles or high latitudes which can then change the Albedo of the Earth causing the ice ages for example, but this is more related to Earth’s orbital characteristics than changes in the Sun.

Piers and colleagues have placed bets of about £1,000 with William Hill and Coral [Bookmakers] for snow at various locations on Christmas Day and stand to win many thousands if they are correct.
Piers whose record of weather bets is second to none* said: “We have just made a breakthrough in our ‘Solar Weather technique of long range forecasting – called SWT25 – and are 75% sure there will be snow in many but not all locations offered by boookies this Xmas, and we have a fair idea of where the best bets are likely to be”.
This £1,000 was of course lost.
http://julesandjames.blogspot.com/search/label/corbyn

Chillybean
Therefore I would say that the exact opposite is closer to the truth.
Leif Svalgaard
I think that kind of paranoia is not helpful
Please do not patronise me Leif. It’s not helpful to your cause but the truth is more important than your reputation. I think everyone here would acknowledge that you have a greater depth of knowledge of your field than most on the site but that alone does not make you right.
Sometimes it takes the better man to admit when he is wrong and move on.

Well said, George E. Smith, a beautiful description of how CO2 could affect atmospheric temps. It can’t affect “climate” really, because the temp of the atmosphere is a small factor in controlling the temp of the ocean, which I believe is the major player in the Earth’s climate. The other “ocean” that I feel is very important is the “gassy ocean” of water vapour. As always it is why you hold an opinion that is the important thing, not what the opinion is. I.e. lots of “deniers” are just as guilty of blinkered and logically fallacious thinking as are the AGW’ers.

Leif Svalgaard (17:06:16) :
From looking at his self-congratulatory writings…
Seems that you are projecting.

Leif Svalgaard (17:17:32) :
Solar activity leaves an imprint in tree rings…
These are consequences not causes. There is a missing link out there, of course not of the “piltdown man” kind.

Let’s see if I’ve got this right,
it’s not C02, it’s not the sun, huh, a missing link as the “first cause” of climate change on our tiny little watery planet. Like a drop of water on the galaxy by comparison.
That’s good. I like that.

All of this reminds me of the comological arguments over the State of the Universe. You don’t see anyone trying to hijack that. Good reason not to: there’s nothing to be gained in doing so.
Climate, on the other hand, is fertile grounds for hijack & abuse by agenda.
Climate needs to be defended by Science, not fought over.
If you have not already done so, go back over what this topic heading has to say, and try to find something good in it.
I have already stated 2 things I found to be good.
What do you find?

OT but here are some fun webcams in Denver right now. Is it Christmas? No, its not even Halloween.
Lots of nice early season (and late season) snows this year across the globe.
This is another one…
http://www.dickgilbert.com/capitolcam.htm
http://www.dickgilbert.com/CDOTdenvercam2.htm
http://www.dickgilbert.com/civiccenterplazacam.htm
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA

I’ve just added a new section to:
Vaughan, P.L. (2009). 11.1 Year Cycle in Solar System Dynamics.
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/VaughanPL2009_11.1aCycleSSD.htm
Based on earlier discussions, I suspect some readers here will find the addition noteworthy.
Motivation for undertaking this work:
1) Illustrate the J-(N-U) 11.1-year-cycle (which I have not seen advertised anywhere [so far], despite looking [with a considerable amount of effort] for such communications).
2) Verify calculations of others (for example Desmoulins), taking the opportunity to also:
(a) develop alternate metrics (to those presented by Desmoulins & Hung), seizing the opportunity to also highlight nonstationarity (which is missed by basic FFT).
[ See particularly:
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/JEV_Period(8,17a)Morlet2pi.PNG ]
(b) showcase the utility of wavelet methods. [Note: I have it in mind to use this as a teaching example. The controversy surrounding this will help keep students interested; even students who don’t care about planets & solar cycles can easily be inspired to learn about how manipulators fool (even themselves) with stats.]
3) Organize 11.1-year-timescale solar system vs. solar cycle phase-comparisons into an overview that can easily be considered in 10 minutes.
I make no physics-based claims regarding the loose synchrony of these “clocks”.
In sharing the preceding, I ask that readers not misrepresent my work (for example by falsely claiming that I am claiming that planets cause solar cycles).
If anyone (qualified) is willing to proofread a translation into Norwegian, please let me know – thank you.
Best Regards,
Paul Vaughan.

Leif Svalgaard is a sobering kind of bloke. In the days of the long cattle drives of the large herds in Australia and the USA he would have been the one chosen to ride round the resting beasts at night, singing to keep them calm so they were not stampeded by sudden sight or sound…
Cattle Call – Eddy Arnold

Leif Svalgaard (13:27:26) :
He is not quite ready to throw in the towel. He is in the process of recalibrating his composite.:
I cannot seem to find any such statements by Frohlich in his AA letters paper maybe you can expand,
His minima comparison is here showing a negative trend.
http://i255.photobucket.com/albums/hh133/mataraka/Froelich2009.jpg

Roger Carr (21:49:04) :
Leif Svalgaard is a sobering kind of bloke. In the days of the long cattle drives of the large herds in Australia and the USA he would have been the one chosen to ride round the resting beasts at night, singing to keep them calm so they were not stampeded by sudden sight or sound…
Aye….that he definitely is….
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA

Adam from Kansas (12:42:47) :
“It’s just an impression, just my opinion, but does Lief himself believe in other credible solar scientists?”
Answer: Only if they agree with his opinion…

Leif Svalgaard (23:25:33)
: From an email exchange earlier this year.
Yes,thanks we already discussed this i could not recall if the exchange was prior or post.
This aspect needs to be resolved,as if the assumed trend was real and persistent due to peculiarities of nonlinear mathematics(saddle-node bifurcation) ie a slight decrease in the net radiation balance would lead to catastrophic consequences.
An important paper discussing this is in press.

Leif:
In a highly insulated space a rise in heating energy of 1% could cause the temperature in that space to rise significantly. To say that the same does not happen in the climate system implies a high degree of knowledge of the sensitivity of the system.
How certain are we about the sensitivity of the climate system to changes in TSI?
Could Svendsmarks proof of concepts for his own theories provide this sensitivity?

Perhaps we need a name change to this blog.
How about “Whats up with Leif”
Not sure we are getting a balanced approach here.

Geoff Sharp (05:13:05) :
Perhaps we need a name change to this blog.
How about “Whats up with Leif”
Not sure we are getting a balanced approach here.

Perhaps the problem is new threads / new posts are generated saying the same ludicrous/wrong things that Leif has de-loused, corrected, and debunked countless times before. I am amazed that he has the patience to continue correcting!

Re Corbyn forecasts – apparently the conference was held, but not much about the details revealed. See here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/29/corbyn/

The foregoing discussion is quite fascinating but unfortunately completely over my head as a professional engineer. The problem I have is that no one has explained, in layman’s terms and to my satisfaction, what caused the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, and the present warming of the planets in our solar system, if it wasn’t the sun. Nor has it been explained why these cyclic effects, the period of which seems reasonably well established, should not continue and so affect our climate.
The present global warming “debate” reminds me of the old religious arguments, and has almost reached the stage where we have the equivilent of debating how many angels will fit on the head of a pin. If some had their way we would be approaching the Inquision, so bitter has the argument become.
To my mind, the mere fact that the proponents of CO2 being the cause of global warming have used their “hockey stick” graphs to purport to show that the most recent hot and cold spells this millenium did not occur has largely invalidated their argument that CO2 is the cause, apart from any other justification. Had they been able to show honestly how CO2 concentrations had caused them they would be so much more believable.
As an unbiased observer, and whilst not arguing that CO2 has no influence on our climate, I am persuaded that it is the sun that primarily governs the global climate, and shall do so until someone comes up with a better argument than those advanced at present that it is something else.

climatologist Piers Corbyn holds that solar-charged particles are mostly responsible.
http://www.bclocalnews.com/surrey_area/peacearchnews/lifestyles/67061732.html

Thank you Lief and Bob. You both bring valuable knowledge to this thread.

Lucy Skywalker (02:54:38) :”What still stands with Paul Vaughan’s work is the remarkable evidence of a double correlation, not one but two correlations, that have held steady for over two hundred years, with slight fluctuations to both sides that then return to exact correlation. The whole picture is of wheels within wheels.”
Agreed and well said…
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA

The blemish on the life giving sun is moving away from mother earth. Solar flux has dropped to 78.9. It appears that our forces have prevailed over the crushing onslaught of evil.
Yes there are widows and orphans. Many valiant defenders of some weird ideas lay broken on the bloodied field of battle. We must none the less be ready for further sacrifice.
You can be sure that the next blemish will see the forces of Leif The Terrible return.
Protect your kin and be sure he doesn’t capture anymore livestock.

Having scanned the commentary it would appear we’re dumber than when we started.

“Horse(07:38:18) :
The foregoing discussion is quite fascinating but unfortunately completely over my head as a professional engineer.”
I am also an engineer and in basically the same (probably crowded) boat as Horse. The message I am taking away from this sometimes good, sometimes bad, but usually informative conversation is a) known external energy input to the earth is basically constant and can’t account for temperature variations, and therefore, b) global temperature changes are driven by global system dynamics which, with an occasional exception, are not understood. I also discount CO2 as anything other than a bit player. Until someone demonstrates Leif to be wrong I have to accept his argument, which also leaves me confused about apparent correlation between past solar and global temperature events such as the LIA.

Geoff Sharp (05:13:05) :
Perhaps we need a name change to this blog.
How about “Whats up with Leif”
Posts on the sun usually do become all about him. Whether he is right in everything or not doesn’t matter to some, it seems. He is perceived by them as always being right.

Lucy Skywalker (02:54:38) :
The whole picture is of wheels within wheels.
I think that is a nice illustration. But I think some here want it to be just one wheel. And friction come from their insisting that it must be so, IMO.

The Fool. On the Hill
(Beatles)
Day after day,
Alone on a hill,
The man with the foolish grin is keeping perfectly still
But nobody wants to know him,
They can see that he’s just a fool,
And he never gives an answer,
But the fool on the hill,
Sees the sun going down,
And the eyes in his head,
See the world spinning ’round.
Well on the way,
Head in a cloud,
The man of a thousand voices talking perfectly loud
But nobody ever hear him,
or the sound he appears to make,
and he never seems to notice,
But the fool on the hill,
Sees the sun going down,
And the eyes in his head,
See the world spinning ’round.
And nobody seems to like him,
they can tell what he wants to do,
and he never shows his feelings,
But the fool on the hill,
Sees the sun going down,
And the eyes in his head,
See the world spinning ’round.
Ooh, ooh,
Round and round and round.
And he never listens to them,
He knows that they’re the fools
They don’t like him,
The fool on the hill
Sees the sun going down,
And the eyes in his head,
See the world spinning ’round.
Ooh,
Round and round and round

Leif
I was most definitely was not questioning Judith Leans work. As you pointed out, she certainly seems to be a very good scientist and is open new data etc that may mean a revision or even rejection of previous work as opposed to others who need not be named in this company of commenters .
My point was more that, because of your comments here regarding the misuse of Lean 2000, I am immediately suspicious of any work that uses it as I am of works that use Yamal.
Making comments can be such a minefield!!
And thank you for more info on TSI. As mentioned above your comments here are very much appreciated and I second everything pyromancer76 said.

PMH (11:12:05) :
Until someone demonstrates Leif to be wrong I have to accept his argument, which also leaves me confused about apparent correlation between past solar and global temperature events such as the LIA.
Assuming that the current consensus of sun scientists is correct as Leif expostulates, there are other means of the sun cycle affecting the climate, all of them speculative and being researched at the moment. One of them is the galactic cosmic ray hypothesis of Svensmark, and others depend on the ultraviolet changes, as in the link given by A Wod (11:12:42) : above. Another possibility is the albedo change again triggered by ultraviolet changes due to plankton http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/environment/0702_planktoncloud.html .
It is quite probable that many mechanisms in conjunction with the chaotic behavior of the ocean and atmosphere currents will be finally involved to solve the jig saw puzzle that is climate.

Gene Nemetz (12:06:05) : Alexander Feht (07:57:35) : Meanwhile, it’s snowing hard in New Mexico.
Ahh, that usually happens in October. Global cooling is a straw man. 😉
Impressive winter storm… but isn’t it still Autumn?
http://www.accuweather.com/m/blog-story.aspx?bn=weathermatrix
Jesse Ferrell: Community Director
Rockies Get Over 40 Inches of Snow!
Excerpts…
Here are the highest snowfall amounts by state as of 9 AM Mountain Time (amounts in parentheses are deprecated due to higher amounts):
Pinecliffe, CO: 43.8″
Sand Lake, WY: 41.0″(Jefferson, CO: 38.6″
Meagher County, MT: 16.0″
Deadwood, SD: 15.1″
Rushville, NE: 12.0″
Alta, UT: 10.0″
As of this writing, CoTrip showed that most of the roads in the state of Colorado werelisted as “snow packed & icy” (colored light blue below) and several highways were closed, including I-25 between Wellington and the Wyoming border.WYDOT’s page said “most offices are closed due to the severe winter storm” and their road information website showed I-25 closed north of Cheyenne, along with many other roads(red=closed on the map below).
How unusual is this much snow for this early in the season? Cheyenne, Wyoming set a new October total snowfall record Wednesday evening with 24 inches, and it is still snowing!
I-80 west of Cheyenne has been closed at various times.
Oct 28
‘Major’ winter storm strikes Colorado, Nebraska and Wyoming
Five times the normal amount of snow in Cheyenne already … and here we go again Blizzard conditions and up to 18 inches of snow were forecast for a wide swath of the Wyoming, Nebraska and Colorado plains, says this article on MSNBC. The storm also brought snow to northern Utah’s Wasatch Front.  
“It’s a major early season storm,” said Mike Weiland, National Weather Service meteorologist in Cheyenne. “The results are going to be quite a bit of snow and a fairly long duration snow event.”  
With 14 inches so far, Cheyenne had already received almost 5 times its normal October snowfall. The average for the month is 3 inches.   http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33504548/ns/weather/

I hope everyone doesn’t forget modern Milankovitch research/theories and the variety of Earth orbits around Ol’ Sol: orbital eccentricity (shape of the orbit from elliptical to more circular, cycle ~100,000 years); inclination or axial tilt varying from 21.5-24.5, cycle ~41,000 years); precession (the wobbly spin of Earth’s axis with north moving from Polaris to Vega (cycle ~23,000 years). And when they all happen to coincide…! At one point I tried to find out where we are today. Can’t find the research, but I thought I tentatively found that while we are not in “danger” we are slowly moving away from “warmth” (maybe).
Combine these mind-bending realities with the movement of tectonic plates and resulting serious volcanic activity, our vast oceans, and our chaotic climate conditions — oh, don’t forget galactic cosmic rays and cloud cover and albedo — and there are all kinds of possibilities for the realtively steady state of energy output of our Sun. Yes, without it we would be cold. And Leif is insistent, thank goodness, on keeping us focused on the science of the Sun’s activities.
Being privileged to consider all of this in its beauty, rawness, mathematical perfection, and even its violence is awesome and humbling. WattsUpWithThat does a remarkable job of tantalizing us with a variety of bits and pieces of these amazing realities.

Gene Nemetz (11:19:52) : “… He (Leif) is perceived by them as always being right.”
Or; Leif, is perceived by many as a benchmark, thus preventing waste of time on wild goose chases, but allowing even flights of fancy when the basic rules are understood and acknowledged.
Flights of fancy are of two kinds: 1. To escape reality (which we all needs do from time to time); and 2. to break new ground in the never ending quest to take mankind onward.

Leif Svalgaard (11:42:52) :
bring nothing to the table except personal attacks on me.
Is using the word ‘attack’ an exaggeration? I do think it is projection though.
You could lighten up Leif. I rarely say anything about you. It is not ‘usual’.

Roger Carr (20:55:31) :
I may have misunderstood what you are saying.

Leif Svalgaard
Interesting – if cosmic ray and/or solar periodicities come and go as non-stationary waves – does this not suggest interference and harmonic / resonant effects? Looks like we need a sound engineer to help us with this.
Is it so unreasonable to suggest that a small solar cycle could have amplified effect if it harmonised with another oscillation such as an intrinsic one like the oceanic decadal oscillations? We all know that small forcings have greatest effect when they are in phase with natural frequencies of systems – just try walking with a glass of water in your hand to observe this effect.

Leif Svalgaard (14:39:23) :
Even more dubious is the Piers Corbyn-type of pseudo-science [that he even failed to elucidate], where you use a combination of the 22-year cycle and the moon to forecast the weather next week. But, hey, if he can make a quid on it, there are worse scams out there.
I have been trying to find an explanation of his method unsuccessfully.
Nevertheless, I would not discount the moon. I live in Greece, which is a peninsula in the middle of the Mediterranean and so the observations apply here: Folk wisdom has it that the weather changes with the quarter of the moon. If the weather does not break within a day at the change( from rain to dry, from north winds to south,etc), it will continue another quarter. I have not been keeping statistics, but the truth is, from rain to dry, which interests me for the walks I take, it seems true that the change comes with the quarter of the moon.

anna v (02:12:32) :
anna v (02:12:32)
‘Phlogiston (17:29:46) :
anna v, Leif Svalgaard
What about resonance and harmonics?’
“Resonances and harmonics have a role in a deterministic system, i.e. where we can put in parameters and boundary conditions and come out with a solution. Not in deterministic chaos. They may look like resonances but the causative link is involved and non linear…”
Science is still bad at understanding dynamic chaotic systems like our climate and often prefers to use linear trend lines which mean nothing and can be ‘cherry-picked’ to your hearts content.
Some climate processes also have a fractal nature and this is has been know for some time as this abstract from a 1994 paper illustrates:-
“Fractal analysis of climatic data: Mean annual temperature records in Hungary – L Bodri
Rescaled range analysis of the annual mean surface air temperatures at 7 meteorological stations in Hungary for the period of 1901–1991 indicates that the considered temperatures are fractals with a mean fractal dimension of 1.23 ± 0.01. This value compares favourably with the fractal dimensions of other climatic records, both on small time scale of 10–100 years and for time spans 10^3–10^6 years. Possibly such fractal dimensions are characteristic of climate change over the whole spectral range of 10 to 10^6 years. If this assumption becomes confirmed through analysis of a wider set of climatic records, long-range climatic prediction (in statistical sense) on different time scales will appear feasible.”
As you say, it could by that there is no single simple cause relating to solar cycles, rather a mass of small – possibly connected – events which push our climate into a lower energy state.
Living in England, I know the influence of something as simple as the movement and strength of the jet stream can have a large effect on weather and I’m sure systems like this and the strength of the Arctic polar vortex, for example, can have big impacts over the longer term.

Hard to have the label of ‘charlatan’ hold for Pirs Corbyn since he is right most of the time.
There must be a secondary definition that a few use. 😉

Leif Svalgaard (11:17:05) :
Corbyn still ranks as a successful charlatan in my book.
It’s something to do with quantum mechanics and the moon. Has anyone got a Total Lunar Irradiance graph? 🙂
It’s a cliche, but the wish is the father to the thought with most of the comments here. You’d have thought that it would be more interesting to people that even in the face of a virtually unchanging solar input we’ve still had very large shifts in climate up and down over the past millennia. As far as I can tell the most prominent AGW proponents ascribe this to the, er, Sun.

And here is a ppt presentation deciphered from the above link ( it gave an erroneous header to it). http:// http://www.weatheraction.com/pages/data/WAclimatechange.ppt

Note to non-alarmists:
I think we need to seriously consider that Corbyn is an agent of the alarmists (on a puppet’s mission to undermine the credibility of non-alarmists). [no sarcasm intended]
Mr. Corbyn: I invite you to prove me wrong.

Here’s a link to the .ppt used in the presentation.
http://www.weatheraction.com/pages/data/WAclimatechange.ppt

Global warming explained ?[see graph below] not entirely .I think that a possible cause of global warming trend of 0.5C /CENTURY is the gradual rise of the proton flux especially the higher level ones . OmniWeb has some plots but only to about 1970. It is difficult to get trends going back 100 years.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1900/to:2010./plot/sidc-ssn/from:1900/to:2010/trend
Has anyone done a similar graph for proton flux [ not solar flux]

Dr Svalgaard’s dismissal of Dr Abdussamatov’s paper, due to taking issue with one figure on historic TSI (and using a conference poster plus an instrument calibration argument for support) seem a little too ambitious.
The Russian paper does not rest only on historic TSI: it involves a number of other components:
(1) A serious inspection of climate history (19 cooling periods over 7500 years) which contrasts with the almost creationist approach by the AGW camp of ignoring climate history. Taking the past climate seriously is something that sets apart the pre-AGW and skeptic scientific cultures. Pro-AGW studies such as Pollock et al.’s reconstruction from bore-holes and BACKWARD extrapolation of global temperature – to an asymptotic flat line – illustrate the contempt the AGW movement have for past climate history.
(2) The transition of the ocean heat budget from positive to negative in 2003 – well documented by several peer reviewed papers. Svalgaard has been silent on this part of Abdussamatov’s paper.
(3) Recent TSI and the current decrease in sunspots and solar output, and the delayed cycle 24. (As distinct from historic reconstructed TSI.)
(4) Several decadal and century scale empirically visible climate cycles.
All these together lead the authors to make bold and highly testable / falsifiable conclusions: climate will stay flat-ish out to 2013 then nosedive. This fulfills the Karl Popper criteria of falsifiability for a scientific hypothesis. Again in striking contrast to AGW models which their rubbery flexibility to explain everything (Popper himself pointed out that a hypothesis that explains everything actually explains nothing).
Abdussamatov’s paper survives even if figure 3 is wrong.
2013 is only 4 years away – a shorter time than many research grant timescales. Looking forward at the accuracy or otherwise of their predictions is at least as important as looking back at the TSI reconstruction which is only on out of several supporting pillars of the paper’s arguments.

Leif Svalgaard (22:24:34)
Deception of course would be out of order. But perhaps it was accidental – for instance bulking up the reference list without checking further than the abstracts in some cases..

There is little or no doubt that the Sun defines Earth’s climate.
But I wonder if Dr. Habibullo Abdussamator has considered the multitude of space-age measurements since 1960 that indicate:
a.) The Sun is NOT a ball of hydrogen, but this lightest of all elements accumulates at the top of most stellar atmospheres;
b.) The Sun formed on the remnant neutron star that remained after the precursor star exploded 5 Gy ago and ejected all of the material that now orbits the Sun; and
c.) The Sun is heated by repulsive interactions between neutrons [1-4].
Has he considered how a compact, energetic solar core might produce changes in solar surface activity?
1. “Attraction and repulsion of nucleons: Sources of stellar energy”, J. Fusion Energy 19,(2001) 93-98.
http://www.omatumr.com/abstracts/jfeinterbetnuc.pdf
2. “€œNeutron repulsion confirmed as energy source”, J. Fusion Energy 20 (2002) 197-201.
http://web.umr.edu/~om/abstracts2003/jfe-neutronrep.pdf
3. “On the cosmic nuclear cycle and the similarity of nuclei and stars,” J. Fusion Energy 25 (2006) 107-114.
http://arxiv.org/abs/nucl-th/0511051
4. ” The Sun is a plasma diffuser that sorts atoms by mass,” Physics of Atomic Nuclei 69 (2006) 847-1856.
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0609509
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel