David Archibald writes in an email to WUWT:
The AGU Fall meeting has a session entitled “Aspects and consequences of an unusually deep and long solar minimum”. Two hours of video of this session can be accessed: http://eventcg.com/clients/agu/fm09/U34A.html
Two of the papers presented had interesting observations with implications for climate. First of all Solanki came to the conclusion that the Sun is leaving its fifty to sixty year long grand maximum of the second half of the 20th century. He had said previously that the Sun was more active in the second half of the 20th century than in the previous 8,000 years. This is his last slide:
McCracken gave a paper with its title as per this slide:
While he states that it is his opinion alone and not necessarily held by his co-authors, he comes to the conclusion that a repeat of the Dalton Minimum is most likely:
Solar Cycle 24 is now just over a year old and the next event on the solar calendar is the year of maximum, which the green corona brightness tells us will be in 2015.
For those who agree that the IPCC and Al Gore have gone too far, signing the online petition “Al Gore and The UN IPCC Should Give Back Their Nobel Prize!” seems like a reasonable option. The link is http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/nomorenobel/
Ecotretas
http://www.thestar.com/business/cleanbreak/article/765519–hamilton-spin-is-in-but-climate-change-still-there
Apparently it’s still being shoveled..
Just to help the discussion along back in 28 July 2009 it was reported by David Archibald (guest post on WUWT):
“NASA now saying that a Dalton Minimum repeat is possible”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/07/28/nasa-now-saying-that-a-dalton-minimum-repeat-is-possible/
First of all Solanki came to the conclusion that the Sun is leaving its fifty to sixty year long grand maximum of the second half of the 20th century. He had said previously that the Sun was more active in the second half of the 20th century than in the previous 8,000 years.
The notion that the last half of the 20th century was the most active the past many millennia is less and less likely. There is mounting evidence that solar activity 1950-2000 was on par with [or possibly even slightly less than] during 1725-1800. Figure 11 of http://www.leif.org/research/Heliospheric%20Magnetic%20Field%201835-2009.pdf shows this well. See also http://www.leif.org/EOS/muscheler05nat_nature04045.pdf
Whether we’ll have a Dalton Minimum remains to be seen. And any cooling may depend [as it did back then] on suitable volcanic eruptions: 2009GL040882.pdf 🙂
Stock tip: Buy! LL Bean, North Face….
Leif Svalgaard (12:23:52) :
And any cooling may depend [as it did back then] on suitable volcanic eruptions: http://www.leif.org/EOS/2009GL040882.pdf 🙂
Dalton Minimum most likely!
If we don’t stop the AGW scare, our sun will!
Unless more snow and cold is sold to the public as warming!
When the sunspots leave the visible spectrum, the question will be; to chill or not to chill.
=============================
Note to self: SELL carbon credits ASAP!
What do you think is the ideal level of CO2 in the atmosphere?(surveys)
Interesting that MWP does not feature any grand maximum, but rather longer period of medium activity, albeit not interrupted by any solar minimum. It is bettr visible also here:
http://blog.sme.sk/blog/560/195013/solanki2.jpg
Al Gore extends his powers to the sun, saves humanity.
Not to point out the obvious, but given that the Oughts were the warmest decade on record, and corresponded with an unusually long and deep solar minimum, doesn’t that suggest the presence of a large non-solar forcing which is warming the planet in spite of the slight fall in irradiance?
If solar forcing had caused the anomalous temps of the 20th century, wouldn’t we have expected a long and deep solar minimum to stop the warming trend?
I’m glad he made sure to say that it is his personal opinion. This non-scientist thinks it is *way* too early to be speculating about minima, whether Dalton-style, Maunder-style, or otherwise. I think it is way too early to be speculating about human-caused GW, too.
Back in school, they taught us to let the data take us where it wanted. What happened to that concept?
Look forward to viewing the video. When is the CERN “Cloud” experiment expected?
The current trajectory of SC24 has a target of 50-70 SSN by 2015.
Roughly. There is an uncertainty here complicated by the L&P effect that is, at present, eating away at the contrast of Sunspots.
The N. Hemisphere of the Sun is progressing in # of spots, but is lagging in Sunspot area. see – http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ftpdir/indices/quar_DSD.txt
A Modern Maximum progression would have produced daily Sunspot Areas into the > 1000 x 10E6 by now.
There is a disconnect between the flux and Sunspot Area.
This is on the face of things.
You can see the Mt. Wilson data here:
http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~obs/150_data.html#plots
and the San Fernando Obs. data here:
http://www.csun.edu/sfo/spotarea.gif
And all that gives a nice heads-up on what this Solar Cycle is panning out to be.
It surely is not an SC19 blowout in progress.
Thanks, David, for the reminder of what is going on 93 million miles away.
The point is that a length that exceeds 12 years has always led to prolonged grand minimum (1798 Dalton minimum, 1856 Damon minimum). It is not known exactly how long the cycles before Maunder minimum were, but there seems to have been a minimum in 1620. This leads to 25 years for the two cycles 1620-1645 just before Maunder.
This means a cooling for decades, at least for 30 years, but we cannot be sure we are on a course to a new LIA (Little Ice Age). A low Dalton is probable, but one can’t be sure, there are too many indications of the solar magnetic field having a deep dive.
http://personal.inet.fi/tiede/tilmari/sunspots.html#alert
We expect that the next relatively deep minimum of the solar activity, radius, and radiation flux in the 200-year quasi-cycle will be close to the Maunder minimum level and will occur in the year 2040 ±10.
Kh. I. Abdusamatov
The Sun’s orbit in the years 1985±2035 is of disordered (nontrefoil) type and similar to that of the second half of the nineteenth century. By analogy,
mostly weaker and longer solar cycles should occur.
Can origin of the 2400-year cycle of solar activity be caused
by solar inertial motion?
I. Charvatova:Geophysical Institute AS CR, BocÏnõÂ II, 141 31 Praha 4, Czech Republic
Though barycentric movements influence have been rejected by “settled” science, only based on gravitational influence (“flintstones universe”), as it is becoming every day more evident the electrical nature of the universe (plasma universe) then, it is possible the mutual influence between planets and the sun.
This ramp up reminds me of cycle 20, looking at the numbers of NH spots produced to date, compared to the SH. But who really knows…
http://www.solen.info/solar/cycl20.gif
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/bfly.gif
*Crossing my optimistic fingers*
The rest is simple: LOW SOLAR ACTIVITY= HIGH COSMIC RADIATION= MORE CLOUDS = COOLING OF THE EARTH.
In the mean time: CO2 grows higher and higher…………
Well that can’t be good, noticed the solar nagnetic field seems to be stuttering a bit. I hope these gentlemen are wrong in this instance. If it turns out they are correct it will be a very interesting ( decade or decades? ) time ahead.
The sun during the second half of the 20th Century was more active than in the last 8000 years?
…and yet solar irradiance accounts for less than 10% of warming according to NOAA. Interesting
Apolgogies to all for the shocking state of my post above! still getting to grips with a new phone. I think my fingers need some shrinking.
This is a Northern Hemisphere view.
In the next few weeks farmers are going to be making decisions about what crops to plant for the year. It is looking possible, or even likely that the ground may not be workable until later than usual this spring, and if the arctic oscillation index keeps diving down and staying low for prolonged periods like has been for the past few months, there could be some very late and hard frosts.
Farmers in North America, Europe and Asia really need some honest guidance about the real expected length of the coming growing season.
If the season is going to be short farmers need to be ordering and preparing to plant short season crops and food for food and not food for ethanol. Since the food to ethanol is a government sponsored or in some cases a legislated initiative; governments must speak up, loud and clear.
If farmers get bad information, they may well bring in a short or damaged crop. If they do, based on the current world grain reserves, about 250 million people could be starving to death come the summer of next year (2011).
If elected leaders continue to insist that the planet is getting warmer, and it does not; then people, lots and lots of people will starve to death during the summer of 2011, not some time in 2035 or 2050, but next year; and there will be nothing anyone will be able to do about it. The food will not be in the bins and humans can not survive by eating money.
rbateman (12:45:11) :
You can see the Mt. Wilson data here:
http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~obs/150_data.html#plots
But be aware that the Mt Wilson data is marred by a change of calibration in 1982:
http://www.leif.org/research/MWO%20MPSI%20-%20F107.pdf
Someone remind me why we believe we know sunspot records in detail further than a few hundred years back?
I would tend to go for non-event. The Sun’s activity is ramping up nicely and radio propagation is beginning to improve.
JonesII (12:49:43) :
it is becoming every day more evident the electrical nature of the universe (plasma universe) then, it is possible the mutual influence between planets and the sun.
AGW is enough voodoo. We don’t need more pseudo-science.
NickB. (12:56:56) :
The sun during the second half of the 20th Century was more active than in the last 8000 years?
Except that it most likely was not.
“For those who agree that the IPCC and Al Gore have gone too far, signing the online petition “Al Gore and The UN IPCC Should Give Back Their Nobel Prize!” seems like a reasonable option. The link is http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/nomorenobel/”
Would you be so kind as to point to where either Al Gore or the IPCC said that we would never see an event similar to the Dalton Minimum?
Solar irradiance is increasing at the moment; it shows up in the sunspot numbers. It remains to be seen whether this unusually long and deep solar minimum, which coincided with the warmest decade on record, is anything other than a blip. Even if it persists, there’s no reason to think it will be remotely as powerful a forcing as GHGs: last month was the warmest January ever according to the sat data, and that’s at the nadir of solar irradiance.
“Not to point out the obvious, but given that the Oughts were the warmest decade on record, and corresponded with an unusually long and deep solar minimum, doesn’t that suggest the presence of a large non-solar forcing which is warming the planet in spite of the slight fall in irradiance?
If solar forcing had caused the anomalous temps of the 20th century, wouldn’t we have expected a long and deep solar minimum to stop the warming trend?” – Robert
Robert, during the Solar maximum we had enjoyed the oceans warmed up, so how long to do think it takes the oceans to release all the heat they built up during that maximum? And just because a few sunspots occured doesn’t mean this minumim is over. In fact it still just began. (By the way – the oceans are cooling off, so the net effect will be a cooling trend.)
Maybe of note: http://solarimg.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=246
OT but BBCs Roger Harribin is calling for a “climate armistice”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8516905.stm
This sentence gave me the creeps though, esp as Harribin has been in touch with Anthony on this issue.
Although it is near impossible to find UK academic scientists professing to be “climate sceptic” (more on this in a future column) plenty of them agree there is much uncertainty about climates past and future.
I wonder what Mr Harribin has got up his sleeve next?
“Our resident lake-effect expert, Tom Moore, noticed Lake Erie is frozen over completely for the first time in 14 years!”
http://twitter.com/TWCi/status/9150581623
http://twitter.com/TWCi
O/T?
Robert (12:35:12) :
Or maybe a long Solar Minimum drives Global temperatures absolutely stark raving wild.
Hey, if Global Warming can cause Global Cooling, then certainly a Solar Minimum can cause massive Polar Ice Cap melting.
This is what the Mayans were so worried about for 2012: The world isn’t coming to an end, reason is coming to an end.
AGW is dead. Now we have a real problem.
BTW,
Donald Trump also defends the idea of taking the Nobel away from IPCC & Al Gore: http://www.nypost.com/p/pagesix/global_cooling_7njz5ZtpFblMuF5Vf7LJmN
Ecotretas
Milwaukee Bob (12:32:02) :
Note to self: SELL carbon credits ASAP!
Buy puts instead. Even though it is morally questionable to take money from weak minded individuals.
http://www.forbes.com/2006/08/23/investools-options-ge-in_wh_0823investools_inl.html
Mike Ramsey
Does anyone measure 10Be production in “real time”?
geo (13:08:57) :
Someone remind me why we believe we know sunspot records in detail further than a few hundred years back?
Solar activity influences the amount of cosmic rays reaching the Earth. The cosmic rays produce radioactive nuclei that we can measure the concentration of in old trees and in deep ice cores in Greenland and Antarctica.
Robert !2:35:12 You are no more pointing out the obvious than the man in the moon. We don’t know how the sun modifies the climate let alone whether it even does or not.
==============================
Leif Svalgaard (13:18:12) :
“AGW is enough voodoo. We don’t need more pseudo-science.”
The CLOUD experiment is designed to test the theory that a decrease in solar magnetic activity causes an increase in clouds cover on the Earth. The idea is that the magnetic field from the Sun shields the Earth from interstellar cosmic rays and that these cosmic rays are a critical part of accumulation of free water molecules into water vapor micro-droplets (clouds).
An increase in cloud cover increases the amount light from the Sun that is reflected back into space. This increased reflection slowly cools the Earth. In the inverse situation when there are a lot of sunspots (increased magnetic activity) there are less clouds and the Earth slowly warms up.
There is substantial correlation between sun spots and cosmic rays and cosmic rays and global temperature in the current, historical and geologic record (cosmic rays leave a distinct atomic signature on some of the materials they strike); but in science, correlation is not causation. The CLOUD experiment seeks to prove at the sub-atomic level that these cosmic rays are in fact a required catalyst in the formation of water vapor micro-droplets and thus, clouds.
It is a simple idea; that makes a definite prediction; requires no proxy data, no adjustments and no interpretation of data. It is basic physics that anyone with a particle accelerator could reproduce. All of the data, methods and procedures will be available as soon as the experiment has been completed; later this year or early next year.
It is a Theory that explains climate change.
More Sun spots = Warmer Earth
Less Sun spots = Cooler Earth
It is not a popular Theory because people would have to accept that the ability for humans to affect the climate is the same as their ability to affect the Sun.
Dr. S you always make my day when you contribute. patience of job.
Thank you, Leif Svaalgard, for reasoned comments from careful research.
This link is to an excellent speech on the topic of solar minimums, sunspots and climate given at CERN by Dr. Jasper Kirkby of CERN at a colloquium on June 4, 2009.
http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1181073/
Title is “Evidence for pre-industrial solar-climate variability”. A must see!
I just attended the Fermilab colloquium on climate change given by Dr. Richard Lindzen, it was great! I’ll post the video when they put it up, please see the link below – his abstract is shown for 10 Feb 2010. It was a rather contentious crowd!
See: http://www-ppd.fnal.gov/EPPOffice-w/colloq/colloq.html
Jean Parisot (13:38:16) :
Does anyone measure 10Be production in “real time”?
Yes, 10Be is used to study land-use and erosion processes [and some of that 10Be comes from the soil]. The issue is not so much the real-time production, but how that corresponds to the deposition in ice.
I agree that “stretched” cycles with low sun spot numbers is “very likely” for this cycle and the next. I predicted these long cycles years ago based on pattern recognition: http://graystonelabs.com/SolarCycle.html.
Leif Svalgaard (13:40:17) :
Leif, are the sun activity proxies created by the formation of radioactive nuclei from cosmic rays corrected by the state of then environment into which our solar system was in? Wouldn’t the amount of cosmic rays be also influenced not only by the sun’s activity but also, for example, if our solar system was passing through a cosmic dust cloud? In that case, less cosmic rays could get to the solar system.
Comparing annualized temperatures may be misleading. Seasonal anomaly may give a different impression. Here is a graph of CET summer temperatures anomaly normalized to the sunspot number
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CET3.htm
It is matter of interpretation if Dalton minimum has any apparent correlation to the SSN.
More temp graphs on: http://www.vukcevic.co.uk/GandF.htm
Dr. Svalgaard
Any recent measurements (or results) from Livingston & Penn ?
Leif Svalgaard (12:27:39) :
Leif Svalgaard (12:23:52) :
And any cooling may depend [as it did back then] on suitable volcanic eruptions: http://www.leif.org/EOS/2009GL040882.pdf 🙂
Thanks Leif, interesting paper in it’s own right, even if a bit light on location of the tree ring and coral proxies mentioned, and magnitudes of temperature drops.
There does seem to be more volcanic activity when the sun goes quiet. More big earthquakes too. Any ideas why?
The top 12 Earthquakes of the last century and the associated sunspot numbers:
http://www.jupitersdance.com/Top12.jpg
Well over at solarcycle24.com Bob K6tr believes that all this talk of Dalton etc. is poppycock while Solanki’s position has been public for awhile. It remains to be seen if Livingston and Penn’s assertion continues to hold. Very interesting time for science.
This topic brings tears to my eyes. The public has been kept in the dark as to the status of their sun. A great public service is done every time this subject comes up.
The current stretch of sun specks does not impress me. It’s just slight venting. Solar minimum continues.
There have been lots of sunspots lately. Anyone know when can we expect an analysis of their contrast? i.e. an update to Livingston and Penn. Are they still fading?
Andrew30 (13:48:21) :
The CLOUD experiment is designed to test the theory that a decrease in solar magnetic activity causes an increase in clouds cover on the Earth.
The first results from a pilot test of CLOUD was inconclusive:
http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/9/18235/2009/acpd-9-18235-2009.html
I know exactly what Harriban has got up his sleeve, as do we all. His side, the warmists, are losing badly and they know it! They see it all slipping away and they are desperately trying to negotiate a way out of their final political defeat!
NO ARMISTICE WHEN VICTORY IS AT HAND!!!
What would skeptics have to gain from an “armistice”, anyways? It would just be “you shut up while we stay in power and do whatever we want.” The warmists, after having been proved to be liars and frauds, are now going to promise to talk a little more nicely and cheat a little bit less and that is supposed to make everything hunky dory???
NO!
The IPCC must be DISBANDED it cannot be reformed!!! How about that for an “armistice”???
See:http://sites.google.com/site/earthquakepredictionbyjac/Home/greenhouse-effect/SUN-EARTH.Energy.Greenhouseeffect-fiction3.Greenland.pdf?attredirects=0&d=1
and
http://sites.google.com/site/earthquakepredictionbyjac/Home/greenhouse-effect
“The sun, stupid”
You have only to balance it.
Hey Kim; I vote that it does.
tallbloke (14:16:18) :
The top 12 Earthquakes of the last century and the associated sunspot numbers
Of course, it is well known that earthquakes cause sunspots, even make Jupiter dance around. You can learn more here: http://blog.beliefnet.com/astrologicalmusings/2008/01/more-on-sunspot-cycles.html
DirkH —
Just pray a volcano doesn’t decide to cook off this Spring.
Ray (14:10:41) :
if our solar system was passing through a cosmic dust cloud? In that case, less cosmic rays could get to the solar system.
Dust wouldn’t do much, but it is possible that there are variations of cosmic rays in interstellar space: http://neutronm.bartol.udel.edu/reprints/2007bieber.pdf
radun (14:14:57) :
Any recent measurements (or results) from Livingston & Penn ?
Livingston only has limited access to the telescope, so we’ll have to wait. He sends me data as soon as he has them.
Leif Svalgaard (14:23:22) :
“The first results from a pilot test of CLOUD was inconclusive:”
Yes, this has been attributes to the small size of the chamber used in the pilot experiment and the materials used to construct the chamber and the variability to a ground state that existed in the pilot chamber.
If you check you will notice that the pilot experiment was to determine how to run the actual experiment. Note also that the pressures and densities used in the pilot were beyond the limits of natural atmosphere.
The pilot was a test of the requirements needed for construction of the experiment more than a test of the Theory.
The new chamber is much, much larger, is stainless steel (except for small beam and detector windows) and is entirely at ground. These factors should reduce the interior surface condensation problems of the pilot experiment; surface condensation needed to be eliminated to best reproduce actual atmospheric conditions.
The Prometheus Award-winning 1991 novel Fallen Angels by Jerry Pournelle, Larry Niven, and Michael Flynn discussed this minimum. See Chapter 7, “Black Powder and Alcohol…” from which I quote:
The people in the science fiction community had picked up on the AGW fraud very early.
Dr. Svalgaard,
I have read that the suns’ energy output was higher pre-1950, since then has been lower. I have also read that the suns’ energy output has been higher post-1950 then pre 1950.
Could you please let me know which, if any version is correct?
Thanx.
Leif Svalgaard,
It is always a good day when I see you posting on solar topics.
Were you at the AGU Fall meeting? Wondering if there are hints of any upcoming new theories in the pipeline that are focusing on the solar variability versus our climate variability?
By new I mean not the several theories sometimes mentioned here. I mean new as in the pre-embryonic stage of thought about new theories. Sort of like thinking of creating a new baby, but just thinking at this stage.
John
Maybe as the Earth cools it shrinks a little causing the earthquakes 🙂
An interesting read about how the indigenous people here in Australia predict the weather:
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/science/03/18/offbeat.weather.aborigines.reut/index.html
“…local Aborigines lived according to an annual six-season calendar.
For longer-range weather forecasting they used an 11-12 year cycle and a massive 8,000-10,000-year cycle…”
“The 11-year cycle started in 2001 with the appearance of the Aurora Australis, the luminous pale green and pink phenomenon that occurs in the upper atmosphere above the South Pole…”
steven mosher (13:52:51) :
Dr. S you always make my day when you contribute.
patience of job.
Only matched by the tenacity of the voodoo-peddlers not to knuckle under to the forces of reason:
rbateman (13:28:55) :
“This is what the Mayans were so worried about for 2012: The world isn’t coming to an end, reason is coming to an end.”
Robert has a point there.
On the subject of paleoclimatology, in an interview with NatureNature , our expert at CRU again draws into question the up and down swings in temp in the last milleniuum:
Thankfully, Nature had asked the pressing question that was absent from the BBC interview, that is: if you have found (without knowning the cause) the unreliability of tree ring data to show the post-1960 warming (the famous ‘decline’), could this not also suggest that historic warming is also be understated?
Now, I really want to understand how these guys were thinking…What I dont get is why the Hockey Team would not use this ice core data in their reconstruction. I mean, why did they not use ice cores that confirm the tree rings? Surely they could find some.
What I also dont get is why Jones would repeat this call for more collecting and collating of data:
I cant believe that a paleoclimatologist cannot know about the studies suggesting global MWP – or are they dismissed for some reason?
I dunno about everyone else but the view from the blogosphere of the Hockey Team all seems just too incredible to be true. Maybe I should not try to understand them and just take Jones’ advice:
Ohio Man Builds Four-Room Igloo, With TV, Cable (with video)
http://www.aolnews.com/weird-news/article/unemployed-ohio-man-jimmy-grey-builds-extreme-igloo/19359175
” Leif Svalgaard (12:27:39) : ”
Well, in particular the comment at the end about the volcanic activity, the more I read, the more I am swayed toward the notion that it is not exactly one thing … orbital mechanics, solar activity, volcanic activity, weather patterns, etc. … that cause great climatic changes. It seems most likely to me that it is some combination of these events happening when conditions tend to favor the outcome leaning more likely in one direction than the other.
So if you have a period of declining insolation at the North Pole, a period of weak solar magnetic activity, a fairly significant volcanic event, and maybe some change in persistent weather patterns that causes a tip in a direction that is unrecoverable, one slides rather quickly into glacial conditions.
Or maybe you don’t if, say, solar insolation is enough to recover from such an event (Krakatoa AD 535?). Would a similar eruption today be enough to tip the balance? I don’t know but I don’t believe it is any one single cause, I believe it is a combination of different factors.
Is there any way we can test the hypothesis that if Mount Svalgaard erupts this blog will go cold? ;?)
With all these sunspots not a word from L&P. I heard they where on vacation until end of January . I guess they still having a good time there. Or unless these sunspots theory are not working out so good on chart. mmmmm
Way O/T, but can’t resist:-
Snow became a rare event! Now it is the Golden Gate Fog!
Fog over San Francisco thins by a third due to climate change
The sight of Golden Gate Bridge towering above the fog will become increasing rare as climate change warms San Francisco bay, scientists have found.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/7243579/Fog-over-San-Francisco-thins-by-a-third-due-to-climate-change.html
I must go to bed before they produce any more scary stories I don’t want to have nightmares!
The above reference to Harrabin and ‘climate armistice’ is more blowing smoke. This is nothing so trivial as a matter between bloggers and anyone else. This is a multi-trillion dollar vicious economic and social fraud centered around carbon trading. The article doesn’t mention carbon trading nor the money behind it, the crime in it, just tries to trivialize the whole thing by saying it’s between bloggers and others. It makes brief mention of ‘politicians’ who counted on AGW for economic reasons. As previously noted in a Guardian article 1/25/10, Gordon Brown expressed that London is the carbon trading center of the world and he ties CO2 trading’s success to that of London. One green fund alone, INCR, owned by ceres.org, has $8 trillion in investments. Al Gore has already mounted forces to attack 22 swing senators for AGW legislation. If bloggers are an issue at all, it is that the Supreme Court 5-4 decision in 2007 based on corrupt data probably would not have happened were bloggers well into the issue back then. That was followed by the EPA ruling made on the same false grounds. And this says nothing about the cancer of regional and state CO2 groups already well entrenched and shaking down some poor slob every minute of the day. They would like to make it a little tiff, but it is the biggest battle of our lifetime. It has had a 25 year head start, trillions of dollars and careers are invested. Naturally, they will do everything in their power to make it succeed.
Leif Svalgaard (13:18:12) :
AGW is enough voodoo. We don’t need more pseudo-science.
Well said. It is not reasonable to play around with opposite universe theories when there is more than enough uncertainty to deal with in this one.
Robert: “but given that the Oughts were the warmest decade on record”
At airports and in cities … maybe.
After all, GISS and CRU have been removing true rural stations from the record and “in-filling” data from airports to former rural sites.
Christopher (15:27:19) :
A cheap 70mm refractor, used on a clear day, is enough to project the current crop of sunspots onto a plain piece of white paper and observe the lowered contrast.
Strong contrast spots are nearly black in the glare.
Greytoned spots are indicative of weakened contrast.
Compare with L&P reports to calibrate your seat-of-the pants judgement.
Last I looked (last week) the spots were of low contrast.
crosspatch (15:21:30) :
It seems most likely to me that it is some combination of these events happening when conditions tend to favor the outcome leaning more likely in one direction than the other.
several things can work together. most people seem to prefer a single pet idea, so you’ll always find peddlers of just about anything.
green sand: how odd it is that warmists claim it’s only rightwing newspapers in UK who are ‘deniers’ blah blah, when the UK Tele always finds space in its print edition for alarmist rubbish such as your link and Lean below, but keeps delingpole in a blog. same can be said up for murdoch’s press in australia, which runs pro-AGW stuff non-stop while keeping andrew bolt’s climategate stuff on a blog. this is the biggest challenge cos salivating over a “carbon economy” is a bipartisan thing.
12 feb; UK Tele: Geoffrey Lean: Do we want to ignore climate change and risk losing all this?
So if the sceptics’ main standard-bearers effectively agree with environmentalists over the basic science, what on earth is all the fuss about? What is the basis for all the over-excited claims that global warming is a “hoax”, a “scam”, or the greatest scientific scandal ever?..
Yet there is still plenty to debate, and here I must make a confession – I only quoted part of Dr Peiser’s sentence above. He went on: “What is uncertain is the magnitude and timescale of the effect.”…
There is a growing conviction that the cost of ignoring climate change will be far greater than of tackling it now, that many of the measures to be taken would be beneficial in other ways, and even that developing low-carbon economies may be the key to future growth. Indeed, that’s probably the most productive debate we could now be having.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthcomment/geoffrey-lean/7223753/Do-we-want-to-ignore-climate-change-and-risk-losing-all-this.html
Leo G (14:52:37) :
Could you please let me know which, if any version is correct?
The sun’s output varies very little. Solar activity seems to have an ~100 year ‘cycle’ [the past 300 years], so what little variation there has been has gone up and down a little bit:
My best guess of the output looks like this [red curve]:
http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-LEIF.png
The ups and downs are on the order of 1/1000 of the whole.
John Whitman (14:53:12) :
Were you at the AGU Fall meeting? Wondering if there are hints of any upcoming new theories in the pipeline that are focusing on the solar variability versus our climate variability?
I was there. We are blundering about in the dark.
Craig Moore (15:22:42) :
Is there any way we can test the hypothesis that if Mount Svalgaard erupts this blog will go cold? ;?)
The posting here often generate more heat than light…
agreed chili – no armistice, not now, not ever. That is the cry of a partisan who knows his side is losing badly and who is making a last ditch effort to forestall ultimate defeat. Not to mention that to him, armistice means “you guys keep quiet and we do whatever we want.”
It’s about time the Dalton Minimum Repeat gets some attention, this is very much old news for many…
Depending on what I read, a solar minimum coincides with lower than average temperatures or higher than average temperatures. Which is it?
It seems that some have equated, or possibly just confused, sunspot numbers with Earth surface temperatures.
As haywire as the world is (and always has been as far as I know) it is a relief that Copenhagen ended the way it did and that we “seem” to regaining some composure about the weather and climate. While the floodgates have not opened very far, more and more “reasonableness” appears to be entering the debate.
The one thing that humans have been fighting since even way before we climbed down out of the trees has been the weather. Lions, tigers, bears, and other predators, were always momentary dangers.
If the AGW mob is correct, humanity will face a warmer world and higher sea levels. Being creatures of the Ice Ages, we’ll no doubt encounter some difficulties, maybe a drop in population, maybe a drop in prosperity for the “First World” economies. And maybe Not.
If the Ice Age mob is correct, humanity will very likely encounter a severe drop in worldwide population, and “prosperity” for the “First Worlders” who just happen to be in the way of the ice.
If the No Change mob is right, they will live out their lives as they have lived all the days before. But then some day, their children or great-great-great grandchildren, will face Global Warming or the Ice. No doubt about it. (Maybe when they do they’ll be a lot calmer that we are:-)
PS: Is it true Al Gore is buying all the US Coal Mine stock he can get his hands on? (-:Joke:-)
Dr. Svalgaard, like many here, I appreciate you taking the time to put on the gloves and take a swing at the issues and some of the commenters…while maintaining a sense of humor. Thank you!
Leif Svalgaard (13:18:12) :
Dear professor, with due respect: What is it more vodooistic or esoteric than: Dark Matter, Strings, Black Holes, other dimensions, etc. This is witchcraft, as far as nothing of these have been proved at a lab, that is precisely the difference with the plasma universe, from Birkeland´s “Terrela” experiment to Hans Alfven.
Leif Svalgaard (12:23:52) : (And Others)
While I do not study this stuff in great detail as you seem to, I have found myself of late looking at volcanic activity. The Tambora eruption in 1813? had really nasty effects during the Dalton. Do you, at present, consider the occurrences to be completely coincidental? I personally can’t imagine where continental drift over hots spots could in any way correlate to sunspots or solar minimums, but I still entertain the idea, I think because of the dire consequences.
On Roger Harrabin
http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2008/04/more-on-the-great-bbc-website-swindle/
I would hardly call the man’s independence an attribute.
“Robert, during the Solar maximum we had enjoyed the oceans warmed up, so how long to do think it takes the oceans to release all the heat they built up during that maximum? And just because a few sunspots occured doesn’t mean this minimum is over. In fact it still just began. (By the way – the oceans are cooling off, so the net effect will be a cooling trend.)”
Except both the oceans and the land continued to warm during the solar minimum which is now ending. (You’ll find no support for the idea that the solar minimum has “just begun.” That’s pure wishful thinking on your part.)
“AGW is dead. Now we have a real problem.”
Leaving aside the fact that this assertion makes no sense scientifically, I’d like to draw attention to the irony of a “skeptic” embracing a single unpublished, un-peer-reviewed paper as the final word on what the climate will do for the next thirty years.
” Ecotretas (13:37:02) :
BTW,
Donald Trump also defends the idea of taking the Nobel away from IPCC & Al Gore: http://www.nypost.com/p/pagesix/global_cooling_7njz5ZtpFblMuF5Vf7LJmN
Ecotretas”
My God! Do you know what this means? Your credibility just shot up to unprecedented levels. Donald Trump is the most intellectually imposing figure in the history of anti-AGW agitprop. Take a hike, Sarah Palin. You’ve found your leader.
Leif Svalgaard (16:07:15) :
Wrote: “The posting here often generate more heat than light…”
So is that why you are here?
Add your heat to the sum of heat in an effort to warm the planet?
robr (16:53:04) :
The Tambora eruption in 1813? had really nasty effects during the Dalton. Do you, at present, consider the occurrences to be completely coincidental?
At this point, the Tambora 1815, Mayon 1814, and Unnamed 1809 together were likely responsible for perhaps the coldest decade of the past several centuries. I consider it to be a coincidence that solar activity was also low 1795-1820.
Andrew30 (16:55:57) :
Add your heat to the sum of heat in an effort to warm the planet?
Warm is better than cold, no?
“Depending on what I read, a solar minimum coincides with lower than average temperatures or higher than average temperatures. Which is it?”
It’s an extremely weak forcing, and it doesn’t last long (the typical cycle in 11 years or so.) So usually you won’t be able to find a strong correlation.
I guess the Sun is gonna do whatever He thinks will upset the most peoples’ predictions. Piers Corbyn seems to be able to forecast Arctic stratospheric warming by some solar method, or he’s a really good guesser.
OT, Greenpeace director John Sauven hoists a not quite green flag at the Guardian. He says “we” a lot:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/16/climate-change-global-solution-greenpeace
Leo G (14:52:37) :
I have read that the suns’ energy output was higher pre-1950, since then has been lower. I have also read that the suns’ energy output has been higher post-1950 then pre 1950.
Could you please let me know which, if any version is correct?
Thanx.
Sunspot numbers are a reasonably good proxy. If you average the numbers over a long enough period, you can see what the change was like over the last 250 years
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/sidc-ssn/mean:132/plot/sidc-ssn/trend
Leif will tell you that the numbers were under-counted in earlier years and is working on magnetic data to try to improve the record.
How’s it going Leif?
It’s fortunate that Dr. Svalgaard frequently comments here at WUWT and explains the current status of our understanding of the sun. Note that the main explanation for global warming before AGW is the sun. But this is not supported by Svalgaard I think.
One could then ask – if the sun is not the origin of the initial temperature increase after the little ice age, what could it be?
And, whatever caused this temperature increase, can we be certain that this “something” is not contributing to global warming (in addition to AGW)?
Is this a valid question? What do you think?
Andrew30-
I was pulling Dr. Svalgaard’s leg and he responded with humor. I guess you failed to grasp the obvious.
It’s fortunate that Dr. Svalgaard frequently comments here at WUWT and explains the current status of our understanding of the sun. Note that the main explanation for global warming before AGW is the sun. But this is not supported by Svalgaard I think.
One could then ask – if the sun is not the origin of the initial temperature increase after the little ice age, what could it be?
And, whatever caused this temperature increase, can we be certain that this “something” is not still contributing to global warming (in addition to AGW)?
Is this a valid question? What do you think?
The “snide” remarks are so belittleing and unworthy.
Fortune Cookie say:
“The wise person learns early that scarcasm gains nothing of value.”
Ross M (15:04:05) : “ Maybe as the Earth cools it shrinks a little causing the earthquakes 🙂 ”
How about the land getting very deeply saturated and heavy with precipitation. The added weight pushing down on the plates causing pressures to go up leading to more quakes/volcanoes?
The climate widget says the sunspot number is 64. Does anyone here actually believe it is a like for like comparison with historical sunspot numbers from previous cycles?
And Andrew30-
Given Dr. Svalgaard’s response he ducked you pointless jab like Ingemar Johansson in his younger years.
Leif,
Thanks for your reply. To me it is wonderful to get the earliest “ah ha” that starts a sequence generating new scientific knowledge. Hope to see some come out about solar influences in this interesting time we live in.
Please keep up your sense of humor! You’ve a lot of supporters.
John
tallbloke (17:05:37) :
Leif will tell you that the numbers were under-counted in earlier years and is working on magnetic data to try to improve the record.
How’s it going Leif?
http://www.leif.org/research/Rudolf%20Wolf%20Was%20Right.pdf
http://www.leif.org/research/SOHO23.pdf
are ‘progress reports’.
Invariant (17:07:27) :
And, whatever caused this temperature increase, can we be certain that this “something” is not contributing to global warming (in addition to AGW)?
The sun makes a contribution to GW, but is is a small fraction of a degree.
Ref – tallbloke (17:16:52) :
“The climate widget says the sunspot number is 64. Does anyone here actually believe it is a like for like comparison with historical sunspot numbers from previous cycles?”
_____________________
Nope! I can barely see three. These astronomy folks must nip a little white lightin’ to stay warm on these cold nights. Aren’t most of their telescopes up on top of mountains?
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/sunspots/
OT
It appears Trenberth’s conduct during AR4 is coming back to haunt him
Now IPCC hurricane data is questioned
tallbloke (17:16:52) :
The climate widget says the sunspot number is 64. Does anyone here actually believe it is a like for like comparison with historical sunspot numbers from previous cycles?
The widget is not updating correctly or timely. This plot is always up to date:
http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-SORCE-Latest.png
The sunspot number today was 27. Brussels will report that as 27*0.6 = 16. I think the sunspot number the past cycle [and today] has been under-reported. See: http://www.leif.org/research/AGU%20Fall%202009%20SH13C-03.pdf
Can anyone explain this NOAA graph of ocean rise?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NOAA_sea_level_trend_1993_2010.png
I heard on NPR how some islands off Bangledash were going under water because of Global Warming and sea level rise. I see the chart from above and it has some parts of the same ocean rising much faster than neighboring areas. How does this work? I thought water will be shaped by the type of container it is in. If a lake receives an influx of water it does not just rise at the source but the whole lake rises. I can pour water in a pot and it will not pile up anywhere. How does ocean water pile up in certain locations as shown in the graph? Are they sure the islands are not sinking as a result of the plate they are on going down?
I would sure like to know the science on how one part of the same ocean is rising at a rate almost 10 times more than water a few hundred miles north in the same ocean basin. Help!
“Day of the Jackal” author Frederick Forsyth:
UK Express: Frederick Forsyth: CLIMATE CHANGE INDUSTRY IS NOW IN DEEP TROUBLE
ONE tries to be forbearing but honestly, the science behind the “global warming” campaign is beginning to look like roadkill.
If you are going to start and mastermind a science-based global campaign urging governments to require their
exhausted taxpayers to fork out not billions but trillions to prevent a catastrophe that may be 50 to 90 years away, you had better be sure your science is impeccable.
First we are told via leaked e-mails that the leading “scientists” have been cherry- picking only the convenient data
that suit their case. That is not science: that is propaganda.
Then we learn the fanatics have tried to airbrush from history chronicled facts such as the Medieval Warm Period (still unexplained).
Next the scare story about the melting Himalayan glaciers is revealed as having been made up, and now we learn that the linkage between droughts and floods with global warming is also bunkum.
Would it not be smart to get the facts right first and then spend the trillions?
http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/154858/Climate-change-industry-is-now-in-deep-trouble
Leif Svalgaard (17:01:47) :
Thanks, last question, is there a scientific understanding as to why the continents drift, the forces, and where those forces come from?
Rather then look at historical records of visible sunspots, would it be possible to look at recent 10Be records (I have no idea of their frequency, spatial distribution, or methodology) and directly compare today’s data with the ice core record?
geo (13:08:57) :
Someone remind me why we believe we know sunspot records in detail further than a few hundred years back?
Galileo started the process of counting sunspots.
I find the concept of climate armistice to be quite amusing. For the majority of skeptical bloggers it has always been about finding the truth. Sure a little jab here and there when the facts refuted AGW theocracy. However, the side that has been shooting all the heavy artillery is now the one that wants an armistice. How interesting.
“1. The climate of the Earth depends on the interaction between the surface and the atmosphere, both of which are heated by solar radiation characterized by a cyclical, variable intensity. The climate is influenced by the Earth’s yearly revolution around the Sun, thermics, changes in ocean waters flow, air mass movement, mountain massif position, their uplift and erosion in time perspective as well as changes in the continents’ position as a result of their permanent wandering…. ”
~Geologic Science Committee – Polish Academy of Sciences
http://www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/spsbpeis/PAS.htm
(h/t Benny Peiser, and Lubos Motl)
“…….a supercenturial solar minimum will be occurring during the next few decades…. It will be similar in magnitude to the Dalton minimum, but probably longer as the last one.”
–Boris Komitov
-Institute of Astronomy, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences
&
–Vladimir Kaftan
-Central Research Institute of Geodesy, Aerial Surveying and Cartography, Federal Agency of Geodesy and Cartography, Moscow, Russia
http://www.astro.bas.bg/AIJ/issues/n9/BKomitov.pdf
&
http://www.astro.bas.bg/~komitov/abstract.htm
Ahhhhh…so it wasn’t just Anthropogenic Global Earthquakes (AGE) resulting from too many people on one side of the planet jumping up and down in glee over the consensus in Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) at the same time? Global Warming causes man-made Global Earthquakes…who’d a thunk it?
Robert (16:55:44),
Responding to the statement: “AGW is dead,” said:
“Leaving aside the fact that this assertion makes no sense scientifically, I’d like to draw attention to the irony of a ‘skeptic’ embracing a single unpublished, un-peer-reviewed paper as the final word on what the climate will do for the next thirty years.”
How can so many mis-statements be packed into one sentence?
According to the scientific method, it is the CO2=Catastrophic AGW hypothesis that fails to produce any empirical evidence showing that a quantified rise in CO2 will cause a specific rise in the global temperature. No one has the final word in science. But that scary hypothesis is swirling the drain.
The AGW hypothesis specifically refers to the dead Catastrophic AGW hypothesis – because where’s the grant money in a few tenths of a degree warming? It’s dead, Jim.
At this stage of the game AGW doesn’t mean some tiny, theoretical, mild warming. No. Rather, it is the scary CO2=CAGW hypothesis, which states that the planet is nearing a “tipping point,” which will cause runaway global warming, which will in turn bring about climate catastrophe – and the mediator of the global disaster is asserted to be a tiny, beneficial, harmless trace gas, comprising only 0.00038 of the atmosphere – one molecule in 2,600. That incredible hypothesis is what the alarmist crowd still insists will happen. But that particular hypothesis is deader than bin Laden.
Next, putting quotation marks around the term skeptic is an ad-hom attempt to play the skeptic card. All honest scientists are skeptics – while the average true blue AGW believer wouldn’t know the scientific method of skepticism if it bit ’em on the ankle. Psychological projection is the hallmark of alarmists, who often preposterously try to pass themselves off as skeptics. They’re not, of course. They have no skepticism of the AGW hypothesis. None.
And demanding peer review to attain legitimacy ignores the fact that the climate peer review system is thoroughly corrupt, as can be seen in the excellent essay, Caspar and the Jesus Paper; and in the Climategate emails, and in the Wegman Report to Congress, and in the tens of $billions already granted to almost anyone with a pulse who mentions global warming in their submission – while scientists skeptical of AGW hardly get even the crumbs. $50 billion buys a lot of AGW.
The peer review system has been gamed, as can be seen in this account of an outsider trying to make a simple correction in a journal. And he’s not even in the climate game! If he was a CAGW skeptic, he would probably not even get the courtesy of a response.
Finally, criticizing someone for predicting the planet’s cycle over the next 30 years, without criticizing the wild-eyed AGW purveyors who are predicting temperatures to a tenth of a degree and glacier movements in 2100 and beyond is hypocritical, no?
There are a lot of scientists writing articles for WUWT and posting here from both sides of the AGW fence. But I’m guessing Robert has no degree in the hard sciences, because I’ve repeatedly asked him about it when he’s been similarly critical of others here, who do have science backgrounds. He always ducks the question. So how ’bout it, Bobby boy, what’s your official expertise? If you have a degree, I’m still betting it’s something like English Lit. Am I right?
robr (17:40:44) :
is there a scientific understanding as to why the continents drift, the forces, and where those forces come from?
Basically: yes. But there are many details that are still debated.
Convection in the mantle is the main process.
Jean Parisot (17:46:27) :
Rather then look at historical records of visible sunspots, would it be possible to look at recent 10Be records (I have no idea of their frequency, spatial distribution, or methodology) and directly compare today’s data with the ice core record?
People are doing this [with some limited success]. There are several problems: 10Be is mostly generated at lower latitudes [simply because there is more surface there] and must be transported to the polar regions for deposition on ice [cores] and the precipitated out. These deposition processes themselves depend a bit on the climate. So the record is not perfect. In addition, large volcanic eruptions put sulfuric acid in the stratosphere, polluting the 10Be record.
Norman (17:36:11) :
“Can anyone explain this NOAA graph of ocean rise? ”
nope, only the NOAA can explain that one.
It’s obviously robust water.
The climate widget seems to be stuck. I’ve been noticing that for a few days now. The current number is really around 27 and the Flux in the high 80’s. The sunspot group numbers on the widget are also no longer correct.
Ross M (15:04:05) : Maybe as the Earth cools it shrinks a little causing the earthquakes 🙂
I like that, Ross!
However, when I look at this quote from the article you linked to I feel despair:
“Present-day scientists do their studies by measurements and experiments. [Australian] Aboriginal people are just as good scientists, but they use observation and experience,” Bodkin, a botanist at Sydney’s Mount Annan Botanical gardens, told Reuters.
OT – but interesting:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article7028418.ece
February 16, 2010
How I made the Met Office admit its climate-change data was wrong
John Graham-Cumming
How much will the recently launched NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory improve the observation of sunspots, magnetic fields and radiance over what is available today?
Will there be enough of an overlap with existing systems to tie the past records to the new records and place a note on the past records as to their ‘possible actuals’?
Milwaukee Bob (12:25:25) : Stock tip: Buy! LL Bean, North Face….
L.L. Bean is privately held (though very large):
http://www.forbes.com/lists/2006/21/biz_06privates_LL-Bean_J18E.html
North Face is a brand of VF Corp (ticker VFC ) who’s chart shows a nice uprun that has stopped, but held up well in our recent downturn. It’s a fairly broad line clothing maker so not much of a cold ‘pure play’ but well positioned for “change” in either direction with brands like:
“V.F. Corporation, together with its subsidiaries, engages in the design, manufacture, and sourcing of branded apparel and related products for men, women, and children in the United States. It offers jeanswear under the Lee, Lee Europe, Wrangler, Wrangler Hero, Genuine Wrangler, Wrangler 47, Wrangler Jeans Co, Wrangler Europe, Rigs, Aura, 20X, Rustler, Riders, and Maverick brands; imagewear under the Majestic, Red Kap, Bulwark, Chef Designs, and The Force brands; and outdoor products under the Vans, The North Face, JanSport, Kipling, Reef, Napapijri, Eagle Creek, and Lucy brands. The company also provides sports wear under the Nautica and Kepling brands; and other contemporary brands, including 7 For All Mankind, John Varvatos, Ella Moss, and Splendid. ”
The above from:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=VFC
In cold weather all sorts of clothing would be needed so they would probably do well.
Were I ‘looking for a cold play’ (no, no Jazz pun 😉 I’d probably look to Polaris Industries (ticker PII ) who started in Snowmobiles, but branched out into Victory Motorcycles (that I’ve drooled over… my Honda 500 V twin water cooled shaft drive is nice 😉 but I like the Victory better… ) so you have some protection against a warm turn, but still get the snowmobile “lift” in a cold turn. Oh, and they have riding clothing for both seasons as well
Chart:
http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/charts/big.chart?symb=pii&compidx=aaaaa%3A0&ma=4&maval=25&uf=7168&lf=2&lf2=4&lf3=1024&type=4&size=3&state=15&sid=3839&style=320&time=8&freq=1&comp=NO%5FSYMBOL%5FCHOSEN&nosettings=1&rand=1201&mocktick=1
Description from:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=PII
“Polaris Industries Inc. designs, engineers, and manufactures off-road vehicles. It offers all terrain vehicles and side-by-side vehicles for recreational and utility use, snowmobiles, and motorcycles. The company also provides replacement parts and accessories, including winches, bumper/brushguards, plows, racks, mowers, tires, pull-behinds, cabs, cargo box accessories, tracks, and oil for ATVs; covers, traction products, reverse kits, electric starters, tracks, bags, windshields, oil, and lubricants for snowmobiles; and saddle bags, handlebars, backrests, exhaust, windshields, seats, oil, and various chrome accessories for motorcycles. In addition, it markets a line of recreational apparel, including helmets, jackets, bibs and pants, leathers, and hats. Polaris Industries sells its products through dealers and distributors under the name RANGER, RANGER RZR, RANGER Crew, Victory Vision Street, and Victory Vision Tour principally in the United States, Canada, and Europe. ”
But realistically, if you want a good “cold play” (and don’t mean a really good CD…) it would probably be best to get one of the the oil and gas trusts (such as PWE ) (9%+ dividend, and I own some) or a gas company like Chesapeake CHK (presently a ‘flat roller” sideways; good for trades) or an exploration and production like APA Apache ( a great company that looks a bit ‘toppy’ to me right now).
Oh, you were just kidding? Nevermind … 😉
I see a 2000 year hockey stick on the sunspot graph.
Could Mann and his trees be recording sunspots?
the ‘carbon cowboys’ know which way the wind is blowing. NYT puts it down to “lack of direction”:
NYT: Special Report: Beth Gardiner: Lack of Direction on Climate Change Hobbles Carbon Trading
Investors are steering clear of energy-saving projects meant to generate carbon credits, and traders in Europe are hunkering down through a period of consolidation that is disappointing to those who had hoped carbon markets would grow quickly into a $2 trillion-a-year business…
“That bold vision, clearly, that hit a brick wall at Copenhagen,” said Dieter Helm, a professor of energy policy at the University of Oxford who argues that taxing carbon is a more effective way of ensuring emissions cuts. People will go on trading carbon, he said, “but it’s not where the future lies.” ..
That may mean that carbon trading loses the primacy its advocates had hoped it would have in the fight against global warming…
Abyd Karmali, the global head of carbon markets at Bank of America Merrill Lynch and president of the Carbon Markets & Investors Association trade group in London, estimated that new investments in such projects fell 30 percent to 40 percent in 2009 and will probably slide another 40 percent to 50 percent this year…
Worldwide, carbon trading markets were worth $125 billion in 2009, Mr. Turner said. In Europe, which accounts for 70 percent to 80 percent of the total, the market is likely to contract this year, he added. ..
Richard Gledhill, head of climate change and carbon markets at PricewaterhouseCoopers, said he had been contacted by European traders and others working on international projects who were looking for jobs…
In Europe, Dr. Helm said, policy makers should set a floor for the carbon price, to keep it stable and high enough to push big emitters to make cuts.
Taxes are better than permits,” he said. “But we’re stuck with the permits, so we end up in a world where we have to say: ‘Given we’ve got that system, how can we make it work better?”’
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/15/business/energy-environment/15rentrade.html
chili palmer (15:40:24) :
References?
Al Gore going after 22 Senators?
Green groups with trillions?
wws (16:10:54) :
Q: Why did the terrorist call for an armistice?
A: He was out of ammunition.
OT, but, seemingly valid criticism of the IPCCs reporting on hurricanes etc:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/15/hatton_on_hurricanes/
Scandinavia Gate?
http://www.climategate.com/scandinavia-gate-climate-cooling-but-scientists-hide-the-decline
Hottest temperature ever heads science to Big Bang
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor Maggie Fox, Health And Science Editor – Mon Feb 15, 11:23 am ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Scientists have created the hottest temperature ever in the lab — 4 trillion degrees Celsius — hot enough to break matter down into the kind of soup that existed microseconds after the birth of the universe.
more at:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100215/sc_nm/us_physics_temperature
Robert (12:35:12) : Not to point out the obvious, but given that the Oughts were the warmest decade on record, and corresponded with an unusually long and deep solar minimum, doesn’t that suggest the presence of a large non-solar forcing which is warming the planet in spite of the slight fall in irradiance?
No, it implies really really bad temperature data collection, archiving, processing, and very dodgy assumptions. Look out the window. See the snow. Think. Snow cold….
If solar forcing had caused the anomalous temps of the 20th century, wouldn’t we have expected a long and deep solar minimum to stop the warming trend?
Only in a simplistic world.
First one has to accept the premise ( “The Sun Did It” ) that is not shown to be true, but accept it for argument we will…
Then you must allow for Time Lags. Big things move very slowly.
Even in temperature movements. So, I’m even going to postulate that the “noughties” were hot (something that I do not agree with generally – they remind me of what my Dad and other “old folks at home” described the ’20s and ’30s as being, though milder and less hot than then.) But lets assume it WAS hot. And lets assume it IS solar driven. And lets assume the sun has reduced it’s output in such a manner as to change heat at the earth (also not shown, though widely surmised).
Now you get to wait a decade or two to suck all the heat stored in the ocean over the last 50 years into the air and radiate it off into space.
You get to do this while taking 2 phase changes in water (water vapor from the ocean condensing to water and freezing to snow) that change the HEAT budget without a TEMPERATURE change at those phase change points. So you really ought to be counting the heat, not the temperature. (Having 2 coins is nice, having two “Dollar Coins” is better than two pennies… but lost if you count the coins not the value in each one…)
So I’d expect to see a long lag time as the “heat in the pipeline” (still looking for that mythical pipeline, BTW) drained through to the oceans (maybe that was the 1996-1999 period?) then a period of flat temperatures as the HEAT redistributed with no temperature change, then after about a decade or so, a drop of temperatures as heat flow finally could pull temperatures down some.
Oh, and I’d expect to see a hot ocean for about 10 to 20 years dumping lots of warmth and moisture into the air that would then move to the poles and flush that heat into space as IR (probably through the Ozone window that opens when UV drops from a sleepy sun at about 9 or 10 micrometers IIRC) and then that FRIGID air would rush south and make a boat load of snow further south than anyone would expect (it having been roughly a lifetime since this happened last if a PDO flip driven or a couple of hundred years if solar minimum driven) as that very cold arctic air hits still warm and moist ocean driven air.
Then all the “warmers” would holler that it was due to WARMTH, completely missing that the warm oceans need a decade to start catching up with the frozen land while everyone else figured out that it was 1950 again and they ought to be ready for cold for the next 30 years or so (more if solar minimum driven). You know, like about 1958? or so when 18 feet of snow buried a train near Donner Pass California and they had to be rescued… (I’ve never seen so much snow in my life as then, and my Dad said it had never snowed that much before in his life… you really need a multi-lifetime view to see these things…) But we’re talking a “hypothetical”…
So in a world with a gazillion tons of ocean, it does not cool off in a year, or two, or three, or 8, or… and the “Lava Lamp” that is our planetary weather would have a ‘hot blob’ off the oceans heading to the poles (leading to all sorts of histrionics about the poles ‘warming’ and ‘melting’ and a ‘loopy jet stream’ as that heat heads to the poles to vent to space) while that air, once suitably cooled to Frigid, would head back south over land (it being the place left cold and cold stuff sinking over prior cold tracks) and freezing the dingles off of places like Siberia, China, Canada, Central USA, … but with the ‘global average temperature’ not showing much from the satellites (as temperature is the wrong measure – we’re looking at how many coins are in our pocket without looking at the denominations… temperature rather than heat… so all that snow “is a warm snow” 😉 in a very real sense. It released a gazillion BTU as the moist air condensed to water then froze. So you took 2 phase changes and not much temperature change) yet the land is frozen and the sea is “hot” so naive folks could continue to fret over the ‘global warmth’… look at all the pennies they have, they MUST be rich…
And in only a couple of decades we would know for sure.
Maybe.
but until you can show me the ‘pipeline’ that all your supposed global warming trend is being stored up inside, I’ll stick with snow in 49 states and it being so cold that it’s Raining Iguanas in Florida as meaning that it’s cold.
Even if it is ‘a warm snow’… 😉
Leif Svalgaard (17:27:47) :
Dr. Svalgaard,
Thanks for all your comments.
Special thanks for putting me on “The Sun from Space” by Lang. Learning a lot from that fine book.
I’d like to know Bobby’s credentials, too. Not that he’d ever misrepresent himself, but it would be interesting to know.
Bobby? Are you there? Are you willing to divulge the basis of your “expertise” as it supports your critiques?
JonesII (12:49:43) wrote: “…it is becoming every day more evident the electrical nature of the universe (plasma universe) then, it is possible the mutual influence between planets and the sun.”
Leif Svalgaard (13:18:12) responded: “AGW is enough voodoo. We don’t need more pseudo-science.”
I appreciate Dr. Svalgaard thinks AGW is voodoo.
Is it possible there is “mutual influence between planets and the sun”?
I don’t know.
But I do know the Sun influences the Earth.
And I do know the Sun is electrical in nature. The Sun is a plasmoid: Plasma – Magnetic – Enity.
And, yes, the Universe is dominated by plasma (99.9% of the observable Universe is plasma) and accordingly the observable Universe is dominated by plasma’s electromagnetic phyiscal relationships.
Nothing “voodoo” about that.
Just the facts.
DirkH (13:34:36) wrote: “AGW is dead. Now we have a real problem.”
I know Dirk is being sarcastic, but in reality with the death of AGW, we have a promising opportunity to better understand what controls & influences the Earth’s climate.
And likely that understanding will partly come by observation & measurement of the Sun – Earth phyiscal relationship:
A plasma physical relationship.
How does ocean water pile up in certain locations as shown in the graph? Are they sure the islands are not sinking as a result of the plate they are on going down?
Land rises and shrinks quite quickly, and certainly faster than the water level at the moment. When judging water rises, no one particular spot can be relied upon.
The Indian plate is sliding northeastwards at about 5 cm a year. That is pushing the Himalayas up, and much of India down. It would seem very likely that islands off Bangladesh are also sinking as a result of this action.
Of course the Dalton minimum is made more profound by the Tambora erruption… and the fact that it followed the maunder minimum (think thermal inertia of the oceans)
James F. Evans (20:15:44) :
And I do know the Sun is electrical in nature.
The dangerous things are the ones you know, but ain’t.
The Sun and the Universe are not electrical in nature. You can, of course, pretend they are and be happy with that. But spare us your pseudo-science.
UK Times: John Graham-Cumming: How I made the Met Office admit its climate-change data was wrong
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article7028418.ece
Well let me add to your troubles. The city I lived in and now live near, Toowoomba Australia, used to get (20 years ago) lots of fog, real thick peasoupers -not pollution, all water cloud at ground level. It was so characteristic that you knew the city limits by when you suddenly emerged from fog into clear air. Then the last 20 years, it simply disappeared. And the last year or so it has returned, but you can no longer tell the city limits, the fog overflows many miles into the country all around. Hey, if less fog in SF proves GW, then more fog in Toowoomba must prove GC, surely?
E.M.Smith wrote:
“No, it implies really really bad temperature data collection, archiving, processing, and very dodgy assumptions. Look out the window. See the snow. Think. Snow cold….”
Can’t help you. It’s balmy as hell here (Oregon). So you’re saying that all of the temperature measurements are wrong? Because you see snow outside?
” Now you get to wait a decade or two to suck all the heat stored in the ocean over the last 50 years into the air and radiate it off into space.”
If that were why the world is warming, then we should see a consistent pattern of the sea cooling during solar minimums and warming during solar maximums. As far as I know, there’s no data to support that.
“but until you can show me the ‘pipeline’ that all your supposed global warming trend is being stored up inside, I’ll stick with snow in 49 states and it being so cold that it’s Raining Iguanas in Florida as meaning that it’s cold.”
Warmest January on record. February on pace to be the warmest ever (http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/). It’s not AGW that has a problem explaining the observed data. But go ahead and keep muttering about snow. Delay, obfuscate . . . it’s what you do best.
MikeC (20:29:29) :
Of course the Dalton minimum is made more profound by the Tambora erruption… and the fact that it followed the maunder minimum (think thermal inertia of the oceans)
It also followed the period 1725-1795 where solar activity has even higher than it is today [1950-2000], so the thermal inertia from the maunder minimum must have ‘skipped over’ 1725-1795…
Two topics of discussion that came up on this thread are the carbon trading market and the shorter growing season and crop failures.
As far as the carbon market is concerned, many people have based their carriers and invested much in the trade of carbon credits world wide. These people will not go quietly int the good night. I feel sorry for them but they will go.
“In a sign of the uncertainty over emissions action and ebbed confidence in carbon markets following the Copenhagen climate conference, two firms in the sector have made gloomy stock exchange disclosures in recent days.
Listed carbon offset project developer Tricorona has revised down the valuation of its 2012 Kyoto carbon credit portfolio by 19 per cent, citing uncertainty over the future of the market and ongoing credits approval delays at the UN. The Swedish company, subject of a takeover bid, develops carbon offset projects under Kyoto’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) to generate CER credits that developed countries and their emitters can use to comply with emissions caps.”
Carbon assets hit in post-Copenhagen malaise
http://www.carbonpositive.net/viewarticle.aspx?articleID=1892
“SAN FRANCISCO (Dow Jones)–Days after Arizona pulled out of a western cap-and-trade market, Utah lawmakers were considering a proposal Friday to follow suit, potentially weakening the fledgling regional carbon market.
In an executive order signed last week, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, a Republican, rescinded the state's agreement to participate in the Western Climate Initiative cap-and-trade market, scheduled to start Jan. 1, 2012, citing concerns about the economy and the program's costs. On Friday, a Utah House panel passed a resolution asking the state's governor to do the same thing.
Carbon market participants said Arizona's departure could weaken the WCI's nascent regional cap-and-trade market, though it hasn't had any impact on the existing carbon market.”
Arizona Quits Western Cap-And-Trade Mkt; Utah Mulls Similar Move
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20100212-715151.html?mod=WSJ_World_MIDDLEHeadlinesAmericas
The end is near for the carbon(CO2) market. Many useless jobs will be lost.
As far as the coming crop failures we may do a little better but food shortages are predicted for this summer. This may trigger a run on food stocks in combination with an economic failure exacerbating the situation with people hording.
A lively discussion can be found on this recent blog post.
Food Shortage(s) Thread
http://goldismoney.info/forums/archive/index.php/t-439295.html
Others have had good information posted on this topic in the past.
What I am getting at by bringing these topics to the surface is we need to stop playing games. People’s livelihoods are being lost and great disruptions in food supplies have not been anticipated.
We need to quantify with boldness as best we can the effects of the solar cycles with the knowledge we have at hand. It is not a question of a quantitative effect of solar minimum on the climate, it is how much. Lives and livelihoods depend on some group of scientists getting it right and giving decent predictions. The predictions have been politicized to a point of insanity. This has to stop.
My best guess of the output looks like this [red curve]:
http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-LEIF.png
The ups and downs are on the order of 1/1000 of the whole.
Dr.Svalgaard, how do we know that your graph isn’t an attempt to “hide the decline” in TSI during the little ice age?
On a more serious note, I’m not doubting your data or methodology, but it is interesting that your measurements of TSI for the LIA period are significantly higher than Lean’s and Wang’s. People who are hoping to account for observed long-term variations in earth’s temperature by recourse to changes in TSI will be rather disheartened by your findings.
I get it. Whenever Leif Svalgaard says it ain’t science it’s voodoo.
[snip]
The Sun and the Universe are not electrical in nature, Great Leif mouthed.
How are we to respond to that? [snip]
Reply: Please maintain a respectful tone. And Leif, please try and phrase things in a manner not to illicit reactions of said tone. ~ ctm
wws (14:24:29) :
I know exactly what Harriban has got up his sleeve, as do we all. His side, the warmists, are losing badly and they know it! They see it all slipping away and they are desperately trying to negotiate a way out of their final political defeat!
NO ARMISTICE WHEN VICTORY IS AT HAND!!!
What would skeptics have to gain from an “armistice”, anyways? It would just be “you shut up while we stay in power and do whatever we want.” The warmists, after having been proved to be liars and frauds, are now going to promise to talk a little more nicely and cheat a little bit less and that is supposed to make everything hunky dory???
NO!
The IPCC must be DISBANDED it cannot be reformed!!! How about that for an “armistice”???
So you have a viper in a choke hold and it hisses “Just let me go – I promise to play fair from now on…”
Reminds me of the old parable of the scorpion and the frog REF: http://allaboutfrogs.org/stories/scorpion.html
The AGW movement is a suicidal movement that will take us all with it – best to keep the pressure up.
Thanx to Dr. Svalgaard and Tallbloke for their graphs and time.
Both point to a bit more energy from the sun from the 50’s to the noughties.
Though it looks like not very much. The journey continues….
TIm Groves (20:50:50) :
your measurements of TSI for the LIA period are significantly higher than Lean’s and Wang’s.
In the last 20 years the various reconstructions have slowly moved towards a common result, namely that the large variation from the Maunder Minimum to now did not take place. Although there are still some details that are being debated, the variation is now recognized to be less than 1 W/m2 [and I think much less, but will give other people the benefit of uncertainty].
People who are hoping to account for observed long-term variations in earth’s temperature by recourse to changes in TSI will be rather disheartened by your findings.
Indeed, and therefore [predictably] there is some resistance to be overcome. Solar physics has its own Hockey Stick [just look at the Figure at the top of this topic].
Leif Svalgaard (15:05:41) :
rbateman (13:28:55) :
“This is what the Mayans were so worried about for 2012: The world isn’t coming to an end, reason is coming to an end.”
Robert has a point there.
But I’d like to dispute it:
To be coming to an end, must not it have begun? Facts not in evidence… 😉
E.M.Smith (21:13:27) :
To be coming to an end, must not it have begun?
Seriously, I think the 18th and 19th centuries to have been ages of reason. This has now been lost.
Alexander Feht (21:05:56) :
[snip]
[snip]
Reply: Please maintain a respectful tone. And Leif, please try and phrase things in a manner not to illicit reactions of said tone. ~ ctm
I think people are themselves responsible for their tone.
“I heard on NPR how some islands off Bangledash were going under water because of Global Warming and sea level rise.”
Islands associated with river deltas have many different forces working on them. It may be overly simplistic to claim that they are disappearing due to a rise/change in sea level.
“How about the land getting very deeply saturated and heavy with precipitation. The added weight pushing down on the plates causing pressures to go up leading to more quakes/volcanoes?”
On the coast of Ecuador they have relatively mild earthquakes associated with the transition from dry to wet to dry seasons. The locals feel it is simple cause and effect, but I haven’t found “expert” confirmation.
Michael (20:48:06) :
“As far as the coming crop failures we may do a little better but food shortages are predicted for this summer”
This summer looks ok for India and China; sub-Saharan Africa looks touch and go as do some of the Pacific Rim Eastern countries, Europe and Western Asia looks ok too. Next summer, 201,1 may be a different story altogether, North America may be trading loaves of bread for EU carbon credits 1:1. Brazil may be asking for 2 credits per bag of sugar and India may no be exporting any rice. Yes, it could be really bad, depending on the weather, not the climate.
The famers need real honest information from their governments, and they need it now.
While the TSI has changed very little (only ~0.01% between the SC22-SC23 minimum to the current SC23-SC24 minimum) the effect on cosmic ray flux has been much more dramatic, with a 4% increase noted between the two minimums. Assuming the “Svensmark theory” is correct & data showing ~linear relationships between cosmic ray flux and cloud cover, and ~inverse linear relationship between global cloud cover and global temperature, seems that there is potentially compelling evidence that small changes in TSI can be “amplified” to much larger changes in radiative forcing.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2010/02/cosmic-rays-v-inverse-solar-magnetic.html
I am not disheartened. so let’s assume Leif’s 1 w/m2 is right. Pretty small. OK, the earth is round and it spins, so effective is even smaller, say 0.25 watts.
Now IPCC is claiming CO2 doubling = +3.7 watts/m2. But SO FAR it has only gone up 38%. Now its not a linear relationship, but for easy figuring let’s say that it’s about 1.4 watts. But we didnt just jump up from zero straight to 38%, we grew there. Again, not linear, but for rough figuring let’s say the average over time has been a contribution from CO2 since about 1920 to now of 0.7 watts.
Now I have a certain amount of faith in Leif’s conclusions about TSI variance, and a lot less (ok almost none) in the IPCC’s conclusions about CO2 contribution, but the point is that both numbers are in the same order of magnitude. But Leif’s Sun can penetreate up to 300 meters of ocean while the IPCC’s longwave from CO2 gets only two or three millimeters in and most likely gets picked up right away by evaporation into the atmosphere. So we’re talking about two very different energy transports with very different time constants that we don’t know for certain how to correlate. But don’t for a second believe that “only 1 watt” variance from TSI is insignificant in the long term.
Peter of Sydney (16:24:52) : Depending on what I read, a solar minimum coincides with lower than average temperatures or higher than average temperatures. Which is it?
I can answer that. The answer is “Yes”.
(It depends on what assumptions you make about things like time delays, solar / volcanic coupling, etc. In other words: “Given these conclusions what assumptions can we draw?” )
Robert (17:03:34) : It’s an extremely weak forcing, and it doesn’t last long (the typical cycle in 11 years or so.)
Robert, please tell me: What are the S.I. units for “Forcing”?
I keep trying to find out what physical units a “forcing” is in, but have failed horridly. If it’s not S.I., I’m ok with Imperial or even American Traditional units. (I just find it easier to understand the physics if I can figure out if the units are ‘degree-seconds/ton’ or ‘watt-newtons/cm’ or even ‘furlongs / fortnight’ … but lacking any units for “forcing” I can’t figure out what it is or what physics it represents or if it’s just a made up farcical unit… )
Thanks!
Mark Sawusch (21:35:02) :
the effect on cosmic ray flux has been much more dramatic, with a 4% increase noted between the two minimums.
For well-understood reasons [drift of cosmic rays in opposite polarity magnetic fields] there is a systematic difference between minima, with every second minimum being a bit lower than the ones on either side. In the long run, there has been no trend in cosmic ray intensity as far back as we have good direct measurements [to ~1950]. See slides 7 and 8 of http://www.leif.org/research/Historical%20Solar%20Cycle%20Context.pdf
davidmhoffer (21:41:57) :
But don’t for a second believe that “only 1 watt” variance from TSI is insignificant in the long term.
A 1 Watt difference in TSI would indeed raise the temperature a very significant 0.05K.
E.M.Smith (20:08:02) :
“…I’ll stick with snow in 49 states and it being so cold that it’s Raining Iguanas in Florida as meaning that it’s cold…”
I remember that. Too funny. BTW, your write up made a lot more sense to me that the AGU Fall 2009 video.
Thanks.
Robert (20:38:10) : (To E. M. Smith) … Delay, obfuscate . . . it’s what you do best.
Whereas your particular skill seems to be sophistry, Robert; and well honed, too. As I read your comments my conscious mind is nodding “Yes, yes!” whilst my subconscious mind is flagging, in red, “Caution! Caution! You’re being had.“
Roger Carr (19:17:26) : However, when I look at this quote from the article you linked to I feel despair:
“Present-day scientists do their studies by measurements and experiments. [Australian] Aboriginal people are just as good scientists, but they use observation and experience,” Bodkin, a botanist at Sydney’s Mount Annan Botanical gardens, told Reuters.
Why on earth would that cause you despair?
“Experience” is just observation of experiments done by the planet all around you all the time. Like Darwin observing the different birds et. al. of the Galapagos or the drug industry looking at native wisdom that chewing willow bark relieved pain (aspirin) or that a South American tree relieved malaria symptoms (quinine) or that foxglove was useful for heart problems (digitalis). ( or a few thousand others…)
ANYONE can know more than you do about the thing they observe most.
Sidebar: I once observed “The Law of Mutual Superiority” up close and personal one day at Armadillo Willies BBQ shop. Buddy and I order the same thing, but he drinks diet coke and I drink full sugar. Order is called. We walk up. Harried minimum wage guy behind the counter points at food for pickup. I ask “Which is the DIET coke?”. He gets the “Oh God a Question” look. Looks at glasses. Fingers one. “That One”. Not believing it, I ask “How do you know?”. He says: “Foam is gone. Foam lasts longer on regular coke.”
So here was someone who was an Expert at serving Coke. He had observed a (reasonable in retrospect) property to which I had been oblivious. He was my Master when it came to Coke foam. We are all superior to each other in something…
So take a people with a 50,000 year oral tradition (and a language and culture that lends itself well to preservation of oral tradition in a place where if you don’t know what frog is full of water 2 feet under the desert you die when the once every lifetime drouth hits…) and I’m quite comfortable with the notion that they just might know more than I do about that thing they have spent several thousand years observing very very closely…
Just like a several hundred year (at least) oral tradition was passed on to me by my Dad when he showed me how to judge tempering of iron / steel by color temperature after a quench… That Smith thing… and the other Smiths who figured out that a quench in urine gave a very hard edge (nitriding the surface) or the Jungle Smiths from somewhere (Papua?) who had an edge hardening technique from sinking a blade into a melon. The edge quenches fast and hard (stays sharp) while the spine stays softer from a slow quench thanks to the mellon being far away giving a blade that does not break easily.
Science is NOT about lab coats and Ph.D. exams, nor even Mr. Popper. It is about open eyes, open minds, keen observation, and never letting your prejudice prevent you from seeing what the data (observations) have to say. Then not forgetting it.
The first Smith to pee on a blade and observe that the hardness and temper was better than anything he had made before is just as good and just as valid a scientist as any other. And an Aboriginal observer of flower patterns as weather predictors is a better scientist than the folks doing climate computer fantasy games, IMHO.
They are certainly more accurate and make better predictions of future outcomes. And their theories are falsifiable …
E.M.Smith (21:53:36) : “What are the S.I. units for “Forcing”?
Watts per meter squared
Leif Svalgaard (20:47:20) :
MikeC (20:29:29) :
Of course the Dalton minimum is made more profound by the Tambora erruption… and the fact that it followed the maunder minimum (think thermal inertia of the oceans)
Leif Svalgaard (20:47:20) :
It also followed the period 1725-1795 where solar activity has even higher than it is today [1950-2000], so the thermal inertia from the maunder minimum must have ’skipped over’ 1725-1795…
Hi Leif
I looked at the solar activity for this period of time and it appears that you exagerrated your point because only one or two of the cycles may have reached that strength for 70 year period you suggested, so I certainly would wonder about thermal inertia of the oceans. Given the small change in TSI between minimum and maximum I’m not sure if the oceans would warm up that much in such a short period of time… over several cycles, yes, possibly.
Have you or anyone you know calculated how much heat the oceans absorb or release (or what the equalibrium would be) at different points in the solar cycle or its phases? I recall Foukal left this open in 2006.
wws: “What would skeptics have to gain from an “armistice”, anyways?”
A place at the table, perhaps.
Interestingly, Harribin ends his article by mentioning uncertainty and risk in relation to calculations about climate. These considerations could also apply to his armistice offer.
Keeping with the war metaphor, if the AGW fortress is corrupt and rotten to the core, and the inhabitants demoralised by an acute sense of guilt and wrongdoing, the strategy would be to keep pushing at the breach until there’s a decisive breakthrough followed by a satisfying slaughter.
On the other hand, if the edifice is basically sound and battle-proof, and the inhabitants, although somewhat shaken, are steeled by a consciousness of injured virtue, a breakthrough would be much less likely, and the besiegers would face a war of attrition.
These uncertainties and risks would be magnified by the attitude of supporters. An armistice might be viewed as a betrayal by some, an opportunity by others.
Whichever way it goes, we are living through what historians call a “watershed” moment. It won’t last for long, though, or at least not at this intensity.
Watts per square meter.
Oh, I’m sorry, did you think that question didn’t have an answer? How embarrassing.
Leif Svalgaard (20:31:49) presented Evans statement (20:15:44): “And I do know the Sun is electrical in nature.”
Dr. Svalgaard responded: “The dangerous things are the ones you know, but ain’t. The Sun and the Universe are not electrical in nature. You can, of course, pretend they are and be happy with that. But spare us your pseudo-science.”
The scientific evidence of the Sun’s electrical nature is significant based on the scientifically observed & measured plasma dynamics of the Sun. What causes that electrical nature of the Sun is subject to discussion & debate.
Of course, Dr. Svalgaard offers no scientific evidence or rational. All Dr. Svalgaard offers is personal characterization which readers are supposed to accept based on his presumed authority.
That kind of response has no scientific merit.
This answer does have scientific merit because it relies on observation & measurement as reported in scientific papers.
Here are some papers that suggest at least part of the “community” understand that the Sun is a plasmoid — Plasma-Magnetic-Enity:
“Generation of large scale electric fields in coronal flare circuits”
Submission August 6, 2009
“A large number of energetic electrons are generated during solar flares. They carry a substantial part of the flare released energy but how these electrons are created is not fully understood yet. This paper suggests that plasma motion in an active region in the photosphere is the source of large electric currents. These currents can be described by macroscopic circuits. Under special circumstances currents can establish in the corona along magnetic field lines. The energy released by these currents when moderate assumptions for the local conditions are made, is found be comparable to the flare energy.”
http://arxiv.org/abs/0908.0813
To highlight:
“This paper suggests that plasma motion in an active region in the photosphere is the source of large electric currents.”
And another scientific paper:
“Driving Currents for Flux Rope Coronal Mass Ejections”
Submitted on 23 Oct 2008
“We present a method for measuring electrical currents enclosed by flux rope structures that are ejected within solar coronal mass ejections (CMEs). Such currents are responsible for providing the Lorentz self-force that propels CMEs. Our estimates for the driving current are based on measurements of the propelling force obtained using data from the LASCO coronagraphs aboard the SOHO satellite. We find that upper limits on the currents enclosed by CMEs are typically around $10^{10}$ Amperes. We estimate that the magnetic flux enclosed by the CMEs in the LASCO field of view is a few $\times 10^{21}$ Mx.”
http://arxiv.org/abs/0810.4210
To highlight:
“We present a method for measuring electrical currents enclosed by flux rope structures that are ejected within solar coronal mass ejections (CMEs).”
And further, as reported in this NOAA press release:
“NOAA Scientist Finds Clue to Predicting Solar Flares
January 19, 2010”
“The long-sought clue to prediction lies in changes in twisting magnetic fields beneath the surface of the sun in the days leading up to a flare, according to the authors. The findings will be published in Astrophysical Journal Letters next month.”
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2010/20100119_solarflare.html
“…twisting magnetic fields…” is consistent with the filamentation and flow of electrical currents as discussed in the two previous scientific papers reporting observations & measurements of coronal mass ejections (CME’s).
And is consistent with this report of the shape of CME’s:
As reported by NASA: The Surprising Shape of Solar Storms:
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/14apr_3dcme.htm
“April 14, 2009: This just in: The Sun is blasting the solar system with croissants.”
“Researchers studying data from NASA’s twin STEREO probes have found that ferocious solar storms called CMEs (coronal mass ejections) are shaped like a French pastry. The elegance and simplicity of the new ‘croissant model’ is expected to dramatically improve forecasts of severe space weather.”
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/14apr_3dcme.htm
NASA goes on:
“Vourlidas says he is not surprised that CMEs resemble French pastries. ‘I have suspected this all along. The croissant shape is a natural result of twisted magnetic fields on the sun…'”
The same magnetic fields as was identified as electrical current in the two above linked scientific paper abstracts.
And NASA goes further:
“That’s how CMEs get started—as twisted ropes of solar magnetism. When the energy in the twist reaches some threshold, there is an explosion which expels the CME away from the sun. It looks like a croissant because the twisted ropes are fat in the middle and thin on the ends.”
“Twisted magnetic flux ropes” is how Birkeland currents are described and Birkeland currents are electrical currents.
Charles Bruce, an electrical engineer and astronomer, identified cosmic jets, solar flares, magnetic fields and high temperatures in space as electrical discharge phenomena.
“And even if one regards the electric fields as merely another postulate, it has the great advantage that it is the one postulate which, in my view, renders all the others unnecessary.” — C. E. R Bruce, Electric Fields in Space, Penguin Science, 1968
Now, read what NASA has to say:
“The sun,” explains Guhathakurta, “is a variable star.”
And:
“SDO is going to revolutionize our view of the sun.” — Lika Guhathakurta of NASA headquarters in Washington DC
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2010/05feb_sdo.htm
And NASA goes on to state:
“‘Solar constant’ is an oxymoron,” says Judith Lean of the Naval Research Lab. “Satellite data show that the sun’s total irradiance rises and falls with the sunspot cycle by a significant amount.”
“At solar maximum, the sun is about 0.1% brighter than it is at solar minimum. That may not sound like much, but consider the following: A 0.1% change in 1361 W/m2 equals 1.4 Watts/m2. Averaging this number over the spherical Earth and correcting for Earth’s reflectivity yields 0.24 Watts for every square meter of our planet.”
“Add it all up and you get a lot of energy,” says Lean. “How this might affect weather and climate is a matter of—at times passionate—debate.”
Yes, indeed.
There is plenty of scientific evidence which suggests the Sun is a plasmoid: Plasma – Magnetic – Enity.
And, the Sun is electrical in nature.
Re Leif Svalgaard (13:40:17)
:geo (13:08:57) :
Someone remind me why we believe we know sunspot records in detail further than a few hundred years back?
Leif :”Solar activity influences the amount of cosmic rays reaching the Earth. The cosmic rays produce radioactive nuclei that we can measure the concentration of in old trees and in deep ice cores in Greenland and Antarctica”
I know pathetically little about cosmic rays, but have a few questions I hope are not over silly. What else affects the cosmic rays on earth, the earth’s variable magnetism? : releatively more and less dense flows of background cosmic rays due to our galatic location?, etc, and do we know the relative strgenth and timing of the ebb and flow of these other factors that may influence the amount of cosmic rays reaching the earth accurately, so that we may quantify the relatively short solar cycle against these other factors?
Thanks in advance, PS, asking Leif a question is like talking to Dr Laura, probably masochistic. (-:
Robert (20:38:10) :
E.M.Smith wrote:
“No, it implies really really bad temperature data collection, archiving, processing, and very dodgy assumptions. Look out the window. See the snow. Think. Snow cold….”
Can’t help you. It’s balmy as hell here (Oregon).
Ah, near the big Pacific Ocean, so near the warm blob headed north in our Lava Lamp world. So you expect the world to be Oregon. Fine. I don’t expect it to be California… WE are near the warm headed north. Lucky us.
So you’re saying that all of the temperature measurements are wrong? Because you see snow outside?
Well, no. I’m in the warm bubble too. But I can see a bigger world than the warm bubble on the west coast of north America.
Yet still, two things you conflate.
1) The hypothetical world; where I to your question responded.
2) The real world where our temperature recording stations are very poorly sited and a bad environment exists http://www.surfacestations.org documents nicely this effect. Further, the NCDC GHCN is badly run and the models made from it such as GIStemp and CRUT are poor in the extreme.
” Now you get to wait a decade or two to suck all the heat stored in the ocean over the last 50 years into the air and radiate it off into space.”
If that were why the world is warming, then we should see a consistent pattern of the sea cooling during solar minimums and warming during solar maximums. As far as I know, there’s no data to support that.
Patience grasshopper. Did you not the “decades” word see? In 2020 a cooling sea will you see in our hypothetical world. And our sea has warmed, per the warmers, during our now past 50 year warming sun. So wait you must, for decades to pass. In fact, the model presented would suggest that, though the world stopped warming in 1998, it will take longer for the ocean to ‘catch up’ to the land (the now cold and snow covered land…) So lag times you must consider, and boats in 1500 did not so many thermometers carry…
“but until you can show me the ‘pipeline’ that all your supposed global warming trend is being stored up inside, I’ll stick with snow in 49 states and it being so cold that it’s Raining Iguanas in Florida as meaning that it’s cold.”
Warmest January on record. February on pace to be the warmest ever
Clearly you did not understand words I have spoken… It is the “warmest ever” yet raining Iguanas in Florida, freezing children in Peru, trains buried in snow in China, snow in the mountains of Australia in the summer, snow on the coast – the Mediterranean coast – of France, ALL 49 continental states of the USA with snowfall, UK covered in snow, Russia frozen, Canada Frozen, China FROZEN, snow in Southern Brazil… Let me say it again for your clarity to grasp:
“No, it implies really really bad temperature data collection, archiving, processing, and very dodgy assumptions. ”
Perhaps even to thinking that warm ocean might cover more AREA yet still have net HEAT loss to space since TEMPERATURE is the WRONG measure. You are counting your pennies yet not seeing the dollars…
Delay, obfuscate . . . it’s what you do best.
I delay nothing. I obfuscate nothing.
I open my eyes and see.
I ask “What is?”
AGW is not.
Cold is.
E.M.Smith (22:37:54) : (to me) Why on earth would that cause you despair?
Because, Michael, they are not scientists, they are everyday man observing “chewing willow bark relieved pain (aspirin)“. To claim they are just as good scientists is to demean them, and, by extension, demean scientists.
That sentence I quoted is simply the noble savage myth of PC. Once we were all savages. As many of us today observe and wonder as we did in the past.
It is the promotion of noble savage man as the true fountain of knowledge still today which causes my despair; and much of the considerable damage to civilisation inflicted by the green religion.
Leif,
I think you will agree with this quote:
See article of James Marusek (14 February 2010) on website ICECAP:
This solar minimum is rather unusual. If we define a period of quiet sun as those months that produced an Ap index of 6 or less and compare the total number of quiet months within each solar minimum, then the results would be:
Minimum Preceding Solar Cycle Number of Months with Ap Index of 6 or less
SC17 11 months
SC18 2 months
SC19 2 months
SC20 5 months
SC21 0 months
SC22 0 months
SC23 3 months
SC24 25 months and counting
His statement is that when the sun gets extremely quiet, the world experiences great cold periods referred to as the Little Ice Ages. I should only answer: “Wait and see!”
“Ah, near the big Pacific Ocean, so near the warm blob headed north in our Lava Lamp world. So you expect the world to be Oregon. Fine. I don’t expect it to be California… WE are near the warm headed north. Lucky us.”
That is what the psychologists call “projection.” You are elevating anecdote above thousands and thousands of standardized temperature measures and two sets of satellite data. You asked me what the weather was here, and I told you. Sorry it doesn’t fit your fantasy of a cold world.
You continue on with your patronizing nonsense, managing only to convey that you really don’t understand the science, but believe in the power of your blind faith over objective reality (“AGW is not.”) Sorry, the data says otherwise. There’s not really that much more to say. Let me know when you get a church and a pastor for your religion; I’ll light a candle and say a prayer for your neglected critical thinking skills.
Michael (20:48:06) : As far as the carbon market is concerned, many people have based their carriers and invested much in the trade of carbon credits world wide. These people will not go quietly int the good night. I feel sorry for them but they will go.
“Carbon Trading” is toast. It isn’t even a mention on trader show, boards, etc. It was (briefly) a ‘maybe future thing’ topic, now it’s not even ‘dead air’.
At this point I’d short carbon futures, except they are already so close to zero that even a short trade is pointless. Not only has it been shorted into oblivion, but the shorts have covered and gone home!
At this point it is rather like a bankrupt company trading for $0.0001 / share. The folks buying are the bond holders who want to assure enough votes at the bankruptcy hearing for “liquidate to the bond holders”…
The end is near for the carbon(CO2) market. Many useless jobs will be lost.
It’s already dead, Jim…
As far as the coming crop failures we may do a little better but food shortages are predicted for this summer. This may trigger a run on food stocks in combination with an economic failure exacerbating the situation with people hording.
As I’ve pointed out before…
We live in incredibly affluent times. NOT eating a pound of beef means you have 10 pounds of corn and soybeans to eat. The beef is “wet” and the grain is “dry”, so that 10 pounds of grain becomes about 30 pounds after you hydrate it in cooking (conservative estimate… really it’s 1 cup to 2 cups ratio but the 1 cup is whole grains so about 1/2 the density of the 2 cups of water liquid… in reality there is a 1:60 mass ratio but even that is a bit conservative…)
So the losers will be the cows and pigs and chickens in any natural disaster. We will eat them and then we will eat their feed…
It isn’t a production problem, it’s a distribution problem. I will not skip the 1/4 pounder with cheese at lunch so that somebody in Sudan can have 2.5 pounds of grain and live for a week. (Nor would their government let the food reach them if I did skip the burger…) So I’m not particularly worried about ‘food shortage’ globally.
But with that said, it is also prudent to have food set aside. I grew up in a Mormon town and they had a cultural experience with famine. They also remembered the Biblical admonition to prepare for 7 years of famine. It is still good advice. (I’ve used my ‘food storage system’ several times. From job loss to earthquakes to just being too lazy to go to the store. It is a Very Good Idea. No matter who you are and no matter what you believe.) If you want to know a trivial way to “be prepared” see here:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/04/06/food-storage-systems/
And even if you are a “warmer” please be prepared. I’d like someone to argue with after The Bad Thing happens 😉 be it too hot or too cold…
I’ve put far more attention on that topic than it deserves. So you can know that when I say things like “this survived a 7.2 quake” or “lentils will store for 16 years but peas are too hard to eat after 2 years” I’ve actually done it.
Oh, and if there is any interest in ‘recipes for stored food’ just drop a comment on my blog and I’ll start a thread. I’m something of a ‘foodie” and I’ve got several good recipes for ‘storage food’. Just because it’s a disaster, that doesn’t mean you can’t eat well 😉
Sidebar: After the Loma Prieta 7.2 quake in California I was running a cheese and wine ‘affair’ at my place with 2 generators on standby and satellite TV coverage from out of the area (local stations were down). I guess it’s a California Thing… but it just didn’t seem right to call it “survival” when we could do “Brie, Cheddar and Zinfandel” instead 😉
Yes, we had a “Quake Party!!”.. Friends from several miles away came over until we could figure out what was going to happen next and who would have power. (Though power came back before we could start the BBQ… talk about your buzz kill..)
Hey, I did have the day off after I sent everyone home and said don’t come back for 3 days minimum, wait until aftershocks are done. No kidding.
Really. Look, we just don’t “DO” disaster in California. Yah know? No, honest. Really. I was most worried because I couldn’t keep the whites chilled unless I started up the big generator and it made too much noise…
I’m not making this any better, am I?…
People’s livelihoods are being lost and great disruptions in food supplies have not been anticipated.
OK, back to “buzz kill” land. Yes, the biggest issue I see is that we’ve gone to “just in time” inventory for grains world wide. This means that we have about 3 months of food “in the pipeline” and then nothing. We have NO preparation for a ‘bad year”. The implicit assumption is that a ‘crop failure’ is a local weather event in Australia or Ukraine. And that’s fine, unless we have a global weather driven event.
EXACTLY the same thing that did in the Maya and the Romans and the …
So it really really is a good thing to go buy $10 of rice and $20 of lentils and put it in jars. And do that again next month. And the month after that.
You will get good at making “Lentil Chili” and “Fried Rice with Spam” over the years. (don’t laugh! fried rice made with Spam is actually quite good… ask the Hawaiians!)
And if what happened a dozen times before happens, you will not perish. And if it does not happen, you will eat well and comfortably and have “no worries” during some local regional “Aw Shit” that happens… even if it is just a job loss.
Graeme From Melbourne (21:06:10) : The warmists, after having been proved to be liars and frauds, are now going to promise to talk a little more nicely and cheat a little bit less and that is supposed to make everything hunky dory?
Oddly enough, there is a parallel with the Profit Mohammed and a ‘truce’. He called a truce when losing, so that his side could regroup, restock, and re-arm. Remember this lesson. A “truce” is so that the loser can regroup… so they can win later…
The AGW movement is a suicidal movement that will take us all with it – best to keep the pressure up.
I prefer to be an Aikido stylist if possible. If your opponent is suicidal, do not oppose them. Ask how you can help?… Join with their flow, then you can direct it. At that moment, step aside and let them go as they wish…
The “problem” is that they have determined to hold us all by the throat as they leap off the cliff… so we must break that grasp while offering encouragement to their end…
Could someone explain to me & anyone else who may feel likewise, why is there a tendency for some to think that if something happens on the Sun, there is an instantaneous reaction down here on Earth? (Flares excepted). I would suspect there is a delay of months & even years before anything happened on Earth, & direct effects even impossible to detect as yet.
Re: Ron House (Feb 15 20:35),
Careful Ron, you and Toowoomba could end up getting reparation demands from San Fransico – you got their fog!
Leif Svalgaard (21:20:34) : edit
E.M.Smith (21:13:27) :
To be coming to an end, must not it have begun?
Seriously, I think the 18th and 19th centuries to have been ages of reason. This has now been lost.
Oh, OK, if you must be ‘serious’ then yes, I too believe that the 18th and 19th centuries beat us all to (self snip!) as ages of reason. But I don’t know how to fix it other than banning TV (that will not happen). So, we are all doomed to ignorance… or at least bound to it… (no, no smiley… on this Leif and I unfortunately agree… ) as time progresses and we ‘evolve’ into mediocrity…
There must be a better answer..
I see that Leif Svalgaard has appointed himself as the sheep-dog whose job it is to ride herd over intellectual debate, making sure that no-one strays too far from his picture of the universe.
In Leif’s Universe, TSI is the only significant way for the Sun, or any other body or process that is external to the Earth, can significantly influence the Earth’s temperature. Leifs belief that the TSI has only varied slightly between the Maunder minimum and the present then allows him to claim that (sustained) reduced solar activity will not lead to decreased world temperatures.
The spanner in the works of Leif’s picture of the Universe, is the
possibility that there may [and I stress may] be other processes that Leif
has not considered which could indirectly link the level of solar activity and
the Earth’s climate.
However, as a sophist, Leif Svalgaard will spend little time admitting that he might (just possibly) be wrong, and most of his time trying to obscure the essence of the debate by pointing to some subtle interpretation of one or possibly two words of the post of the person who holds him to account.
Mark Sawusch (22:45:52) : edit
E.M.Smith (21:53:36) : “What are the S.I. units for “Forcing”?
Watts per meter square
Great!
So when someone says “0.04 % CO2 increase has lead to a 2000 percent increase in the forcing” I can somehow translate that into 2000% increase in W/M^2 ?
OK, I’ll keep that in mind and apply it to every time “forcing” is used.
For example:
Robert (12:35:12) : doesn’t that suggest the presence of a large non-solar forcing [watts / M^2 ] which is warming the planet in spite of the slight fall in irradiance?
Oh, drat. Perhaps you can explain where these watts/M^2 came from as the solar W/M^2 of solar irradiance were dropping? I seem to have misplaced where they came from.. IFF the solar watts/M^2 are dropping where are these non-solar watts/M^2 coming from?
Or:
Robert (13:20:48) : It remains to be seen whether this unusually long and deep solar minimum, which coincided with the warmest decade on record, is anything other than a blip. Even if it persists, there’s no reason to think it will be remotely as powerful a forcing as GHGs
So ‘remotely as powerful a watts/ m^2 as GHG” … Pardon? Do GHG have a measured “watts/m^2” ?? What is the w/m^2 of, oh, Argon or freon? I didn’t see that in my CRC Handbook…
Perhaps you could elaborate?
I’d really like to be able to put a 1 mm blanket of Argon, freon, methane or CO2 on my ceiling and have some “watts/M^2” from them so can stop paying my heating bill.
This is just such an exciting prospect, I can hardly contain myself. Just think, a few mm blanket of CO2 with it’s “Watts/M^2” and we can all sleep comfortably for generations!
Surely our saviour is at hand!
Mark Sawusch (21:35:02) : While the TSI has changed very little (only ~0.01% between the SC22-SC23 minimum to the current SC23-SC24 minimum) the effect on cosmic ray flux has been much more dramatic,
…, seems that there is potentially compelling evidence that small changes in TSI can be “amplified” to much larger changes in radiative forcing.
Ok, so while the TSI in W/M^2 is dropping, the radiative “W/M^2” is somehow increasing?!
WoW! Please elaborate! WHERE do these added W/M^2 come from?
Re E.M.Smith (02:06:57) :
I am concerned to agree with both of you, perhaps our politics, journalism, and spin technologies grew a little faster then our science,
Robert (23:04:00) : Watts per square meter.
Oh, I’m sorry, did you think that question didn’t have an answer? How embarrassing.
Oh, I’m sorry, did you think that the question did have an answer without consequences? how embarrassing…
“And any cooling may depend [as it did back then] on suitable volcanic eruptions:”
Which volcanic activity will be more proof, in itself, of a grand minimum. First barrage should be following aa, ap upturn.
Regarding 20th century solar activity, this chart:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Solar_Activity_Proxies.png
suggests from Be10 that the activity was higher than the preceding centuries.
What’s wrong with this?
MikeC (22:54:19) :
I looked at the solar activity for this period of time and it appears that you exagerrated your point because only one or two of the cycles may have reached that strength for 70 year period you suggested
‘solar activity’: there are several sunspot numbers floating around. Figure 11 in http://www.leif.org/research/Heliospheric%20Magnetic%20Field%201835-2009.pdf shows several reconstructions of the Heliospheric Magnetic Field since 1700. We take that as a better representation of solar activity than the raw sunspot numbers [which were under-counted early on]. The purple dashed curve shows Steinhilber et al.’s values. Compare 1725-1800 with 1950-2000.
James F. Evans (23:06:34) :
1361 W/m2 … And, the Sun is electrical in nature.
I see, the light bulb in my office lamb says ‘120 Watt’ on it and must be ‘electrical’ in nature. The Sun also radiates ‘Watts’, so is clearly also electrical in nature.
Material flowing across solar magnetic field lines generates electrical currents that quickly dissipates in various explosive ways. Same thing happens near the Earth. The presence of such events does not make anything ‘electrical in nature’ as they are just short-lived consequences, rather than fundamental constituents. You something mentioned that 99.9% of the Universe is electrically neutral plasma. This is incorrect, only 4.4% of the Universe is baryonic and capable of even being a plasma.
David (23:45:29) :
What else affects the cosmic rays on earth, the earth’s variable magnetism? […] so that we may quantify the relatively short solar cycle against these other factors?
The primary factor is the Earth’s main dipole field that changes slowly over thousands of years. The solar modulation is but a small fraction of that. http://www.leif.org/research/CosmicRays-GeoDipole.jpg shows how the cosmic ray intensity has varied over the past 10,000 years. The little wiggles on the curve are due to solar activity.
E.M.Smith (02:06:57) :
So, we are all doomed to ignorance… or at least bound to it… (no, no smiley… on this Leif and I unfortunately agree… ) as time progresses and we ‘evolve’ into mediocrity…
There must be a better answer..
I don’t know the answer. We must combat unreason and pseudo-science whenever they raise their heads.
Ninderthana (02:44:43) :
Leif Svalgaard will spend little time admitting that he might (just possibly) be wrong
Almost anything will turn out to be wrong eventually. The problem is when we act on things that are wrong already.
E. M. Smith @ 22:37:54
‘We are all superior to each other in something’. You said a mouthful, there. I’ve yet to meet the person who can’t teach me anything.
=====================================
E.M. Smith,
“WoW! Please elaborate! WHERE do these added W/M^2 come from?”
Willis Eschenbach wrote an excellent article called “The Steel Greenhouse,” which I think holds the key to the question of where this extra flux comes from. He uses the idea of a steel shell surrounding a hypothetical planet to model the way greenhouse gases work. In this thought experiment, the planet is warmed not by the sun, but by some internal heat source. For arguments sake, imagine that the planet reaches equilibrium, without the steel shell, where it radiates 235 w/m^2 into space.
Next, he imagines the steel shell is added around the planet at an altitude of several thousand metres. To maintain equilibrium, the whole system must sill radiate at 235 W/m^2. To do this, the steel shell must warm until it radiates at 235 W/m^2. Because the shell has an inside and outside, it must also radiate at 235 W/m^2 downwards towards the planetary surface. The surface is now being heated by 235 W/m^2 from the interior and 235 W/m^2 from the shell, giving a total of 470 W/m^2.
This elegant model caused some confusion among readers, including myself, because of the “problem” of accounting for this extra radiation flux. After all, the internal energy from the interior, the only heat source, hasn’t changed, so this seemed like energy being created out of nothing. But as Willis explained, this is not the case, since the system as a whole, is still radiating at the same 235 W/m^2 into space. The radiating surface has simply moved to a point above the surface, while the “surface” is now “inside” this new system.
My own way of trying to come to terms with this apparant sleight of hand is to imagine the energy as quantas flowing second by second from a m^2. In 1 second, a 235 packet radiates outwards and 235 Joules radiates back down into that area. In the next second this combines with another 235 Joules from the interior making 470 Joules. This extra 235 Joules has not come out of nowhere. It was the 235 realeased in the previous second from the interior but has radiated back downwards.
The same logic applies to greenhouse gases. The extra watt comes from energy that was radiated from the ground in the first place, and is combined with it to make what some people are pleased to call by the misleading term “forcing”.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/17/the-steel-greenhouse/
Jim Cross (04:02:43) :
suggests from Be10 that the activity was higher than the preceding centuries.
What’s wrong with this?
Different ice cores give different results and climate itself influences the deposition. A very recent reconstruction is likely better. Look at Figure 7 of http://www.leif.org/EOS/2009JA014193.pdf
Robert (00:38:24) : You are elevating anecdote above thousands and thousands of standardized temperature measures and two sets of satellite data.
If you only had a clue how poor those “standardized measures” are…
http://www.surfacestations.org
But it is your “hypothetical world” we are discussing, not mine. In my world we have a terrible poverty of well proven and well vetted data. In my wold we ‘have no clue’ what the global average temperature is… and even less clue if it means anything.
It was not me who asked (with a non proven predicate): “doesn’t that suggest the presence of a large non-solar forcing” (watts/m^2) “which is warming the planet in spite of the slight fall in irradiance?”
Said W/M^2 being no where to be found as the world cools… and as the only source of W/M^2 being shown to become lower.
You asked me what the weather was here, and I told you. Sorry it doesn’t fit your fantasy of a cold world.
Um, I don’t remember (nor did a check of my comments up thread show any evidence of) my ever asking “what the weather was here”. Sorry. I really do not care. And what it is where you, or I, live is of little relevance. You have leapt off a cliff of conclusion here where I will not follow.
That we are both under the “hot blob of ‘near the ocean warmed’ air headed north” does confirm my description of how I would expect the “fantasy world” to work, but you also seem to have missed my many disclaimers that this was a ‘hypothetical world’. And while it may have strong similarities to The Real World, it lacks a causal mechanism, so must remain “hypothetical world”.
But since you missed them, let me repeat them here:
“First one has to accept the premise ( “The Sun Did It” ) that is not shown to be true, but accept it for argument we will…”
“Even in temperature movements. So, I’m even going to postulate that the “noughties” were hot (something that I do not agree with generally – they remind me of what my Dad and other “old folks at home” described the ’20s and ’30s as being, though milder and less hot than then.) But lets assume it WAS hot. And lets assume it IS solar driven. And lets assume the sun has reduced it’s output in such a manner as to change heat at the earth (also not shown, though widely surmised). ”
So as much as you want to assert I’ve embraced those premises, I’ve only said that while they are not in evidence, they are needed for your argument, so we can accept them for your point to be debated.
So please, when I’ve specifically disclaimed a belief in the model world that is the underpinning of your argument, do not assert that I BELIEVE in it.
Sorry, the data says otherwise.
The “data” are horridly distorted, cooked, and flat out unavailable for any rational statement about what is or is not happening. That is why all the disclaimers about “Hypothetical World” had to be said. We simply do not, and can not, know if we are warming. THE best evidence (long lived unadjusted thermometers) says we are not, that it is a normal cyclical pattern and we are about as warm now as we were during the 1720’s (but not as warm as we were 5300 year ago when green plants grew under what are now glaciers in the Peru mountain peaks (carbon 14 dated) or when The Ice Man culture walked passes in the Swiss Alps (also carbon 14 dated) that have been iced over ever since) but there is not enough data to say for certain.
So you may wish to leap off a cliff of conclusion. I do not.
All we really know is that it has been both warmer and cooler than now in the past, and that in a “few thousand years” it will be a new ice age. Beyond that is speculation. And the AGW meme is speculation of an extreme sort.
There’s not really that much more to say.
Yet the warmers keep saying it, no matter how poorly supported, over and over again.
Let me know when you get a church and a pastor for your religion
I have no religion. A fact that causes my very religious spouse much distress. (I do have a Doctor of Divinity degree so I can put DD after my name. It cost me $20 … and I do ponder such things as the meaning of truth and of life) but no, I have no “church” and do not expect to ever find one. I have one goal in life. Truth. My only Church is the Church of Truth. Nothing else matters to me. Not money, and not even life itself. We all die, so life is only a process to an end. In the end, all that matters is how you got there. For me, learning what truth there is, is the only process that matters. The only “sin” in my personal “church” is to not be true to truth.
And the very blatant truth is that in the 1800 era we had no satellites so we have no way of knowing if the seas were warm when the land was frozen (though there are some interesting proxies). In 1600 even less so and in 400 not at all. We are but fleas on the planet.
So the Roman Warm Period was very warm On Land. And the Greek period was cold On Land. And 5200 years ago it was very hot On Land when Utze fell in a Swiss pass to be covered by newly fallen snow for 5200 years and when the Maya wrote of a great deluge to come in 5200 years and as the Peruvian Ice Cap formed over green plants that are only now being exposed as the glacier melts back too a point not as far melted as it was then. And the Iron Age cold period was colder while the Medieval Warm Period was warmer.
And so the cycle of life has turned.
Yet some folks want to assert that all of that history does not exist. That the sun did it, or that the sun did not do it. That CO2 did it. That people did it.
To all of them I say: “Nice theory, but you have no clue what really happened”.
So please, do not assert I have a religion. You have no clue… Just like the rest of us… (But some of us know that we have no clue…)
“Norman (17:36:11) :
Can anyone explain this NOAA graph of ocean rise?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NOAA_sea_level_trend_1993_2010.png
I heard on NPR how some islands off Bangledash were going under water because of Global Warming and sea level rise. I see the chart from above and it has some parts of the same ocean rising much faster than neighboring areas. How does this work? I thought water will be shaped by the type of container it is in. If a lake receives an influx of water it does not just rise at the source but the whole lake rises. I can pour water in a pot and it will not pile up anywhere. How does ocean water pile up in certain locations as shown in the graph? Are they sure the islands are not sinking as a result of the plate they are on going down?
I would sure like to know the science on how one part of the same ocean is rising at a rate almost 10 times more than water a few hundred miles north in the same ocean basin. Help!”
Whew!
First, the Spectator (UK print edition, 6/2/10) had an article by Richard Orange about the Sunderban Islands. The gist of it is they are deltaic islands which are essentially mobile as the Ganges distributaries shift their course, as all such rivers do. It has nothing to do with any putative sea level rise.
Second, as the Ganges, the Indus and the Brahmaputra are enthusiastically eroding the Himalaya range they are depositing vast tonnages in their deltas every year which are, as a result, sinking under the weight, in addition the the fact that the tectonic plate is subducting under the Asian plate. So the ‘relative’ sea levels are of course rising relative to the land.
Lastly, what you mean by sea level is an absolute nightmare. The average sea surface (i.e. that undisturbed by tides etc.) will take up a shape known as the geoid, which is an ‘orrible lumpy object that cannot reasonably be used for calculations. So we use a spheroid, a nice regular geometrical shape. Now, no self-respecting geodesist could leave it at that, so there are literally dozens of speroids in use. Therefore the opportunities for mistakenly using two or more spheroids are plentiful, but even if you get that right the heights of sea level, i.e. the geoid above the spheroid, will vary considerably.
As an example of the differences, the geoid shows a 100m hole just south of India and a bulge of about the same height in Western Australia.
The lumpiness of the geoid is due to variations in the density of the Earth affecting the local gravitaional forces.
E.M.Smith (22:37:54) :
Science is NOT about lab coats and Ph.D. exams, nor even Mr. Popper. It is about open eyes, open minds, keen observation, and never letting your prejudice prevent you from seeing what the data (observations) have to say. Then not forgetting it.
—————————————————————-
As “Let no man ignorant of geometry enter here” was inscribed above the door to Plato’s academy, so that should be writ large at the entrance to every science faculty.
I saw both Solanki and McCracken, this last one referred to cycles of about 100 years and 200 years and also mentioned the 2,200 years of a greater oscillation. Ivanka Charvatova has found both, after the work of Paul D.Jose.
I Charvatova speaks of the possibility of The results indicate that
`solar dynamo’ that was long sought in the solar interior, operates more likely from the outside, by means of the varying planetary configurations.
And, recent findings:
NASA’s IBEX (Interstellar Boundary Explorer) spacecraft has made the first all-sky maps of the boundary between the Sun’s environment (the heliosphere), and interstellar space. The results, reported as a bright, winding ribbon of unknown origin which bisects the maps, have taken researchers by surprise. However, the discovery fits the electric model of stars perfectly.
http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=74fgmwne
So, we are approaching an unexpected explanation of solar actiity.
Green Sand (01:48:54) : edit
Re: Ron House (Feb 15 20:35),
Careful Ron, you and Toowoomba could end up getting reparation demands from San Fransico – you got their fog!
Surely liability runs the other way! THEY can sue SFO for being afflicted with the accursed fog that SFO has let wander away due to depravity!!! 8-o
Ref – E.M.Smith (19:23:14) :
Milwaukee Bob (12:25:25) : Stock tip: Buy! LL Bean, North Face….
_________________________
Curious – Did/Has anyone made a pile of moola off AGW and, since Coppenhagen, its demise? It was buy “Green” for a long time and it may now be buy “Blue” –not a Wall Street Geek. Have thought for sometime that this was more and more a Bernie Madoff kind of trick by folks like Soros and his friends (Big Al, etc.) just taking advantange of the “Chicken Little” in all of us. (Maybe it was much bigger, China trumping the West at our own game?) Any thoughts?
FWIW it seems most likely that virtually all the climate variability we have directly observed is system driven internally with the sun only providing a very long background trend which has yet to be quantified.
We are nowhere near sorting out the relative sizes of the separate internal and external natural forcings (the only real external forcing being solar). However I think oceanic variability trumps just about everything else.
It is even possible that the transitions between glacial and interglacial periods are substantially affected by internal system variability.
Furthermore it likely all boils down to varying RATES of energy transfer from one part of the Earth system to another with the troposphere just being the filling in the sandwich being pushed and pulled first one way and another by the varying rates of energy transfer within the layers of the oceans and from the stratosphere upwards through the different layers of the upper atmosphere.
In the end it may be almost a zero sum game but a great deal happens during the game on a multitude of different interlinked and overlapping time scales.
Ref – Leif Svalgaard (04:33:39) :
Jim Cross (04:02:43) : suggests from Be10…
______________________
Dr Svalgaard
The Sun has such minor variation that it appears to be something else driving the glacial/interglacial cycles. What is the latest theory (or combination of) that seems to be the most interesting one from your perspective?
Brendan H (22:59:22) :
wws: “What would skeptics have to gain from an “armistice”, anyways?”
A place at the table, perhaps.
I think we already have many, many places at the table. The internet has become the table. The MSM are just starting to understand it and are hoping they have a place.
E.M.Smith (04:38:07),
Well said. What I find typical of warmers is they never question their sources and repeat exactly what they have read, and/or they have no clue what the word “uncertainty” means.
Most of them simply do not understand the complexity of climate. This goes for several that have PHDs as well. I still blame it on the education system.
E.M Smith, on watts/m^2:
It is a unit of projected energy that has a confusing meaning and has been invented by the climatologists to obfuscate the issue
a) In a parallel ray radiative system geometrically, to get the energy, and it is energy that can be budgeted because energy is conserved, one can go from these funny units to energy inputted ( joules/second) by integrating the area. By the time the sun’s rays reach us it is in parallel geometry, but it hits a sphere at various angles, so these watts/m^2 to be turned into energy need the geometrical factors which also depend on the seasons. One fudge factor.
b) when talking of the earth radiating as a black body watts/m^2 the distinction of where one is measuring this radiation ( radius) changes the meter square corresponding to the same energy cone .
If one assumes that the 1300watts/m^2 that fall on a solar panel have finally to be radiated back to space somehow if the earth is not to heat up as a pressure cooker, the difference in the radius of the earth gives something like 8watts/m^2 between the different radii(6357 km , to 6378km). If we take the hand waved geometrical average value of 1300/4 that makes an uncertainty from geometry of 2Watts/m^2. Similar uncertainties come from calculating in meter squares for the troposphere .
And I have not included the seasonal changes . I have not included the fractal nature of oceans and mountains ( the area changes) either.
In conclusion I think this watts/m^2 is a very opaque idea that does not allow for easy uncertainty calculations, but what the heck, the whole AR4 has no error propagation, it leaves it to the creative devices of the climatologists.
Leif Svalgaard (17:27:47) :
tallbloke (17:05:37) :
Leif will tell you that the numbers were under-counted in earlier years and is working on magnetic data to try to improve the record.
How’s it going Leif?
http://www.leif.org/research/Rudolf%20Wolf%20Was%20Right.pdf
http://www.leif.org/research/SOHO23.pdf
are ‘progress reports’.
Thanks Leif. Very interesting documents both.
On a rough estimate, the first half of the C20th had 11 year cycles of lower amplitude and the second half of the C20th had 10 year cycles of higher amplitude.
I think this accounts for the extra energy which went into the oceans to cause ocean heat content to rise from the ’40’s onwards to the ’90’s. Shorter minima, higher amplitudes.
Disputin (04:46:45) :Surely it has happened because of the lots of shampoo used during the Gloibal Warmers jamborees usually held in those south pacific paradise islands. Nothing to worry about, except for the contamination to GAIA these warmers/millionaires originate.
Disputin (04:46:45) :
“Norman (17:36:11) :
Can anyone explain this NOAA graph of ocean rise?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NOAA_sea_level_trend_1993_2010.png
the heights of sea level, i.e. the geoid above the spheroid, will vary considerably.
As an example of the differences, the geoid shows a 100m hole just south of India and a bulge of about the same height in Western Australia.
The lumpiness of the geoid is due to variations in the density of the Earth affecting the local gravitaional forces.
And these change over time. I think this has to be partly to do with changes under the Earth’s crust. These are linked to changes in length of day, as heavier matter flows further out nearer to the crust slowing Earth down and vise versa. This tends to occur over ~60 year cycles and is coincident with the changing relationships of the distribution of mass in the solar system.
Magnetic variations follow the same timescales.
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2009/11/29/planetary-solar-climate-connection-found/
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2009/12/11/north-pole-position-shifts/
Leif Svalgaard (22:01:22) :
davidmhoffer (21:41:57) :
But don’t for a second believe that “only 1 watt” variance from TSI is insignificant in the long term.
A 1 Watt difference in TSI would indeed raise the temperature a very significant 0.05K.>
My point being Leif, that if 1 watt from TSI is pretty much insignificant than 1.4 watts from CO2 is pretty much insignificant. I’m not saying one is right and one is wrong, I’m saying that they are in the same order of magnitude. If one attributes major effects to one, then so to the other. If the effects of one are minor, so too are the other. The only way this isnt true is if the measurements and estimates are wrong and in reality they are different orders of magnitude.
By far the best (interesting, educational, entertaining) thread I’ve read in a great while. Thank you all (even Robert 😉 ).
View from the Solent (05:06:07) : So it is not surprising that knowledge has never been hidden but rejected. Men of old, perhaps from thousand of years ago, knew the universal laws and this knowledge is open to everyone, but we stubbornly prefer to complicate things up. Remember Pitagoras ask for a slave prisoner to be release so to demonstrate he also could demonstrate his theorem, and he did it?
The precondition to learning is NOT knowing. If one already “knows” everything then one is filled to the rim. The eternal play of forces:Remembering is only possible after one forgets, in order to get a result forces should be separated by a gap, call it a lever, a potential difference or love, it´s the same.
>>>Leif Svalgaard (12:23:52) :
>>>Whether we’ll have a Dalton Minimum remains to be
>>seen. And any cooling may depend [as it did back then]
>>on suitable volcanic eruptions: 2009GL040882.pdf 🙂
So Solar minimums and their low temperatures are always coincident with volcanic eruptions – eh. Leif?
Convenient…
.
Pascvaks 5:28:52. Well, Maurice Strong is now in China. Beyond that small fact, I’ve difficulty following the Great Game. But for sure it is being played without the interests of the mass of humanity at the fore.
=====================================
>>>rbateman (13:28:55) :
>>“This is what the Mayans were so worried about
>>for 2012: The world isn’t coming to an end, reason
>>is coming to an end.”
.
The Mayans and Egyptians were all believers in astrological epochs, driven by the precession of the equinox.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precession
In the classical 12-month zodiac, the constellations change every 2,160 years or so, which is known as the Great Month. Twelve of these months made a full 25,700 revolution of the precessional equinox, and was known as the Great Year.
Momentous events were always supposed to happen on the change of the Great Month. The last change happened in about AD10, when Aries changed into Pisces (when viewed at the dawn Vernal Equinox). That is why the great king of this era was born as a Lamb of God but became a Fisher of Men.
This is also why Alexander the Great always wore the horns of the ram, because he was a King of Aries.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_l4cIVPitpyo/ShnQxMwFFZI/AAAAAAAAA2c/_6RM5zQqxFY/s400/alexander+the+great.jpg
Most of these traditions are astrological, as are the Mayan Prophesies.
.
Leif Svalgaard (04:11:42) :
Thank you for the link. How is the earth’s Earth’s main dipole strgenth determined over the time period in the link you kindly provided, As to the background cosmic ray strgenth and how it varies relatve to our position in the galaxy, how is this history quantified, and can the future of it be predicted?
Thanks in advance.
JonesII (05:14:00) :
However, the discovery fits the electric model of stars perfectly. […]
So, we are approaching an unexpected explanation of solar activity.
If it fits perfectly, you shouldn’t have a problem.
Pascvaks (06:04:39) :
The Sun has such minor variation that it appears to be something else driving the glacial/interglacial cycles.
Variations of the orbital elements of the Earth explains those cycles even with a constant Sun.
tallbloke (06:33:25) :
I think this accounts for the extra energy which went into the oceans to cause ocean heat content to rise from the ’40’s onwards to the ’90’s. Shorter minima, higher amplitudes.
Except does not account for the increase from 1900 to 1950 which was equally strong, or the cold 18th century when solar activity was as great as it has been recently.
davidmhoffer (06:59:08) :
If the effects of one are minor, so too are the other.
and so they both are.
JonesII (07:09:13) :
Men of old, perhaps from thousand of years ago, knew the universal laws
So your knowledge is on the level of science reached thousands of years ago…
Ralph (07:55:47) :
So Solar minimums and their low temperatures are always coincident with volcanic eruptions – eh. Leif?
Convenient…
There is a but of circular reasoning in this. The record that we use to gauge solar activity in the past is contaminated by volcanic eruptions, so some of the coincidence has a natural explanation.
David (08:27:04) :
Thank you for the link. How is the earth’s Earth’s main dipole strgenth determined over the time period in the link you kindly provided, As to the background cosmic ray strgenth and how it varies relatve to our position in the galaxy, how is this history quantified, and can the future of it be predicted?
We can measure the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field by measuring the magnetism of pottery shards and lava streams. You have probably heard about the proof of plate tectonics being the magnetized strips of lava found on either sides of mid-ocean ridges.
We cannot predict the change of the Earth’s field. It is now decreasing [15% the past 200 years] and there are some speculation that it may decline to near zero and reverse in about a thousand years, but that is still speculation at this point.
Stephen Wilde (05:39:22) :The interaction mechanism seems to be the one presented by Earl Happ:
http://climatechange1.wordpress.com/2009/04/05/solar-warming-solar-cooling/
Manifestly, the engine of climate change is in the tropics. Here, energy gain from solar radiation exceeds emission via radiation. The energy gain, more at some times than others, is transferred to high latitudes by the ocean and the atmosphere. To understand climate change we have to understand the Southern Oscillation that governs the warming and cooling of the tropics and also how that oscillation changes over time. The suns total irradiance varies by 0.1% over the solar cycle and is out of step with the observed change in surface temperature. At the height of the sunspot cycle a La Nina cooling event is frequently experienced. Plainly, the temperature of the Earth is unrelated to the sunspot cycle. However, there is a second mode of variation in solar activity that is deterministic. This is the Quasi Biennial Oscillation.
Leif Svalgaard (08:38:06) :
Pascvaks (06:04:39) :
Q=The Sun has such minor variation that it appears to be something else driving the glacial/interglacial cycles.(?)
A=Variations of the orbital elements of the Earth explains those cycles even with a constant Sun.
_________________________
Follow up please: Where are we vis-a-vis the cycles? All the talk of sunspots and AGW has thrown me off (if I ever really knew). Are we yet on our bumpy way down the mountain to the deep cold of the next glacial period? Or is there still time (say another millenium) for humanity to get in a little more fun and games in the far north and far south of the planet before we head back to the caves around the Equator?
Pascvaks (09:01:25) :
Are we yet on our bumpy way down the mountain to the deep cold of the next glacial period?
Yes we are, but it will take 100,000 years to hit the bottom, so lots of time for fun and games.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/53/MilankovitchCyclesOrbitandCores.png
E.M.Smith (02:58:36) : “Ok, so while the TSI in W/M^2 is dropping, the radiative “W/M^2″ is somehow increasing?! WoW! Please elaborate! WHERE do these added W/M^2 come from?”
This is not what I said…I said changes (up or down) in radiative forcing can be amplified given the Svensmark theory, i.e. small changes in solar activity up or down can amplify cosmic ray flux up or down [solar geomagnetic activity up -> cosmic ray flux down & vice-versa], via the mechanism of cloud cover nucleation [cosmic rays up -> cloud cover up -> temperature down & vice versa].
Coincident with the current longest & quietest solar magnetic minimum over the past 8 solar cycles, cosmic ray counts at Oulu Finland are 4-5% higher than ever recorded since the station began monitoring April 1964:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_nOY5jaKJXHM/S3pELn4kTqI/AAAAAAAAAyU/Tn4vbpRgpYY/s1600-h/Fullscreen+capture+2152010+110423+PM.jpg
Also meant to mention that during a typical solar cycle, cosmic ray counts increase by ~25% at solar magnetic minimums, cosmic ray counts are ~linearly related to cloud cover, and global cloud cover is inversely ~linearly related to global temperature. Thus, although TSI only changes 0.1% during a solar cycle, solar magnetic activity changes produce an amplified effect on cosmic ray counts.
Ninderthana (02:44:43) :
I agree, the term “sophist” is apropos:
Sophist: Any of a class of later Greek teachers of rhetoric and philosophy known for their over subtle and often misleading arguments.
Leif Svalgaard (04:11:42) presents a TSI value, “1361 W/m2”, Evans (23:06:34) quoted from a NASA press release for increased TSI between solar minimum and solar maximum.
Let’s put the TSI value given by NASA in its proper context by supplying the full NASA quote:
“At solar maximum, the sun is about 0.1% brighter than it is at solar minimum. That may not sound like much, but consider the following: A 0.1% change in 1361 W/m2 equals 1.4 Watts/m2. Averaging this number over the spherical Earth and correcting for Earth’s reflectivity yields 0.24 Watts for every square meter of our planet.”
“Satellite data show that the sun’s total irradiance rises and falls with the sunspot cycle by a significant amount.”
“Add it all up and you get a lot of energy,”
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2010/05feb_sdo.htm
Dr. Svalgaard, after presenting the NASA TSI value, then juxtaposed Evans’ statement: “And, the Sun is electrical in nature.”
Then Dr. Svalgaard responded: “I see, the light bulb in my office lamb says ‘120 Watt’ on it and must be ‘electrical’ in nature. The Sun also radiates ‘Watts’, so is clearly also electrical in nature.”
This is an example of sophism:
Of course, the TSI value given by NASA is a reference to increased energy as expressed in Watts per square meter. This is not “electrical in nature” and I never claimed it as such, I presented the NASA quote for the information it contained therein:
“Satellite data show that the sun’s total irradiance rises and falls with the sunspot cycle by a significant amount.”
What I did present to demonstrate the electrical nature of the Sun was two Scientific papers:
Partial abstract:
“This paper suggests that plasma motion in an active region in the photosphere is the source of large electric currents.”
http://arxiv.org/abs/0908.0813
Partial abstract:
“We present a method for measuring electrical currents enclosed by flux rope structures that are ejected within solar coronal mass ejections (CMEs).”
http://arxiv.org/abs/0810.4210
And two NASA press releases:
One on twisting magnetic fields beneath the surface of the Sun:
“The long-sought clue to prediction lies in changes in twisting magnetic fields beneath the surface of the sun in the days leading up to a flare, according to the authors. The findings will be published in Astrophysical Journal Letters next month.”
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2010/20100119_solarflare.html
And, one on twisting magnetic fields that give shape to CME’s:
“Vourlidas says he is not surprised that CMEs resemble French pastries. ‘I have suspected this all along. The croissant shape is a natural result of twisted magnetic fields on the sun…’”
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/14apr_3dcme.htm
So, it’s misleading to imply I relied the NASA value for increased TSI to justify my statement that the “Sun is electrical in nature.”
Dr. Svalgaard then responds: “Material flowing across solar magnetic field lines generates electrical currents that quickly dissipates in various explosive ways. Same thing happens near the Earth. The presence of such events does not make anything ‘electrical in nature’ as they are just short-lived consequences, rather than fundamental constituents. You something mentioned that 99.9% of the Universe is electrically neutral plasma. This is incorrect, only 4.4% of the Universe is baryonic and capable of even being a plasma.”
The above quote has several misleading statements:
“Material flowing across solar magnetic field lines generates electrical currents that quickly dissipates in various explosive ways.”
Yes, I agree that “electrical currents” are generated at the Sun (and so do the two papers I cited) and, indeed, electrical discharges do dissipate, but not without significant effect: Coronal mass ejections have a significant impact on Earth and Man’s technologies — that’s why CME’s are being studied — and CME’s are a significant aspect and physical phenomenon of the Sun’s dynamics.
And, as the both papers suggest, CME’s are an electromagnetic phenomenon.
“Same thing happens near the Earth.”
Yes, electric currents called Birkeland currents flow down to the Earth’s magnetic poles and cause the auoras at regular intervals which, again, can impact Man’s technologies — it’s why NASA is studying the process, beyond the purely scientific desire to understand the physical process for its own sake.
“The presence of such events does not make anything ‘electrical in nature’ as they are just short-lived consequences, rather than fundamental constituents.”
The electrical currents are consequences of fundamental physical processes of the Sun and it’s interaction with the Earth. Electromagnetism is a fundamental component of the Sun’s plasma physical relationships.
“You something mentioned that 99.9% of the Universe is electrically neutral plasma. This is incorrect, only 4.4% of the Universe is baryonic and capable of even being a plasma.”
Actually, this is what Evans (20:15:44) stated: “…the Universe is dominated by plasma (99.9% of the observable Universe is plasma) and accordingly the observable Universe is dominated by plasma’s electromagnetic phyiscal relationships.”
And, Indeed, the observable Universe is 99.9% plasma.
Dr. Svalgaard’s statement, “only 4.4% of the Universe is baryonic and capable of even being a plasma,” assumes the presence of “dark matter” and “dark energy” which neither have been observed & measured. In Dr. Svalgaard’s Universe 95.6% of the Universe has never been observed & measured.
But that isn’t the real Universe: It only exists in Dr. Svalgaard’s imagnination.
Richard M: “The internet has become the table.”
Colour me sceptical on that one. The internet has certainly changed the discourse, and is a wonderful source of information at our fingertips.
Unfortunately, it is also a woeful source of misinformation, and often, sheer noise. The MSM has its faults, but its gatekeeping structures and accountability to the wider community serve to keep it honest in a way that is not possible on the internet.
Interestingly, the MSM is also morphing, both reflecting and critically examining what happens on the internet. So I don’t think the future is either internet or MSM, but rather a combination of the two.
Mark Sawusch (09:20:17) :
Coincident with the current longest & quietest solar magnetic minimum over the past 8 solar cycles, cosmic ray counts at Oulu Finland are 4-5% higher than ever recorded since the station began monitoring April 1964
It is very hard to maintain a constant calibration of a neutron monitor over such a long time. And Oulu is not doing such a good job at it. Cosmic rays are measured at many other stations and they don’t see any such high counts. E.g. http://www.puk.ac.za/fakulteite/natuur/nm_data/data/nmd_e.html
or Thule: http://www.leif.org/research/Thule-Neutron-Monitor.png
or Moscow: http://www.leif.org/research/CosmicRayFlux-Moscow.png
The following will be an astounding “Litmus paper test” for the current minimum:
A salt lake in Argentina will fill again with water if in a solar minimum. There are historical records and geological/palentological records that it happened so before:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/m11m129238u61484/
Here you can see this lake:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=salinas+del+bebedero&hl=es&ei=b9N6S6WNHYTmiAO48b3_BA&ie=UTF8&view=map&cid=10411604023318932519&iwloc=A&ved=0CBQQpQY&sa=X
Any time soon: A lake confirming a Dalton Minimum.
James F. Evans (10:11:37) :
The electrical currents are consequences of fundamental physical processes of the Sun
Indeed, as I have said repeatedly. Just like the electrical current from a wall outlet is a consequence of a fundamental physical process [at your local power station], namely moving a conductor in a magnetic field.
And, Indeed, the observable Universe is 99.9% plasma.
[…] assumes the presence of “dark matter” and “dark energy” which neither have been observed & measured.
Dark Matter is very much observed by its gravitational effect. Here http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap011007.html you can observe it yourself.
James F. Evans 10:11:37
Hyperbole does not become you. Surely that universe exists in other minds besides Leif’s.
=========================================
James F. Evans (10:11:37) :
Add to all you said the connection to earth’s climate:
http://climatechange1.wordpress.com/2009/04/05/solar-warming-solar-cooling/
James F. Evans (10:11:37) :
When kids we were told Comets were made of Icecream and the Moon made of Cheese. As time passed and we grew up we discovered that it was not like that…
Those were the days, when following an old italian tradition we pledged to the moon, raising a silver coin before our eyes and saying: “Luna, Luna, porta fortuna” (Moon, Moon, bring us fortune)
Dr S offers proof of dark matter by showing gravitational lensing in Abell 2218:
”
However, when we look at the APOD for Abell 1689, we find this statement:
You see the visible matter is hardly sufficient and only accounts for 1% of the mass needed to give a lensing effect. The gravitational mass is introduced in the form of dark matter. “Still mysterious dark matter.” Dr S offers as evidence lensing, which requires dark matter as proof that the lensing has occured.
Mark wrote:
“cosmic ray counts are ~linearly related to cloud cover,”
Most scientists don’t think so. The papers that purported to show such a connection are characterized by “dubious manipulation of data in order to suit [the author’s] hypothesis.” See an extensive discussion of the issue here:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11651-climate-myths-its-all-down-to-cosmic-rays.html
David (08:27:04) :
“As to the background cosmic ray strength and how it varies relatve to our position in the galaxy, how is this history quantified, and can the future of it be predicted?”
I have a link here; Shaviv and Veizer;
http://www.phys.huji.ac.il/~shaviv/Ice-ages/GSAToday.pdf
Leif Svalgaard (08:38:06) :
tallbloke (06:33:25) :
I think this accounts for the extra energy which went into the oceans to cause ocean heat content to rise from the ’40’s onwards to the ’90’s. Shorter minima, higher amplitudes.
Except does not account for the increase from 1900 to 1950 which was equally strong, or the cold 18th century when solar activity was as great as it has been recently.
Hi Leif. I don’t think there is any data for OHC for the earlier part of the century is there?. Although your rejigged amplitudes for the C19th are higher then the group sunspot numbers said, they are not that much higher than Wolff, and the minima were longer, and we are still waiting (impatiently :-)) for you to push the magnetic data back further. What my sunspot count model is showing is that there is a background rise in OHC (with a lift and dip in the later 1800’s) since the Maunder minimum, with the ~60 year ocean cycles riding on top. Thus we get the strong rise from 1910-1943 followed by the weak fall from 1943-1975, followed by the strong rise from 1975 to 2003.
There is often more than one thing going on at once in climate. It’s complcated like that.
Zeke the Sneak (11:59:45) : Still in the realm of Vodoo science. That lensing effect could be the humble diffraction, as also in the so called Einstein’s theory proof in a sun eclipse: space it is not vacuum and difracts light too.
One such person, who believed in the wave theory was Augustin Fresnel, who in 1819, handed a paper to the French Academy of Sciences, about the phenomenon of diffraction. However, the Academy mainly consisting of Newton’s supporters, tried to challenge Fresnel’s point of view by saying that if light was indeed a wave, these waves, which were diffracted from the edges of a sphere, would cause a bright area to occur within the shadow of the sphere. This was indeed oberved later, and the area is today known as the Fresnel Bright Spot
NASA Deep Impact probe couldn’t break Tempel 1 Icecream comet:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/deepimpact/main/index.html
“Leif Svalgaard (13:18:12) :
AGW is enough voodoo. We don’t need more pseudo-science.”
I think you are being a bit harsh on the electric universe theorists. They are devising tests, testing their hypothesis and not hiding any data (unless you know something we don’t? care to share?). Just by that standard alone they don’t deserve the association with AGW any more than the AGW-skeptics deserve being associated with holocaust deniers.
“Solanki came to the conclusion that the Sun is leaving its fifty to sixty year long grand maximum..”
“McCracken gave a paper.. that comes to the conclusion that a repeat of the Dalton Minimum is most likely.”
________________
It appears that we need to be looking for changes in the Thermohaline Circulation (aka The Great Ocean Conveyor).
Leif Svalgaard (10:21:24) :
The primary point I was trying to make is that “during a typical solar cycle, cosmic ray counts increase by ~25% at solar magnetic minimums, cosmic ray counts are ~linearly related to cloud cover, and global cloud cover is inversely ~linearly related to global temperature. Thus, although TSI only changes 0.1% during a solar cycle, solar magnetic activity changes produce an amplified effect on cosmic ray counts.” That cosmic ray counts change by ~25% during a typical solar magnetic cycle is shown in all of the links you provided.
Robert (12:04:05) : Thanks for the New Scientist reference, which essentially cites “satellite scientist” Gavin Schmidt on Realclimate.org blog (need I say more) and a single peer reviewed paper:
http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/Laut2003.pdf
as evidence of your statement “most scientists don’t think so.” I will spend some time looking over the Laut paper though before commenting. On the other hand, here are graphs showing the relationship from four different papers (and there are others as well):
http://images.intellicast.com/App_Images/Article/207_17.jpg
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_nOY5jaKJXHM/Sz_eNInqneI/AAAAAAAAAiE/OvB7dZocTFA/s1600-h/cloud.gif
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_nOY5jaKJXHM/Sz5LXmkEznI/AAAAAAAAAfc/iic5jWKYNkQ/s1600-h/neutronsunspot.jpg
http://theresilientearth.com/files/images/Cosmic_rays_and_cloud_cover-marsh.jpg
Wow!, all this made me remember “The Twilight Zone” TV Show of the 1950’s.
Why do these science guys insist in telling us scary tales of multiple dimensions, dark matter, entangled strings, sucking black holes (which surprisingly, some times, tired from sucking begin blowing out!!), dark energy…Oh! how fearsome!, we are surrounded by ghosts!.
But the scare tactits doesn’t stop there: We are doomed to die in an armageddon of gigantic proportions…kind of a big and dark mattered Katrina.
However we do not believe in ghosts and, since we were born we knew we were going to die some day, knowing that life it’s just nature’s trick for overcoming entropy.
Andrew Parker (21:24:41) :
D. Patterson (18:08:03) : Ed Murphy (17:14:40) :
“How about the land getting very deeply saturated and heavy with precipitation. The added weight pushing down on the plates causing pressures to go up leading to more quakes/volcanoes?”
On the coast of Ecuador they have relatively mild earthquakes associated with the transition from dry to wet to dry seasons. The locals feel it is simple cause and effect, but I haven’t found “expert” confirmation.
Reply: Hi Andrew, I’d go so far as to say the earthquake in Haiti was caused by this relationship. From before about 2008 the N. American continent was suffering from lack of clouds and a large amount of drought and the drying up of aquifers. Now its been extra cloudy for a few years and the bulk of the continent is fully saturated, refilling the aquifers, overly so in many areas except parts of the west. That’s a big weight transfer on the N. American plate which from what I understand has a boundary to Haiti.
I don’t know if Svensmark’s cosmic ray flux link to cloud formation will hold, but from observation, either that theory or a combination of that and the slight cooling from less solar and the pronounced cooling and particulate from the May’08 eruption in Chile, Redoubt and Sarychev really kicked the addition of moisture weight into high gear. Cloud formation and precipitation intensified adding to the cloudiness that was already on the upswing.
Volcanoes emit a large volume of steam, moisture gets to the outer mantle/crust boundary from being dragged in at subduction zones. The large amounts of moisture that saturated the land and refilled the aquifers adding all this weight and downward pressure to the land would eventually seep down to the outer mantle boundary and create even more pressure with time. No need to wait for significant glacier buildup of weight pressure, there is plenty already. Poof, then you have the pressure buildup needed for a series of eruptions like happened around the time of Tambora and the ‘year without a summer’. Then when does increased solar eventually come to the rescue, that is the big question.
Before I get flamed, sorry the neutronspot.jpg graph link above was not related to cloud cover
I have been lurking on this site for a few years and thank you for a lot of information. I have always been interested by what Dr Svalgaard has to say. I know this is going OT but would like to ask Dr Svalgaard if “dark matter ” is now observable. What is the latest thinking of what it might be?
Winters of the Dalton minimum period were not colder than those of the 1940-1970 period, while summers were cooler than in any period since 1700.
This graph shows both summer and winter CET anomalies for 1700-2010 http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CET3.htm
This is in a way consistent with large amount of micro-particles in the atmosphere from volcanic activity increasing cloud formation, condensation and rainfall giving cool summer and not so cold winters.
Brendan H (10:20:31) :
I’m sorry, what planet are you from? The media keeps itself honest?
Pulease!!!
The internet is the only thing that keeps the media honest. The media does not check itself. The internet is what busted Dan Rather. And the internet is what’s busting global warming.
The misinformation on the internet is coming from people like you Brenden. You folks already have a grip on most of mainstream media. Now you are trying to do the same with the internet.
Take your song and dance to the clones and trolls. The internet is the only free press around. Your schtick don’t stick in it!!
vukcevic (14:07:55) :Don´t tell me that there will be enough room for the Global warming church to keep preaching 🙂
davidmhoffer (06:59:08) :
My point being Leif, that if 1 watt from TSI is pretty much insignificant than 1.4 watts from CO2 is pretty much insignificant. I’m not saying one is right and one is wrong, I’m saying that they are in the same order of magnitude.
No – they are not the same order of magnitude. The extra 1 w/m2 from TSI is only operating ~25% of the time (due to day, night, dawn & dusk etc). Also a proportion of TSI (~30%) is reflected by snow ice and clouds. A 0.1% increase in TSI is 1.3 w/m2 but this corresponds to an average of only about 0.24 w/m2 over the earth’s surface.
“Thanks for the New Scientist reference, which essentially cites “satellite scientist” Gavin Schmidt on Realclimate.org blog (need I say more)”
This is part of the weird reality distortion field in the anti-AGW discussion. You clearly are a group of passionate activists for your point of view, most of the papers presented on this site are the product of people and organizations with a long history of (and in many cases a financial interest in) arguing against AGW. Yet anyone on the OTHER side with the slightest hint of a point of view is assumed to be automatically discredited, even if their only sin is responding to the distortions of the anti-AGW noise machine.
If you applied the same standards for scientific objectivity to supporters of your own cause, how many allies do you think you’d be left with?
“I don’t know if Svensmark’s cosmic ray flux link to cloud formation will hold,”
It hasn’t. It’s been completely discredited:
But after 1995, the beguiling fit of Svensmark’s graph depends on a “correction” of satellite data, and the satellite scientists say this is not justified. “It’s dubious manipulation of data in order to suit his hypothesis,” says Joanna Haigh, an atmospheric physicist at Imperial College London, UK.
This is an opportunity for the real skeptics to demonstrate their integrity. A research has been caught fudging the data. How do we feel about that?