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.
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 @ur momisugly 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/