Dr. Nicola Scafetta has written an extensive summary of the state of climate science today. He’s done some very extensive analysis of the solar contribution that bears examination. Pay particular attention to this graph from page 49:
WUWT readers may remember him from some previous papers and comments he’s written that have been covered here:
Scafetta: New paper on TSI, surface temperature, and modeling
Scafetta: Benestad and Schmidt’s calculations are “robustly” flawed.
He writes to me with this introduction:
On February 26, 2009 I was invited by the Environmental Protection Agency Office of the Science Advisor (OSA) and National Center for Environmental Economics (NCEE) to present a talk about my research on climate change. I thought that the best way to address this issue was to present an overview of all topics involved about the issue and their interconnections.
So, I prepared a kind of holistic presentation with the title “Climate Change and Its Causes, A Discussion about Some Key Issues”. Then, a colleague from Italy who watched my EPA presentation suggested me to write a paper in Italian and submit it to an Italian science journal which was recently published.
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Download the report here (PDF -warning over 10 MB – long download time on slow connections)
This work covers most topics presented by Scafetta at a seminar at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, DC USA, February 26, 2009. A video of the seminar is here:
The Italian version of the original paper can be downloaded (with possible journal restrictions) from here
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Here is the table of contents, there’s something in this report for everyone:
Climate Change and Its Causes: A Discussion About Some Key Issues
Introduction … 4
The IPCC’s pro-anthropogenic warming bias … 6
The climate sensitivity uncertainty to CO2 increase … 8
The climatic meaning of Mann’s Hockey Stick temperature graph … 10
The climatic meaning of recent paleoclimatic temperature reconstructions … 12
The phenomenological solar signature since 1600 … 14
The ACRIM vs. PMOD satellite total solar irradiance controversy … 16
Problems with the global surface temperature record … 18
A large 60 year cycle in the temperature record … 19
Astronomical origin of the climate oscillations … 22
Conclusion … 26
Bibliography … 27
Appendix…29-54
A: The IPCC’s anthropogenic global warming theory … 29
B: Chemical vs. Ice-Core CO2 atmospheric concentration estimates … 30
C: Milky Way’s spiral arms, Cosmic Rays and the Phanerozoic temperature cycles … 31
D: The Holocene cooling trend and the millennial-scale temperature cycles … 32
E: The last 1000 years of global temperature, solar and ice cover data … 33
F: The solar dynamics fits 5000 years of human history … 34
G: The Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age – A global phenomenon … 35
H: Compatibility between the AGWT climate models and the Hockey Stick … 36
I: The 11-year solar cycle in the global surface temperature record … 37
J: The climate models underestimate the 11-year solar cycle signature … 38
K: The ACRIM-PMOD total solar irradiance satellite composite controversy … 39
L: Willson and Hoyt’s statements about the ACRIM and Nimbus7 TSI published data .. 40
M: Cosmic ray flux, solar activity and low cloud cover positive feedback … 41
N: Possible mechanisms linking cosmic ray flux and cloud cover formation … 42
O: A warming bias in the surface temperature records? … 43
P: A underestimated Urban Heat Island effect? … 44
Q: A 60 year cycle in multisecular climate records … 45
R: A 60 year cycle in solar, geological, climate and fishery records … 46
S: The 11-year solar cycle and the V-E-J planet alignment … 47
T: The 60 and 20 year cycles in the wobbling of the Sun around the CMSS … 48
U: The 60 and 20 year cycles in global surface temperature and in the CMSS … 49
V: A 60 year cycle in multisecular solar records … 50
W: The bi-secular solar cycle: Is a 2010-2050 little ice age imminent? … 51
X: Temperature records do not correlate to CO2 records … 52
Y: The CO2 fingerprint: Climate model predictions and observations disagree … 53
Z: The 2007 IPCC climate model projections. Can we trust them? … 54
tallbloke (20:14:50) :
I certainly respect your scientific mind, Tallbloke, and appreciate the diversity on here.
I have learned much from many of you on here. Hopefully we can all figure it out and get along in the process.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
tallblock, that was childish.
Steve Hempell (18:46:40) :
“Temperatures are higher now than 100 years ago.”
Ah, but are they any higher than 70 or 80 years ago?
The summer I was born was the warmest one on record in Denmark. My point was that the solar activity is now where it was 107 years ago, but temperatures now are higher than 107 years ago.
Clive E Burkland (19:00:54) :
Extreme UV being one of those factors
The energy in the EUV is minute compared to all of TSI, and the observed variation during the cycle is of the order of 0.1K or less. Just look at Scafetta’s graph at the top of the page and find an 11-year variation that is larger. Ain’t there.
kim (19:53:32) :
Leif, I would like to know what you think of Miscolzi’s work.
Haven’t read it, so don’t know. What is his bottom line?
DirkH (19:59:30) :
“BTW, I note that nobody has manned up to give their ‘Leif score/number’ :-)”
I didn’t see anything i disagree with in your list.
So your number is 3FFFF.
Dave F (20:02:33) :
You didn’t say what temperatures.
The ‘Global Temperature’, of course. 🙂
Now some fools say that there is no ‘Global Temperature’ or that it is meaningless. They wouldn’t say that if the ‘Global Temp’ reported the next ten years would drop by 2 degrees and disprove AGW, would they?
Of course, there is a meaningful global temperature. If you measured the total radiation the Earth gives off, then you can calculate an ‘effective’ temperature from that. We do this for stars and the Sun.
“Dave F (20:02:33) :
Sorry Leif, you said ‘Temperatures 100 years ago were higher…’ You …”
Leif:
“1) Temperatures are higher now than 100 years ago. Exactly how much can be discussed [fakings, UHI, etc].”
I think you misread it, Dave. Interesting here is that E.M. Smith didn’t find any warming in Germany during the last 260 years:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/03/11/germany-not-warming/
Maybe we are so stable because of the gulf stream’s influence.
Sou (20:39:08):
Citations, please:
How was the Oregon survey “faked”?
and
Provide evidence that the emails were “stolen”.
Re: Anu (Mar 14 13:28),
Gee thanks for that contribution ANU.
You have also made a mistake in your post. You left out the ‘S’ at the end of your screen name.
p.s. if your post was satire, then pls treat this the same.
tallbloke (20:14:50) :
If you want to mislead people about the sun here instead of presenting a balanced account
People asked for my opinion… not for ‘balanced account’.
And if you remember, the discussion back then was if the ‘Angular Momentum’ explanation was viable, and we showed it was not [as even elementary physics shows you directly]. If you can substantiate the correlation [which you have not] and you have another explanation that overcomes the energy problem, then by all means present it. Write a paper, get it published, etc.
I note that Scafetta does not seem too hot on the Angular momentum idea either.
I realize that some people get insulted if you show that their pet theory doesn’t stack up, and I guess that is just human nature that we must live with.
kim (19:53:32) :
Leif, I would like to know what you think of Miscolzi’s work.
Ditto.
Links to Miscolczi’s work and an interesting letter from Dr Miklos Zagoni here.
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2010/01/04/why-the-sun-is-so-important-to-climate/
Doesn’t put NASA in a very good light.
wayne (20:38:09) :
Go to NASA Horizons system
You try that… and report back
Leif Svalgaard (16:12:55) :
I’m still digging on #1, and I cannot find any evidence that today’s temps are not trumped 70 – 130 years ago. It’s a slow process when the old Weather Bureau records are not digitized.
As for #3, I’ll wait for Svensmark to have his day. The uncertainty of proxies being able to distinguish different forms of solar activity is not entirely useful to me.
If anyone knows where to find daily station data or more complete summaries of the Weather Bureau, I’m all ears.
AGW, what can’t it do?
“Leif Svalgaard (20:45:56) :
kim (19:53:32) :
Leif, I would like to know what you think of Miscolzi’s work.
Haven’t read it, so don’t know. What is his bottom line?”
http://miskolczi.webs.com/ZM_v10_eng.pdf
“If the system energetically could increase its
surface temperature, it need not wait for our
anthropogenic CO2 emissions, since another
GHG, water vapor, is available in a practically
infinite reservoir, in the surface of the
oceans.”
Leif Svalgaard (19:40:28) :
wayne (19:25:48) :
No, the distance between the Sun and the Earth is not affected by this [because the Earth orbits the ‘barycenter’ determined by the Sun and the Earth [+the Moon], no matter what the Sun does. Just like the Moon orbits the ‘barycenter’ determined by the Earth and the Moon, no matter what the Sun does. If the Sun had a companion star [Nemesis] very far away, the barycenter of the total system would be way outside our planetary solar system. But [as we have discussed so often], the barycenter of the solar system is irrelevant because the Sun and all the stuff in the solar system are just in free fall in their combined gravitational field and feel no forces from that.
Careful Leif, sometimes you jump too fast, I programmed ephemeris systems for four years and have a close (I wish it closer) version of the Horizon system running on my older machine to my left, written by me from the ground up. I have different versions using nine or ten different ODE integrators to boot. Have you ever written an ephemeris software system? Try it, they are challenging!
Your statement is almost like the other planets gravitation fields do not also affect the Earths orbit. Are you sure of your statement? If it was only the Sun and the Earth I would concur with you.
Now if you are saying this small amount does not amount to much, I agree, but the fact that scientifically the difference exists and since it exists it must affect the TSI however tiny. Get my drift.
I hate to hide proper science, even how tiny its effect is, because it can confuse people that logically know it must have SOME effect. The amount of effect is for others to determine (and may have already determined). But please don’t jump on my attempts to teach people here, just make a comment that its effect is so small it can be ignored. Let’s build on each other, not tear each other apart. OK?
Leif (16:12:55):
For the record:
1. Don’t know if it is significantly warmer.
2. If it is, the cause is probably not external.
3. If it is, the cause is probably not external.
4. If it is, the cause is probably not external.
5. If it is, the cause is probably not external.
6. If it is, the cause is probably not external.
7. If it is, maybe it is CO2, maybe not.
8. If it is, CO2 changes in the distant past aren’t relevant.
9. If it is, the cause is probably not external.
10. If it is, the cause is probably not external.
11. If it is, climate models haven’t answered No. 7.
12. If it is, maybe it is just Earth’s internal cycles. As for external cycles, see Nos. 2-6, 9-10, 13-14.
13. If it is, the cause is probably not external.
14. If it is, the cause is probably not external.
I appreciate the effort, but basically all you have said here is: “Idunno, but it ain’t anything external to the Earth”. I would think you’d have something more to offer on the radiative physics of greenhouse gases. And none of this explains why you compare climate science to “voodoo science”.
Leif Svalgaard (21:00:29) :
tallbloke (20:14:50) :
If you want to mislead people about the sun here instead of presenting a balanced account
People asked for my opinion… not for ‘balanced account’.
Fair enough, but I note you snipped the uncertainty levels bit though, and you present your opinion as definite fact sufficient to diss other people with when that isn’t warranted.
And if you remember, the discussion back then was if the ‘Angular Momentum’ explanation was viable, and we showed it was not [as even elementary physics shows you directly].
No it doesn’t. JPL Horizons presupposes that the solar system’s angular momentum sums to zero between the sun and planets, so you wouldn’t expect to find the energy of a spin-orbit coupling there.
If you can substantiate the correlation [which you have not] and you have another explanation that overcomes the energy problem, then by all means present it. Write a paper, get it published, etc.
At least you now admit there is a correlation to substantiate. This is progress! 😉
I realize that some people get insulted if you show that their pet theory doesn’t stack up
No Leif, you insult people with discourtesy and disrespect (Astologer, pseudoscientist), which should have no place on this (or any other) blog.
savethesharks (20:40:58) :
I have learned much from many of you on here. Hopefully we can all figure it out and get along in the process.
Amen to that.
Leif,
I think I very well might have been one of the ones you referenced, talking about the absurdity of a global average temperature. I can only speak for myself, but when I have made statements like that it has been in regards to the myopic overemphasis on the global average surface temperature record as the adjudicator of all things climate when it is, in fact, a proxy to the temperature you’re talking about.
I think to describe what you’re getting at we’d be talking about total heat content (ocean + surface + atmospheric) – which I agree would be useful. Why aren’t radiative analyses being taken, or are they and nobody is paying them any attention? Also, could an AGW signal be deduced from an analysis like this?
Leif Svalgaard (20:45:56) :
I would say that the process of adding up temperatures about 6 feet off of the surface and averaging them out would seem like an exercise in futility.
As to measuring the radiation coming off of the Earth, isn’t that what Lindzen was measuring with CERES (I am pretty sure that is the right acronym)?
Scafetta and Willson try to prove that the ACRIM data gap (caused by the Challenger disaster) show that the Sun is actually getting brighter, and assuming they are correct, they then show that this warming Sun can account for a good bit of the observed global warming (at least 10% to 30%).
Here’s the data gap.
At issue is the calibration of the satellites on both sides of the gap – the ACRIM device measures TSI variances very precisely, but it’s much harder to get an absolute measure like 1368 watts/m^2.
Here’s one calibration that NASA favors now.
It differs crucially from the interpretation NASA used to use earlier, in 2003 when Scafetta began trying to derive consequences of this “brightening Sun”.
http://www.physorg.com/news6892.html
, challenged the previous satellite interpretations of solar output. Willson and his colleagues concluded, rather that their analysis revealed a significant upward trend in average solar luminosity during the period.
Using the Columbia findings as the starting point for their study, Scafetta and West then statistically analyzed how Earth’s atmosphere would respond to slightly stronger solar heating. Importantly, they used an analytical method that could detect the subtle, complex relationships between solar output and terrestrial temperature patterns.
Applying their analytical method to the solar output estimates by the Columbia group, Scafetta’s and West’s paper concludes that “the sun may have minimally contributed about 10 to 30 percent of the 1980-2002 global surface warming.”
The March 2009 Scafetta/Willson paper (preprint here) attempting to show a brightening Sun, once again, using a solar model (developed by Solanki and Krivova) for estimating TSI for that troublesome ACRIM gap, is later slapped down by none other than Solanki and Krivova, for failing to understand the limitations of their solar model, and saying explicitly that it was misapplied for those timescales, and redoing the work using a more appropriate model of TSI.
This slapdown was published in record time in the same journal (Geophysical Research Letters) in October 2009.
Preprint here.
Nicola Scafetta’s recent paper, Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics
Volume 71, Issues 17-18, December 2009, Pages 1916-1923 is more hesitant now, after so much controversy over the TSI trends:
The sun may have caused from a slight cooling, if PMOD TSI composite is used, to a significant warming (up to 65% of the total observed warming) if ACRIM, or other TSI composites are used.
Here is the PMOD (Swiss Observatory and World Radiation Center) TSI results. Even the ACRIM composite solar minimums that Scafetta prefers is no longer trending upwards, by 2008.
So yeah, if the Sun was brightening decade after decade after decade, that would certainly explain a big part of the planet warming decade after decade after decade.
But it isn’t, so it doesn’t.
And Leif, I read you speaking of this “angular momentum” bit, I also am very leery of it. My only guess is they are trying to put some important sounding words (angular momentum) on some basic gravitational effects like the tiny difference I described and build a theory on it. It’s a fancy way of saying the planets orbits are all affected by the other planets. I hate fancy words! But to drag that into some sizeable effect on Earth’s climate system, I for one don’t buy that. Please don’t think I was describing that in my previous comment! I was not.
Re: Leif Svalgaard (Mar 14 19:30),
Maybe they don’t want to revolve around your Barycentre 🙂
@ur momisugly Smokey (20:58:39)
Google or bing ‘Oregon petition debunked’ for the story behind the fake Oregon Petition.
The Norfolk Police are investigating the theft of CRU emails. I don’t believe they have arrested anyone yet, but they should release their findings at some stage, whether they catch the thieves or not.
BTW – Thanks for responding to my post again, I think I’ve got a fan 🙂
I remember following a debate regarding the differences between Scafetta’s earlier estimates of TSI influence vs. his later estimates. One point made was his later revisions contradicted his earlier work cited by the IPCC and created quite a dispute with the IPCC. I couldn’t find the citation myself but I was able to find a seemingly related comment and response in the AR4 working group 1 notes:
The expert review comments on the First-Order Draft (16 November 2005), comment # 2-1786 requests that the Scafetta N. and B.J. West (2005) paper should be cited in the next draft. The reviewer’s response is: “Their paper is cited but with caveats that their claim depends crucially on the observational solar irradiance time series adopted for that period…”
I’m not sure where the line of demarcation is between being a reference source and contributor is nor can I determine if he submitted his paper for consideration but it seems certain his work was was at least reviewed, considered, discussed, and cited in the IPCC’s AR4 WG1 report for what it’s worth.
Henry (17:48:05) :
P.S.
Paid by Exxon.
No worries folks, it will be out eventually, and all the skeletons in the closets of the posters here wiil eventually be out
Did it ever occur to simplistic twits like you that at the widely touted Exxon figure of 20 million bucks divided by all the sceptics equals a flat rate of about $1.85 each? You can make better money by collecting empty beer cans which is about your intellectual level.
Oh, Leif, please read Miscolzi. He’s got the saturated gassy argument, that past a certain concentration, CO2 has no further greenhouse effect. His math is well beyond me, but it seems his thesis is highly controversial, embraced by skeptics and trashed by alarmists. Me? I know nossing.
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Wayne, @ur momisugly 20:38:09
Is there enough difference in the variable TSI by your mechanism to account for the wide variation in climate?
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