Nasa warns solar flares from ‘huge space storm’ will cause devastation

Hi All,
Very enjoyable banter! Personally, I visit this site to get useful papers and data – and am always pleased when Leif is posting, because he produces some really useful stuff. Thanks for the paper on the 1859 event.
Am I a pseudo-scientist???! Well, I don’t think so. Pseuds I used to meet when a student – people pretending to know stuff they didn’t really know. I don’t see myself in that light. But I know lots of people do! That is because I wrote a book on climate change whilst not being a climate scientist. But I do claim to know my stuff. I did not publish my analysis until after three years exhaustive review of the literature, perusal of station temperature data, NASA’s radiation flux data bases, ocean temperatures and heat storage measurements – and making sure my search spread over several disciplines – oceanography, solar-terrestrial physics, astrophysics, sedimentalogy and paleo-climatology, for example. I then circulated a draft report for two years and got some feedback, finally visiting the nearby Hadley Centre and talking for several hours with their oceanographers and solar specialists. I have utmost respect for science itself and for the scientists I meet. I don’t think this is what most people would call the behaviour of a pseud………
But is it useful to science to have ‘outsiders’ do this? I get flak for having disturbed the public’s confidence and even having upset the Copenhagen negotiations (I don’t think my book had much influence – I think the Chinese disrupted it because they needed a better deal on carbon trading).
As it happens, I did not set out to be useful to science – I set out to ‘test’ the assumptions and conclusions of the ‘consensus’ because the environmental and human cost of what they were proposing looked to me far greater than the ailment of global warming they were so alarmed about (I am an ‘expert’ consultant on the integration of renewable energy systems into landscape, community and biodiversity – being a professional ecologist, certified biologist and former member of the Institute of Biology and having advised UK government agencies and the EU on these issues).
But my grounding in ecological systems analysis, plus some years critically reviewing oceanic models of pollutant dispersion (whilst also advising the UN on restructruing its conventions on pollution control) – all of which is published in the peer-reviewed science literature – gave me an ideal background to critically examine the mechanism of causation assumed by IPCC models.
In my book, I offered the specialist climate community the view that they were not working sufficiently on an inter-disciplinary level (this was evident from a detailed reading of the Working Group reports of the IPCC). Paper after paper shows that, for example, solar physicists hardly talk to oceanographers, or that computer modellers of complex atmospheric dynamics do not talk to students of paleo-ecology familiar with the cycles and harmonics.
Thus for example, on a recent visit I made to talk to the US National Center for Atmospheric Reseach in Boulder, when I asked one of their specialists on the Sun’s influence in climate why he still believed, surprisingly for me, that anthropogenic sulphur had caused the 1945-1978 trough of global temperatures (after which sulphur controls had allowed the warming to continue) – and I showed him graphs of the short-wave flux at the ocean surface demonstrating the influence of clouds and natural aerosol loading, plus three Science paper references and the final admission of the IPCC in 2007 (somewhat buried), that ‘global dimming’ due to human emissions was too localised to account for the global pattern – he said ‘I have no idea what you are talking about’. This is perhaps not uncommon among top experts. Of course, this does not make him a bad scientist, nor me a good one. It is about information overload, ‘search image’ and knowledge transfer. I was looking for holes in the argument – and they were not hard to find.
At Hadley, I pointed the oceanographers to the large long-term build-up of subsurface heat in the North Atlantic and North Pacific (in my book I produce a map of where the oceans store the heat from the sun – it is not homogenous). I noted that in 2006 the north Pacific had suddenly lost surface heat over a large area upwind of Alaska – and that Alaska had been cooling as a result (this is what oceanographers would call the PDO). I asked how long the Atlantic heat store would last? We got out the most recent surface temperature maps, and lo……we could see the first blips of red changing to blue.
My question to the science community is simple enough: what is the long-term dynamic in these two major heat stores? What determines the phases of accumulation and depletion?
If we go back to the Little Ice Age, we are midway in what appears to be a cycle – that creates global peaks and troughs at 800-1000 year intervals – and more pronounced in the northern hemisphere (where the world’s food surplus is grown).
I asked some specialists in NOAA (also at Boulder) – who have been studying heat transfer (they had concluded in the literature that 80% of all ‘global warming’ on land was due to heat transfer from the ocean). They were not convinced there was a ‘cycle’ at all – to them a cycle meant an exact repetition – like a Hertz cycle, and thought that any oceanic system could create apparent cyclic phenomenon due to some kind of stochastic resonance. That gave me much food for thought – and stretches my skills-base in math!
As a result of my overview – I deduced that cycles were real, that the northern oceans determine the cycles on a global scale through teleconnections from basin to basin, and that some solar factor was the likely timer – I reviewed Svensmark’s theories and his critics, but pointed to breaking science around the much more variable UV flux from the sun, upper atmospheric heating and the displacement of the jet-stream (which drives the storm vortices that suck heat out of the ocean and dump it on land) – there were about a dozen scientific papers on this UV potential effect and the jetstream – compared to several thousand in the ‘mainstream’ causal picture. Several recent papers have confirmed my prediction that UV would eventually prove most relevant.
On the basis of this work, I was able to predict that the very wet summer in England during 2007 would be repeated in 2008 and 2009, and that Britain would begin to experience very cold winters as sub-polar high-pressure systems began to dominate. My rather simple textual analysis and three years of effort performed better than Hadley’s £30m new computer and all their experts.
In this respect – one might want to look at how ‘pseudo’ might be applied to climate science that relies upon unfounded and untested assumptions built into computer models? It reminds me a lot of the 1980’s when environmental toxicology relied upon atmospheric and oceanic models of dispersion and dose-effects (and also spawned a massive global emissions and monitoring industry).
You see – Leif, with great respect – which I truly mean, because your contribution to solar science is outstanding, as is your commitment to scientific discourse even with annoying non-scientists, but even real top scientific experts can be led astray into the realms of pseudo-science where they pretend to know things they don’t really know.
But that is still not as bad as the relation to things science knows it does not know – such as sub-quantum realities where no instrument can extend our awareness. Clearly as you state, Leif – this is beyond science – but it is the implied superiority that you have to watch – just because science cannot go there, it does not mean there is ‘nothing’ there – no pattern, no power, no influence on this physical reality or more importantly, on human consciousness – which is also beyond scientific measurement.
I say this because as well as having a science education and working as a ‘scientist’, I am also a practising astrologer, as was Theodore Landscheidt. I also have a professional qualification in Social Anthropology (Oxford University) and have studied linguistics and models of causation, magic, witchcraft and divinity among African and Amazonian tribal peoples, all of whom have an entirely different cosmological understanding as well as approaches to ‘reality’ as defined by our science. For example in most shamanic cultures, the ‘dreamworld’ is primary in causation – and this world exists as another dimension that inter-penetrates this one – and one that a shaman-magician can enter. The world of human consciousness is then seen as existing on another dimensional reality.
As with my approach to climate science – I have visited shamans and yogis, but been fortunate to also study and practice with them (of much greater interest to me than measuring stuff). Most of them work as healers.
It is with these perspectives that I ask – ‘maybe the barycentre could be acting as a proxy for other forces operating’. Firstly, those other forces may be those we know about (or think we know about) such as magnetic field lines, electric currents and voltage shocks – all of which appear to be emanating from the Sun. Or the transfer of angular momentum to the Sun and whatever effects that mau have on spinning plasma. Or forces that we as yet have no instruments to measure but may be operating to produce some of the cyclic phenomena we witness. For example, Hannes Alfven proposed a ‘back-current’ of electrons into the sun. In my understanding of electrons (and the solar wind is an electrical current) there always has to be a circuit for the current to flow – so what happens at the helio-pause? Do those electrons never return? And if they do, then may they not follow some complex magnetic field pathways back to the source?
I don’t know the answers, but these seem relevant questions. Maybe they are not – maybe these are old-chestnuts and I just haven’t seen the right papers.