I’m on my way back to the USA from my Australian speaking tour. I’ll be offline a couple of days. There are many, many, people who I owe a debt of gratitude to, for kindnesses big and small, but, there is one person to who I owe a debt that is much more prominent.
That person is Mr. David Archibald of Perth.
David has been my constant companion throughout the grueling continent crisscrossing pace of the tour, sorting out and correcting details, making sure I was where I needed to be when I needed to be, fighting some idiotic travel battles we faced, and most importantly, helping me hear. This was critical in Q&A after the lectures.
Without him, I would have been lost. He’s a gentleman, a scholar, and I count him as a friend. David, I cannot thank you enough.
That said, there’s something WUWT readers can do that can show gratitude on my behalf, while learning something in the process.
David spoke right along side me at each stop, and created an excellent presentation from the work he has done on his just printed book The Past and Future of Climate.
I’ll review this book in a future post, I’ve read a personal copy he gave me and it reads very well. Like WUWT, this book is heavy on illustrations. There’s not only some very interesting solar research, but some points on climate as well.
For example this illustration (from his slide show) is very interesting:
On my recommendation, if you wish, you can download an order form here:
The Past and Future of Climate – order form
He offers the book for $30AU post paid, and advises that he’ll also ship internationally as well. You can also visit his website at http://davidarchibald.info/
When I do my review, he’ll have an order form that can be used via PayPal, until then, direct by postal mail or PayPal via email contact are the only options.
Again my sincere thanks to David for his unfailing help, good cheer, and pathfinding. I hope WUWT readers can express thanks also.
David Ball says:
July 3, 2010 at 9:09 pm
Including the interaction between the earth and the sun. I believe it is I who touched a nerve.
No nerve there. I have stated my view on this before.
The point of my initial post was not about D.A. [or I] having all the answers, but simply pointing out that that one Figure was misleading and sloppy. If you have any problems with that, then explain why the Figure is not misleading. What the meaning of the green and blue lines might be?
Steinar Midtskogen says:
July 3, 2010 at 9:44 pm
Leif Svalgaard says:
Steinar Midtskogen says:
The same exercise has been done for other stations and the trend is the same, nothing more.
I have not been able to find any convincing analysis by D.A. [or others for that matter] that show that the length of the solar cycle predicts the temperature during the next cycle, but would be interested in what specific ‘exercises’ you refer to.
CRS, Dr.P.H. says:
July 3, 2010 at 9:52 pm
Goodness!! How did this thread turn into a “pile on Leif” party??
If people cannot bring any science to the table, they often resort to ‘piling on’. Just human nature. So far, the ‘piling on’ has been light and mediocre. I have seen much better ‘piling ons’ in other threads.
Of interest is the “partyline” eg Lean 2010
From 2014 to 2019,global annual surface temperatures are expected to
increase only minimally (0.03◦C), as declining solar irradiance cancels much of the anthropogenic warming, analogous to the recent period from 2002 to 2008 when decreasing solar irradiance during the descending phase of solar cycle 23 countered much of the anthropogenic warming.
This would imply high sensitivity and hence irreducibility ( with all its random consequences) eg I. Zaliapin and M. Ghil 2010, on the other hand as JL arguments are essentially linear,it may be best to bury them at the bottom of the garden.
Leif, less it be said, as has been said, that this is a pile on Leif thread, let me say that David Archibald can look after himself so I don’t want to follow that line that it is you or him, but I am nonplussed by this comment of yours:
July 3, 2010 at 9:23 pm
cohenite says:
July 3, 2010 at 8:53 pm
a doubling of CO2 has as much temperature effect/forcing as a 2% increase in solar output. Isn’t life grand?!
Well, if that is what you really believe, we can put some numbers to that. A 2% increase in solar output would give you a 2%/4 = 0.5% = 288K*0.5%/100 = 1.44K temperature increase. Except that the Sun has not varied that much the past ~10,000 years, more like 10-20 times less.
First of all I didn’t say it, Real Climate said it; secondly, your calculation is slightly odd. For instance for solar cycle 23 the solar output varied only 0.1%. yet RC are equating 2XCO2 = 2% variation in solar output; don’t you find that strange?
Anyway, I thought the sun was now in its main sequence where solar output increases ~ 4% every billion years so a sudden 2% increase is unlikely. But it’s not just about increases, the sun can decrease as well. As a matter of interest how much do you think solar activity dropped during the Maunder and what effect did that have on temperature?
With respect to the lecture tour, one lady drove eleven hours across South Australia, from west of Ceduna, to hear us in Adelaide. Another lady attend in Melbourne then wanted to hear us again, so she drove four hours to Hamilton to the lecture there and then four hours back to Melbourne.
Anthony is a living saint, so I tried to get him to heal a neighbour of mine in Perth, who is in a wheelchair after ankle surgery. I said to Anthony,”Lay your healing hands on this pathetic cripple, so that he may walk again.” But nothing happened.
REPLY: Take that last paragraph with a grain of salt – some humor there, the neighbour was not offended, he laughed. But I was beet red. – Anthony
Molon Labe
It’s you Yanks that have the funny accent. Anthony has a hearing impairment.
Christoph
I wouldn’t say “Lucky them” but it did a lot of good. The Italians invaded Greece and the Greeks belted them. Then the Germans had to do the Italians’ job for them. They finished up fighting the Greeks, the Brits and us Australians. All up it delayed Operation Barbarossa about 8 weeks, so that Father Winter caught the Germans outside Moscow instead of miles to the east. We had no hope but Churchill had promised the Greeks and we kept the promise.
899 says: July 3, 2010 at 5:21 pm
vukcevic,
Aren’t you forgetting just one wee tiny detail in all of that? The Earth’s rotation, tilt, and nutation.
No, Gulf stream current is an offshoot of an interconnected complex Atlantic currents system http://www.bigmarinefish.com/map_currents_atlantic.jpg
which regardless of time of the year (revolution, tilt or nutation) it always catches range of insulations (including maximum) from both hemispheres, which eventually averages out due to its high velocity . Its effect is felt all the way from tropics to the Arctic., there is more to it than IPCC’s CO2.
BTW. Correlations for the AMO index and the Arctic temperatures are now calculated and are here:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/AMOFz.htm
Leif Svalgaard says:
July 3, 2010 at 8:15 pm
I have been wrong many times and undoubtedly will be in the future. That is not the issue, which is the incredible sloppiness and outright falsehoods in D.A.’s ‘work’. Somebody once had this to say about it: http://n3xus6.blogspot.com/2007/02/dd.html
—————————
I followed that link right up to the last line, then for some reason burst out laughing 😉
I stand corrected but I thought RC claimed a 2x CO2 = 2DegC. Not 2% increase in TSI
Roger Carr says:
July 3, 2010 at 9:10 pm
Which neatly encapsulates my dislocation, John. I find David’s conclusions seductive. I find Leif’s compelling.
Roger
When I first started looking into AGW some years ago I wanted to believe much of the anti-AGW literature (including David’s).
I was totally cheesed of with being told how the “science was settled”. Unfortunately the ‘research’ which seemed to produce the most definite and “seductive” conclusions often turned out to be the most dubious. I’m now forced to accept that there is not going to be a ‘eureka’ moment when the truth will be revealed in a single discovery. It’s going to take decades after decade of careful observations before any sort of conclusions can be made. I’m still sceptical of catastrophic AGW. I think the feedback issue (often covered independently on WUWT by Richard Lindzen and Roy Spencer) is an area of huge uncertainy. It’s also possible the sun will plays a bigger role than it appears at present. Dr Svalgaard doesn’t rule out that possibility – but he makes the point that, for that to be the case, the climate would need to be highly sensitive. It’s perhaps worth noting that the pro-AGW crowd are happy to accept a solar influence. It is the only way they can explain the early 20th century warming.
Anyway, the main lesson I’ve learned over the past few years is that scepticism needs to be applied in all cases – not just those we don’t like.
When is the DA temperature response to Solar Cycle Length
David has clearly managed to confuse WUWT readers on this issue. Understandably so, I claim that David simply creates his own ad hoc temp/SCL relationship depending on the period under discussion.
The following is from this paper http://www.davidarchibald.info/papers/Solar%20Cycles%2024%20and%2025%20and%20Predicted%20Climate%20Response.pdf (available on David’s web site). Here David is discussing THE RECENT TEMPERATURE RECORD IN NORTH AMERICA (~5th page). Th esecond paragraph reads:
The temperature profile over the period shows three distinct trends: a relatively
stable period from 1905 to 1953 averaging 16.3°C, a relatively steep decline of 1.4°C
over the 15 years to 1968 due to a weak solar cycle 20 , and then a slight rise to the
current day with an average of 15.8°C to 2003.
According to David the 1.4 deg decline between 1953 and 1968 was “due to a weak solar cycle 20”. But solar cycle 20 didn’t begin until 1964 (and ended in 1976). Apparently this cycle caused a temperature decline more than a decade before it started. According to David’s ‘latest rule’, the decline should be over the following cycle. In other words, temperatures should have started to fall from ~1976 onwards. In fact, the temperature decline at these US stations (and these are the ones he’s carefully selected) began just about the time the strongest cycle ever recorded (SC19) was starting.
This is not an isolated case. David’s work is littered with contradictions – some of which, I note, he has now removed. The original Armagh research by Butler & Johnson used temperature data (11 years mean) centred on the maxima and minima of the cycle in question – not the next cycle. In the above plot, B&J have included the data points for SC21. They clearly state that the temperature data is from 1796-1992. This gives them data for 5-6 years after the SC21 minimum (in ~1986) which is enough to calculate the 11 year mean.
The original timeframe for David’s predicted temperature decline shows his prediction to be demonstrably wrong – so he’s changed it. Easy!
899 says: July 3, 2010 at 5:21 pm
…………..
The CETs summer/ winter anomaly oscillates with 50-60 year cycle. http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CETsw.htm
Long term summer anomaly shows no change, which would indicate that it is related to the insolation.
Long term winter anomaly has a rising trend and I attribute this to rise in velocity of Gulf Stream. In my view possible cause is the reduction in strength of the Earth’s magnetic field, affecting the Arctic’s currents circulation, for which there is a strong correlation.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/NFC1.htm
Re: John Finn says:
July 4, 2010 at 4:12 am
A slight correction to my previous post. The statement for DA’s paper is not on the 5th page – but on page 4 of David’s paper (Page 32 of E&E) .
I’ve just noticed to-day’s date – does that mean US posters will be otherwise occupied for the rest of the day.
Leif,
I found this paper from the names on the plot above:
http://www.warwickhughes.com/agri/armagh_temp_history.pdf
by C.J. Butler and D.J. Johnston
A Provisional Long Mean Air Temperature Series
for Armagh Observatory
In its fig7, it has a minimum to minimum length and it does not look like your
http://www.leif.org/research/DavidA19.png plot.
Of course it is filtering and adding 1 to the cycle number from what I understand of the caption:
Figure7 The Mean Temperature at Armagh for 11
year intervals against the Sunspot Cycle Length smoothed with a 1-2-2-2-1 filter, as determined from (a):successive maxima in the sunspot number curve, and ( b)
successive minima. The value plotted for the Sunspot Cycle Length has been shifted by one cycle to take into account the delay in the response of the temperature at Armagh discussed in Sections 3,4.
It is a puzzling plot. It displays the temperature of the cycle against the length of the previous cycle, and I guess that is where D.A. got the idea to use it for a prediction.
I am in no position to know if the data in the published plots are the same , the abstract is.
And I cannot even guess what this 1-2- etc filtering does, which is what probably makes your plot different than the one in the publication.
Hi Anthony & David, your travels around Australia were not particularly greulling criss crossing. Some of us kept up schedules like this for years. One day we bought a new Cessna Citation V with long range fuel tanks to fly for example from Melbourne head office to Robe River, as direct line was far shorter than via adelaide & Perth on commercial. The guys in the West called it “the flying overheads”.
While in a jovial mode, this old joke came on the Net. I thought it worth repeating if you replace “ship” in the last line with “CAGW”…………………………………………
A magician worked on a cruise ship. The gullible audience was different each week, so the magician did the same tricks over and over again. One problem:The captain’s parrot saw the shows each week and began to understand how the magician did every trick. Once he understood, he started shouting in
the middle of the show:
“Look, it’s not the same hat!”
“Look, he’s hiding the flowers under the table.”
“Hey, why are all the cards the ace of spades?”
The magician was furious but couldn’t do anything. It was, after all,
the captain’s parrot.
The next day the ship sank. The magician found himself on a piece of wood in the
middle of the sea with, as fate would have it, the parrot. They stared at each
other with hatred but did not utter a word. This went on for a day and
then another and then another.
Finally on the fourth day, the parrot could not hold back:
“OK, I give up. Where’s the f…..g ship?”
REPLY: Heh. When flying your own plane you are in control. When flying Virgin Blue (aka iPod air), Rex (pray it doesn’t), or Tiger air (the baggage fee that roars) you are in control of nothing. -A
anna v says:
July 4, 2010 at 4:58 am
Leif,
I found this paper from the names on the plot above:
http://www.warwickhughes.com/agri/armagh_temp_history.pdf
by C.J. Butler and D.J. Johnston
David is using Fig 5 from this paper – not Fig 7. Fig 5 doesn’t mention shifting – nor does it mention the filter. The 1-2-2-2- filter was uded by F-C & Lassen. As far as I can tell this is just some arbitrary filtering to make the data fit better.
cohenite says:
July 3, 2010 at 10:49 pm
First of all I didn’t say it, Real Climate said it;
You seemed to go along with it, even quote it as important.
secondly, your calculation is slightly odd. For instance for solar cycle 23 the solar output varied only 0.1%. yet RC are equating 2XCO2 = 2% variation in solar output; don’t you find that strange?
No, 2% change in solar output would change the temperature 1.44 C, and 2XCO2 [according to RC] would also change the temperature by 1.44 C. What is so strange about that? What is strange to me is why you make an issue out of this or bring it up.
As a matter of interest how much do you think solar activity dropped during the Maunder and what effect did that have on temperature?
Less than 1 W/m2, corresponding to 0.05 C. http://www.leif.org/research/Does%20The%20Sun%20Vary%20Enough.pdf
anna v says:
July 4, 2010 at 4:58 am
In its fig7, it has a minimum to minimum length and it does not look like your
http://www.leif.org/research/DavidA19.png plot.
I was trying to replicate Figure 5. The 1-2-2-2-1 filtering is so dubious that it is not worth wasting much time on. For example, with that filtering, the filtered lengths for cycle 22 and 23 cannot even be calculated yet, so what are SC22 and SC23 doing on the Figure?
I don’t recall D.A. saying anything about shifting by one solar cycle. Check for yourself here: http://www.warwickhughes.com/agri/Solar_Arch_NY_Mar2_08.pdf
He is saying: “what a 13 year long Solar Cycle 23 would look like. It follows that the temperature at Armagh will be 1.6 degrees lower. This effect is upon us right now.”
Leif Svalgaard says: July 4, 2010 at 5:51 am
Q: As a matter of interest how much do you think solar activity dropped during the Maunder and what effect did that have on temperature?
A: Less than 1 W/m2, corresponding to 0.05 C. http://www.leif.org/research/Does%20The%20Sun%20Vary%20Enough.pdf
If that assumption is correct then there is an alternative:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CETlmt.htm
Me thinks Svalgaard, Finn etc protesteth too much. They have worked themselves up into a lather repeating the same stuff over and over again. Friis-Christensen and Lassen theory says that the length of a solar cycle determines temperature over the following solar cycle. Solar Cycle 4, preceding the Dalton Minimum, was 13.6 years long. The cycles of the Dalton Minimum, 5 and 6, were each 12 years long.
Solar Cycle 23, preceding the current minimum, was 12.5 years long. The important thing is that it was 3 years longer than Solar Cycle 22.
I regard the Butler and Johnson figure as the Rosetta Stone of solar- climate studies. They applied Friis-Christensend and Lassen theory to the record of one weather station, and it worked. There is very little scatter about the line of best fit, which means it can be used as a predictive tool. So on top of their graph, I put on the lengths of Solar Cycles 22 and 23. Lo and behold, Armagh will be 1.4 degrees colder on average over Solar Cycle 24 than it was over Solar Cycle 23. Nothing is going to stop that from happening.
The other thing that is causing the current cooling is that it is a de Vries cycle event, which has a 210 year period. The last de Vries cycle event was the Dalton Minimum, which started 210 years before the 223-24 transition. It is happening right on schedule.
I have applied Butler and Johnson’s methodology to a number of other temperature records. Good correlations are seen in the CET, de Bilt, Archangel and four stations in the northeastern US. These latter four indicate a 2 degree C cooling for the latitude of the US-Canadian border.
I finished my lectures on the tour by saying that Canadian agriculture will be back to trapping beavers by the end of the decade. A 2 degree fall should reduce the Canadian grain growing area to next to nothing.
David Archibald says:
July 4, 2010 at 7:12 am
They applied Friis-Christensen and Lassen theory to the record of one weather station, and it worked. There is very little scatter about the line of best fit, which means it can be used as a predictive tool. So on top of their graph, I put on the lengths of Solar Cycles 22 and 23. Lo and behold, Armagh will be 1.4 degrees colder on average over Solar Cycle 24 than it was over Solar Cycle 23.
The FC&L ‘theory’ works with 1-2-2-2-1 smoothing of the lengths. So to calculate the length of cycle 22 you need the lengths of 20-21-22-23-24 and for SC23 you need the lengths of 21-22-23-24-25. We don’t know all of these, so cannot apply the ‘theory’. We can make some informed guesses, e.g. that SC24 and 25 might be similar to SC23 or even a bit longer, say 12.5. SC20 was 11.21 yrs, SC21 10.34, SC22 10.04, and SC23 12.35. That means that the appropriate lengths to use on the graph would be SC22=(1*11.21+2*10.34+2*10.04+2*12.35+1*12.5)/8=11.15 and SC23=11.58 yr.
Now, you can say that FC&L doesn’t apply strictly, etc, but that would just be excuses.
Nothing is going to stop that from happening.
It is this kind of unfounded Alarmism that is dangerous and should be beneath serious work.
Leif, the value of R is quite small, but difficult to interpret without a table, so I’d suggest adding the confidence interval at 90% or 95% confidence levels. Undoubtedly in this figure zero will be included in the confidence interval and then one can safely say “there is no trend here at all, only noise.” Despite their limitations, I prefer confidence intervals to R or R-squared as indicators of significance.
I would be very interested indeed to read a scientific assessment by Prof. Svalgaard Dr. Jeff Glassman’s apparent evidence for an amplified signal of the Sun’s radiance in the ‘official’ surface temperature record from 1850.
http://www.rocketscientistsjournal.com/2010/03/sgw.html
Dr. Glassman’s analysis would seem to be either good evidence for some sort of amplified sensitivity or, if it were not, is just a remarkable coincidence of probabilities which, conversely, would have to cast doubt on the shape of the temperature record itself.
In other words, it is either a genuine finding or a poisoned chalice. To me this seems far, far more interesting than David Archibald’s rather shaky stuff.
I understand that Dr. Glassman is a respectable retired physicist (77) who, during his working career in avionics last century, was recognised as an authority on noisy signal analysis in telemetry. Although a PhD scientist myself of 30+ years experience my own field is very different (chemothermodynamics and geochemistry), therefore I have tried hard to get some careful technical reviewing from various Net-prominent AGW proponents on Dr. Glassman’s approach but have so far failed.
vukcevic says:
July 4, 2010 at 6:36 am
If that assumption is correct then there is an alternative:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CETlmt.htm
The problem with your alternative is that the strength of the Earth’s main field has been steadily decreasing the last 2500 years, which does not match the temperature record. Starting your graph in 1600 introduces a spurious ‘dependence’.
Leif Svalgaard says:
July 4, 2010 at 8:05 am
It is this kind of unfounded Alarmism that is dangerous and should be beneath serious work.
It is this type of hyperbole that is silly and just undermines what you say.
David is right, you really do protest too much. I suspect it’s because you feel threatened by his work. Wonder why?