A note of sincere thanks

For those interested in Fig. 5 (main post), Dr. Archibald’s paper “Solar Cycle 24: Expectations and Implications” (D. Archibald 2009) provides similar analyses for the following stations, with similar positive results :
CET 1659-2004
Portland, Maine 1835-2005
Hanover, NH 1835-2005
It’d be interesting to see the results for other long-term instrumental temperature records, to map the regional nature of this relationship.

“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.”…
_______________________________
Hopefully, each of us will be so fortunate as to find a ‘Good Archibald’ coming to our assistance along the byways of life should the need arise. And, hopefully, each of us will be so kind as to acknowledge that person –regardless of their unintelligible accent or any other distinguishing characteristics. A friend is a friend is a friend; and we will go through life and meet far less than we ever thought possible for such a long –or short– span of time.

David Ball says:
July 4, 2010 at 10:23 am
People should also be aware that Svalgaard’s numbers are based on “adjusted” GISS data. The collection of which we all understand to be in question. Svalgaard is trying to direct the discussion to a narrow focus. This is misleading. Do not fall for amateur debating techniques.
People shoud be aware that David Ball is talking out of his hat. Leif Svalgaard has been using the Armagh data set p- excatly the one used by David Archibald.

David Archibald says:
July 4, 2010 at 7:12 am
Me thinks Svalgaard, Finn etc protesteth too much
David
Nice of you to drop by again. Is there any chance you could answer one or two quick questions about your work.
1. David, in your post you discuss the Butler & Johnson analysis. You say “So on top of their graph, I put on the lengths of Solar Cycles 22 and 23”. Could you explain exactly how you calculated the temperature value for SC22 and SC23?
2. David in your paper: http://www.davidarchibald.info/papers/Solar%20Cycles%2024%20and%2025%20and%20Predicted%20Climate%20Response.pdf You state the following
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.
Can you explain the highlighted statement, David. It seems that you are suggesting that a drop in temperatures which began in the early 1950s was caused by a solar cycle which didn’t start until more than a decade later. I find this particularly puzzling because SC20 was a longer than average cycle (SC19 was shorter than average) and according to your current line of thinking the temperature decline should have taken place during the following cycle (i.e. SC21) which began in ~1976.

Leif Svalgaard says: July 4, 2010 at 8:37 am
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’.
Yes that is correct for something you call ‘dipole’, but the Arctic Ocean has a more complex situation then just a dipole. There is a conflict between rising and falling GMF field in the Arctic area and data for that particular fascet exist only from 1600. The average just happen to match temperature anomaly.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/NFC1.htm
The arithmetic average of two fields is in the area of Beaufort gyre (see the GMF polar area illustration). The BG circulation is currently moving towards Alaska away from Siberia in response to (reverse) changes of the area’s GMF.
Also you should look at correlation calculation (end of the page). BTW correlation of AMO to GMFz is actually higher then that one to the Arctic temp anomaly if 6 year delay is eliminated. You might say ‘6 year delay’ is a fiddle.
quote:
On the average, it takes ice more than 6 years to drift from the Beaufort Sea to the Fram Strait and one year from the North Pole. During high AO years, ice drift from the Beaufort Sea to the Fram Strait takes more than a year longer, but ice travels faster from the North Pole to the Fram Strait. Page 20.
http://www.geus.dk/program-areas/nature-environment/international/reports/geus_special_publ_nov_2004.pdf
quote:
The Fram Strait represents the unique deep water connection between the Arctic Ocean and the rest of the world ocean. Its bathymetry controls the exchange of water masses between the arctic basin and the north atlantic seas. The significant heat flux through water mass exchange and sea ice transport, i.e. transport of fresh water and sea ice southwards and transport of warm saline waters northwards, influences the thermohaline circulation at a global scale.
http://www.awi.de/en/research/research_divisions/geosciences/marine_geology_and_paleontology/research_themes/bathymetry_and_geodesy/bathymetric_chart_of_the_fram_strait_bcfs/regional_setting_and_relevance/
I conclude that the GMFz controls the Beaufort Gyre’s circulation (largest and most powerful in the Arctic), while Fram Strait is the embryonic AMO index area.
Your reply: you are an engineer calculate power.
My problem is I do not entirely understand driving mechanism.
It is possible that GMF is just a proxy for gravity anomaly, or even that there is a bidirectional feedback between GMF and the Arctic currents (as suggest elsewhere).
Your problem is you dismiss everything you do not understand as nonsense.

Prof. Lief Svalgaard stated above:
“ecoeng says:
July 4, 2010 at 8:24 am
Dr. Glassman’s analysis would seem to be either good evidence for some sort of amplified sensitivity or…
He uses [and recognizes] rather obsolete TSI reconstructions. There is less and less credence to the idea that there is a ‘background’ on which the solar cycle variation rides.”
yet Dr. Jeff Glassman on his blog clearly stated:
“Wang, et al. (2005) has no references to anthropogenics of any type, and while Wang apparently has had no direct association with IPCC, his co-author on the second source was IPCC author Lean. Wang’s model did reduce Lean’s estimate of the Sun’s radiance and the solar forcing by increase by a factor of 2.4, as noted by IPCC:
From 1750 to the present there was a net 0.05% increase in total solar irradiance, according to the 11-year smoothed total solar irradiance time series of Y. Wang et al. (2005), shown in Figure 2.17. This corresponds to an RF of +0.12 Wm-2, which is more than a factor of two less than the solar RF estimate in the TAR, also from 1750 to the present. Using the Lean (2000) reconstruction (the lower envelope in Figure 2.17) as an upper limit, there is a 0.12% irradiance increase since 1750, for which the RF is +0.3 Wm-2. IPCC, AR4 ¶2.7.1.2.2 Implications for solar radiative forcing, p. 192.
Consequently the Wang model is substantially superior to the Lean model for demonstrating that the greenhouse effect and CO2 not only cause global warming, but that they are a threat.”
In other words, it seems to me that Glassman has very wisely used a relatively recent and conservative authority on the apparent (likely?) variation in solar irradiance over the last 160 years in attempting to discern a signal in the ‘consensual’ global surface temperature record.
So here we have a situation where Glassman deliberately chose the (more conservative than Lean et al. 2000) Wang et al. (2005) paper and yet Prof. Svalgaaard is still claiming that Glassman used an obsolete record!
Obsolete? Obsolete since 2005? Come now – isn’t that stretching the bounds of credibility just a little too much?
Are we to take on face value Prof. Svalgaard’s clear inference that in the period since 2005 only he himself has become the absolute arbiter of what is obsolete or not in respect of what we should understand is the long term variation in solar irradiance?
I have heard a lot of claims from the so-called AGW ‘consensus’ concerning varous consensual paradigms but this is the first time I have ever heard a statement that we can actually ignore the entire pre-2005 literature on solar irradiance variation over the last 150 years (only) as being ‘obsolete’ because it was actually much more constant than even Wang et al., 2005 estimated?
Once again I would point out that I have made many genuine attempts to get prominent AGW proponents to comment critically on Glassman’s ‘signal analysis’ work. In each case, the response has seemed to me technically unsatisfactory – reducing to little more than an insult to Dr. Glassman’s (or my own) intelligence because Glassman himself clearly stated a number of times that if his finding is true some sort of amplification mechanism must be in operation.
A disappointingly similar response from Prof. Svalgaard which, in addition, is quite startling in its clear assertion of an ‘absolutely constant Sun’ over the last 150 years or so!
This seems bizarre to me! In my own scientific field I know of no case whatsoever where an assertion could be sustained that such a significant new paradigm must be (or can be) accepted ‘consensually’ within a period of as little as 5 years!

I further note that Glassman in his blog clearly stated:
“The observation in Lean (2000) is still valid: no empirical evidence exists beyond a few decades to compare the accuracy of these models. Regardless, the modeling in Wang et al. (2005) is a substantial improvement in rigor. They divided the Sun’s surface in two: an active region comprising the sunspots and faculae, plus a separable ephemeral or background region. They represented the active region by as many as 600 large, closed loop dipoles, called Bipolar Magnetic Regions (BMRs), randomly placed over the sphere. They matched the resulting magnetic field to the annual sunspot number, the polarity switching phenomenon, and the solar wind aa index. They also adopted empirical relationships from the literature, and substantially reduced the facular background used in Lean (2000).
Wang, et al. recognize that their secular (background) trend is substantially smaller than found in previous models. However they make no claim that their model is more accurate beyond accounting for implications from an arbitrary scaling of the aa index, recorded since 1868, and empirical relationships involving the index. While any model of sophistication would agree with modern measurements, the question is how well a model represents the evolution of the Sun’s irradiance to the present, as Wang, et al. stated at the outset was their objective. While the absolute value of the trend remains relatively uncertain, the Wang model represents the state-of-the-art in representing solar irradiance, optimum to account for the fine structure of TSI variability because it is an emulation of physical phenomena, constrained by the long records of sunspot numbers and the solar wind.
The Total Solar Irradiance used in this paper is the Wang et al. (2005) model, digitized from the violet trace in IPCC’s Figure 2.17.”
As I see it, Prof. Svalgaard chose to impugn Glassman’s source for the TSI over the last 280 years (1720 – 2000) being Wang et al., 2005, as being ‘obsolete’ even though he (Glassman) had reached the reasonable conclusion that the Wang et al. model:
“…represents the state-of-the-art in representing solar irradiance, optimum to account for the fine structure of TSI variability because it is an emulation of physical phenomena, constrained by the long records of sunspot numbers and the solar wind.”
I would therefore really appreciate an explanation from Prof. Svalgaard of just how the Wang et al. (2005) model may be reasonably judged to be “obsolete”.
It seems to me that Prof. Svalgaard can only be implying that the Wang et al. (2005) model is dead wrong simply because the TSI was either:
(1) remarkably constant over the last 150 years; or
(2) any variation in TSI is purely random,
and hence the outcome of Glassman’s analysis is purely……. fortuitous.
Alternatively, or preferably additionally, if our understanding of TSI is non-negligible, and noting Glassman’s authority as a physicist experienced with electromagnetics, I would appreciate a technical critique from Prof. Svalgaard of Glassman’s:
* signal analysis philosophy (relating the TSI record to IPCC’s AR4 Figure 3.6 global temperature record from HadCRUT3); and
* his (Glassman’s) analytical methodology.
Please.