George Monbiot probably burst a blood vessel when he read this. Congratulations to Piers, who doesn’t need a teraflop class supercomputer to render a forecast. This passage tells the story:
I have not a clue whether his methods are sound or not. But when so many of his forecasts seem to come true, and when he seems to be so consistently ahead of the Met Office, I feel I want to know more.
Maybe that’s why Mr. Johnson says London is prepared for snow, where others are not.
Here’s some excerpts:
Do you remember? They said it would be mild and damp, and between one degree and one and a half degrees warmer than average. Well, I am now 46 and that means I have seen more winters than most people on this planet, and I can tell you that this one is a corker.
Never mind the record low attained in Northern Ireland this weekend. I can’t remember a time when so much snow has lain so thickly on the ground, and we haven’t even reached Christmas. And this is the third tough winter in a row. Is it really true that no one saw this coming?
Actually, they did. Allow me to introduce readers to Piers Corbyn, meteorologist and brother of my old chum, bearded leftie MP Jeremy. Piers Corbyn works in an undistinguished office in Borough High Street. He has no telescope or supercomputer. Armed only with a laptop, huge quantities of publicly available data and a first-class degree in astrophysics, he gets it right again and again.
And this:
The question is whether anthropogenic global warming is the exclusive or dominant fact that determines our climate, or whether Corbyn is also right to insist on the role of the Sun.
Full story here. Boris John is the Mayor of London, more here.
h/t to WUWT reader “Roger” aka “Old England”
Can anyone point me to a side-by-side comparison of Piers Corbyn’s predictions vs. the MET’s? I’m not willing to take on faith the statement that PC has been right “85% of the time” or that such a percentage is higher (or lower) than the MET’s without data.
I’m sure there’s a site out there—can someone direct me? Thanks!
–Z
Another UK first.
University Challenge, a fairly influential, high-brow TV quiz programme, asked three questions on anti-Global Warming authors. Most unusual, and raised eyebrows from the undergraduates.
I presume Jeremy Paxman is no loner a believer.
.
>>EM Smith
>>For what it’s worth, there is a “19 counter” at Stonehenge. It looks like
>>the whole thing was a giant astronomics lab.
And of course 19 squared equals roughly the number of days in a year (and degrees in a circle, for obvious reasons). There are lots of symbiotic resonances in orbital mechanics.
.
Thank you Pamela, I’ll give all that some thought.
However I don’t want to descend into minute detail at this point. I think that is the very mistake that has stymied the climate establishment.
In the end it is just a matter of energy in versus energy out. If that changes due to an external cause then so be it.
I’m not sure that it is possible or desirable to try and engage in detailed wiggle matching. The scenario I paint fits on the 1000 year timescale. It matters not to me that the fit is poorer on shorter timescales.
From time to time such as now the sun makes such a large and sudden step change that its effects become obvious in the short term thereby swamping all else.
I find it very hard to discount a solar influence given recent events added to all the other ‘coincidences’ that I referred to above.
I have set out a number of predictions and if any of them go awry then I risk falsification. That is the best I can do for the moment.
Pamela Gray said:
“Bottom line, there is sufficient energy transfer oscillation to internally and intrinsically produce the noisy engine needed to create short and long term trends in the presence of a relatively constant Solar input taking care to replenish the leaks.”
Yes that is the bottom line. But there isn’t.
That is where I also depart from Leif Svalgaard and Bob Tisdale.
No amount of solely internal variability can create a 1000 year peak to peak oscillation from MWP to LIA to date (and going back before the MWP) which reasonably closely matches changing solar surface activity AND jetstream shifting.
For it to be solely internal you would have to point to a LENGTHY period of time when the jets were poleward (or zonal) at a time of quiet sun and equatorward (or meridional) at a time of active sun. It can be done on short timescales but not on century plus timescales.
The jets were poleward in the MWP and in the late 20th century. They were more equatorward in the LIA, Dalton Minimum, Sporer Minimum, during the weaker cycle 20 and now. You need to jump that hurdle to be taken seriously. Between those equatorward periods the jets moved a bit poleward again as the sun regained activity.
Unless you want to suggest that the internal Earth system variability drives the solar changes.
There is just too much historical evidence supported by a large number of isotope studies for the whole thing to be an internal oscillation or even set of internal oscillations.
I just cannot believe the ‘solely internal’ idea.
“Sir Piers Corbyn”. Has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? Well if they want to save money close the Met Office and pay Piers. Save a bundle and be much better prepared for bad weather.
Kudos to Mr Corbyn. Long, long overdue.
Pamela Gray says:
December 20, 2010 at 9:52 am
So one could say that the most important part of pressure cooking is intrinsic to the pressure cooker and can be adjusted, with the heat source being extrinsic and can either vary a bit or be quite stable without much change happening inside the cooker. Take the rocker off, or change weights and suddenly change is upon us.
The metaphor isn’t perfect but may help some understand my thinking of extrinsic versus intrinsic drivers of weather (short term and long term) pattern change.
OK, let’s run with this…
So you turn on your pressure cooker, and what happens. It achieves a stable state. Or does it? The weight rises until it levitates in perfect harmony with the pressure. Except it doesn’t. What the weight does is jiggle around in the steam – it overshoots, then settles down lower than it should, then overshoots.
What’s the temperature during this? Depends on the pressure – PV=nRT and all that. So when the weight is at the top end of it’s travel, the temperature is lower and vice versa. Now lets say your sense of time is not what it should be, and it takes 1470 +- 500 years for the weight to reach the top and then fall back down.
Now lets assume the flame flickers. Not much, the gas supply alters less than 1%. This flicker is cyclic, and takes round about 11 years. As part of this flicker, the flame changes colour from blue to yellow, and back. Can you tell over the 1470 years this flickering? No. Can you spot it over the 11 years? Maybe. Can you spot it when the yellow flame goes metastable for a protracted period of time? Oh yeah…
Why is that? The flame is important. Some wavelengths like UV penetrate more deeply than others. Not so important for a pot, makes a difference if you were trying to heat an ocean. Other times the flame will induce condensation which must be “burned off” by the transmitted heat. Maybe call that a Svensmark flame?
Next we have a cook, who moves the pot around in a circle to stop the food sticking. That takes 21,000 years. He also tilts it from side to side taking 41,000 years. His name: Milankovitch.
In short: If you think *anything* is in a stable state, you need to change your temporal frame of reference. Go quickly enough, and even nothing seethes.
Sometimes, what is a long cycle for us, is just random banging and clattering for something else, because its temporal reference frame is so different to ours. What we perceive to be a long established cycle of glacial/interglacial, is just water hammer to the Earth, and for it, it’ll stop soon.
Common sense!
Actually, this is the method of the “New AI (Artificial Intelligence).” See the cover story in the January issue of Wired, just out. The Met Office’s parallel processing supercomputer is very Old School.
Piers has shown up here and commented in threads and directly challenged Leif’s constant Sun theory with it’s tiny variance. He doesn’t have a theory of the mechanism of the how the Sun’s variances affect climate/weather. He does state unequivocally that it does, and that CO2 is IRRELEVANT. But, Leif can’t abandon his dogma without a reason to, an observation, empiracally, of a variance outside of accepted max/min.
This is the true enigma of our age: The sun drives climate per Piers. The sun can’t drive climate per Leif.
In 2006 The New Scientist published an article stating that there was a new Ice age on the horizon, the depth of which would be determined by how long the sun remained dormant. Leif was a mis-quoted contibutor to that article. Maybe the Physics of the sun needs a re-evaluation. Threads regarding alternate models of the physics of the sun-namely Electric Universe (EU). Perhaps the ‘Landscheit Little Ice Age’ is the null
hypothesis of our current physics model of the sun. It would be interesting to see if the EU guys can account for what we are seeing whereas our current standard model cosmology cannot. I’ve followed the TSI threads and the EU threads but there really is no arguing with Piers results…and that rather settles the matter. Does it not?????
“But, Leif can’t abandon his dogma without a reason to, an observation, empirically, of a variance outside of accepted max/min.”
Leif accepts that there is greater variance (than seen in simple TSI) in the mixture of wavelengths and in the composition of the mixture of photons and particles that emanate from the sun over a cycle and presumably over multiple cycles.
However he refuses to accept a climate consequence or any internal system amplification effect even though he suggests that climate change is all down to internal system variability. I think he is a bit illogical there. If Leif wants to propose a powerful enough internal system variability then he should also accept it’s amplification potential when small external changes impact the system.
He has described to me and referred me to relevant links that indicate significant variability in the quantity of a number of separate reactions in the upper atmosphere in response to changes in the mixture of materials from the sun that produce substances that affect ozone quantities in those upper levels. Those quantities vary in line with the level of solar activity.
Conventional climatology places gtreat emphasis on ozone changes at lower levels as a result of UV variability but the ozone changes at higher levels from those other reactions are sparsely documented, largely unknown and barely investigated.
Having set that scene consider this:
i) According to recent data highlighted by Joanna Haigh the ozone reactions above 45km appear to be of the opposite sign to that expected and of the opposite sign to those below 45km.
ii) The observed jetstream shifting (or meridionality changes) appear to require just such a reverse sign effect somewhere in the atmospheric column for reasons I have set out elsewhere.
iii) Over periods of more than a century (or when there is a sudden step change in solar activity such as recently) the link between solar variability and jetstream behaviour is pretty much incontrovertible and many people other than Piers have chosen to see something in that and have been working to explain it.
There is clearly a top down solar effect on tropospheric pressure distribution and my best attempt to explain it so far can be found here:
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=6645
“How The Sun Could Control Earth’s Temperature”
It may need refinement or adjustment of certain components but it is a better fit to observations than anything else I have yet seen.
Stephen Wilde: Thanks very much for that !
One only needs to look at the LIA, the MWP, the Dalton Minimum, and the sunspot cycles to understand that the SUN is the place to look – first and foremost – for what is driving our weather and our climate.
It is a terrible pox on science that the climatologists have ignored the Sun as much as they have and instead have pointed at man’s puny excrement as the cause of any warming that has taken place recently. (and excrement it is, after all…)
Science has lost so much of its sheen since this entire episode began in the 1970s, at the end of the “coming ice age” scare. Since it was such a cold snap, anyone could have predicted it would warm up. James Hansen happened to be the snake oil salesman who put his name to it. And the world has been dumber ever since.
Anthropogenic global warming is anthropocentric, to say the least. At worst, it is barking up the wrong tree. Every effort to point to the Sun has been treated like the individual was Raymond the autistic patient from the movie, or looked down on as a Forrest Gump, someone who lucks into his correct moves.
Well, we have now gone over 2 decades since the IPCC was formed, and lo and behold, every Hyde Park soapbox rant out of its collective mouth talks about how important its existence is. The last thing the IPCC or its subcontractors wants is for some little squirrelly looking man “in Borough High Street,” London, to point out that the Empire Has No Clothes.
It’s the Sun, Stupid!
What a radical idea…
Geoff Sharp says: December 20, 2010 at 6:46 am
I take your check as my needing to take care how I express myself. The way I see it is, Holle and Bailey both have real ability, as well as the ability to move outside the accepted paradigms. So although (of course) any weaknesses in their theses need to be challenged, I still have confidence in their ability to stay openminded and embrace the challenges as growth points. I will have to look up Fred Bailey again – without checking, I cannot assume that his hypothesis has been terminally debunked, any more than Gavin Schmidt’s claims of debunking McKitrick and Nierenberg, or of McShane and Wyner, mean that either McK-N or McS-W have actually been debunked – though Gavin’s points may deserve consideration.
Funny thing is, I’ve generally thought of you as someone putting forward very interesting ideas but without enough evidence or scientific clarity or ability to deal with the fair parts of Leif’s criticisms. But I also trust you’ve learned from Leif by now. At one point when you two were at each other, I analysed each of your material and found… mathematical agreement hidden under the disagreements. Crazy!
I’ve always believed that there is important material in Landscheidt etc to explore, if it can be done in a way that can be seen to be scientific. And I am still sure that it needs a book written by someone of the calibre of Nigel Calder to cast it in classic popular form like Chilling Stars.
>>EM Smith >>For what it’s worth, there is a “19 counter” at Stonehenge. It looks like >>the whole thing was a giant astronomics lab. And of course 19 squared equals roughly the number of days in a year (and degrees in a circle, for obvious reasons). There are lots of symbiotic resonances in orbital mechanics. .
This is nonsense. The Sun has nothing big to do with climate — well, not when contrasted with re-using shopping bags.
Lucy Skywalker says:
December 21, 2010 at 11:02 am
Geoff Sharp says: December 20, 2010 at 6:46 am
I will have to look up Fred Bailey again – without checking, I cannot assume that his hypothesis has been terminally debunked,
Fred’s solar chord theory is that the earth and other planets orbit the SSB and not the Sun. His son Howard and I have had lots of meaningful discussions on my blog where I showed him via the JPL data plotted in a graph that the theory was impossible. It may be a coincidence that the solarchord website is now gone or they just did the right thing. All of my data is up for grabs and is published, but I would do the same if the core theory was found to be incorrect. So far the unnamed minimum is right on track along with the climate implications.
“Atomic Hairdryer says:
December 20, 2010 at 7:09 am
He’s already been vilified by the CAGW faithful and that hasn’t worked because he has this irritating habit of beating the official forecasts and making our public funded forecasting services look like idiots.”
That sounds a bit like Sherlock Holmes!
Hello everyone, moderators and readers all. It has been a while since I had a chance to check in here; like Anthony, I’m having family medical issues. BUT! It is nice to see Piers throw in with me on the forthcoming Little Ice Age. Look back a couple of years at some of my posts in the solar activity (sunspots) discussions.
Seasons greetings!
George M.
….is George M……….George Monbiot??
Anyway, who ever you are, feel free to find the thread and post the link please.