Old, but untold. Trenberth treated us to a trick in his Halloween interview with Bill Sweet by changing the sign on his own most famous quote. As Trenberth now tells it:
One cherry-picked message saying we can’t account for current global warming and that this is a travesty went viral and got more than 100,000 hits online.
The email in question actually bemoaned how Trenberth couldn’t account for the LACK of global warming:
The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.
Global warming… LACK of global warming. Hey, what’s the difference?
This is Trenberth’s answer to having his doubts exposed by the ClimateGate leak: just cover them back up. Pretend that the revealing email said the opposite of what it actually said and PROBLEM SOLVED. The guy’s a genius. No wonder he rose to the esteemed lead author position.
Of course he’s not fooling anyone who knows what he actually said. Add that lack of warming does have to do with the state of global warming, and most knowledgeable people will grant Trenberth the benefit of the doubt, but should they? Ignorant people will be fooled, and Trenberth has a habit of misleading the ignorant.
Here is Trenberth in a follow-up interview with Sweet (after Sweet was apparently inundated with comments and email calling Trenberth a liar and castigating Sweet for playing softball—yay WUWT):
Sweet: Can you say something about the widespread belief that solar activity somehow accounts for the temperature changes we’ve seen in recent decades?
Trenberth: That’s easily disproven. It’s nonsense. Since 1979 we’ve had spacecraft measuring total solar irradiance, and there’s been no change—if anything the sun has cooled slightly. There’s nothing in the record that indicates that the sun is responsible for any of the warming in this period.
Trenberth knows full well that “solar activity” refers primarily to solar-magnetic activity, which varies by an order of magnitude over the solar cycle, while total solar irradiance is almost invariant over the solar cycle (which is why it is called the solar constant). Does he really think he can disprove the theory that 20th century warming was caused by solar activity without looking at anything but the least active solar variable?
Again, the knowledgeable will not be fooled, but it is perfectly clear that Trenberth’s intent in this instance is to deceive the ignorant. He is also providing us with an example of what he was talking about in his original IEEE interview when he said:
Scientists almost always have to address problems in their data, exercising judgment about what might be defective and best disregarded.
That pesky data about solar-magnetic activity and earthly temperatures being highly correlated? (“The long term trends in solar data and in northern hemisphere temperatures have a correlation coefficient of about 0.7 – .8 at a 94% – 98% confidence level.”) “Best disregarded.”
And it is easily done. Just change out “solar activity” for the least active solar quantity and, voilà. As easy as replacing “lack of global warming” with “global warming.”
As J.R. Ewing put it, “once you give up integrity, the rest is easy.”
Any other “lumpies”? (Santa must have had anti-CO2 alarmists in mind when he chose coal for the bad. Like crosses for vampires.)
Thanks to Robuk for digging up my 2005 exchange with Gavin Schmidt, who agreed with my assertion that any warming created by solar activity had to be a function of the LEVEL of solar activity, not the trend. Schmidt: “the response to an increase to a steady level of forcing is a lagged increase in temperature and then a asymptotic relaxation to the eventual equilibirum.”
That’s an important admission, because what numerous alarmists were saying at the time, and have continued to say, is that since solar activity was not trending upwards in the last decades of the 20th century, solar activity cannot explain the warming over this period. Earlier that year I had criticized Schmidt’s co-blogger Rasmus Benestad for making this idiotic claim, and here Schmidt was admitting that I was right, that an increased “steady level of forcing” will lead to continued warming, tapering off “to the eventual equilibrium.”
Schmidt went on to claim that this tapering off: “is not what is seen. In fact, the rate of temperature increase is rising, and that is only compatible with a continuing increase in the forcing, i.e. from greenhouse gases.”
That’s garbage. There was a single spike of temperature in 1998, which everyone agrees was caused by ocean oscillations. Except for that there had been only a modest warming since 1980 (about .2°C from 1980 to 2005 according to UAH, just about the 20th century average). Add how ocean oscillations make the surface temperature record very noisy as a measure of global temperature (which is really the temperature of the ocean as a whole) and it is absurd for Schmidt to have been making claims in 2005 about a perceived tiny spurt in temperature increase being inconsistent with a steady high solar driver. It is even more absurd today, when folks like Trenberth are bewailing the lack of warming over the same period that solar activity has fallen off.
Set aside Schmidt’s untenable claims about what the data imply. If he has no trouble acknowledging that what would matter in a solar explanation of temperature is level, not trend, then how have so many other actual scientists managed to screw this up? Is it just more dishonesty from the solar-warming deniers? I’d say not. Maybe in the case of Benestad and Frolich, but not in general, because there turns out to be a technical basis for making this mistake.
Several of the seminal papers on the solar-activity/climate link were correlation studies, looking at the correlation between changes in solar activity and changes in temperature. If it is the level of solar activity that drives temperature, there will still be a correlation between changes in solar activity and changes in temperature. When solar activity goes up, the resulting higher LEVEL will tend to coincide with rising temps. Not always. An increase to what is still a low level could still yield cooling. Only in a regime of instant equilibration would trend upticks always correlate (ceterus paribus) with temperature upticks .
Usoskin 2005 was one of these correlation studies. They didn’t start with a model of how solar activity drives temperature and try to estimate its parameters statistically. They just looked for correlation between changes in solar activity and changes in temperature, and since this was the nature of their data, they continued to speak in those terms, even when it didn’t make any sense, as in the Usoskin sentence that Bob Tisdale quotes: “During the last 30 years the solar total irradiance, solar UV irradiance and cosmic ray flux has not shown any significant secular trend, so that at least this most recent warming must have another source.”
It’s a total non-sequitur. Can they really be that dumb? A steady very high level of solar activity cannot have caused warming? More likely Usoskin et al. just didn’t want to point out the deficiencies in their study: that instead of looking at simple correlations, they ideally should have been estimating the parameters of a physical model. (For instance, they could have estimated a simple linear model of how the equilibrium global temperature varies with the level of solar forcing, while simultaneously estimating how the speed of temperature change towards equilibrium varies with the distance from equilibrium.)
Maybe it was just too embarrassing to note in their own paper that what must actually be driving temperature (the level of solar activity) is not what they were looking at, leading them to keep mum as others kept making the same idiotic mistake. That’s my guess.
As for Bob Tisdale’s criticisms, it seems we are just going to disagree. He complains that by citing AGW alarmists like Usoskin and Frolich, I am citing references that undercut my claims. But that is false. I don’t disagree with Usoskin and Frolich on the data. I disagree with them on what it means, and I have been very explicit about exactly how I differ with them on what it means, and I’m glad to expand further.
Frolich makes the insane claim that because solar activity peaked in 1985, solar driven warming would have started falling off in 1985:
“In 1985, the Sun did a U-turn in every respect. It no longer went in the right direction to contribute to global warming. We think it’s almost completely conclusive proof that the Sun does not account for the recent increases in global warming.”
What? Solar driven warming should start to fall off when solar activity is at its absolute peak? Frolich takes trend-level confusion to its reductio ad absurdum. Ken Gregory has the most precise answer to this foolishness. Scroll down to his “Climate Smoothing” graphic to see how the temperature of a heat sink actually responds to a fall-off in forcing.
Frolich isn’t even right about the sun doing a U-turn in 1985. Solar cycle 22 (from 1986 to 1996) was one of the most intense on record. This is particularly true for solar activity as measured (inversely) by the cosmic ray flux. Solar cycle 22 shows the lowest levels of GCR in the instrumental record. Does that mean I can’t cite his admission of numerous studies showing a solar-climate link?
Tisdale goes so far as to accuse me of bad behavior: “Alec Rawls should not have cited a paper that contradicts his post, and, secondarily, he should not reply to comments with statements that are contradicted by data.” From someone who fails to grasp what I’m saying, that’s an awfully loose remark.
How about Bob answer the question I put to him in my first response? Isn’t it about time Usoskin stop claiming that only an increasing level of solar activity can cause warming (and that the steady high level of solar activity through 2003 couldn’t)? Isn’t it about time that Frolich withdraws his idiotic claim that the failure of temperatures to start falling when solar activity was at its peak proves that warming cannot have been caused by the sun?
If instead Mr. Tisdale is for some reason stuck on the idea that I just have to be wrong, well, it’s nice to meet him too. If he wants to shipwreck on the reef that I am trying to mark, he can be my guest.
The sun cannot have cause the last decades warming, since solar activity has been in steady decline since the maximum in the 1950s.
Alec Rawls says:
“Trenberth knows full well that “solar activity” refers primarily to solar-magnetic activity, which varies by an order of magnitude over the solar cycle, while total solar irradiance is almost invariant over the solar cycle (which is why it is called the solar constant). Does he really think he can disprove the theory that 20th century warming was caused by solar activity without looking at anything but the least active solar variable?”
Magnetic activity is proportional to Sunspot number, the data that has more ancient data:
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/bfly.gif
http://sidc.oma.be/sunspot-index-graphics/sidc_graphics.php
http://sidc.oma.be/html/wolfmms.html
This result is entirely consistent with the solar irradiance data.
R. Gates says:
December 25, 2010 at 12:29 pm
http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2010/12/14/deep-ocean-heat-is-melting-antarctic-ice/
Ok, Gates, your no-brained formulaic link using some of the usual anti-scientific tactics of the “Climate Science” CAGW Propaganda Op. says that the Antarctic’s oceanic ice sheets are being rapidly melted away by melting from the bottom/undersurface allegedly due to Trenberth’s lost heat, which so far has not been found to even be entering the oceans, so that, “This raises the specter of sea-level rise driven by melting in this region….”, when the only alleged melting it has directly mentioned cannot raise sea levels.
I only clicked the link to see if you are still as uncredible a source as I’ve known you to be right from early on at WUWT. Congratulations, yes, you are! And do you really think that there are enough hapless suckers reading WUWT to make your propaganda efforts worthwhile, especially when compared to the readers who will get from you the right idea that “Climate Science” CAGW Propaganda is not science, but instead only a cynically deluding part of a massive scam which, after all, is what Trenberth has also shown by his intentionally misleading statement above?
Alec Rawls says:
Alec,
That’s a strange conclusion given that the current trend for the cumulative UAH LT data since 1979 is 0.14 C per decade ( http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt ). That would give us a total rise between 1979 and now of ~0.43 C. Needless to say, temperature rises determined by RSS or the surface data sets are somewhat higher than this.
I am not sure what you mean by “except for that” but you are not allowed to just leave out years that you don’t like. After all, I personally don’t like the year 2008 where there was a downward spike due to La Nina but that doesn’t mean I can simply ignore it. (Actually, I don’t think leaving out the year of data around 1998 would even affect the trend very much, which makes me wonder what you did actually do to get your erroneous trend claim.)
Question: If our sun was to suddenly disappear, How long before we notice the light disappear?
Question: If our sun was to suddenly disappear, How long before we notice the warmth disappear?
Looking at the broader view, where is the upward trend, since about 1980 ?
http://members.casema.nl/errenwijlens/co2/europe.htm
Alec Rawls says: “How about Bob answer the question I put to him in my first response? Isn’t it about time Usoskin stop claiming that only an increasing level of solar activity can cause warming (and that the steady high level of solar activity through 2003 couldn’t)? Isn’t it about time that Frolich withdraws his idiotic claim that the failure of temperatures to start falling when solar activity was at its peak proves that warming cannot have been caused by the sun?”
I have no need to answer a hypothetical question that isn’t relative to the discussion, Alec. Isn’t it about time that YOU stop trying to redirect the topic away from the mistake made in your post, and the mistakes you’ve added in your replies. I didn’t write a post that references a paper that contradicts the point I was trying to make. You did that, Alec. Not me.
You wrote, “As for Bob Tisdale’s criticisms, it seems we are just going to disagree. He complains that by citing AGW alarmists like Usoskin and Frolich, I am citing references that undercut my claims. But that is false. I don’t disagree with Usoskin and Frolich on the data.”
So you have just stated that you support the Mann et al Hockey Stick, even though it was discredited at ClimateAudit years ago. And you are stating that you support the hypothesis of AGW, since both papers you cited in our exchange do precisely that. Your attempts at misdirection aren’t working, Alec.
You wrote, “Tisdale goes so far as to accuse me of bad behavior: ‘Alec Rawls should not have cited a paper that contradicts his post, and, secondarily, he should not reply to comments with statements that are contradicted by data.'”
I didn’t accuse you of bad behavior. I noted that the Usoskin and Frolich you cited support AGW and contradict the point you were attempting to make in your post. I’m not the only person noting this on this thread, or haven’t you noticed? And as I illustrated in an earlier reply, your statement, “12 years with no warming. Where is the inexplicable warming that these people are talking about? There isn’t any,” is incorrect. Your statement is not supported by the three global surface temperature anomaly datasets for the past 12 years.
The linear trends of HADCRUT (0.106 deg C/ decade), GISTEMP LOTI (0.205 deg C/decade), and NCDC (0.126 deg C/decade) for the past 12 years are all positive:
http://i54.tinypic.com/2ecjb7b.jpg
Climate satellites, the best data we have,
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1979
show global cooling in the last 12 years.
On this graph you can see clearly how GISS manipulates the data
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1998/mean:12/plot/rss/from:1998/mean:12
Robuk says: “Gavins response is utter rubbish if the two graphs above are correct.”
The second graph you linked…
http://i446.photobucket.com/albums/qq187/bobclive/irradiance.gif
…is obsolete.
Judith Lean no longer agrees with the variability of TSI minimums shown in her 2000 TSI reconstruction. Refer to Leif’s 10/26/08 @ur momisugly 14:55:41 comment on the following thread at WUWT:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/10/25/new-theory-predicts-the-largest-ozone-hole-over-antarctica-will-occur-this-month/
He wrote, “Note that Judith Lean [2002 and 2008] is agreeing with me that TSI hasn’t changed significantly over time. Nevertheless, the model-paper you reference, uses the old Lean [1995] and Hoyt and Schatten [1993] TSI-reconstructions that are simply wrong. Therefore the result is spurious and cannot be trusted.”
And if you’re wondering, there’s little difference between Lean 1995 and Lean 2000:
http://s5.tinypic.com/fp6qyp.jpg
Regards
If you want some reputedly very accurate humour about the making of PhDs, phdcomics.com is your meat. If you have the week off, start at the beginning of the archives and work forward.
🙂
Bob Tisdale writes: “I noted that the Usoskin and Frolich you cited support AGW and contradict the point you were attempting to make in your post.”
No these papers do not support AGW or contradict the point I was making in my post. They TRY to support AGW by interpreting the data in blatantly errant ways, but they utterly fail. Does Mr. Tisdale accept the bizarre position of Usoskin and Frolich that solar activity does cause warming, and has for thousands of years, but that the steady high level of solar activity post-1980 couldn’t have caused warming? In any case, he thinks it is improper of me to cite the data in these papers while rejecting this bogus post-1980 exception. It’s “misdirection.”
I have no problem with Tidsale’s criticism of Usoskin’s use of Mann’s temperature reconstruction. Of course Usoskin et al. is still one of the seminal studies in the use of cosmogenic isotopes to compare solar activity with paleo-temperatures, and its findings have been backed by numerous other studies, but sure, set it aside, as I welcomed Tisdale to do in my first reply to him, referring him to the 17 other studies that Frolich sites on the sun-climate link. But that’s not enough for Tisdale. He keeps harping on the flaws of Usoskin as if it was some great crime to have ever mentioned this very important paper, and he rejects the Frolich references as well because Frolich is also an AGW alarmist. Sorry, but making up excuses to ignore the data is willful blindness.
In broad strokes, the last forty years fit nicely with the solar-climate theory. The planet warmed while the sun was in its grand maximum phase, then temperatures flattened out after the sun went quiet in 2005. Tisdale ignores this big picture and cavils about my description of the recent flattening out of temperatures. I said there has been “no warming” for the past 12 years, or no “inexplicable warming.” Tisdale thinks he is catching me in something when he points out that there has indeed been a small amount of warming (which would be even smaller if he didn’t cut off the 98 El Nino):
These are tiny temperature changes, far outsized by the noise of ocean oscillations. It is absurd to say that this tiny and uncertain amount of warming is inconsistent with a solar-climate mechanism. The recent grand maximum in solar activity only ended in 2005 (2003 if you want to go back to the last energetic year, or 2008 if you want to go to the end of solar cycle 23). One might think that cooling SHOULD have set in by now, if it is really the sun that is driving things, but that is not the position Usoskin and Frolich are taking.
They both claimed that there is just too darned much warming to possibly account for by solar activity, which doesn’t begin to hold water. The only way they were able to say it all was by pretending that it is changes in solar activity that drive temperature, not the level of solar activity. I’d like to see the physics for that proposition. Usoskin and Frolich TRY to rule out a solar theory of post 1980 warming, but they FAIL. And no, it is not “misdirection” to point it out.
As for the noisiness of the temperature signal, it might be possible to do a little better than to just look at the raw temperature records. Why not in very rough fashion include what we know about ocean surface temperatures? There was a big El Nino in 1998, and a fairly big El Nino this year, so look at those two points.
It looks like the two years will have almost the same average temperature. Maybe a smidge lower this year? We’ll find out next week. I call that flat. What temperatures have certainly NOT done is go up so much as to be inconsistent with a solar theory of post 1980 temperature change.
Adrian the trend since 1998 is slightly upwards.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1998/trend/plot/rss/from:1998
Therefore that isn’t global cooling. And technically since that’s the start of 1998 that’s 13 years to the end of 2010. So for 12 years start in 1999:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1999/trend/plot/rss/from:1999
That’s a pretty strong upwards trend. But it only shows why you shouldn’t use so few years data, and the dependence on start and end points.
Re Alec Rawls
December 26, 2010 at 2:57 am:
“But that’s not enough for Tisdale. He keeps harping on the flaws of Usoskin as if it was some great crime to have ever mentioned this very important paper, and he rejects the Frolich references as well because Frolich is also an AGW alarmist. Sorry, but making up excuses to ignore the data is willful blindness.”
I think Bob Tisdale’s points are quite justified. The paper itself might be wrong but it backs up what Trenberth was saying, whereas you cited it as if it disagrees with him.
R. Gates says:
December 25, 2010 at 12:29 pm
“The “lack of global warming” that Trenberth spoke about….”
“Trenberth ….. felt the “missing” heat must have gone into the deeper ocean….”
Good to see you have acknowledged that there isnt much global warming to speak about.
Also good to see that you acknowledge that AGW is based on “feelings”.
Alec Rawls says:
Fine, so you don’t like the way that Usoskin and Rolich correlate temperature and solar activity. Then, why the heck do you cite them at all? Why don’t you show us the wonderful correlation that you can produce with your ideas and how it accounts for the post-1980 warming? Instead you try to piggyback on the part of what they say that you like and then agglomerate to it your ideas that contradict the part that you don’t like. That is incredibly weak!
If you can really explain the post-1980 warming in the same quantitative manner that one can explain the last several hundred years using solar activity, then show us this. Otherwise, you should apologize to the readers here and to Trenberth and be done with it.
.Joel Shore says:
December 26, 2010 at 6:20 am
Why don’t you show us the wonderful correlation that you can produce with your ideas and how it accounts for the post-1980 warming?
Joel, the ocean accumulates solar energy over long periods of time. Therefore the correct thing to do with the solar data is to integrate it to compare with OHC and SST
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2010/07/21/nailing-the-solar-activity-global-temperature-divergence-lie/
tallbloke: I don’t find your agreement very impressive, especially over the long-term; I guess there is a reason why you didn’t try to put your integrated solar data and OHC on the same graph. I also find it amusing how those people who believe that feedbacks must be negative for CO2-caused warming strangely believe not only that unknown positive feedbacks or amplification factors must be at work for solar effects, but that even the most obvious “feedback”, namely the increase in radiative emission with warming described by the Stefan-Boltzmann Equation can be neglected, which is what your integration procedure essentially assumes!
Response to JPeden:
December 25, 2010 at 6:28 pm
________
The essential point– that there recent evidence for heating of the deeper ocean– is valid and I’ve provided the links for readers to understand the issue on a more honest and thorough level than your ad hominems on me would allow. Dr. Trenberth is very specific in his statements about the problems with the “missing heat” and where he suspects it must have gone based on the known and measured energy inputs and outputs from our planet. The deeper ocean is where it must have gone and now that the research is pointing that way it must drive the skeptics crazy (if they actually take the time to look at the current research) to see one of their favorite targets proven correct on this point.
________
kwik says:
December 26, 2010 at 5:57 am
R. Gates says:
December 25, 2010 at 12:29 pm
“The “lack of global warming” that Trenberth spoke about….”
“Trenberth ….. felt the “missing” heat must have gone into the deeper ocean….”
Good to see you have acknowledged that there isnt much global warming to speak about.
Also good to see that you acknowledge that AGW is based on “feelings”.
_____
If there is heat going into the deeper oceans, then in only means it isn’t showing up directly in upper ocean or atmospheric measurements. Any while I may have used the word “feelings” is had nothing to do with Dr. Trenberth’s contention that the heat must be in the deeper ocean, as that was based on very solid science in calculating the energy inflow and outflows from the planet. If the energy outflow is less than the inflow each year, yet we can’t account for that “missing heat”– the deeper ocean is the only place it could be as it is the only place we don’t have planetary wide temperature measurement in place. Skeptics of course wil argue that the missing heat doesn’t exist at all, but if the deeper oceans are warming (as the latest studies linked in my first post seem to be indicating) then Trenberth is right and the skeptics are wrong.
R. Gates says:
December 26, 2010 at 11:12 am
“…Dr. Trenberth’s contention that the heat must be in the deeper ocean, as that was based on very solid science in calculating the energy inflow and outflows from the planet.”
“Calculating” as you call what I’d call “estimating” is not “solid science.”
“If the energy outflow is less than the inflow each year, yet we can’t account for that “missing heat”– the deeper ocean is the only place it could be as it is the only place we don’t have planetary wide temperature measurement in place. ”
You are making the argument from ignorance; a logical fallacy often using by the religious to explain why god must have created the universe. This argument is just as silly coming from your mouth.
Assuming Trenberth’s “calculations” are correct, which is a mighty big assumption, there may be many places where the “heat” has gone. I’m assuming he is calculating the amount of energy received from the sun and using earthshine and similar measurements to determine the outgoing energy.
I’m obviously working from hypotheticals, so take take that with a grain of salt if you like, but I imagine the greening of the planet has converted much of that “missing energy” into biomatter. I would also imagine that the poles would be the be a good candidate for the energy escaping as actual heat since I believe the satellite coverage of the area is either sparse or non-existent.
Joel Shore wrote:
I did:
In 0rder to say that this sequence cannot be driven by the sun, Usoskin and Frohlich have to make the moronic claim that a steady very high level of solar activity could not cause warming. So why cite them? Here are leading CO2 alarmists ADMITTING that for the past thousands of years solar activity seems to have been a primary driver of climate, and Joel is looking for excuses to turn a blind eye. Ridiculous.
It’s probably unfair of me to call Usoskin a leading CO2 alarmist. His co-author Sami Solanki certainly isn’t. I think they just said what they had to say to get published. They needed to pretend that their findings did not support the solar theory of late-20th century warming so they concocted the crazy claim that a steady high level of solar activity was incompatible with a solar explanation.
Kind of amazing to me that Misters Shore and Tisdale are completely uninterested in this amazing phenomenon, where researchers make up an obviously untenable argument that just happens to allow them to stay on the safe side of the climate debate. Tisdale positively refuses to consider whether Usoskin’s post-1980 dodge is tenable, and Shore thinks I should APOLOGIZE for pressing this issue. Is this an alternate universe? Has WUWT become RealClimate?
Alec Rawls said, “No these papers [Usoskin and Frolich] do not support AGW or contradict the point I was making in my post. They TRY to support AGW by interpreting the data in blatantly errant ways, but they utterly fail.”
If they are such utter failures, why would you include Usoskin et al in your post to support your claims?
You wrote in the post, “That pesky data about solar-magnetic activity and earthly temperatures being highly correlated? (‘The long term trends in solar data and in northern hemisphere temperatures have a correlation coefficient of about 0.7 – .8 at a 94% – 98% confidence level.’)” You did not discuss the last 40 years as you are attempting to now. You accepted the Usoskin “similar long-term trends (‘hockey stick curve’) in the data,” as they noted in their conclusions. Your attempts to redirect the period and discussion don’t work, because what is being discussed is was what you wrote in the post.
Alec Rawls asked, “Does Mr. Tisdale accept the bizarre position of Usoskin and Frolich that solar activity does cause warming, and has for thousands of years, but that the steady high level of solar activity post-1980 couldn’t have caused warming?”
I do not accept the “position of Usoskin and Frolich that solar activity does cause warming”. You’re the one who brought them into this discussion. In fact, I do not accept anything presented by Usoskin et al (2005). What I do accept is that the variations in total solar irradiance have only a minimal impact on global temperatures, approximately 0.1 deg C per solar cycle (solar min to solar max) or approximately 0.1 deg C per watt/m^2.
Alec Rawls says, “In broad strokes, the last forty years fit nicely with the solar-climate theory. The planet warmed while the sun was in its grand maximum phase, then temperatures flattened out after the sun went quiet in 2005. Tisdale ignores this big picture and cavils about my description of the recent flattening out of temperatures.”
The data contradicts you once again. The following graph compares global temperature anomalies to TSI data that has been scaled by a factor of 0.1 deg C per Watt/m^2. Note the decadal variations in the solar cycle and how little they could contribute to the changes in the global temperatures. Also note the sign of the TSI data linear trend since 1970. It’s negative. It’s tough for you to justify a rise in global temperatures based on TSI data when the TSI data trend is negative:
http://i55.tinypic.com/rk2ae1.jpg
If you like, you could update that graph, but it won’t help.
Alec Rawls says, “I said there has been ‘no warming’ for the past 12 years, or no ‘inexplicable warming.’ Tisdale thinks he is catching me in something when he points out that there has indeed been a small amount of warming (which would be even smaller if he didn’t cut off the 98 El Nino)…”
Linear trends of 0.106 deg C/ decade (HADCRUT), 0.205 deg C/decade (GISTEMP LOTI), and 0.126 deg C/decade (NCDC) over the past 12 years are not “a small amount of warming,” as you claim. That’s 1.06 to 2.05 deg C/century. In fact, the period you, Alec Rawls, elected to discuss (the last 12 years) has higher linear trends than the often-cited period since 1900 (about 0.07 deg C/decade):
http://i54.tinypic.com/2mouubo.jpg
Also, there was no reason to include the 1997/98 El Niño. The 1997/98 El Niño did not occur in the past 12 years. That was the period you chose, the last 12 years, not the last 14 years.
You wrote, “…but sure, set it aside, as I welcomed Tisdale to do in my first reply to him, referring him to the 17 other studies that Frolich sites on the sun-climate link. But that’s not enough for Tisdale…”
If you insist: Your post is not about climate in general; it is about global temperature anomalies. The following lists the subject matter of the 17 papers cited by your linked Lockwood and Frolich (2007):
1. Davis & Shafer 1992 was about Arizona Monsoons.
2. Jirikowic et al. 1993 was a study of wet or dry periods at the Mission Cross Bog in Elko Co., Nevada.
3. Davis 1994 was about precipitation in the Southwest U.S.
4. van Geel et al. 1998 discussed the sharp rise in their proxy in 800 BC.
5. Yu & Ito 1999 was about drought frequency.
6. Bond et al. 2001 was about the North Atlantic.
7. Neff et al. 2001 dealt with monsoons in Oman.
8. Hu et al. 2003 was about the Alaskan Subarctic.
9. Sarnthein et al. 2003 studied sediment injections as a proxy of SST off the western Barents shelf.
10. Christla et al. 2004 was a study of climate over the past 200,000 years with a resolution that would not capture the recent warming.
11. Prasad et al. 2004 dealt with the period of 17,000 to 24,000 years BP.
12. Wei & Wang 2004 was about Asian monsoons.
13. Maasch et al. 2005 discussed atmospheric circulation and hydrology.
14. Mayewski et al. 2005 was another paper about atmospheric circulation.
15. Wang et al. 2005a is yet one more monsoon paper.
16. Polissar et al. 2006 discussed the tropical Andes during the Little Ice Age.
17. Bard & Frank 2006 concluded that proxies “are still not sufficiently precise to extract a meaningful solar component”.
Looks like the papers you cited, especially Bard and Frank (2006), do not support your claims about the impact of solar variations on Global temperatures.
Alec Rawls says: “Kind of amazing to me that Misters Shore and Tisdale are completely uninterested in this amazing phenomenon, where researchers make up an obviously untenable argument that just happens to allow them to stay on the safe side of the climate debate. Tisdale positively refuses to consider whether Usoskin’s post-1980 dodge is tenable, and Shore thinks I should APOLOGIZE for pressing this issue. Is this an alternate universe?”
There is no “post-1980 dodge”. Your claim that Usoskin et al “needed to pretend that their findings did not support the solar theory of late-20th century warming so they concocted the crazy claim that a steady high level of solar activity was incompatible with a solar explanation,” is not supported by the TSI data. In my above December 26, 2010 at 3:04 pm reply, I included a comparison of scaled TSI to HADCRUT global temperature anomalies that started in 1970. Here it is again:
http://i55.tinypic.com/rk2ae1.jpg
The same comparison starting in 1980 does not help your position:
http://i52.tinypic.com/2mq4xax.jpg
You concluded that comment with, “Has WUWT become RealClimate?”
No. This is WattsUpWithThat, which is why we respond negatively when someone claims a long-term correlation between solar and TSI and links in support of that claim a paper that compares a hockey stick solar reconstruction to two Mann Northern Hemisphere temperature hockey stick reconstructions.
Bob Tisdale is absolutely correct about WUWT. And anyone who takes Mann seriously should read up on the Tiljander upside-down proxy in The Hockey Stick Illusion and on Climate Audit.
Mann is no more honest than Trenberth, which is to say not at all. But it’s fun watching Gates doing flip-flops trying to keep up with their changing narrative. It’s hard being an apologist for liars.
And Joel Shore’s arm-flapping over my post – in which neither he nor anyone else addressed the central argument of low sensitivity to CO2 – is because Joel is still smarting from being exposed as an economic illiterate last week. But Marxists in general are economic illiterates, in addition to being clueless about human nature.
The Climategate emails are always fun peeks behind the scenes of IPCC charlatanism. Here’s Phil Jones discussing Trenberth with Michael Mann:
OK, R. Gates. Start spinning that one.
Alec Rawls said:
Well, in broad strokes, CO2 has been rising since the beginning of the industrial revolution…and especially since 1900 and so have temperatures. End of story.
Sorry…Broad strokes don’t cut it. Usoskin et al. (supposedly) find a good correlation between some specific measure of solar activity and temperature over a fairly long period. However, they claim this correlation breaks down over the last 30 years. You claim it doesn’t, or if you look at the correct thing it doesn’t, so I am just saying: Prove it. Show me a graph of whatever quantity related to solar activity you want to plot vs. temperatures over that period and that it gives a good correlation over the period that they talk about and continues to give a good correlation over the last 30 years. Is that too much to ask?
Hint: Over the past thousands of years until the last century, there was very little variations in forcings outside of variations in solar activity. The idea that solar activity may have played the most prominent role in climate change prior to the 2nd half of the 20th century is not an idea in conflict with the notion that this is no longer true today. In fact, Michael Mann and Gavin Schmidt, amongst other “CO2 alarmists” (terminology that for some reason is allowed here while the D-word is not), have written scientific articles about it. In fact, the higher-end estimates of the magnitude of solar variability on centennial scales would require there to be some noticeable temperature changes associated with the changes in solar forcing if the generally-accepted estimates of climate sensitivity are correct. (However, given the uncertainty in these estimates of solar variability and the general trend to believe the magnitude of this variability may not have been as large as was once believed, I am not sure if this is still true.)
This is the most lame sort of argument that I can possibly imagine. It is a nice little fairy tale that you have fabricated so that you can suitably grab what you like from their paper and then justify reaching conclusions completely different from theirs. But, of course, you are going to be showing us a plot proving me wrong…which I eagerly await.
I can wholeheartedly assure you that the posts here in WUWT by no stretch of the imagine resemble those on RealClimate. On that, I think we can both agree (even if we disagree on the reason why).
Smokey says:
It is interesting seeing lectures on moral failings of others coming from someone who refuses to post under his own name, who regularly distorts the facts and what others say, and who repeats long-discredited arguments again and again.
I’ve addressed your argument so many times that I can hardly keep count anymore but that doesn’t stop you from repeating it as if it has never been addressed.
It is a testament to your lack of maturity that
(1) you call anyone a Marxist who believes in anything but the purest laissez-faire principles that you subscribe to.
(2) and you call someone an economic illiterate if they think that there are actually alternate views to economics than what you can read on the Heritage Foundation website and the Austrian school (which probably makes about 98% of practicing economists “economic illiterates” in your book).