Guest post by Alec Rawls
Study of the sun-climate link was energized in 1991 by Friis-Christensen and Lassen, who showed a strong correlation between solar-cycle length and global temperature:
This evidence that much of 20th century warming might be explained by solar activity was a thorn in the side of the newly powerful CO2 alarmists, who blamed recent warming on human burning of fossil fuels. That may be why Lassen and Thejll were quick to offer an update as soon as the 1997-98 El Nino made it look as if temperatures were suddenly skyrocketing:
The rapid temperature rise recently seems to call for a quantitative revisit of the solar activity-air temperature association …
We conclude that since around 1990 the type of Solar forcing that is described by the solar cycle length model no longer dominates the long-term variation of the Northern hemisphere land air temperature.
In other words, there was now too much warming to account for by solar cycle length, so some other factor, such as CO2, had to be driving the most recent warming. Of course everyone knew that the 1998 warming had actually been caused by ocean oscillations. Even lay people knew it. (El Nino storm tracks were all the news for six months here in California.)
When Lassen was writing his update in mid ’99, temperatures had already dropped back to 1990 levels. His 8 year update was outdated before it was published. 12 years later the 2010 El Nino year shows the same average temperature as the ’98 El Nino year, and if post-El Nino temperatures continue to fall off the way they did in 99, we’ll be back to 1990 temperatures by mid-2011. Isn’t it about time Friis-Cristensen, Lassen and Thejll issued another update? Do they still think there has been too much recent warming to be accounted for by solar activity?
The most important update may be the discovery that, where Lassen and his colleagues found a correlation between the length of a solar-cycle and temperatures over that cycle, others have been finding a much stronger correlation to temperatures over the next cycle (reported at WUWT this summer by David Archibald).
This further correlation has the advantage of allowing us make projections. As Archibald deciphers Solheim’s Norwegian:
since the period length of previous cycle (no 23) is at least 3 years longer than for cycle no 22, the temperature is expected to decrease by 0.6 – 1.8 degrees over the following 10-12 years.
Check out this alarming graphic from Stephen Strum of Frontier Weather Inc:
The snowed in Danes might like to see these projections, before they bet the rest of their climate eggs on a dangerous war against CO2.
From sins of omission to sins of commission
In 2007, solar scientist Mike Lockwood told the press about some findings he and Claus Frohlich had just published:
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.
Actually, solar cycle 22, which began in 1986, was one of the most intense on record (part of the 20th century “grand maximum” that was the most active sun of the last 11 thousand years), and by almost every measure it was more intense than solar cycle 21. It had about the same sunspot numbers as cycle 21 (Hathaway 2006):
Cycle 22 ran more solar flux than cycle 21 (via Nir Shaviv):
Cycle 22 was shorter than cycle 21 (from Joseph D’Aleo):
Perhaps most important is solar activity as measured (inversely) by the cosmic ray flux (which many think is mechanism by which solar activity drives climate). Here cycle 22 is THE most intense in the 60 year record, stronger even than cycle 19, the sunspot number king. From the Astronomical Society of Australia:
Some “U-turn in every respect.”
If Lockwood and Frohlich simply wanted to argue that the peak of the modern maximum of solar activity was between solar cycles 21 and 22 it would be unobjectionable. What difference does it make exactly when the peak was reached? But this is exactly where their real misdirection comes in. They claim that the peak of solar activity marks the point where any solar-climate effect should move from a warming to a cooling direction. Here is the abstract from their 2007 Royal Society article:
Abstract There is considerable evidence for solar influence on the Earth’s pre-industrial climate and the Sun may well have been a factor in post-industrial climate change in the first half of the last century. Here we show that over the past 20 years, all the trends in the Sun that could have had an influence on the Earth’s climate have been in the opposite direction to that required to explain the observed rise in global mean temperatures.
In order to assert the need for some other explanation for recent warming (CO2), they are claiming that near peak levels of solar activity cannot have a warming effect once they are past the peak of the trend—that it is not the level of solar activity that causes warming or cooling, but the change in the level—which is absurd.
Ken Gregory has the most precise answer to this foolishness. His “climate smoothing” graphic shows how the temperature of a heat sink actually responds to a fall-off in forcing:
“Note that the temperature continues to rise for several years after the Sun’s forcing starts to decrease.”
Gregory’s numbers here are arbitrary. It could be many years before a fall off in forcing causes temperatures to start rising. In the case of solar cycle 22—where if solar forcing was actually past its peak, it had only fallen off a tiny bit—the only way temperature would not keep rising over the whole solar cycle is if global temperature had already equilibrated to peak solar forcing, which Lockwood and Frohlich make no argument for.
The obvious interpretation of the data is that we never did reach equilibrium temperatures, allowing grand maximum levels of solar activity to continue to warm the planet until the sun suddenly went quiet. Now there’s an update for Lockwood and Frohlich. How about telling the public when solar activity really did do “U” (October 2005).
Usoskin, Benestad, and a host of other solar scientists also mistakenly assume that temperature is driven by trend instead of level
Maybe it is because so much of the evidence for a sun-climate link comes from correlation studies, which look for contemporaneous changes in solar activity and temperature. Surely the scientists who are doing these studies all understand that there is no possible mechanism by which the rate of change in solar activity can itself drive temperature. If temperature changes when solar activity changes, it is because the new LEVEL of solar activity has a warming or cooling effect.
Still, a remarkable number of these scientists say things like this (from Usoskin et al. 2005):
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. …
… Note that the most recent warming, since around 1975, has not been considered in the above correlations. During these last 30 years the total solar irradiance, solar UV irradiance and cosmic ray flux has not shown any significant secular trend, so that at least this most warming episode must have another source.
Set aside the other problems with Usoskin’s study. (The temperature record he compared his solar data to is Michael Mann’s “hockey stick.”) How can he claim overwhelming evidence for a sun-climate link, while simultaneously insisting that steady peak levels of solar activity can’t create warming? If steady peak levels coincide with warming, it supposedly means the sun-climate link is now broken, so warming must be due to some other cause, like CO2.
It is hard to believe that scientists could make such a basic mistake, and Usoskin et al. certainly have powerful incentive to play dumb: to pretend that their correlation studies are finding physical mechanisms by which it is changes in the level of solar activity, rather than the levels themselves, that drive temperature. Just elide this important little nuance and presto, modern warming gets misattributed to CO2, allowing these researchers to stay on the good side of the CO2 alarmists who control their funding. Still, the old adage is often right: never attribute to bad motives what can just as well be explained by simple error.
And of course there can be both.
RealClimate exchange on trend vs. level confusion
Finally we arrive at the beginning, for me anyway. I first came across trend-level confusion 5 years ago at RealClimate. Rasmus Benestad was claiming that, because post 1960’s levels of Galactic Cosmic Radiation have not been trending downwards, GCR cannot be the cause of post-60’s warming.
But solar activity has been well above historical norms since the 40’s. It doesn’t matter what the trend is. The solar-wind is up. According to the GCR-cloud theory, that blows away the GCR, which blows away the clouds, creating warming. The solar wind doesn’t have to KEEP going up. It is the LEVEL that matters, not the trend. Holy cow. Benestad was looking at the wrong derivative (one instead of zero).
A few months later I took an opportunity to state my rebuttal as politely as possible, which elicited a response from Gavin Schmidt. Here is our 2005 exchange:
Me: Nice post, but the conclusion: “… solar activity has not increased since the 1950s and is therefore unlikely to be able to explain the recent warming,” would seem to be a non-sequitur.
What matters is not the trend in solar activity but the level. It does not have to KEEP going up to be a possible cause of warming. It just has to be high, and it has been since the forties.
Presumably you are looking at the modest drop in temperature in the fifties and sixties as inconsistent with a simple solar warming explanation, but it doesn’t have to be simple. Earth has heat sinks that could lead to measured effects being delayed, and other forcings may also be involved. The best evidence for causality would seem to be the long term correlations between solar activity and temperature change. Despite the differences between the different proxies for solar activity, isn’t the overall picture one of long term correlation to temperature?
[Response: You are correct in that you would expect a lag, however, 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 equilibrium. This 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. – gavin]
Gavin admits here that it’s the level of solar activity, not the trend in solar activity, that drives temperature. He’s just assuming that grand maximum levels of solar forcing should have bought the planet close to equilibrium temperature before post-80’s warming hit, but that assumption is completely unwarranted. If solar activity is driving climate (the hypothetical that Schmidt is analyzing), we know that it can push temperatures a lot higher than they are today. Surely Gavin knows about the Viking settlement of Greenland.
The rapid warming in the late 90’s could easily have been caused by the monster solar cycle 22 and there is no reason to think that another big cycle wouldn’t have brought more of the same. Two or three more cycle 22s and we might have been hauling out the longships, which would be great. No one has ever suggested that natural warming is anything but benign. Natural cooling bad, natural warming good. But alas, a longer grand maximum was not to be.
Gavin’s admission that it is level not trend that drives temperature change is important because ALL of the alarmist solar scientists are making the trend-level mistake. If they would admit that the correct framework is to look at the level of forcing and the lapse to equilibrium then they would be forced to look at the actual mechanisms of forcing and equilibration, instead of ignoring key forcings on the pretense that steady peak levels of forcing cannot cause warming.
That’s the big update that all of our solar scientists need to make. They need to stop tolerating this crazy charade that allows the CO2 alarmists to ignore the impact of decades of grand maximum solar activity and misattribute the resulting warming to fossil fuel burning. It is a scientific fraud of the most disastrous proportions, giving the eco-lunatics the excuse they need to unplug the modern world.
They need to stop tolerating this crazy charade that allows the CO2 alarmists to ignore the impact of decades of grand maximum solar activity
There has been no Grand Maximum. http://www.leif.org/research/AGU%20Fall%202010%20SH53B-03.pdf
Yep. Once my spaghetti water has been brought to the boil on burner settings 7-9 (depending how impatient I am) I cut it back to 5 and the spag keeps boiling (as long as it’s partially covered).
Lesson: enough heat input is enough.
ignore the impact of decades of grand maximum solar activity
There were decades of high activity in the 1770-1800s and 1830-1880s and both were followed by cold decades [probably for non-solar reasons anyway], see also http://www.leif.org/EOS/muscheler07qsr.pdf and http://www.leif.org/EOS/muscheler05nat_nature04045.pdf
What I have found most interesting is the recently discovered change in spectral distribution of solar energy. This new information that solar UV has greatly decreased even though TSI hasn’t changed much could change everything. If the magnitude of the spectral changes are enough to explain the variation, then I believe it will result in a much better understanding of how the Sun drives our climate. Add to the spectral changes any changes in cloud cover due to increased GCR activity and bingo, there you have it.
This is going to be an interesting couple of years.
We will see what the future will bring.
Since solar activity is down now we should see a drop in global temperature.
This drop should big enough that they can’t hide the decline…
Typo?:
Shouldn’t that be “stop rising”?
crosspatch says:
January 2, 2011 at 10:32 pm
This new information that solar UV has greatly decreased even though TSI hasn’t changed much could change everything.
Maybe not:
“Surface radiative forcing very small, direct surface response < 0.1 K in 11-year" from
http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/news/2010ScienceMeeting/doc/Session4/4.04_Cahalan_atmos_model.pdf
The total energy in the UV is very small and is absorbed high up in the atmosphere. If that energy is offset by infrared [to keep TSI constant], then since IR penetrates to the surface the net result [as the calculations showed] is very small [perhaps even the other way around, depending on the details].
Wow. The thought that brings to mind is, “Riding for a fall.”
Rather then look at the so called past minimums and maximums we need to resiolve the annular mode problem.
http://www.geo.fu-berlin.de/en/met/ag/strat/forschung/SOLARIS/Input_data/CMIP5_solar_irradiance.html
Oh dear
ftp://strat50.met.fu-berlin.de/pub/outgoing/_matthes/CMIP5_solardata/TSI_WLS_mon_1882_2008.txt
grienpies says:
January 2, 2011 at 10:38 pm
Since solar activity is down now we should see a drop in global temperature.
This drop should big enough that they can’t hide the decline…
Solar activity has been decreasing for a couple of decades now, and so has global temperature. Am I wrong?
Leif: “…UV is very small….”
So way we get sunburn and skin-cancer?
Mick.
CO2 alarmists will continue to be in denial. Even if the next 20-30 years show a cooling trend and SC 25 is also a dud it won’t change their beliefs. Great article, well done.
Mick says:
January 2, 2011 at 10:56 pm
Leif: “…UV is very small….”
So way we get sunburn and skin-cancer?
The UV in question does not penetrate to the surface, so no worry.
Leif Svalgaard says:
January 2, 2011 at 10:41 pm
“Maybe not”
I thought it was the possible indirect affects of UV rather than direct contribution to TSI that matters with these new solar spectrum measurements?
On another point Leif your first two replies here suggest to me you believe the long term correlation is poor. Is that the case?
“CO2 alarmists will continue to be in denial. Even if the next 20-30 years show a cooling trend and SC 25 is also a dud it won’t change their beliefs.”
Nah, of course they’ll change. They’ll say there’s a great global-cooling catostrophe, and we need to nationalize, and globalize, some aspect of the economy or other to prevent it, if not adapt to it.
Alec,
This analysis tells us nothing about CO2 forcing so to completely dismiss a role for CO2 seems a little unscientific at this point.
It’s fairly easy to get the email for these scientists from their publications. Why not put this analysis to them (leave off the little rant at the end) and see what they have to say? I can’t see why they wouldn’t also be curious about a further update.
crosspatch says: What I have found most interesting is the recently discovered change in spectral distribution of solar energy. This new information that solar UV has greatly decreased even though TSI hasn’t changed much could change everything. If the magnitude of the spectral changes are enough to explain the variation,
I think you want to read this:
http://www.agu.org/news/press/pr_archives/2010/2010-28.shtml
So those folks seem to agree with you (I’m also sure Leif will want to rake them over some of his coals… 😉
then I believe it will result in a much better understanding of how the Sun drives our climate. Add to the spectral changes any changes in cloud cover due to increased GCR activity and bingo, there you have it.
I speculate that IFF there is a solar driver here ( I *hate* the use of “forcing”) it is working via a UV modulation of atmospheric temperatures, not surface temperatures, and that drives the atmostpheric height that then drives the Polar Vortex and AO / AMO and the southern circumpolar winds (then to the circumpolar current and into ENSO / La Nina – El Nino).
It’s a long, and I again emphasize speculative, chain, but that’s what it looks like when you start running down “The shin bone’s connected to the, leg bone, the leg bones connected to the thigh bone…”
I connect some of the dots (or maybe dashes) here:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2011/01/02/the-arctic-shuffle/
with a bit on the potential special role of Drakes Passage here:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/12/22/drakes-passage/
and there are some French researchers finding the same solar pattern:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/12/26/french-research-its-the-sun/
So the (tentative) chain of events would be:
Solar shift in UV, upper atmosphere heat / thickness change, (and cosmic ray /cloud shift), AMO / AO and Polar vortex shift (similar shift in souther hemisphere but with more impact via water issues at Drakes Passage) leading to “loopy jet stream” and more cold flowing to lower lattitudes. At the same time, thinner atmosphere gets colder at shallower heights, so mountain tops, even at the Equator, get colder. (Reverse for warming).
Sidebar: Had a call from a friend in Ecuador. Said the locals in Quito are talking about the snow on the mountain tops. More of it, and lower down, than anyone ever remembers. Even at the Equator it’s colder.
Thinner atmosphere matters. And I’d speculate it matters a whole lot. TSI isn’t the issue… and looking at surface temperatures is just the wrong place to look. We’ve got a delta-T of 41 K in the air…
E.M.Smith says:
January 2, 2011 at 11:33 pm
We’ve got a delta-T of 41 K in the air…
In the termosphere where the density is millions of times smaller than at the surface…
and so is the heat content.
UV is what causes sunburn at ground level, and causes the body to make vitamin D.
IR penetration is blocked from reaching the surface by cloud cover.
Surface water causes far more lag time than solids in the timing of the warming effects of solar radiation or cooling effects because of the lack thereof.
Don’t have to be a scientist to know the above.
Leif Svalgaard says:
January 2, 2011 at 10:41 pm
crosspatch says:
January 2, 2011 at 10:32 pm
This new information that solar UV has greatly decreased even though TSI hasn’t changed much could change everything.
Maybe not:
“Surface radiative forcing very small, direct surface response < 0.1 K in 11-year" from
http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/news/2010ScienceMeeting/doc/Session4/4.04_Cahalan_atmos_model.pdf
The total energy in the UV is very small and is absorbed high up in the atmosphere. If that energy is offset by infrared [to keep TSI constant], then since IR penetrates to the surface the net result [as the calculations showed] is very small [perhaps even the other way around, depending on the details].
Its ground hog day again. We are not talking about energy from UV or EUV but more about the atmospheric changes that are in lock step. Plus the variation is much larger that any TSI variation. Think smaller atmosphere.
“I speculate that IFF there is a solar driver here ( I *hate* the use of “forcing”) it is working via a UV modulation of atmospheric temperatures, not surface temperatures, and that drives the atmostpheric height that then drives the Polar Vortex and AO / AMO and the southern circumpolar winds (then to the circumpolar current and into ENSO / La Nina – El Nino).
It’s a long, and I again emphasize speculative, chain, but that’s what it looks like when you start running down “The shin bone’s connected to the, leg bone, the leg bones connected to the thigh bone…”
#######
easy. put some real numbers on the “chain” and calculate.
Well done, “smart Alec.” I mean that in a good way of course.
HR says:
January 2, 2011 at 11:26 pm
On another point Leif your first two replies here suggest to me you believe the long term correlation is poor. Is that the case?
The whole premise for the article is that during the past 60 years [the Modern Grand Maximum] the Sun has been extraordinarily active. I presented analysis [and some links] to show that this is very likely not the case, so the conclusion of the article falls flat.
E.M. Smith – Very, very interesting post! The concept of a variable thickness of our atmosphere never occurred to me before but makes perfect sense. Yet another piece of this complex moving puzzle to consider.
This is so much more fascinating than the simplistic CO2 story that one must almost feel sorry for those trapped inside that boring box.
Look forward to the coming comments.
stevenmosher says:
January 2, 2011 at 11:53 pm
That’s been done before Mosh. Let me demonstrate..
Step 1- We’ve known since Arhenius that CO2 is a GHG
Step 2- GHGs warm the atmosphere
Step 3- We are pumping gigas of the stuff into the air.
Step 4- We put some numbers on this chain and…..
Step 5- We are doomed I tell ya
Now IFF only these folks had o’ speculated a little more before running around waving their “crunched numbers” papers around……
“”ignore the impact of decades of grand maximum solar activity”
There were decades of high activity in the 1770-1800s and 1830-1880s and both were followed by cold decades [probably for non-solar reasons anyway]” LF
….or conversely [probably for solar reasons anyway!]
@Leif
Not a critique, rather a comment.
——————————————–beginquote
..
There were decades of high activity in the 1770-1800s and 1830-1880s and both were followed by cold decades [probably for non-solar reasons anyway], see also
…
———————————————endquote
I briefly leafed through the papers you referred to. Have you looked at the rather interesting mesured temperature data from e.g. Denmark( Copenhagen Rundetårn), Berlin (Tempelhof) , Sweden (Stockholm(GML)), Russia (Moscow) covering these periods? I assume some interesting comparisons could be made?
See e.g. http://www.rimfrost.no/
As far as I have understood, at least the Danish are considered to be of rather good quality (after they moved the measurement outdoors in 1761). They are incorporated into the DMI database.
I do acknowledge that these measurements are NOT global at all, but they should anyway be considered when applying e.g. 1860 as a starting point for trend calculations. The data series seems too long to just be a function of periodic phenomena (NAO) for N Europe like we have seen the later winters.
It can of course be argued that 1860 is an appropriate starting year, because before that decade few globally distributed measurements was available.
On the other hand, considering the few pre- 1860-data we have, quite a few of them indicates that the 1860’ies was close to a temporal minimum.
I would think this could have some implications for the causal relation between CO2w and temperature.
Cassanders
In Cod we trust
@Leif
“We can reasonably *correct* sunspot records by applying a scaling factor to old measurements. Ergo, we can rule out a maximum.”
Also, comment: If two quantity, sunspot number and cosmic ray flux do not show proportionality (cycle 19 vs. 22,) then sunspot number alone may be an inadequate proxy to encapsulate all solar factor?
Leif,
Your dismissal of a grand maximum was based up sunspot number adjustments in the past. Do you have a similar analysis of Solanki’s proxy work, which also concluded that the latter part of the 20th century was a solar grand maximum, among the highest sustained levels in the last 7000 years.
You also appear to be doing a simplistic radiative forcing level dismissal of the relevance of much larger variations in UV. UV couples with a different vertical distribution and chemically via production of ozone, much of that ozone is in the stratosphere above the infrared radiative interface of the atmosphere. Similarly, the rest of the solar spectrum is also distributed and coupled to different parts of the climate system. Solar radiation couples far more strongly at the equator and several meters deeper into the ocean, while CO2 radiation penetrates mere microns. Albedo’s are different in different parts of the spectrum, which snow and ice being far more reflective in the visible than the infrared part of the spectrum. In a nonlinear dynamic system how can you just dismiss the solar hypothesis with a simplistic linear argument?
Most climate scientists believe climate models are needed for such a complex system. There is agreement that “high top” models (with a stratosphere) do a better job, and this was when the stratospheric variation was thought to vary less than recent UV measurements indicate. The climate smoothing chart above actually under represents the time to reach equilibrium with a new level of forcing, the climate commitment studies of Wigley, et al, and Meehl, et al, found the greatest response occurred in the first few decades due to the thermal capacity of the mixing layer of the ocean and the total response would take centuries for the deep ocean system. All of the solar variation since 1940 was probably above anything even the mixing layer of the oceans had adjusted to. The mid-century cooling probably requires a different explanation than variation in CO2 or solar forcing. Aerosols and multi-decade internal climate modes are probably the leading candidates.
Alec is right about his summation of the level being more important than the trend. The warmist argument that solar TSI or any other solar measure does not follow climate is a structured ploy to distract the pubic from the truth. Solar outputs by themselves are not enough to explain the world temperature trend, but when mixed with oceanic oscillations the picture becomes very clear. As long as the solar level of output is high when associated with warm ocean cycles the natural warming occurs. The higher level of solar output influences the positive atmospheric oscillations (AO,NAO), I dont think this is about heat, but more about spreading the cold.
SC22 had a high level of F10.7 flux which also means the EUV levels were high. The outer atmosphere would have been high at the same time as the warm PDO cycle.
E.M.Smith says:
January 2, 2011 at 11:33 pm
I speculate that IFF there is a solar driver here ..
It is a possibility.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/MF.htm
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC20.htm
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/NFC1.htm
Commenting myself re Leif.
I wrote
—————————————-beginquote
I would think this could have some implications for the causal relation between CO2w and temperature.
—————————————endquote
I would like to elaborate. I do not claim that CO2 does not have an effect as a contributor to the “greenhouse effect”. My speculation relates to the calculation of trend-lines, and hence some of the inferences for climate sensitivity.
Cassanders
In Cod we trust
Leif Svalgaard says:
January 2, 2011 at 10:49 pm
grienpies says:
January 2, 2011 at 10:38 pm
Since solar activity is down now we should see a drop in global temperature.
This drop should big enough that they can’t hide the decline…
————————–
Solar activity has been decreasing for a couple of decades now, and so has global temperature. Am I wrong?
I would say way wrong. Isolating SC24, solar cycles since SC20 have maintained a high level of output. The F10.7 flux figures for SC21,22,23 are high, well in advance of the EUV levels required to maintain a high stable outer atmosphere. Factor in the the positive PDO of the era and all is sweet. Now we have a small atmosphere from low solar output that is coupled with a neg PDO. This is a very different place.
Think level of solar activity as the article explains.
I like this discussion. it’s stuff like this that makes me such a wuwt fan
thanks to all involved
Thanks to the author of this article, a very informative, logic and relevant approach to this important climate discussion!!
Even served in a language that manages to inform difficult scientific issues to a broad audience, perfect.
K.R. Frank
Ian Holton says:
January 3, 2011 at 12:13 am
“There were decades of high activity in the 1770-1800s and 1830-1880s and both were followed by cold decades [probably for non-solar reasons anyway]”
….or conversely [probably for solar reasons anyway!]
You are suggesting the cold caused solar activity…
Cassanders says:
January 3, 2011 at 12:13 am
On the other hand, considering the few pre- 1860-data we have, quite a few of them indicates that the 1860′ies was close to a temporal minimum.
Assuming you mean ‘temperature minimum, I’ll agree, and this happened at the a height of solar activity.
Buffoon says:
January 3, 2011 at 12:15 am
If two quantity, sunspot number and cosmic ray flux do not show proportionality (cycle 19 vs. 22,) then sunspot number alone may be an inadequate proxy to encapsulate all solar factor?
The comic ray flux is a poor proxy for solar activity being a couple of links of a chain away.
Martin Lewitt says:
January 3, 2011 at 12:20 am
Your dismissal of a grand maximum was based up sunspot number adjustments in the past.
I do not ‘dismiss’. I show by careful analysis.
Do you have a similar analysis of Solanki’s proxy work, which also concluded that the latter part of the 20th century was a solar grand maximum, among the highest sustained levels in the last 7000 years.
Yes, we looked at that. See line 77ff of http://www.leif.org/research/Comment%20on%20McCracken.pdf
Most climate scientists believe climate models are needed for such a complex system.
See: http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/news/2010ScienceMeeting/doc/Session4/4.04_Cahalan_atmos_model.pdf
“Surface radiative forcing very small, direct surface response < 0.1 K in 11-year"
The main problem is that the correlations are so poor. If they were good, we would not be discussing them any more. Hiding behind 'complex, non-linear' systems is just admitting that we don't know squat. An assessment based on energy [in this case, lack thereof] is always a good first cut if you don't understand what is going on. A linear treatment is also a good first cut as it involves a minimum of assumptions.
I'm all ears if someone can show me an engineer's 'back-of-the-envelope' estimate that makes sense energetically. I take a dim view of unknown forcings, unknown mechanisms, unknown feedbacks, unknown unknowns, etc.
@EternalOptimist says: January 3, 2011 at 12:41 am
I agree. And this is particularly the case when all the “solar” boys & girls come out to play with their latest theories.
Just reminds me of exactly how “settled” the science really is. And why it is such a good idea to shovel billions into carbon trading and building windmills.
Leif
You say “The whole premise for the article is that during the past 60 years [the Modern Grand Maximum] the Sun has been extraordinarily active. I presented analysis [and some links] to show that this is very likely not the case, so the conclusion of the article falls flat.” I accept that you are very likely correct w.r.t. maxima, flux etc.
But the graphs from Stephen Strum above http://icecap.us/images/uploads/SolarCycleLengthandGlobalTemperatureAnomalies1.pdf look pretty interesting to me.
In looking for a book present to myself, I came across this from Richard Feynman. It seemed highly relevant to the CAGW debate.
http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.pdf
Thank you Andrew and WUWT contributors for such knowledgeable and (generally) objective food for sceptical minds on both sides of the fence.
Graham
The main climate driver is hardly CO2 *OR* solar activity. The climate is complex. To prove the CO2 hypothesis wrong by showing that solar activity explains everything is a path leading nowhere. So is to prove the solar activity hypothesis wrong by showing that CO2 explains everything. To me it seems that either side is trying to prove the other wrong by making the same mistake: to think that there is one simple answer.
Well said . . . simplistic responses to complex problems can only lead further into the mire.
Al Gored says:
E.M. Smith – Very, very interesting post! The concept of a variable thickness of our atmosphere never occurred to me before but makes perfect sense. Yet another piece of this complex moving puzzle to consider.
Glad you liked it. FWIW, I finally got a bit of time (family all asleep at 2 am 😉 to dig around for some hard facts on that Ecuador story. Found ’em. Looks like the “freeze level” is down from about 5-6000 meters in January (1959-1990 era) to 4500-5000 Meters now. Moving the freeze line down 1000 m globally is very likely to have a coldening impact on things, IMHO…
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2011/01/03/freezing-level/
Yeah, it’s a first cut and needs a lot of work to turn an observed oddity into an actual defensible thesis. But as a “Dig Here!” I think it’s a very interesting one.
While I believe more in ocean cycles shaping the 20th century record (whatever drives them), truth is that when heating a pot with water you do not have to increase the gas flame to get the water boiling. Steady flame will do just nicely.
@Leif,
..well, what I really meant was temporal temperature minimum. 🙂
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=temporal
Cassanders
In Cod we trust
Interesting to note that there’s as much of a no consensus in the field of solar science, and the suns effect on our daily weather and therefore climate, as it is amongst the usual suspects of climate hippies and their constant no consensus on everything from the accuracy of weather balloons to the accuracy of climate models.
But, of course, and essentially, in a climate where everyone, individually, believes they have the right of it, there can only be one consensus which is that there is no consensus.
What would the world look like if the engineers behaved with an equal tenacity of not trusting in what they observed and only make judgment based upon that observation? (My guess is probably bickering about if it is wise to invent the wheel or not. Still.)
Terry says:
January 3, 2011 at 1:33 am
But the graphs from Stephen Strum above http://icecap.us/images/uploads/SolarCycleLengthandGlobalTemperatureAnomalies1.pdf look pretty interesting to me.
Certainly has the potential of been falsified in the next couple of years if temps don’t fall 1C.
I think his argument: “Since net solar radiation is slightly higher during periods of heightened sunspot activity (and lower during periods of little sunspot activity), the combination of long solar cycles and low sunspot numbers results in cumulatively more months on a decadal time scale with below average net solar radiation” is wrong in its implication, namely that we will get less energy. Imagine a cycle of 10 years with sunspot number = 100, now stretch it to 20 years and lower the sunspot number to 50. We still get the same amount, namely 10*100 = 20*50 ‘sunspot-years’.
Cassanders says:
January 3, 2011 at 2:10 am
..well, what I really meant was temporal temperature minimum. 🙂
Everything is ‘temporal’…
@Leif Svalgaard
The least we can say is that Solanki has a very different opinion on solar activity:
http://climatemedia.wordpress.com/2010/12/28/new-reconstruction-of-solar-spectral-irradiance-since-the-maunder-minimum/
1DandyTroll says: What would the world look like if the engineers behaved with an equal tenacity of not trusting in what they observed and only make judgment based upon that observation?
Roughly like it does now. There are regularly spectacular failures of engineered structures (Galloping Girdy? bridge?, Challenger, several dozen dams…). Because of that, most engineering designs for human occupation have about a 50% “fudge factor” put in to cover that “lack of trust”. Few engineers really believe they understand everything perfectly. That’s why you test materials samples constantly (and why sometimes whole sections of concrete are torn out when they fail spec…). And even then there are times when a parking garage collapses…
It’s very much a “trust but verify” business…
Alec Rawls (author of this post) seems to want it both ways. He presents 2 graphs one by Friis-Christensen and Lassen and the other by Stephen Strum. Both show a ‘tight’ correlation between SCL and temperature and both show a fairly immediate temperature response (i.e. little or no lag). However, when the correlation breaks down he appears to be arguing that this is due to a decades long lag.
Also his appeal for a review by Lassen on the SCL-Temerpature correlation isn’t a good idea. The fact that the temperatures for one La Nina year might drop to somehere close to 1990s levels isn’t going to rescue the correlation. According to UAH the mean temperature for the past 10 years (2001-2010) is at least 0.2 deg higher than the mean temperature for the previous ten years (1991-2000).
Edouard says:
January 3, 2011 at 2:46 am
The least we can say is that Solanki has a very different opinion on solar activity
Actually it is not really his ‘opinion’ [we don’t have opinions on these things]. They base their claim [or ‘result’ or ‘finding’] on the main input to their model, namely the Group Sunspot Number [GSN]. So, their model stands or falls with the GSN. It thus comes down to examining if the GSN is correct. By comparison with the effect of UV [assumed to depend on GSN] on the Earth’s ionosphere [a current is generated whose effect we can measure on the ground – even with 18th century instruments] we can check if the calibration of the GSN is correct, and we find it is not.
Personally I think the Lockwood and Frohlich article to be one of the dumbest and at the same time most influential papers in climatology – responsible as it is for playing down the role of the sun. I agree with the author of the piece above in its shortcomings: the difference between the direction of solar activity and the level of solar activity. I always use the anology with a wooden rain barrel with some little holes in it. The level of water in it can still rise if amount of rainfal decreases but still is above average. Gavin is right however that the amount of rise will decrease. But that is in a simple system. Climate is not one of those and we have not enough knowledge of all the cycles in our climate and the lag times induced by them.
At the same time that lack of knowledge applies for both sides of the debate so some toning down would make this a stronger piece
“12 years later the 2010 El Nino year shows the same average temperature as the ’98 El Nino year”
So 2010 did. The difference being the super Niño of 1998 covered the calendar year and the moderate recent Niño tapered off during summer 2010. The fact that 2010 managed to attain almost 1998 levels is hard empirical evidence for global warming.
Alec Rawls wrote in the post: “Ken Gregory has the most precise answer to this foolishness. His ‘climate smoothing’ graphic shows how the temperature of a heat sink actually responds to a fall-off in forcing…”
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/gregory-climate-smoothing-contra-lockwood.gif
Ken Gregory’s explanation of the “climate smoothing” graph you linked does not provide a “precise answer” as you state. He actually admits it is conjecture when he writes in explanation, “Below is a graph showing a hypothetical increase followed by a decrease in the Sun’s forcing, and the resulting temperature change. The graph is only for illustrative purposes to show the climate smoothing and time lag effects on temperature. The units are arbitrary. Here I assume the temperature of a given year is effected by the Sun’s forcing over the previous 24 years such that each prior year has 85% of the weighting of the next year.”
He only presented this conjecture for one cycle, so your assumption that this is “precise” is a stretch.
You wrote in the post, “Check out this alarming graphic from Stephen Strum of Frontier Weather Inc…”
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/lagged-solar-cycle-length-and-temp-stephen-strum-frontier-weather-inc.png
The U.S. temperature data in Stephen Strum’s “alarming” graph ends around 2007, Alec. Did U.S. temperatures drop like the solar cycle graph did? Nope. The correlation fell apart. U.S. temperatures dropped a little, but are nowhere near the solar cycle length data in your graph:
http://i55.tinypic.com/wvo3th.jpg
This is why Stephen Strum qualified the graph you used with the following, “While temperature anomalies will likely not decline as much as might be suggested by the solar cycle length curve, the long solar cycle could at least help to drive North America temperature anomalies back down towards the long‐term average.”
You wrote in the post, “Actually, solar cycle 22, which began in 1986, was one of the most intense on record (part of the 20th century “grand maximum” that was the most active sun of the last 11 thousand years), and by almost every measure it was more intense than solar cycle 21. It had about the same sunspot numbers as cycle 21 (Hathaway 2006):” You wrote that in response to Mike Lockwood’s comment, “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.”
If you had smoothed the sunspot data with an 11-year filter, you would have noted what Lockwood was discussing:
http://i52.tinypic.com/xbmut5.jpg
I posted that graph on the thread of your earlier post here at WUWT:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/12/24/lump-of-coal-award-to-ipcc-lead-author-kevin-trenberth-for-hiding-the-decline-or-the-lack-of-increase-in-global-temperatures/#comment-560438
Note that that graph did not the Sunspot numbers before 1945 corrected as suggested by Leif Svalgaard here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/12/24/lump-of-coal-award-to-ipcc-lead-author-kevin-trenberth-for-hiding-the-decline-or-the-lack-of-increase-in-global-temperatures/#comment-560504
I’m using that graph solely to show you that the sun, in fact, did a U-turn in 1985 based on the 11-year smoothing and has been declining since the 1950s.
Also, you used a sunspot number graph from Hathaway 2006 in your post:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/sunspot-prediction-nasa-2006.jpg
Why? SC24 through 2010 is nowhere near that magnitude. And current projections are for a much lower SC number. That graph, therefore, gives the misleading impression that Sunspots have remained elevated, as temperatures have.
You wrote, “Set aside the other problems with Usoskin’s study. (The temperature record he compared his solar data to is Michael Mann’s ‘hockey stick.’)”
This appears to be a 180 degrees spin on your part. In your earlier post here at WUWT…
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/12/24/lump-of-coal-award-to-ipcc-lead-author-kevin-trenberth-for-hiding-the-decline-or-the-lack-of-increase-in-global-temperatures/
… you cited Usoskin et al, agreeing with their use of Mann et al hockey stick data. In fact, in the comments, you wrote, “I don’t disagree with Usoskin and Frolich on the data.”
@Leif:
At least some of the UV is important to processes below the Thermosphere. In the mesophere, the modulation of noctilucent clouds could easilty be the kind of process that ‘makes interesting things happen’. From the wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noctilucent_cloud
So here we have a direct observation of historical rising UV reducing water (implying lower amounts of noctilucent cloud) and now we have a sudden plunge of UV (that would imply more water available) and thus more noctilucent clouds.
I’ve personally noted (as have a couple of other folks) more of a ‘milky hint’ to the sky at night some times, especially when illuminated by the moon.
OK, I have to emphasize that I am not saying this IS causal I’m just showing a line of speculation and how there could be interesting things driven by the UV that could impact temperatures and are outside the thermosphere.
But the bottom line, for me, is there there are a lot of things that UV can influence in the atmosphere (at several levels) and we know that UV is changing a lot during this solar cycle. I think that’s enough to make it worthy of a look-see and more than a casual dismissal on bulk energy grounds or due to TSI variance being small. The details seem to matter.
Leif told us a few days ago that he had reconstructed the sunspot number back to 1835 from magnetic data.
The SIDC sunspot number trends upwards from 42 in 1836 to 73 in 2003
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1835/to:2003/trend
Please could Leif tell us what start and end sunspot numbers he gets for the linear trend on his reconstruction between those dates.
Thanks
Leif: In past comments on prior posts, haven’t you disputed or disproved the arguments presented in Alec Rawl’s post?
A marvelous piece of work Alec. Not many have an understanding as you.
Alec spins
———–
This evidence that much of 20th century warming might be explained by solar activity was a thorn in the side of the newly powerful CO2 alarmists
———–
No it wasn’t.
Alec scoffs
—————
that it is not the level of solar activity that causes warming or cooling, but the change in the level—which is absurd.
—————
I don’ think you understand what they said Alec.
Alec approves
———-
“Note that the temperature continues to rise for several years after the Sun’s forcing starts to decrease.”
———-
Why?
Where exactly was the Sun’s energy stored so that it could be later released as heat?
Remember the Sun’s energy is absorbed and converted into heat immediately by the land and water surface. So how come it disappeared and then reappeared later?
Maybe you should consider the possibility that some some guy blogger is wrong. And that you are not skeptical enough.
Alec makes stuff up
——————-
allowing these researchers to stay on the good side of the CO2 alarmists who control their funding.
——————-
A popular theory as ever but absolutely no evidence.
By the way, when the endpoint effects are handled correctly, the breakdown in Friis-Christensen and Lassen’s correlation occur sooner than they claim. See Figures 3 & 4 (and also 5) in this paper by Laut (which is also useful in looking at other purported correlations): http://atoc.colorado.edu/wxlab/atoc7500/laut2.pdf
I think this last sentence gives you away. This is what I think you are essentially telling us if we correctly read between the lines: “My ideological biases lead me to strongly oppose the policy implications associated with admitting that the rise in temperatures is due to CO2. So, I would prefer to believe there is some sort of correlation between solar activity and the temperature even though I can’t demonstrate such a correlation quantitatively (although I can certainly wave my hands around a lot) and any attempts to demonstrate it quantitatively have failed for the most recent rise. And, in order for such a correlation to exist, I have to rely on some mechanism that would selectively amplify solar effects relative to other effects like greenhouse gases.”
Why are some solar cycles longer than others? Why are there no two or three solar cycles alike? I know similar but not alike. Why why why..
Alec gets breathless
————-
s the big update that all of our solar scientists need to make. They need to stop tolerating this crazy charade that allows the CO2 alarmists to ignore the impact of decades of grand maximum solar activity and misattribute the resulting
————–
I am having second thoughts as far as time delays are concerned. For sea surface heating there will be some transfer of energy to the depths. This will limit the temperature reached at the surface. However I am going to guess that it is a fairly small effect that can be ignored on decadal time scales.
I think/suspect that scientists are not unaware of this and apply it where appropriate. If memory serves the IPCC has a section discussing immediate climate change in comparison to climate change as the earth catches up and approaches equilibrium over longer time scales.
My comments do not seem to be making publication..is there a problem?
[Rescued from the spam folder & posted. ~dbs, mod.]
Leif,
You state: “So, their model stands or falls with the GSN.”, but the Krivova-Solanki model is validated with modern data and instrument measurements and not over the time frame of your Group Sunspot Number corrections. The GSN is only used to reconstruct the solar irradiance from the Maunder Minimum to the present. Applying the model to your sunspot reconstruction instead would not change their 1.25W/m^2 increase since the Maunder minimum, since your results are not relevant to the Maunder Minimum figures. Timing is all that is impacted.
The Solanki work I had in mind for supporting a Solar Grand Maximum was his follow on to his 2004 article in Nature, that he did with Usoskin.
Solanki, S. K., I. G. Usoskin, B. Kromer, M. Schu¨ssler, and J. Beer (2004),
Unusual activity of the Sun during recent decades compared to the previous
11,000 years, Nature, 431, 1084–1087.
Usoskin, I. G., S. K. Solanki, and G. A. Kovaltsov (2007), Grand minima and maxima of solar activity: new observational constraints, A&A, 471(1), 301
The sunspot number differences would not appear to change the conclusion that the recent solar activity was a grand maximum, nor the statistical results on grand maximum or minima over the last several thousand years, but might give us another grand maximum before the current one, in the time since the Maunder Minimum.
You are correct that we are in need of a mechanism for solar forcing having a more strongly suggestive correlation to temperature over the paleo record than can be explained by radiant energy alone. But we are also in need of model independent evidence for net positive feedback from CO2 forcing in the current climate regime.
You state: “A linear treatment is also a good first cut as it involves a minimum of assumptions.” Actually linear treatments involve more assumptions, such as assumption that the sensitivities to solar, CO2 and aerosol forcings are the same despite the known qualitative and distributional differences in their coupling to the climate system. Every model independent estimate of climate sensitivity in the current regime is based upon solar or aerosols and then translated to sensitivity to CO2 doubling by rote assumption of equivalence.
Citing the nonlinear dynamic nature of the climate system is the basis for skepticism about questionable assumptions, it isn’t “hiding” because we know the system is nonlinear. “Hiding” would be ignoring that fact. We have a lot to learn, may we live in interesting solar times. That may bring insight quicker than the models, which still have errors and correlated biases several times larger than the energy imbalance of interest (about 0.75W/m^2 globally and annually averaged in the 1998 el Nino year per Hansen).
LazyTeenager says: “Remember the Sun’s energy is absorbed and converted into heat immediately by the land and water surface.”
Downward shortwave radiation (visible light) penetrates the oceans to depths of, what?, a hundred meters. Granted the impact decreases greatly with depth, but your comment is flawed. Refer to the following graph of tropical Pacific Ocean Heat Content versus NINO3.4 SST anomalies. OHC rose in the mid-1970s in response to the decreased cloud cover and increased downward shortwave radiation associated with the 1973/74/75/76 La Nina. It took almost 20 years for that OHC to be discharged.
http://i36.tinypic.com/eqwdvl.png
The graph is from this post:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/09/enso-dominates-nodc-ocean-heat-content.html
So your comment is flawed–I’m not saying the post isn’t–but your comment is as well.
E.M.Smith says:
January 3, 2011 at 2:02 am
That is a very interesting report from Ecuador indeed. Would it be possible to go back to your source and find out when it started, how fast the onset etc? Any news from the rest of Andean Cordillera would also be useful. I have been wondering when sea level rise would stop and reverse. 2011 could be the year.
Alec has hit the nail on the head. Its not the trend, but the level that is important. Solar cycles are part of the equation, oceans are the bigger player (that may be solar influenced). Mix high solar activity with positive PDO and the world will experience warming. The opposite is happening right now
LazyTeenager,
“Where exactly was the Sun’s energy stored so that it could be later released as heat?”
The Sun’s energy is continuously supplied. Nearly all of the heat capacity in the climate system is in the oceans. The temperature can continue to increase after a decrease to a lower level of solar forcing, if the lower level of solar forcing is still high enough to increase the temperature of the oceans. Consider a pot of water on a source of heat, you set the level of forcing to 10 and the temperature starts increasing, but before the water has warmed fully to its new temperature level, set the forcing level to 8. The level of 8 may still be able to raise the water to a higher temperature.
The mixing layer of the ocean takes two to three decades to reach most of its temperature increase, the whole ocean takes millenia. Now consider the puzzle the the mid-century cooling poses for both the solar and CO2 hypotheses. Solar forcing did dip, but that doesn’t seem large enough to explain the pause in warming. The aerosol hypothesis could explain the pause in warming by reflecting more solar energy, and this would impact both the solar and CO2 warming impacts, even if both forcings were staying the same or increasing. A reduction in aerosols could then explain the steep rise in temperature in the 80s and 90s as the solar energy lost to space is reduced and solar is still high and CO2 is still high and increasing. A competing hypothesis for the mid-century cooling is that the multidecadal ocean oscillations such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) were in a cooling pattern. The analysis for this is more complex energetically, since changes in ocean circulation can move huge amounts of heat energy around storing it and releasing it in different locations for different periods of time. They can also impact transport of heat to the poles where it can be more efficiently radiated and can also impact cloud amounts which might influence the amount of heat reflected into space. Just rest assured that the climate system is complex enough to give a rational person pause about any claims not well supported by the evidence.
Bob Tisdale says:
January 3, 2011 at 3:10 am
.
“The U.S. temperature data in Stephen Strum’s “alarming” graph ends around 2007, Alec. Did U.S. temperatures drop like the solar cycle graph did? Nope. The correlation fell apart. U.S. temperatures dropped a little, but are nowhere near the solar cycle length data in your graph:”
They went bloody close in real terms after E.M. added the deleted thermometers back in.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/11/07/gistemp-ghcn-selection-bias-measured-0-6-c/
Leif Svalgaard says: January 2, 2011 at 10:41 pm
The total energy in the UV is very small and is absorbed high up in the atmosphere. If that energy is offset by infrared [to keep TSI constant], then since IR penetrates to the surface the net result [as the calculations showed] is very small [perhaps even the other way around, depending on the details].
Except that UV is the only spectrum chlorophyll likes, and that ‘insignificant’ amount of UV drives every living plant on the plant. That’s a lot of transpiration, albedo shift, and temperature regulation that contributes to the climate.
Would someone be willing to update the first graph which is a 1991 Friis-Christensen and Lassen chart showing trends in cycle length versus temperatures anomalies through 1990? I suspect that the strong correlation breaks down after 1990.
yes I agree with Mr Rawls, there could be a profound simplicity to the temperature increase on earth. As I stated earlier on several occassions its just cooking pot theory, you don’t have to keep turning up the temperature to get the pot to keep getting warmer as long as heat gain is greater than heat loss the cooking pot and the earth will warm.
Leif Svalgaard says:
January 3, 2011 at 1:30 am
I take a dim view of unknown forcings, unknown mechanisms, unknown feedbacks, unknown unknowns, etc.
~
Put this on your “dimmer view” list. lol
Fewer interstellar particle flux reaching 1AU during more active solar cycles, more solar radiative whatevers reaching Earths surface. More interstellar particle flux at 1AU during less active solar cycles, less solar radiative whatevers reaching Earths surface. Kinda like the a dimmer switch those interstellar particle fluxes. And if the very local ISM increases in particle flux..we have a dimmer switch, right outside the heliosphere door.
Good day..
Great article. Very informative.
Ripper says: “They went bloody close in real terms after E.M. added the deleted thermometers back in.”
I didn’t see a long-term graph (since 1880) of U.S. temperature anomalies in Chiefio’s post to contradict what I wrote earlier. Was there one?
tallbloke says:
January 3, 2011 at 4:20 am
Please could Leif tell us what start and end sunspot numbers he gets for the linear trend on his reconstruction between those dates.
1835-2003: 0.09+/-0.07; R^2=0.0095 not significant
The choice of dates often changes such non-significant trends. E.g.
1835-2010: 0.02+/-0.07; R^2=0.0005 even less significant
Bob Tisdale says:
January 3, 2011 at 4:44 am
Leif: In past comments on prior posts, haven’t you disputed or disproved the arguments presented in Alec Rawl’s post?
‘disproved’ is a big word. But in essence: yes.
frozenfuture says:
January 3, 2011 at 4:44 am
A marvelous piece of work Alec. Not many have an understanding as you.
Thank God.
Carla says:
January 3, 2011 at 5:35 am
Why are some solar cycles longer than others? Why are there no two or three solar cycles alike? I know similar but not alike. Why why why..
Because the sun is a messy place
Martin Lewitt says:
January 3, 2011 at 5:58 am
The GSN is only used to reconstruct the solar irradiance from the Maunder Minimum to the present.
The GSN is used to calibrate the model.
Bob Tisdale says:
January 3, 2011 at 6:07 am
An Inquirer says:
January 3, 2011 at 7:00 am
Would someone be willing to update the first graph which is a 1991 Friis-Christensen and Lassen chart showing trends in cycle length versus temperatures anomalies through 1990? I suspect that the strong correlation breaks down after 1990.
http://www.leif.org/research/Cycle%20Length%20Temperature%20Correlation.pdf
I’ve never understood why Friis-Christensen and Lassen felt the need to declare that something other than solar had been responsible for late 20th century warming, other than to appease the powers that be that review/publish their work. If you look closely, their graph is never 100% perfect correlation. 1890-1920 is a fine example where they don’t seem to be all that correlated over that particular small time period. 1 decade doesn’t undo over a century of reliable and decently correlated data, that’s absurb. How’s the graph looking now? Pretty darn good….
Leif Svalgaard says:
January 3, 2011 at 2:22 am
[Terry says:
January 3, 2011 at 1:33 am
“But the graphs from Stephen Strum above http://icecap.us/images/uploads/SolarCycleLengthandGlobalTemperatureAnomalies1.pdf look pretty interesting to me.
Certainly has the potential of been falsified in the next couple of years if temps don’t fall 1C.”]
“I think his argument: “Since net solar radiation is slightly higher during periods of heightened sunspot activity (and lower during periods of little sunspot activity), the combination of long solar cycles and low sunspot numbers results in cumulatively more months on a decadal time scale with below average net solar radiation” is wrong in its implication, namely that we will get less energy. Imagine a cycle of 10 years with sunspot number = 100, now stretch it to 20 years and lower the sunspot number to 50. We still get the same amount, namely 10*100 = 20*50 ‘sunspot-years’.”
The problem with this Leif, is that because our climate is dynamic system it is the amount of energy at any instant in time which is important, not the average. We also need to know about how other factors like magnetic field/solar wind e.t.c. vary over very short time-scales if we are to start to see the effects on weather/climate.
The suns activity and it’s relationship to our weather has been a headscratcher for quite sometime now. Maybe we need to start looking at this differently
Seems to me folks are trying to correlate/causate sunspot activity with Earths climate. But WHAT IF sunspot activity is not an affect but an effect?
For example, Leif made a statement at 2:22am thus…
That is a perfectly true statement if taken as an ‘affect’. But I’d like folks to consider the following
The above happens in Australia often enough. Long periods of drought may be broken by some inordinately heavy rain in December, though the yearly totals are unexceptional.
So a (with kind regards to E M Smith) “dig here” may well be worthwhile regards solar cycle lengths.
“…they are claiming that near peak levels of solar activity cannot have a warming effect once they are past the peak of the trend—that it is not the level of solar activity that causes warming or cooling, but the change in the level—which is absurd.”
Could be both. Higher solar wind speeds generally correlate to higher surface temperatures on weekly/monthly basis, but the uplifts in SW from through 1998 and 2010 both have absolute levels that are very average, and at first sight disproportional to the amount of surface warming compared to the SW speed and surface temp`s in say 2003.
http://omniweb.gsfc.nasa.gov/form/dx1.html
“Leif Svalgaard says:
January 2, 2011 at 10:49 pm
grienpies says:
January 2, 2011 at 10:38 pm
Since solar activity is down now we should see a drop in global temperature.
This drop should big enough that they can’t hide the decline…
Solar activity has been decreasing for a couple of decades now, and so has global temperature. Am I wrong?”
Leif, had you read Leroux, you’d know that atmospheric circulation has been entering a rapid mode since the 1970s. Only the inane temperature fixation by post-modern cephalopod climatologists has forgotten that temperatures are not in themselves a reliable climate indicator.
Tenuc says:
January 3, 2011 at 8:03 am
The problem with this Leif, is that because our climate is dynamic system it is the amount of energy at any instant in time which is important, not the average.
I agree completely. Yet people keep talking about ‘lags’, ‘storage’, ‘levels’ and such. These things are convenient to play with to get correlations to look better. Just add an appropriate [even better: variable] lag.
TomRude says:
January 3, 2011 at 8:35 am
temperatures are not in themselves a reliable climate indicator.
My cold butt claims otherwise. I lived some time in Greenland and got the same message there. Now with global warming, even California [where I now live] has become too cold. Next stop: Tahiti, perhaps.
“Al Gored says:
January 3, 2011 at 12:13 am
E.M. Smith – Very, very interesting post! The concept of a variable thickness of our atmosphere never occurred to me before but makes perfect sense. Yet another piece of this complex moving puzzle to consider.”
It is the various atmospheric heights that matter most for pressure distribution in the troposphere and I have suggested how ALL the heights must vary to achieve the climate changes that we see.
I have been constructing the entire scenario piece by piece for some time. The troposphere and thermosphere must change temperature in the opposite direction to stratosphere and mesosphere whether the sun be more active or less active.
Latest version can be found here:
http://www.irishweatheronline.com/2011/01/how-sun-could-control-earths.html
“How The Sun Could Control Earth’s Temperature”
I have amended it slightly to deal with Leif’s objections which were to the effect that solar protons alone could not produce the required effect. Instead I now propose that it is the entire package of solar reactions with molecules at the top of the atmosphere that produces the observed outcome.
Furthermore it is a matter of atmospheric chemistry and not radiative physics so objections based solely on radiative physics are not valid.
BTW, there are spots very close to the equator today. Possibly left over #23 spots?
@Tenuc says:
January 3, 2011 at 8:03 am
“We also need to know about how other factors like magnetic field/solar wind e.t.c. vary over very short time-scales if we are to start to see the effects on weather/climate.”
Exactly, especially in N.H. winter.
My cold butt claims otherwise. I lived some time in Greenland and got the same message there. Now with global warming, even California [where I now live] has become too cold. Next stop: Tahiti, perhaps.
A new weather index is born! 😉
When temperatures cool due to declining solar activity, the warmes may acknowledge the cooling cycle but say that we now have 20-30 years to prepare for the coming warming and just think how hot it is going to be in 30 years.
Thus, no amount of cooling will convince the warmers that there is any possibility but AGW.
LazyTeenager says:
Alec gets breathless
————-
And LazyTeenager enlessly posts fragments but never manages to make a coherent arugment while frothing….
However I am going to guess that it is a fairly small effect that can be ignored on decadal time scales.
You seem to do this ‘guesing’ thing rather a lot.
While it can be helpful for finding interesting things to explore, it’s terrible as a filter for finding truth. The ocean has hundreds of years cyclicalities in it as the overturning current has to cover the whole planet at a walking pace. Surface waters of the Pacific can take decades to move from the equator to the North Pole. Ignoring the ocean is A Very Bad Thing…
I think/suspect
These are two VERY different processes, best kept very far from each other. Mixing them leads to large errors.
that scientists are not unaware
Double Negative Alert (kind of like an “intruder alert”)… it starts to holler whenever someone is trying to sound over intelligent while mangling the language and hiding what they are actually trying to say. (Exception made for German native speakers at it is a normal construct, partial exception for French native speakers if they use it in the “ne verb pas” format… but LT seems a native English speaker…)
the IPCC has a section
Apeal To Authority Alert And a politically driven non-scientific authority at that. Shows a lack of care in filtering what crawls into the mind and poor evaluation skills.
Rest of emissions flushed, too many contaminants detected in thought stream…
TomRude says:
January 3, 2011 at 9:17 am
“My cold butt claims otherwise.”
A new weather index is born! 😉
Works for me…
MattN says:
January 3, 2011 at 8:55 am
BTW, there are spots very close to the equator today. Possibly left over #23 spots?
No, they have the magnetic signature of SC24. Perhaps leftover SC22 🙂
Geoff says:
January 3, 2011 at 9:22 am
When temperatures cool due to declining solar activity
For all you solar enthusiasts, here is what you get when you add the sunspot to the graph of RSS: http://www.leif.org/research/RSS-and-SSN.png
Perhaps someone would put CO2 on the graph as well 🙂 … Aw, forget it, CO2 lags 800 years behind Temperatures…
David Archibald says:
That is a very interesting report from Ecuador indeed. Would it be possible to go back to your source and find out when it started, how fast the onset etc? Any news from the rest of Andean Cordillera would also be useful. I have been wondering when sea level rise would stop and reverse. 2011 could be the year.
Unfortunately, they are a young couple who don’t have a lot of ‘time on the ground’ so I can ask them to ask an ‘old timer’ but we’re starting to end up in 3 rd hand anecdotal land then. That’s why I dug up that paper on Freezing Level as that is hard data from 1959-1990.
I’d love to find an original record of snow levels on mountains, but it would likely be in Spanish and may not even be ‘on line’ as I doubt that weather reports from, oh, 1930 or 1890 in Ecuador are digitized. (Also my choice of Spanish search terms still gave me way too many Engish pages… I need to sharpen my filter for that approach to work).
What I was told, at any rate, is that it’s THIS winter when things have really gone cold. The last couple of years were cool, but not bad. This last round of snow during the “wet cycle” was the real surprise. So it looks to me like onset was sudden, was ‘this wet cycle’ and was odd enough to set tongues wagging.
So I think someone needs to round up some old folks in Quito, or find a Spanish weather / snowfall data archive. (I’m sure someone must have freeze level and / or snow level data for The Andes. It’s just a new bit of turf for me – snow level – and I’m not tuned up on search terms to find the interesting bits efficiently… yet… )
Per sea level: I thought it was already stopped? Haven’t the last couple of years been a “failure to advance” ? Or maybe I’m just remembering an inflection in the second derivative…
Leif Svalgaard said:
“The whole premise for the article is that during the past 60 years [the Modern Grand Maximum] the Sun has been extraordinarily active. I presented analysis [and some links] to show that this is very likely not the case, so the conclusion of the article falls flat.”
Just a few years ago, we were told that sunspot activity was the highest it’s been in the last 8,000 years:
“The Sun is More Active Now than Over the Last 8000 Years”
http://www.mpg.de/english/illustrationsDocumentation/documentation/pressReleases/2004/pressRelease20041028/
and
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6591
Bob Tisdale says:
I didn’t see a long-term graph (since 1880) of U.S. temperature anomalies in Chiefio’s post to contradict what I wrote earlier. Was there one?
I have one, and it is fun to look at, but I would not use is as global / authoritative.
The Dt/dt method has a few great advantages for seeing what is actually happening, but is designed first and foremost as a forensics tool. I specifically DO NOTHING to correct for areal bias in the data and depend on application to subsets of the data for that ‘correction’. For example, the dozen thermometers in France make a pretty good ‘areal average’ and you get a ‘grid cell’ the size of France. But the larger the area covered, the more this breaks down.
Further, the data start with ONE thermometer (substantially by definition) then expand to over 7000 globally, then shrink back to 1200. That means that the location and selection bias in the early parts of the curve are very large. That’s why most folks like CRU and GISS start their ‘study’ after what they speculate is enough thermometers show up in the record. (They still must hand wave and data adjust their way out of Nyquist in both time and space, though…)
The most interesting thing I found was just how much “splice artifacts” matter. So you get graphs like Gibraltar where you can’t splice much nor move the thermometer very far that are basically ‘dead flat with wiggles’ over their history:
http://chiefio.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/gibralter_hair.png
while nearby, France has a slow decline in temperatures right up until the point where the thermometers are moved to the Airport Tarmac and the processing is changed. Then it gets a bit of a hockey blade grafted on the end:
http://chiefio.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/france_hair_seg.png
And my favorite is the Netherlands:
http://chiefio.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/netherlands_hair.png
Just dead flat with a wiggle. Nobody screwing around with their instrumentation… Has about 3/4 C rise spread over 300 years as we rise out of the Little Ice Age.
I’ve got graphs for every country of the world here:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/category/dtdt/
Probably the better “entry point” to the country graphs is here:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/04/11/the-world-in-dtdt-graphs-of-temperature-anomalies/
though I’ve not updated them from last year. It’s a manual process that ought to be automated…
At some point I did make an “all data” graph, but frankly I’ve forgotten what posting it is in. It has a very volatile ‘start of time’ as the one lone cold thermometer in Europe in the early 1700s whips around, then does the rise out of the LIA to a mostly flat present. IIRC, it has a bit of a rise in the 1990 to date as the data location is corrupted.
Final note: I’ve not been able to “put the thermometers back in” as I don’t have data from the missing-but-still-there sites that are reporting-but-not-heard-by-NCDC. Though some Mets in Turkey did for their country. Though GISS says Turkey is warming, when all the thermometers are used, it’s cooling…
This posting looks at the GHCN data:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/03/10/lets-talk-turkey/
and finds a very pronounced “hockey blade” right when the thermometer drop happens. In comments, this paper was brought up. It finds cooling continues when you put them back in…
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/joc.3370150507/abstract
IMHO, what they did in Turkey is what needs to be done for the whole planet if we are ever going to have a clue about what the temperature really is from land thermometers.
kramer says:
January 3, 2011 at 9:53 am
Just a few years ago, we were told that sunspot activity was the highest it’s been in the last 8,000 years
don’t believe everything you find on the Internet 🙂
For more on this:
http://www.leif.org/EOS/muscheler05nat_nature04045.pdf
and
http://www.leif.org/research/AGU%20Fall%202010%20SH53B-03.pdf
Kapow
kramer says:
January 3, 2011 at 9:53 am
Just a few years ago, we were told that sunspot activity was the highest it’s been in the last 8,000 years http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6591
From your link:
“She notes that the current upsurge in sunspots is not enough to account for the approximate 0.5°C rise from pre-industrial temperatures over the last 30 years.”
Leif Svalgaard says:
January 3, 2011 at 7:59 am
tallbloke says:
January 3, 2011 at 4:20 am
Please could Leif tell us what start and end sunspot numbers he gets for the linear trend on his reconstruction between those dates.
1835-2003: 0.09+/-0.07; R^2=0.0095 not significant
The choice of dates often changes such non-significant trends. E.g.
1835-2010: 0.02+/-0.07; R^2=0.0005 even less significant
Thanks Leif. For the SIDC data, the equivalent values are:
1835-2003: 0.18; R^2=0.004
The choice of dates often changes such non-significant trends. E.g.
1835-2010: 0.11; R^2=0.002
Clearly, there is a big difference between your reconstruction and the sunspot numbers scientists have been working on for the last 150 years. I appreciate end points matter. That’s why I tried to pick dates which were approx half way up the solar cycles, though I now realise 1835 is near the start of the cycle and 2003 is nearer the end.
TSI and sunspot numbers used to correlate well, but they don’t at the moment, with TSI trending lower than sunspot numbers. Yet you said to Geoff Sharp that numbers are currently being undercounted?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1996/to:2010/plot/pmod/from:1996/to:2010/offset:-1365.4/scale:100
Can you explain the disparity for us, which would be even wider if the current sunspot count was higher as you seem to think it should be?
Thanks
@E.M.Smith
‘Roughly like it does now.’
Probably if everything else was equal, however, I note I should have been more clear as to if people would so readily throw money after every engineers whim of could-be-invention as to people and government have done so far towards the climate hippies. (And as was done in the dot com debacle bubble.)
Although geo-engineering would probably have come a lot farther. All they lack is pretty much just money since they already have the support of governments even being ready to screw with the weather to fix the statistical climate back to a colder statistical climate. I wonder though what has the Chinese governments geo-engineering to fix their local weather these last few years had for impact on the global climate?
tallbloke says:
January 3, 2011 at 10:48 am
Thanks Leif. For the SIDC data, the equivalent values are:
1835-2003: 0.18; R^2=0.004
The choice of dates often changes such non-significant trends. E.g.
1835-2010: 0.11; R^2=0.002
Clearly those are not significant either.
Clearly, there is a big difference between your reconstruction and the sunspot numbers scientists have been working on for the last 150 years.
That is why it is so important to get the numbers right. You might enjoy Kopecky’s take on the [in]homogeneity http://www.leif.org/EOS/Kopecky-1980.pdf
TSI and sunspot numbers used to correlate well, but they don’t at the moment, with TSI trending lower than sunspot numbers.
TSI is not trending lower than sunspot numbers. You may be biased by the PMOD TSI that Froehlich produces. I have shown that PMOD has a calibration problem and that they do not fully understand the behavior of their instrument:
http://www.leif.org/research/PMOD%20TSI-SOHO%20keyhole%20effect-degradation%20over%20time.pdf
I’m right now working with the parties involved trying to get to the bottom of this and perhaps in a joint paper dispel the notion you [and many others] have about this.
Yet you said to Geoff Sharp that numbers are currently being undercounted?
I have shown very carefully that compared to the rest of the world SIDC is too low from about 2001. They may slowly be climbing back out of that hole [now that they have been made aware of this, e.g. http://www.leif.org/research/SIDC-Seminar-14Sept.pdf ]
Leif Svalgaard says:
January 3, 2011 at 1:30 am
………………..
Hey Doc
Solanki is good for SSN to 1950, Svalgaard & Cliver for NAP.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/AllvsVuk.htm
Happy New Year.
@Baa Humbug says:
‘The suns activity and it’s relationship to our weather has been a headscratcher for quite sometime now. Maybe we need to start looking at this differently’
Yes, for, obviously, our weather, and therefore climate, wouldn’t change one bit if we removed the Sun’s bountiful incoming light and all other radiation.
Although, for some crazy mathematical reason or another, I wouldn’t bet on the weather being the same if we could remove or effectively block out our local stellar hearth.
To Leif Svalgaard and the various proponents of solar cycle / climate links.
I have an idea on the issue of correlating solar activity metrics with climate. I do not have the data or the skills to evaluate this idea and would like to see what your thoughts are on my idea and / or if one of you can actually compile the data.
Here is my idea. Compare average sun spot number (or an average of some other solar activity measure) (which I define as the sum of daily observations over the course of a solar cycle divided by the length of the cycle in days) with the average temperature (averaged over the length of each solar cycle).
Leif,
“The GSN is used to calibrate the model.”
You are right, I didn’t consider all 5 data sets. I assume you weren’t satisfied with Krivova’s separate handling of the pre-1874 data?
“Before 1874 a correlation analysis between sunspot areas and numbers is first carried out in order to compute sunspot areas for that earlier period. Following Krivova et al. [2007], we employ a fixed ratio between umbral and penumbral areas, u/( u + p) = 0.2 [Brandt et al., 1990; Solanki , 2003; 218 Wenzler, 2005].”
I think you are misinterpreting the interest in the solar hypothesis. Since the direct effects of CO2 can only explain about 30% of the recent warming, the rest must be explained somehow. The solar hypothesis is really in competition with the net positive feedback to CO2 hypothesis for some of the rest of the attribution. Despite your concerns about the sunspot record, there is good evidence that solar activity is at high levels. There is no evidence that net feedback to CO2 is positive, and some evidence suggestive that the feedback is actually negative. Aerosols, black carbon and multidecadal internal climate modes will probably also garner some of the attribution for the warming and except for black carbon also help explain the mid-century cooling.
Vuk etc says:
January 3, 2011 at 11:04 am
Solanki is good for SSN to 1950, Svalgaard & Cliver for NAP.
NAP fails completely around 1850, so we write that off as falsified.
The McCracken and Solanki curves are dealt with here:
http://www.leif.org/research/McCracken%20JGR%202.pdf
and here:
http://www.leif.org/research/2009JA015069.pdf
So, no need to keep bringing them up. Even Lockwood [of all people] agrees that the Svalgaard&Clive reconstruction is good.
Matt says:
January 3, 2011 at 11:41 am
I have an idea on the issue of correlating solar activity metrics with climate.
Your idea applied to data [RSS and corresponding SSN] since 1979:
Cycle avg SSN avg dT
SC21: 90 -0.10
SC22: 78 0.01
SC23: 56 0.25
SC24: 10 0.38 [so far]
Clearly: lower SSN => higher dT
So your idea works quite well.
Leif Svalgaard says:
January 3, 2011 at 11:04 am
You might enjoy Kopecky’s take on the [in]homogeneity http://www.leif.org/EOS/Kopecky-1980.pdf
404 – not found
I have shown that PMOD has a calibration problem and that they do not fully understand the behavior of their instrument:
http://www.leif.org/research/PMOD%20TSI-SOHO%20keyhole%20effect-degradation%20over%20time.pdf
I agree PMOD is a mess. Froelich doesn’t understand the behaviour of other peoples instruments he’s been fiddling with the data from either.
Look at this letter from ACRIM’s principle investigator to Nicola Scafetta!
http://tallbloke.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/acrim.jpg
Ouch!
This is why I have little confidence in the flat TSI scenario.
Dr. Svalgaard,
From your conclusion on pg 18 it appears there is a long cycle harmonic to solar cycle peaks (and troughs, though much less variable) . By eyeball, your chart seems to show 2.5 cycles. Is this just coincidence or is there another mechanism at work here.
tallbloke says:
January 3, 2011 at 12:06 pm
http://www.leif.org/EOS/Kopecky-1980.pdf
404 – not found
Try now.
I agree PMOD is a mess.
Yet you happily quote PMOD if it fits your ideas…
This is why I have little confidence in the flat TSI scenario
PMOD has nothing to do with that. On the contrary, he [Froehlich] advocates a TSI that changes more than it really does. The Krivova paper that you call ‘crucial’ also uses PMOD as their calibration point: “Following Krivova et al. [2007], we also require the computed TSI variations to match the PMOD composite of space‐based measurements since 1978”
You are a good example of Leif’s law: “if the [otherwise crappy, messy] data somehow confirm my own pet theory, they must be good after all” or can, at least, be used in argument, hoping nobody will notice how bad they are.
Leif Svalgaard says:
January 2, 2011 at 10:04 pm
“There has been no Grand Maximum. http://www.leif.org/research/AGU%20Fall%202010%20SH53B-03.pdf”
Right. It’s the Modern Maximum. The last 50 years is the largest maximum since at least th 1600’s when decent observational records of sunspot number began.
What’s it take to graduate from the most active period in 500 years to a Grand Maximum? Seems like semantic games to me if not actually a moving goalpost.
Stephen Wilde says:
January 3, 2011 at 8:50 am
..I have amended it slightly to deal with Leif’s objections which were to the effect that solar protons alone could not produce the required effect. Instead I now propose that it is the entire package of solar reactions with molecules at the top of the atmosphere that produces the observed outcome..
~
Stephen did you read this,
Atmospheric Ionization and Clouds as Links Between Solar Activity
and Climate
Brian A. Tinsley and Fangqun Yu
https://utdallas.edu/nsm/physics/pdf/Atmos_060302.pdf
Leif, just get some long underwear and a bun warmer. Then move up to between 40th+50th lat so you can seeeeee the difference in cloud changes. I’ve been driving for a number of years now, with a prior bias on weather related issues and have noticed that the last few years have been seeing changes in clouds.
Leif Svalgaard says:
January 2, 2011 at 10:04 pm
“There has been no Grand Maximum. http://www.leif.org/research/AGU%20Fall%202010%20SH53B-03.pdf”
Others disagree and call it a Grand Maximum. Plenty of others by the looks of it.
http://www.nicholas.duke.edu/thegreengrok/predictions-of-a-cooling-sun/?searchterm=None
http://www.agu.org/journals/ABS/2008/2008GL035442.shtml
What’s it take to graduate from the most active period in 500 years to a Grand Maximum? Seems like semantic games to me if not actually a moving goalpost.
Martin Lewitt says:
January 3, 2011 at 11:56 am
“The GSN is used to calibrate the model.”
You are right
I think you are misinterpreting the interest in the solar hypothesis.
I know people are desperate for this link. Even the AGW-cult needs it to explain variability before CO2 kicked in.
Since the direct effects of CO2 can only explain about 30% of the recent warming, the rest must be explained somehow.
Any complex system [even the Sun] has random fluctuations that look like cycles.
Gino says:
January 3, 2011 at 12:18 pm
From your conclusion on pg 18 it appears there is a long cycle harmonic to solar cycle peaks (and troughs, though much less variable) . By eyeball, your chart seems to show 2.5 cycles. Is this just coincidence or is there another mechanism at work here.
We don’t know what causes the long quasi-cycles, but any complex system has those [Sun, Earth’s Climate, Lemmings, Freeway Traffic, the Economy, …] that seemingly come out of nowhere for no good reason. You live with them.
Leif Svalgaard says:
January 3, 2011 at 12:19 pm (Edit)
tallbloke says:
January 3, 2011 at 12:06 pm
http://www.leif.org/EOS/Kopecky-1980.pdf
404 – not found
Try now.
Excellent, thanks.
You are a good example of Leif’s law: “if the [otherwise crappy, messy] data somehow confirm my own pet theory, they must be good after all” or can, at least, be used in argument, hoping nobody will notice how bad they are.
No need to throw your toys out of the pram Leif. Why not address the substantive issues raised by the ACRIM P.I. Richard Wilson in the letter rather than attacking the messenger?
http://tallbloke.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/acrim.jpg
I already know how uncertain the calibration and splicing of the satellite data is. That’s why I use sunspot numbers rather than TSI in my studies.
[Froehlich] advocates a TSI that changes more than it really does.
You seemed happy with Froelich’s TSI and PMOD model while it was confirming your pet theory about a little varying sun. Yet when TSI takes a dive as the sun goes into the funk Geoff and I and several other planetary theorists predicted you suddenly don’t like it any more and ‘the data must surely be wrong’ ?
Where else have we heard that recently?
The current Grand Maximum is either the grandest or tied for the grandest in the past 12,000 years. You have to go back to 9000 B.C. to find a possibly higher maximum.
Grand minima and maxima of solar activity: New observational
constraints
I.G. Usoskin1, S.K. Solanki2, and G.A. Kovaltsov3
1 Sodankyl¨a Geophysical Observatory (Oulu unit), POB 3000, University of Oulu, Finland
e-mail: ilya.usoskin@oulu.fi
2 Max-Planck-Institut f¨ur Sonnensystemforschung, 37191 Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany
3 Ioffe Physical-Technical Institute, Politekhnicheskaya 26, RU-194021 St. Petersburg, Russia
Received Month XX, 2007; accepted Month XX, 2007
Figure 3 on page three is the entire Holocene sunspot record. Not sure how good it is as it must be via proxy for most of that period. I bet it needs further study (send money).
Darn. Must have missed something in the href. Link for above paper on Holocene solar activity:
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0706/0706.0385v1.pdf
tallbloke says:
January 3, 2011 at 12:41 pm
Why not address the substantive issues raised by the ACRIM P.I. Richard Wilson in the letter rather than attacking the messenger?
Because I think that the ACRIM analysis is not valid either. E.g. they have a large unexplained annual variation. Livingston has measured the temperature of the quiet sun and finds no variation at all [not even with the cycle] over that past ~35 years. The magnetic indicators: F10.7, MgII, CaK, you name it, do not show the erratic variations between minima as ACRIM has.
You seemed happy with Froelich’s TSI and PMOD model while it was confirming your pet theory about a little varying sun.
You get this wrong all the time. I advocate a sun that varies a lot more than what people think. The standard variation of my sunspot numbers is higher than the GSN crew’s. What I dispute is the secular, regular, steady increase that is claimed.
Yet when TSI takes a dive as the sun goes into the funk Geoff and I and several other planetary theorists predicted you suddenly don’t like it any more and ‘the data must surely be wrong’ ?
TSI did not take a dive, it is behaving just as it should getting to the minimum value it always gets to at any solar minimum, so if you predict something else, you are off the mark.
Leif Svalgaard says:
January 2, 2011 at 10:41 pm
“The total energy in the UV is very small and is absorbed high up in the atmosphere. If that energy is offset by infrared [to keep TSI constant], then since IR penetrates to the surface the net result [as the calculations showed] is very small [perhaps even the other way around, depending on the details].”
In other words you don’t even know the sign of surface temperature change due to spectral distribution changes.
This is supposed to inspire confidence in your understanding of the phenomenon?
One thing is for sure. You have all your bases covered – it might get warmer or it might get cooler
Hey, my post is up. Cool. (Or cold actually, as my furnace is down, and I’ve spent the morning trying to clean the flame sensor and get the igniter out of “lockout” mode. Fail.)
Leif (at 12:03) is of course correct that if the sun has not been “extraordinarily active” over the past 60 years “the conclusion of the article falls flat.” But Leif’s view that there is no modern grand maximum is far from the only view. He cites Muscheler in support. Solanki and Usoskin say Muscheler is out to lunch.
In any case, Leif’s and Muscheler’s critiques apply only over the last 400 and 1000 years respectively, whereas Solanki and Usoskin’s 11,000 year study (2004) and especially 2007 found the modern maximum to be the grandest since about 7000 BC. Also, Leif’s critique is focused on sunspot numbers, which bear an uncertain relationship to the solar wind and GCR blocking. If GCR turns out to be a climate driver (Svensmark’s GCR-cloud theory), then it is GCR we should be looking at, as Solanki and Usoskin are doing.
At 10:49 Leif says: “Solar activity has been decreasing for a couple of decades now, and so has global temperature. Am I wrong?” In other words (as I read him), he is saying that if climate is driven by the sun, the last couple decades of decreasing solar activity should have caused a couple of decades of global cooling.
Is this view wrong? Yes. My whole post is pointing out the illogic of that position. First, if one takes a close look at cycle 22, it was bigger, not smaller, than cycle 23. But that’s secondary. Wherever one places the smoothed peak of recent solar activity, it is not true that a solar driver has to switch from creating warming to creating cooling as soon as peak solar activity passes. That requires the additional assumption that solar forcing has already driven temperatures to their equilibrium point, which neither Leif, nor Lockwood, nor Frohlich, nor Schmidt, has even attempted to argue.
This is the essence of the trend-level mistake (which Usoskin and Solanki also make in regards to post 1970 temperatures). To say that a steady high level of temperature forcing cannot cause warming (or equivalently that a fall off in forcing must cause cooling) is to assume that equilibrium temperatures have been reached. One could make an argument for that, but none of these folks have, while I did make a counter argument: if the sun is driving climate, we know it can drive temperatures substantially higher than today (citing the Viking settlement of Greenland).
Does Leif have an argument to make for his implicit assumption that solar forcing reached its equilibrium temperature in the late 20th century?
Leif Svalgaard says:
January 3, 2011 at 12:05 pm
NAP fails completely around 1850, so we write that off as falsified.
My dear Dr. Svalgaard
1850 -2000 is fine. NAP does not fail, it can’t fail, a square doesn’t fail because is not a circle. What you and your colleagues graph I will not go into, but if it is something generated by the sun, than all of you have failed, or your science has failed you, or both.
NAP (vukcevic) and Heliomagnetic field (Svalgaard & Cliver) according to what you teach can’t be more same than a square and a circle, more same than Californian vine and Eskimo fish oil.
But if it happens that you are correct, and they should be the same, then the NAP signal is one of the major discoveries of the early 21st century.
1DandyTroll says:
January 3, 2011 at 10:59 am
“(And as was done in the dot com debacle bubble.)”
It was no debacle. It followed the path of other revolutionary new technologies. A whole buttload of companies in the beginning followed by consolidation into a few leaders as the technology matured just as it happened in the auto and airline industries in the past century. No early investors in Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, Apple, Google, Facebook, Ebay, or Amazon are complaining today.
I would like to add a couple of references and ask a couple of questions to this actually good and intelligent debate. Leif, what is your comment regarding this question of the Wolf study. The Wolf paper essentially is seeking to flatten the data. It is able to do so due to a convenient start point, so that some of the earlier data can be discounted and fudged higher. Hiowever, if we were to carry the study back in time a few years some very apparent technical, mathematical problems would emerge. Specifically, the mathematical model would not work across the Little Ice Age. I would like your comments on that.
Also there are published mathematical studies of sun dynamics versus climate by Scafetta and West which contradict the Wolf study and show a climate time response of about 7.5 years to solat variability. I would like your comments on this. The Wolf study is critical in your argument to refute a grand maxima in solar activity and it looks to be questionable.
Leif Svalgaard says:
January 3, 2011 at 12:53 pm
The standard variation of my sunspot numbers is higher than the GSN crew’s. What I dispute is the secular, regular, steady increase that is claimed.
I’m not seeing this “secular, regular, steady increase” on this graph, can you point it out?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/sidc-ssn/mean:124
Your reconstruction may have a larger sd than the GSN, but the issue is the centennial variation, not the difference between adjacent high and low cycles. This is a red herring.
“Carla says:
January 3, 2011 at 12:32 pm
Stephen Wilde says:
January 3, 2011 at 8:50 am
Stephen did you read this,
Atmospheric Ionization and Clouds as Links Between Solar Activity
and Climate
Brian A. Tinsley and Fangqun Yu
https://utdallas.edu/nsm/physics/pdf/Atmos_060302.pdf”
Thanks Carla, I haven’t seen that one before. It seems to be an extension of Svensmark’s GCR idea but I differ from that in a number of respects.
Firstly I think the cloudiness and albedo changes arise from changes in jet stream characteristics (zonality/poleward or meridional/equatorward) rather than cloud seeding by cosmic rays or solar particles.
Secondly I think the mechanism involves variable rates of ozone destruction above 45km arising from chemical processes that vary in line with the mix of wavelengths and particles from the sun as they change over time.
Thirdly it is the vertical temperature profile of the whole atmosphere that is affected so as (inter alia) to affect the height of the tropopause and therby change pressure distributions in the tropopause.
I have constructed the novel aspects of the scenario to fit with all manner of past observations. It should be easy enough to check it out as new data comes in regarding the climate system changes observed in response to the recent quiet sun.
The finding that ozone quantities increased above 45km despite the quiet sun is the first persuasive piece of evidence that supports the requirements of my hypothesis.
The planet is in a cooling mode and a decrease in solar activity very likely a major factor-but due to the recent maximum being a double peak, we were exposed to a longer period of high activity which led to the warmth of recent times. Oceans still cumulitavely contain stored heat which will be released in spurts-el-ninos. It will take a bit of time for the cooling to really manifest itself.
The most confident national temperature records from U.S. and Scandinavia correlate highly with solar activity during past 100 years. Correlation stays there up to this date. If the correlation is not as good with GISTEMP or HadCRUT, then this could merely be indication of problems in those datasets. Actually 1930’s and 2000’s could be also globally more close to each other than HadCRUT or GISTEMP claims. I think that this is the missing piece of climate puzzle.
TonyR says:
January 3, 2011 at 1:39 pm
Oceans still cumulitavely contain stored heat which will be released in spurts-el-ninos. It will take a bit of time for the cooling to really manifest itself.
Excellent, another person who gets it.
Lief,
Thanks. I had no idea which side of the argument that would support, but it seemed to me to be the best choice for numbers that would actually be comparable.
*******
E.M.Smith says:
January 2, 2011 at 11:33 pm
Solar shift in UV, upper atmosphere heat / thickness change, (and cosmic ray /cloud shift), AMO / AO and Polar vortex shift (similar shift in souther hemisphere but with more impact via water issues at Drakes Passage) leading to “loopy jet stream” and more cold flowing to lower lattitudes. At the same time, thinner atmosphere gets colder at shallower heights, so mountain tops, even at the Equator, get colder. (Reverse for warming).
*******
Viewing the earth as a “heat engine”, this seems implausible. Cause and effect would seem reversed . The major energy transfer is in 30 to-30 lat tropics of the troposphere. This tropical “engine” drives many of the important characteristics of the rest of the atmosphere (like lapse rate and Hadley cells) all the way to the poles. Something that contains so little energy/mass & is stratified like the stratosphere is unlikely to drive anything — just the opposite, its characteristics are driven mostly from below.
Dave Springer says:
January 3, 2011 at 12:58 pm
In other words you don’t even know the sign of surface temperature change due to spectral distribution changes.
Not me, the experts who model this. Their models ombodies what man-kind collectively knows about this. [This may not be much or enough].
Alec Rawls says:
January 3, 2011 at 1:00 pm
Leif (at 12:03) is of course correct that if the sun has not been “extraordinarily active” over the past 60 years “the conclusion of the article falls flat.” But Leif’s view that there is no modern grand maximum is far from the only view. He cites Muscheler in support. Solanki and Usoskin say Muscheler is out to lunch.
Additional support. Not the only one.
In any case, Leif’s and Muscheler’s critiques apply only over the last 400 and 1000 years respectively, whereas Solanki and Usoskin’s 11,000 year study (2004) and especially 2007 found the modern maximum to be the grandest since about 7000 BC.
Their study was calibrated on wrong assumptions about solar activity the past 200 years. Another study is Steihilber’s http://www.leif.org/EOS/2009JA014193.pdf especially figure 9 if you don’t want to slug through the whole thing. They get the low values wrong [even infer negative values of the magnetic field] but are likely correct once you are off the bottom. If you look closely at Figure 9(a), you’ll see that the present is not extraordinarily high. The filtered version 9(b) shows that perhaps more clearly. They say: “Figure 9a also shows that there have been several periods with similar high IMF values during the Holocene.”
The issue with the low values [the floor] is of great interest as we discuss in http://www.leif.org/research/2009JA015069.pdf Figure 14 shows the ‘modern’ part of their reconstruction. There is a distinct minimum around 1890. We know from other data that the solar magnetic field did not take a dip then, showing their problem with the low-end of the calibration.
Also, Leif’s critique is focused on sunspot numbers, which bear an uncertain relationship to the solar wind and GCR blocking.
No, there is no ‘uncertain’ relationships. The physics is well-known and we can account in considerable quantitative detail for what is going on.
At 10:49 Leif says: “Solar activity has been decreasing for a couple of decades now, and so has global temperature. Am I wrong?” In other words (as I read him), he is saying that if climate is driven by the sun, the last couple decades of decreasing solar activity should have caused a couple of decades of global cooling.
No, I was rhetorical. You was supposed to say: “what do you mean temps are decreasing, this is the second warmest year ever”. The fact is that solar activity is down but temps are up. I illustrated this here http://www.leif.org/research/RSS-and-SNN.png
That requires the additional assumption that solar forcing has already driven temperatures to their equilibrium point, which neither Leif, nor Lockwood, nor Frohlich, nor Schmidt, has even attempted to argue.
So how long does that take? 100 years? Most researchers of this talk about a time constant of 5-7 years.
while I did make a counter argument: if the sun is driving climate, we know it can drive temperatures substantially higher than today (citing the Viking settlement of Greenland).
During the 11 century [1000 AD-1100AD] solar activity was low [the Oort minimum.
Does Leif have an argument to make for his implicit assumption that solar forcing reached its equilibrium temperature in the late 20th century?
I do not know when that happened [if ever] and I don’t know if anybody else does. What I do know is that solar activity in the latter half of the 20th century probably was not extraordinarily high. The basic argument is what role the ‘background’ solar magnetic field plays [the Ephemeral Regions which is supposed to mirror the ‘open flux’]. Many years ago I suggested that the ‘open flux had doubled during the 20th century. I have since then shown that I was wrong, but unfortunately the notion of a ‘doubling’ has made it into the literature and tainted untold numbers of papers ever since. See http://www.leif.org/research/Reply%20to%20Lockwood%20IDV%20Comment.pdf for a discussion of this. Solanki and company still subscribe to the doubling, even though Lockwood does not any more. What has happened is that the open flux is now down to where it was 108 years ago, so we expect TSI, cosmic rays, temperatures [if there is any solar connection] and all the rest to have reverted to values of a century ago. In particular: has temperatures reverted to the very cold 1900s? You can always get around such inconvenient questions by postulating a lag of such variable length to make things fit. Which lag du jour do you suggest?
Vuk etc says:
January 3, 2011 at 1:18 pm
NAP does not fail, it can’t fail
Yet another idea that cannot be falsified, it seems.
then the NAP signal is one of the major discoveries of the early 21st century.
There are 13 to a dozen of those. But just in case, reserve front seats for me at your Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
GuyG says:
January 3, 2011 at 1:24 pm
I would like to add a couple of references and ask a couple of questions to this actually good and intelligent debate. Leif, what is your comment regarding this question of the Wolf study.
Which Wolf study?
tallbloke says:
January 3, 2011 at 1:26 pm
“The standard variation of my sunspot numbers is higher than the GSN crew’s. What I dispute is the secular, regular, steady increase that is claimed.”
I’m not seeing this “secular, regular, steady increase” on this graph, can you point it out? http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/sidc-ssn/mean:124
typical bait and switch. The Krivova et al paper was based on GSN, and you ask about SIDC. Look at slide 4 of http://www.leif.org/research/Rudolf%20Wolf%20Was%20Right.pdf for GSN. Follow the red arrow.
Your reconstruction may have a larger sd than the GSN, but the issue is the centennial variation, not the difference between adjacent high and low cycles. This is a red herring. The sd over a century takes into account all low and high values so gives a good measure of overall activity.
There is no centennial variation since 1720, see Figure 14 of http://www.leif.org/research/2009JA015069.pdf
The dips in 1700, 1810, and 1985 are most likely due to volcanic activity, either directly via aerosols or indirectly via climate-related circulation. “W. R. Webber et al. (A comparison of new calculations of the yearly 10Be production in the Earth’s polar atmosphere by cosmic rays with yearly 10Be measurements in multiple Greenland ice cores between 1939 and 1994—A troubling lack of concordance, manuscript in preparation, 2010) suggest that “more than 50% of the 10Be flux increase around, e.g., 1700 A.D., 1810 A.D. and 1895 A.D. is due to nonproduction related increases.”
Leone, Yes, its very likely indeed that its the GISS + Hadcrut temperature graphs that are responsible for a significant part of the mismatch between Solar activity and “temperatures”.
This is obvious from an overwhelming variety of sources, for example:
Treeproxies combined with UAH trend:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/lanser_holocene_figure3.png
From Article: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/04/11/making-holocene-spaghetti-sauce-by-proxy/
(here is a special version of fig2 from the Article:
http://www.klimadebat.dk/forum/vedhaeftninger/gissdivergence.gif )
or
Glaciers: http://hidethedecline.eu/media/OverviewLansner/mar20101.jpg
etcetc.
K.R. Frank
The dips in 1700, 1810, and 1985 are most likely due to volcanic activity
1895, of course.
Alec rawls!
Superbe input to the debate, and then you write:
“To say that a steady high level of temperature forcing cannot cause warming ..”
EXACTLY, i have been saying this obvious point for ages, and someting so simple is hard to understand for many.
There is NO way we can say for shure that a steady HIGH level of solar activity should not be leading to some temperature increase over more decades (!!)
K.R. Frank
PS, I have something more to sho you, coming up…
Dave Springer
‘It was no debacle. It followed the path of other revolutionary new technologies. A whole buttload of companies in the beginning followed by consolidation into a few leaders as the technology matured just as it happened in the auto and airline industries in the past century.’
Of course it was a debacle, serious people was selling, or rather trying to sell, serious hardware, software, and actual working solutions, but they were our paced by more, well, money wise intelligent folks and the get-rich-quick-scheme folks that just were lucky.
There was a lot of awesome tech back then that never saw the light of day because all the money went the way of, preferably, fast return.
‘No early investors in Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, Apple, Google, Facebook, Ebay, or Amazon are complaining today.’
Oh, except the ones that bailed before lift off, as per usual, equal that to most who draw the quick conclusion. :p
Alec, This is a sketch (In Danish) what you are suggesting, that the full 100% effect of more very strong solar cycles or more very weak solar cycles is not nessecary achieved already during first cycle: It is neither physically impossible nor unlikely that effect from solar cycles (Strong or weak) ACCUMULATES to some degree over more cycles.
http://www.klimadebat.dk/forum/vedhaeftninger/fpredict.gif
In fact, if the energy some source of heat cannot be accumulated over decades, then for example the 100% full effect of the 380 ppm CO2 should have been seen in the same decade 380 ppm was reached. The effect of 390 ppm should only be the 10 ppm extra effect etc etc, and this we can all see is nonsence.
K.R. Frank
http://www.hidethedecline.eu/
Leif Svalgaard says:
January 3, 2011 at 2:36 pm
The dips in 1700, 1810, and 1985 are most likely due to volcanic activity
1895, of course.
Which one ?
Frank Lansner says:
January 3, 2011 at 2:27 pm
(here is a special version of fig2 from the Article:
http://www.klimadebat.dk/forum/vedhaeftninger/gissdivergence.gif )
Using the Hoyt&Schatten TSI is almost a crime against humanity. [trying to influence people on a highly politicized subject, with potential devastating effects].
beng says:
January 3, 2011 at 2:03 pm
something that contains so little energy/mass & is stratified like the stratosphere is unlikely to drive anything — just the opposite, its characteristics are driven mostly from below.
Finally somebody who gets it.
Leif, i know what you say about hoyt and Schatten, but please notice the point (!) : The solar graph shows rather the same level 1940 and 2000, which is imilar to the other graphs. This – THE – point is in no way changed beacause i use Hoyt and Schatten.
K.R. Frank
Frank Lansner says:
January 3, 2011 at 2:49 pm
There is NO way we can say for sure that a steady HIGH level of solar activity should not be leading to some temperature increase over more decades (!!)
Double the solar output and keep it steady for a few thousand years, then be sure. Unless your double [almost triple] negative fools me.
interesting discussion..
after reading McIntyre, Watts, Chiefio etc for years I don’t trust the temperature data and from what Leif is saying we there are many data sets of solar output that conflict with each other and in the future it is possible he will disprove what he is saying now, yet people continue to plot graphs looking for correlations. 🙂
I live in a condo on the beach in Puerto Vallarta, this is the coldest winter in my six years here, and the ocean is in the exact same place it was when I bought the condo.
something that is ignored in the discussion of forcing and feedback is resonance. The assumption is made that the change in TSI is not a significant forcing factor because the magnitude is small. This totally ignores the effects of resonance.
consider a playground swing. a small change in the center of gravity of the rider has minimal forcing effect when applied at random. However, this small forcing leads to a very large observed effect when applied in phase with the observed effect.
So, if there is a resonance between TSI and climate, the possibility exists for a very large change in temperature to occur as a result of a very small change in TSI. Is there evidence for a resonance between TSI and temperature?
12:30:60 is an obvious resonance between the orbits of Jupiter, Saturn and the PDO, with the angular momentum of the sun around the center of mass of the solar system “stirring up” the sun and driving changes in the TSI.
Frank Lansner says:
January 3, 2011 at 3:10 pm
Leif, i know what you say about hoyt and Schatten, but please notice the point (!) : The solar graph shows rather the same level 1940 and 2000, which is imilar to the other graphs. This – THE – point is in no way changed because i use Hoyt and Schatten.
H&S were also wrong about 1940.
http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-recon.png
http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-recon3.png
http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-recon4.png
and about the dip in the 1960s.
maksimovich says:
January 3, 2011 at 2:59 pm
“The dips in 1700, 1810, and 1985 are most likely due to volcanic activity
1895, of course.”
Which one ?
Probably Krakatoa as the dip starts in 1883: Figure 13 of http://www.leif.org/research/2009JA015069.pdf
Leif, When i write : “There is NO way we can say for sure that a steady HIGH level of solar activity should not be leading to some temperature increase over more decades (!!)”
.. do you agree or not?
K.R. Frank
Hi Again Leif:
Your graph shows more variation in Hoyt and Schatten in for example 1940-70, but as I said, the point we are discussing is the Solar activity on average has not risen since perhaps 1940 unlike some supposed indicators of temperatures. ALL the graphs you show on http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-recon3.png could be used in that context. Please go for the central points .
K.R. Frank
ferd berple says:
January 3, 2011 at 3:13 pm
This totally ignores the effects of resonance.
Resonance requires a transfer of energy between more than one reservoir, i.e. a coupling that effects such transfer.
Is there evidence for a resonance between TSI and temperature?
TSI comes from the Sun and the question is what the coupling would be. There is certainly no transfer back to TSI, so no resonance.
12:30:60 is an obvious resonance between the orbits of Jupiter, Saturn and the PDO, with the angular momentum of the sun around the center of mass of the solar system “stirring up” the sun and driving changes in the TSI.
There is no transfer of angular momentum to the Sun’s rotational angular momentum, so so coupling, and no two-way transfer required for resonance.
ferd berple says:
January 3, 2011 at 3:13 pm
This totally ignores the effects of resonance.
Resonance requires a transfer of energy between more than one reservoir, i.e. a coupling that effects such transfer.
Leif Svalgaard says:
January 3, 2011 at 9:40 am
Geoff says:
January 3, 2011 at 9:22 am
When temperatures cool due to declining solar activity
For all you solar enthusiasts, here is what you get when you add the sunspot to the graph of RSS: http://www.leif.org/research/RSS-and-SSN.png
Perhaps someone would put CO2 on the graph as well 🙂 … Aw, forget it, CO2 lags 800 years behind Temperatures…
Phil Jones I believe stated there has been no statistically detectable warming since 1995, so the temperature levels off near the end of solar cycle 22, steady high solar activity from around 1960 kept the temperature rising, it then probably reached its peak in 1995 then stabilized.
http://i446.photobucket.com/albums/qq187/bobclive/irradiance.gif
Why don`t you add CO2 to this graph, don`t bother I`ve already done it.
http://i446.photobucket.com/albums/qq187/bobclive/leif4.jpg
Leif Svalgaard says:
Alec Rawls says:
while I did make a counter argument: if the sun is driving climate, we know it can drive temperatures substantially higher than today (citing the Viking settlement of Greenland).
During the 11 century [1000 AD-1100AD] solar activity was low [the Oort minimum.
The Oort minimum doesn’t show up very strongly in the Greenland Be10 data (Yes I know there are issues with the Be10 data). But the Sporer does. Maybe that’s what drove the Vikings out of Greenland at the end of the C15th?
http://tallbloke.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/tim-10be.jpg
Leif Svalgaard says:
January 3, 2011 at 3:19 pm
maksimovich says:
January 3, 2011 at 2:59 pm
“The dips in 1700, 1810, and 1985 are most likely due to volcanic activity
1895, of course.”
Which one ?
Probably Krakatoa as the dip starts in 1883:
That does not tell us that there is no solar signal in the historical record,merely that variations are dampened by volcanic forcing with competing temporal amplitudes .
Leif Svalgaard says:
January 3, 2011 at 2:24 pm
tallbloke says:
January 3, 2011 at 1:26 pm
“The standard variation of my sunspot numbers is higher than the GSN crew’s. What I dispute is the secular, regular, steady increase that is claimed.”
I’m not seeing this “secular, regular, steady increase” on this graph, can you point it out? http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/sidc-ssn/mean:124
typical bait and switch. The Krivova et al paper was based on GSN, and you ask about SIDC. Look at slide 4 of http://www.leif.org/research/Rudolf%20Wolf%20Was%20Right.pdf for GSN. Follow the red arrow.
Apologies, not intentional. I think you are probably right about C18th GSN being too low. I also think ocean heat content takes a long time to build up following the LIA, so I don’t have much of an issue with this. Krivova et al are still on the mark for the rise in activity since Maunder, it’s just that it happened sooner than GSN would indicate.
beng says:
January 3, 2011 at 2:03 pm
something that contains so little energy/mass & is stratified like the stratosphere is unlikely to drive anything — just the opposite, its characteristics are driven mostly from below.
Leif responds
Finally somebody who gets it.
Just as the troposphere is driven from below, i.e. by the ocean, which accumulate solar energy on multi-decadal timescales when the Sun has above average activity levels. Which it did for a lot of the latter C20th, no matter how much you try to flatten it out.
Which is why temps are slow to fall following the cresting of the solar activity in 2003 and the downturn in ocean heat content which is gathering pace since the Sun stayed well below average activity levels. If we go along with the lag du jour you mentioned of 7.5 years, we’d expect the surface to start getting colder about now…. which it is doing.
E.M.Smith says: “I have one, and it is fun to look at, but I would not use is as global / authoritative”
Sorry for the confusion. The point I was trying to make is that the North American Land Surface data graph used by Alec Rawls in the comparison to solar cycle length ends in 2007 or 2008 and that the correlation no longer exists:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/lagged-solar-cycle-length-and-temp-stephen-strum-frontier-weather-inc.png
It is unlikely that you have an unadjusted North American LST dataset that drops to levels that are lower than the early 20th Century, as would be required to maintain the claimed correlation. So I don’t understand why the graph is in the post.
Leif asks: “Which lag du jour do you suggest?”
There are two different “lags” to consider. One is the time it takes for solar warming of the oceans to show up in temperature records. If we had a good direct record of ocean heat temperatures, there should be no lag in seeing the hypothesized solar warming. If, for instance, the GCR-cloud theory is right, and high solar wind blows the clouds away, allowing more solar radiation to sink into the oceans, we should see that warming effect in each year’s ocean heat content.
If we are looking at surface temperatures, then there does seem to be a lag before solar effects show up. On the solar-cycle-length measure of solar activity, the closest correlation seems to be between current temps and the length of the last solar cycle. It’s not a very firm result, since the record isn’t very long, but there is some evidence for it.
Then there is the lag between the onset of a steady level of forcing and the equilibration of planetary temperature in response to that new level of forcing. In the present example, there was a 60 or 80 year period of grand maximum or near grand maximum solar activity. If climate is bring driven by solar activity, then it seems pretty clear that equilibration can take hundreds of years, as seen with the 200+ years of warming coming out of the little ice age, with some dips that roughly correspond to dips in solar activity. (There isn’t just the modern maximum to explain this long temperature rise, but also the climb out of the Maunder Minimum.)
Given the size of the heat sink we are talking about, and how slowly it warms, there is nothing implausible about such long periods of equilibration, and no prima facie reason to think that another 50 years of grand maximum solar activity wouldn’t have continued to pour more heat the oceans than an additional degree of ocean temperature would radiate out.
I should work on these numbers too, and try to figure where ocean warming should equilibrate in response to a given level of forcing. My point here, however, is that none of the authors who are implicitly assuming that temperatures were in equilibrium when the sun peaked in the 1990’s are even acknowledging this assumption, never mind making any argument for it.
Leif answered this critique by asking:
I think Leif must be confusing the lag before a rise in ocean heat content can be seen in surface temperatures with the time it takes planetary temperature to equilibrate in response to a forcing. How could a heat sink the size of the oceans equilibrate to a substantial change in forcing in a mere 5-7 years? Surely there can’t be many people who think that equilibration happens that fast.
Frank Lansner wrote in reply to Leif, “The solar graph shows rather the same level 1940 and 2000, which is imilar to the other graphs. This – THE – point is in no way changed beacause i use Hoyt and Schatten.” And your comment was about this graph:
http://www.klimadebat.dk/forum/vedhaeftninger/gissdivergence.gif
You are once again presenting misleading information in a failed attempt to discredit GISS, Frank. The GISS LOTI data is a global dataset, but none of the other datasets you’re comparing it to are global. The graph is obviously wrong and misleading. A group of people who blog here, and at Lucia’s, and at Steve McIntyre’s Climate Audit, have picked apart the GISS data and the GISS code, and do not find these major errors you attempt to portray with your graphs.
Also, I disagree with what you wrote to Leif. In that graph, you are also attempting to use the obsolete Hoyt and Schatten data to show a correlation in the early part of the data and a divergence of the GISS data in the latter part. The point is, since solar minimums are now considered to be relatively flat (not as presented by Hoyt and Schatten), not one of that unusual mix of temperature datasets you present would correlate with solar in the beginning of the data either.
ferd berple says:
January 3, 2011 at 3:13 pm
12:30:60 is an obvious resonance between the orbits of Jupiter, Saturn and the PDO, with the angular momentum of the sun around the center of mass of the solar system “stirring up” the sun and driving changes in the TSI.
Finally someone who gets it.
Although tallbloke, Cheifo, Stephen Wilde and others are very clear and correct on the important points.
Here is a chart that puts together the main temperature drivers, it clearly shows how solar activity rises to a level that will sustain a thicker atmosphere (pos AO & NAO) around every 170 years before declining as we are seeing now. The solar power wave can be broken by grand minima which makes the pattern not show up as regular using a Fourier method etc. Understanding what drives grand minima is the key as it is truly the only variable in the system.
The solar induced PDO wave is in the background, once again not variable but super important.
Frank Lansner says:
January 3, 2011 at 3:22 pm
Leif, When i write : “There is NO way we can say for sure that a steady HIGH level of solar activity should not be leading to some temperature increase over more decades (!!)”
.. do you agree or not?
Too many negatives for me. If you meant: A steady high level of solar activity would lead to some temperature increase, then, of course, I agree and nobody would disagree. But, if this is the case, why not say it positively as I just did?
Frank Lansner says:
January 3, 2011 at 3:26 pm
the point we are discussing is the Solar activity on average has not risen since perhaps 1940 unlike some supposed indicators of temperatures.
If you are saying that solar activity has decreased since the late 1950s, then we have common ground. And since temperatures have increased, it should be clear to even the most rabid solar enthusiast tha the Sun is not a major driver of climate.
Please go for the central points.
You did not express the central point(s). If you are saying that your central point is that the Sun is not a major driver of climate, then just state that up front, clearly, and simply.
Robuk says:
January 3, 2011 at 4:07 pm
Why don`t you add CO2 to this graph, don`t bother I`ve already done it.
http://i446.photobucket.com/albums/qq187/bobclive/leif4.jpg
So you demonstrate that temperature change is not by the Sun. This is, however, old hat.
tallbloke says:
January 3, 2011 at 4:35 pm
But the Sporer does. Maybe that’s what drove the Vikings out of Greenland at the end of the C15th?
Nope, what drove the Vikings was a steadily deteriorating climate long before the Spoerer, starting already around 1200. http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/lia/end_of_vikings_greenland.html
maksimovich says:
January 3, 2011 at 4:37 pm
That does not tell us that there is no solar signal in the historical record,merely that variations are dampened by volcanic forcing with competing temporal amplitudes .
It tells us that the dip in the record in 1895 was probably not solar, and that casts doubt on the other dips as well.
tallbloke says:
January 3, 2011 at 4:48 pm
Apologies, not intentional.
Accepted, but be more careful before shooting mouth off 🙂
Krivova et al are still on the mark for the rise in activity since Maunder, it’s just that it happened sooner than GSN would indicate.
This is where I beg to differ. They assume that activity essentially went away. I think we were having a full-blown L&P effect which means that the magnetic field was still there [I can line with it being a tad lower – on par with today or what we might see in a couple of years], cosmic ray modulation was still there, TSI was not much lower, BUT the process that concentrates specks and pores to sunspots was not operating efficiently enough to create visible spots, hence the deep [but only apparent] minimum of sunspots.
beng says:
January 3, 2011 at 2:03 pm
when the Sun has above average activity levels. Which it did for a lot of the latter C20th, no matter how much you try to flatten it out.
The Sun in the latter part of the 20th was as active as in the latter part of the 18th.
Bob Tisdale says:
January 3, 2011 at 4:57 pm
Alec Rawls says:
January 3, 2011 at 5:18 pm
there should be no lag in seeing the hypothesized solar warming. […] we should see that warming effect in each year’s ocean heat content.
one would think so.
If we are looking at surface temperatures, then there does seem to be a lag before solar effects show up.
so, lag #2
Then there is the lag between the onset of a steady level of forcing and the equilibration of planetary temperature in response to that new level of forcing.
Lag #3.
With enough lags you can fit anything.
Bob Tisdale says:
January 3, 2011 at 5:25 pm
The point is, since solar minimums are now considered to be relatively flat (not as presented by Hoyt and Schatten), not one of that unusual mix of temperature datasets you present would correlate with solar in the beginning of the data either.
This is what I got out of it too. It would help if people would just be straightforward and say up front what their agenda is, what they are trying to prove [or disprove], and then present whatever ‘evidence’ they think they have.
Alec Rawls: Regarding time lags, the seasonal lag for SST is 2 to 3 months, if memory serves me well. I haven’t plotted it in a while.
You could use the sea level data at the KNMI Climate Explorer to approximate thermal lag of the southern hemisphere (more ocean), but you’d have to consider the seasonal contribution of glacier runoff, etc. That should also approximate the OHC seasonal time lag.
How can we tax the sun and make the people feeling guilty ?
Co2 is much more convenient !
Forget the sun and stick to Co2 !
The monthly Penticton AU adjusted F10.7 flux data is in. December continues the very flat trajectory of this important metric. When compared with SC20, SC24 is looking very weak at present.
Leif states that normal solar activity continues during grand minima but with an absence of spots (L&P, what ever that is?). If the current trend continues this will falsify his argument for all time. EUV values are following the same trend along with their influence on the atmosphere.
Alec Rawls says:
January 3, 2011 at 5:18 pm
“There are two different “lags” to consider.”
I’d guess two hundred different lags not just two. The thing about the ocean is that we know almost nothing about what the bottom half is doing and that portion alone has 500 times the thermal mass of the atmosphere. It’s merely presumed to be constant but if all Trenberth’s missing heat were evenly distributed in it there wouldn’t be enough temperature rise to detect. The surface temperature down to a few hundred meters is all weather related so knowing that down to a tenth of a degree doesn’t tell us anything. The average temperature of the whole ocean top to bottom is 4 degrees C and that tells us something – it tells us that the average surface temperature of the earth over a whole interglacial/glacial period of 120 thousand years is 4 degrees C as that length of time is certainly long enough for the deep water below the thermocline to take on the average temperature of the surface layer.
The 4°C is the densest water. The bottom will always be that temperature unless the whole water column is higher than that.
Brian H says:
January 3, 2011 at 8:18 pm
The 4°C is the densest water. The bottom will always be that temperature unless the whole water column is higher than that.
Actually (sorry to be pedantic) 4C is the density minimum for fresh water but not sea water, where it is close to zero. (Sea ice still floats – it dumps its salt, making surrounding water more salty.) However the deep ocean water asymptotes down to around 2-3 C.
I agree with Dave Springer that the ocean, where almost all climate heat resides, especially the deep ocean and the THC, will always be the spanner in the works for those who claim that direct “forcing” or “driving” from the sun is a complete and sufficient explanation of climate variation. There are nonlinear forced oscillations of the ocean by the sun and orbital factors over a wide range of timescales. These interact with real time solar oscillations to give weather and climate. The atmosphere is a passenger in between the two real players in climate heat, the sun and the ocean.
Something even Leif and I can agree on?
EEEEHAWWWW!!!!!
Stanford just clobbered Virginia Tech.
Sorry Hokies. Great game though.
Geoff Sharp says:
January 3, 2011 at 7:26 pm
When compared with SC20, SC24 is looking very weak at present.
As it should, as it is predicted to be much weaker. The Active Region Count [and the sunspot number is falling below what we would expect from F10.7, confirming the weakening of sunspots as L&P predicts. http://www.leif.org/research/ARC-Updating.png shows this very clearly.
states that normal solar activity continues during grand minima but with an absence of spots (L&P, what ever that is?). If the current trend continues this will falsify his argument for all time.
What trend? F10.7 is holding while sots are getting weaker and weaker, may soon disappear [L&P]. If they do, we have a Grand Minimum; if they don’t, we don’t have a Grand Minimum.
Alec Rawls says:
January 3, 2011 at 9:02 pm
Something even Leif and I can agree on?
EEEEHAWWWW!!!!! Stanford just clobbered Virginia Tech.
Indeed.
Geoff Sharp says:
January 3, 2011 at 7:26 pm
(L&P, what ever that is?).
To remind you what L&P is:
1) measurements of magnetic fields and intensity of sunspot by L&P:
http://www.leif.org/research/Livingston%20and%20Penn.png
2) sunspot number is falling increasingly below what we would expect from F10.7 based on the relationship valid 1947-1990:
http://www.leif.org/research/F107-SSN-Yearly-1951-Now.png and
http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/news/2010ScienceMeeting/doc/Session6/6.03_Tapping_F10.7.pdf
Leif Svalgaard says:
January 3, 2011 at 9:45 pm
Geoff Sharp says:
January 3, 2011 at 7:26 pm
When compared with SC20, SC24 is looking very weak at present.
———————————-
As it should, as it is predicted to be much weaker. The Active Region Count [and the sunspot number is falling below what we would expect from F10.7, confirming the weakening of sunspots as L&P predicts.
Weaker than you predicted I would suggest. If you count sunspots as they used to the sunspot record is following the F10.7 flux.
states that normal solar activity continues during grand minima but with an absence of spots (L&P, what ever that is?). If the current trend continues this will falsify his argument for all time.
—————————————————-
What trend? F10.7 is holding while sots are getting weaker and weaker, may soon disappear [L&P]. If they do, we have a Grand Minimum; if they don’t, we don’t have a Grand Minimum.
But you said we will not have a grand minimum not long ago?? The F10.7 trend is flat, not rising, not ramping up etc.
Geoff Sharp says:
January 3, 2011 at 10:35 pm
If you count sunspots as they used to the sunspot record is following the F10.7 flux.
They have not done that for 134 years ever since we [Wolfer] discovered that the old way [Wolf’s] was not a good way of counting them as it is not reproducible. And it is evident from your own graph that F10.7 does not follow the sunspot number [the latter just took a dive while F10.7 didn’t as you point out]. Last, the only one who really know how to count sunspots ‘as they used too’ is Hans-Uwe Keller, who has been counting for several years now using Wolf’s original, handheld telescope with 40mm aperture and magnification x40. Keller’s k-factor with that old scope is 1.1 so is very close to what Wolf would have counted [but we are still uncertain because we don’t know where difference between 1.1 and 1.0 comes from – perhaps different Snellen ratios]. Since you have made no comparisons with anything, the LSC is free floating without any ties to reality.
But you said we will not have a grand minimum not long ago??
No, I said that I didn’t think we would have a Grand minimum [although I would love to be wrong], but if L&P are correct [which time will tell] then we might get a Grand Minimum with no spots visible.
The F10.7 trend is flat, not rising, not ramping up etc.
It is certainly on the rise: http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-SORCE-2008-now.png
F10.7 consists of two components: gyro-synchrotron radiation [directly over active regions] and a ‘slowly varying background due to bremsstrahlung by free electrons in the corona. The latter is what you see if you follow the ‘bottom’ of the F10.7 graph [I put in a line hugging the bottom], and you can clearly see its steady rising ramp-up.
Leif Svalgaard says:
January 3, 2011 at 11:13 pm
No, I said that I didn’t think we would have a Grand minimum [although I would love to be wrong], but if L&P are correct [which time will tell] then we might get a Grand Minimum with no spots visible.
No , I distinctly remember you saying SC24 will not be a grand minimum. It might be worth tracking if I can be bothered.
Leif Svalgaard says:
January 3, 2011 at 2:24 pm
Yet another idea that cannot be falsified, it seems.
It is not an idea, hypothesis, theory, or reconstruction, it is just simple set of easily verifiable records. Since there are no miracles in science, both can’t be right: your (et al) reconstructions is no good!
Bob T… ALL solar graphs shows pretty much the same activity in 2000 as in 1940, so your focus on the outdated Hoyt and Schatten (which we have already discussed in this debate!!) – is not changing anything. And then I showed an old where I could have plotted in Hadcrut, GISS, NCDC or what ever, the ground based land-graph is there a graf to show that the land graphs certainly normally shows warming! Its not some specific GISS attack or whatever you think.
beng says: January 3, 2011 at 2:03 pm
something that contains so little energy/mass & is stratified like the stratosphere is unlikely to drive anything — just the opposite, its characteristics are driven mostly from below.
Events in the stratosphere are significant onlyduring polar winters, when difference in insolation + Coriolis force generate polar vortex. Sudden stratospheric warming SSW is regular occurrence in the Arctic, while in the last 50 years occurred only once (2002) in the Antarctica.
There reason for this is rising of a plume of warm air, caused by the upwelling of the warm North Atlantic drift current’s waters, mainly in the area of Labrador sea. Dome of warm air rising upwards pushes into lower levels of stratosphere causing SSW. Similar effect is result of the sporadic Kamchatka and Aleutian volcanic eruptions.
As far as climatic changes are concern this matters since the regularity and normal configuration of the Rosby planetary wave is interrupted, mainly affecting higher latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere.
Leif, i wrote:“There is NO way we can say for sure that a steady HIGH level of solar activity should not be leading to some temperature increase over more decades (!!) .. do you agree or not?”
And you answer: “Too many negatives for me. If you meant: A steady high level of solar activity would lead to some temperature increase, then, of course, I agree and nobody would disagree. But, if this is the case, why not say it positively as I just did?”
Now THIS is a central part of the discussion. IF the average solar activity was higher 1940-2000 than normal, THEN it is not impossible that we have higher temperatures in 2000 than 1940 due to Solar input.
This may not explain ALL the difference between “flat” Solar activity 1940-2000, but then we must not forget that the “temperatures” are certainly polluted by UHI and warming adjustments. I personnaly think that the best long term temperatures we have are the global ocean temperatures which shows less warming. They have the problem that they are more slowly changing, true, BUT they are rid of UHI and siting problems.
Here I have shown difference in temperature data for NH using pre 1984 (AGW) data averaged from many sources, and extended with average UAH+RSS NH data just and then I compare with Hadcrut NH:
http://hidethedecline.eu/media/PERPLEX/fig71.jpg
(NH simply because NH data are much better represented pre 1984).
This is (obviously) not an attempt to be quantitatively accurate as some might think, no its just to show the bigger picture, that temperature data normally used is not really a solid proof of anything, just an indicator with a lower robustness.
***
Then you say, Leif: “If you are saying that solar activity has decreased since the late 1950s, then we have common ground. ”
YEAH YEAH!!
But you continue: “And since temperatures have increased, it should be clear to even the most rabid solar enthusiast tha the Sun is not a major driver of climate.”
nono…
K.R. Frank
– But Leif, i think its more correct to say that Solar activity 1940-2000 is rather flat rather than to define it as “falling”?
http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-recon4.png
K.R. Frank
And Leif, from you graph, its rather clear that the 1940-2000 general level simply is higher than normal:
http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-recon4.png
– And therefore its certainly possible (no double negations…) that a longer period with pretty much the same high Solar activity could result in increasing temperatures.
In fact, you have to be a “most rabid” denier to rule this out 🙂
While Leif probably will scathe me for introducing “unknowns” 🙂 I think it is worthwhile to elaborate a bit on Phlogiston’s point with respect to Oceanic Heat Content.
While the Meridional Ocean Circulation is recognized as having great impact on the distribution of carbon, nutrients, heat(sic) and other substances to the deep-water (http://mgg.coas.oregonstate.edu/~andreas/pdf/S/schmittner07agu_intro.pdf),
I am not aware of many who have considered the possibility for “Climate signals” in the upwelling and old MOC water.
But as the turn-over frequency is up to 1600 years, I do not see any plausiuble reasons why not the positive and negative energy balance in previous warm and cold periods should nor have been preserved in MOC.
Except for the part of MOC related to “freezing out” (which always will be close to -1 to -1.5C) the formation of deep water should be relative to the TS characteristics of the surrounding water.
Cassanders
In Cod we trust
Cassanders says:
January 4, 2011 at 2:44 am
……………
see my post
Vuk etc says:
January 4, 2011 at 1:59 am
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/01/02/do-solar-scientists-still-think-that-recent-warming-is-too-large-to-explain-by-solar-activity/#comment-565368
Cassanders says: “But as the turn-over frequency is up to 1600 years, I do not see any plausiuble reasons why not the positive and negative energy balance in previous warm and cold periods should nor have been preserved in MOC.”
This is not a critique, just a question. How and why would a warm or cold “signal” that has been subducted to depth remain intact for 1600 years?
Frank Lansner says: “Bob T… ALL solar graphs shows pretty much the same activity in 2000 as in 1940, so your focus on the outdated Hoyt and Schatten (which we have already discussed in this debate!!) – is not changing anything.”
It’s all in the presentation, Frank. If that’s the only point you were trying to make, then exclude the data in your graph before 1940. Because the Hoyt and Schatten data you’ve used is misleading in the early part of the graph. It catches the eye and makes the viewer believe a correlation existed then, when in reality there was no agreement.
BTW, your posts would be much more believeable if you stopped using the unusual datasets, like National Geographic and your self-assembled proxies–the ones you used in this graph:
http://www.klimadebat.dk/forum/vedhaeftninger/gissdivergence.gif
If you want to be believed, stick to conventional datasets like GISS LOTI, HADCRUT, and NCDC, and present them without the unusual smoothing. Also, the scaling of the different variables that you include on one graph like solar and temperature have to rely on known scaling factors. And again, the other thing that was blatantly misleading in your graph was the comparison of Global data with the other subsets.
Vuk etc says:
January 4, 2011 at 1:59 am
Sudden stratospheric warming SSW is regular occurrence in the Arctic, while in the last 50 years occurred only once (2002) in the Antarctica.
Hi Vuk, there was another one I remember last year around August, it was one of the reasons for the smaller ozone hole last year.
@Bob Tisdale,
You are probably familiar with the essentials, but if not, you will find a “popular” presentation here: http://www.windows2universe.org/earth/Water/ocean_heat_storage_transfer.html
I am sure you are also aware of the thermocline in low and mid-lattidude waters (comprising a large chunk of the global water mass) below which the temperature is “rather stable” and varies within a much smaller range (typically 0 -4 C) than the surface. But this relatively small range does not (as far as I understand) preclude a temporal (Hi Leif! :-)) small change to the temperature of the deep water. (The density could be maintained by a simultaneous change in salinity).
My “mental image” of this can be mapped onto the picture of the conveyor belt (url above) as e.g. 200 year “pulse” of relatively warmer deep water. Hence my “thought” of a stored heat pulse “travelling along MOC ” and surfacing some centuries -a millennium later.
If pushed, I might even try a back of the envelope calculation 🙂 Currently I am confident the amount of energy required to heat the deep MOC water say 0.1-0.2 C has a magnitude that could be relevant to the atmosphere.
Cassanders
In Cod we trust
Commenting myself:
It is of course the deep water below the thermocline that constitutes a large chunk of the Oceans’ water, not the water in the thermocline itself.
Sorry for the sloppiness.
Cassanders
In Cod we trust
Hi Bob
I want you to know, that the image i showed Alec s not part of an article published anywere. It is old, and im aware that the Hoyt and schatten is has a lot of critics etc. Likewise, the old graph showed a “national geographic” and other pre-.1984 data I have digged a lot in since then: http://hidethedecline.eu/pages/posts/the-perplexing-temperature-data-published-1974-84-and-recent-temperature-data-180.php
No, I used that old graph simply because we here talk about the 1940-2000 with stagnating solar activity accompanied by rising temperatures. But If i write a new article on the subject, i would make a new graph using for example Leifs solar curves in stead etc.
In general, many peoble are comparing smaller areas like USA, The Arctic, Greenland etc with solar acitivity. This is normally done because some thinks that these temperature data are simply better than for example an overall global GISS or the like.
I wont be the judge of that here and now, but i have used full-NH data, Proxy data almost global, Glacier data, Sea level data to finally get the impression that any of the ordinary datasources for global data hadcrut, Giss or their “mother” GHCN etc. is not at all robust anough to be used to dismiss the Solar theory.
K.R. Frank
phlogiston says:
January 3, 2011 at 8:32 pm
Thanks for pointing that out, Phlogiston. Many people make the mistake of assuming that sea water thermal expansion is the same as freshwater. It isn’t. Seawater exhibits thermal expansion through its entire liquid phase and its freezing point is negative 1.8C at its typical salinity of 35 parts per thousand.
The water below the thermocline isn’t at 3.0C because that’s the temperature of maximum density. It’s at 3.0C because that’s the average surface temperature over an entire glacial cycle. It’s physically impossible for it to be at that temperature for any other reason.
http://www.waterencyclopedia.com/Re-St/Sea-Water-Freezing-of.html
Frank Lansner says: “I wont be the judge of that here and now, but i have used full-NH data, Proxy data almost global, Glacier data, Sea level data to finally get the impression that any of the ordinary datasources for global data hadcrut, Giss or their “mother” GHCN etc. is not at all robust anough to be used to dismiss the Solar theory.”
No dataset–Land Surface Temperature, Sea Surface Temperature, Lower Troposphere Temperature, Combined Land Plus Sea Surface Temperature, Ocean Heat Content, Sea Level–during that satellite era supports the “Solar theory”, and during the satellite era, the data is “robust enough” to detect it. Have you considered that fact that maybe your “Solar theory” is wrong?
Cassanders says: January 4, 2011 at 4:04 am.
I don’t believe you answered my question. How would the pulse remain intact after 1600 years?
Hi Geoff:
Yes , I saw your link any particular, I shall look into it, any articles?
Apparently 2002 SSW was something exceptional, if you google :
Antarctic 2002 Sudden stratospheric warming
there are numerous entries and articles for the event.
Leif Svalgaard says:
January 3, 2011 at 6:33 pm
Nope, what drove the Vikings was a steadily deteriorating climate long before the Spoerer, starting already around 1200. http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/lia/end_of_vikings_greenland.html
The Wolf minimum is quite strong in Greenland Be10 as well. Much stronger than Oort. The last marriage which took place in Hvalsey church on Greenland was in 1408. They disappeared after 1480.
http://tallbloke.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/tim-10be.jpg
@Bob Tisdale,
I would think inertia. To me the idea is in principle not very different from the scenario the authors argue for at the end of this page.
http://www.windows2universe.org/earth/Water/ocean_heat_storage_transfer.html
Cassanders
In Cod we trust
Hi Bob!
You write: “No dataset–Land Surface Temperature, Sea Surface Temperature, Lower Troposphere Temperature, Combined Land Plus Sea Surface Temperature, Ocean Heat Content, Sea Level–during that satellite era supports the “Solar theory”, and during the satellite era, the data is “robust enough” to detect it. Have you considered that fact that maybe your “Solar theory” is wrong?”
First of all, im thrilled that we can talk about the essentials finally.
Glacier data:
I analysed Oerlemanns glacier data here:
http://hidethedecline.eu/pages/posts/the-warm-glacier-temperature-reconstruction-of-oerlemans-2005-160.php
And I believe this graph tells a story you should not ignore:
http://hidethedecline.eu/media/glaciers/Skepticalscience.jpg
summa: Recent data is not showing more heat than 1945-55 data
You have to ignore for example UHI to get the idea that ordinary temperature data is robust.
You should not: http://hidethedecline.eu/pages/posts/urban-heat-island—uhi—a-world-tour-159.php
You have to ignore warming adjustments too to ditch Solar theory using std temperature data.
Sea levels has not accellerated in 2000 compared to 1940:
http://www.globalwarmingart.com/images/0/0f/Recent_Sea_Level_Rise.png
Greenland – where UHI and adjustments are limited – shows approx same temperatures in recen decades as in 1925-47.
In general you can come with studies of recent data where results happens to become more in line with AGW points of view, but thats another story. This you can do on practically all parts of the climate debate: Recent studies that comes after changes of viewpoints by IPCC or NASA tends to support these. You can then coose that this is a freak random coincidence.
Then you came with a comment i need to address. You implied that when I dig into and use older data like “national geographic”, then you suggest that peoble wont “believe me”.
Why do you think we had peoble hacking CRU´s office? Why are there a huge pressure on GISS, NIWA, CRU, the university that holds Manns data etc to release ORIGINAL DATA?? Its because its a widely spread out wish to know how much data has been adjusted!
But I just take the easy way: Data is there right in front of us in the old writings. I have summarized ALL relevant original temperature data of recent temperatures here:http://hidethedecline.eu/pages/posts/the-perplexing-temperature-data-published-1974-84-and-recent-temperature-data-180.php
Bob, its simply your personal opinion, that it is not relevant to work with original non-adjusted data as I do.
You again and again accept blindly what ever comes from CRU, GISS etc is state of the art useful. So it seems.
Bob, your confidence in CRU and GISS data is your business, but you must stop claiming that we all should have your opinions about what data is in fact solid and what is not!! Your opinions are your opinions, no more no less.
Your concern about who will believe what: This is totally wild guessing from your part. I can tell you this: Normally i think hidethe decline has around 5000 hits a day. But in the days when a new article is on, its normally around 30-60000 hits a day. We had all time record of 149.820 hits in one day 18 March 2010, so someone is reading afterall. This happens even though i often simoutaneously publish at Joanne Nova or WUWT. So we dont cry over lack of readers. But if you say they all read our stuff because they dont believe a word … well thats your belief.
K.R. Frank
Dr. Svalgaard
Your link
http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/lia/determining_climate_record.html
should cause you some concern. Data for NAP prior 1650 is scarce, but what there is, it tallies nicely with your link’s temperature graph.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/NAP11-16.htm
Time to think again.
Vuk, tallbloke, & others:
Cause & effect. Like they say in politics, follow the money to root out cause and effect — in this case, follow the energy. It’s an unbelievable stretch to say that a minor component (energy-wise) of TSI (UV) that only affects an isolated and tiny (mass-wise) part of the atmosphere (the stratosphere) controls the weather/climate. That’s prb’ly worse than saying a minor change in a trace gas like CO2 controls the climate — at least CO2 & other GHGs have a measurable effect on the radiation properties at the surface.
Most of the argument on this subject assumes instantaneous effect. That is, the effect follows the cause immediately. These arguments are spurious. Before one attempts to analyze one must understand the basic physics no matter how big ones computer. The ocean contains many zones that interact with one another and with the surface. Any useful analysis requires one to accept this fact ab initio. Some posters above do realize this.
One such approach might be the one adopted by John Scott Haldane. Haldane sought to develop a procedure for estimating the blood level of nitrogen in deep sea divers. His approach involved dividing the body into many individual “compartments” and determining the time constants for each. Google “Haldanean.” If you don’t care about the math, read the man’s bio. He was a memorable individual.
Looking at graphs that assume instantaneous effect is a waste of time. The one above that treats solar cycle length vs future temperature change is not; it does not assume instantaneous effect. It is a stab in the right direction.
Geoff Sharp says:
January 4, 2011 at 12:31 am
No , I distinctly remember you saying SC24 will not be a grand minimum. It might be worth tracking if I can be bothered.
It probably won’t [although I would like it to]. I might have said that if it becomes like the Dalton, then since the Dalton does not qualify etc. Anyway, it all hinges on L&P, so we’ll have to see if it persists.
Frank Lansner says:
January 4, 2011 at 2:01 am
“THIS is a central part of the discussion. IF the average solar activity was higher 1940-2000 than normal, THEN it is not impossible that we have higher temperatures in 2000 than 1940 due to Solar input.”
There it is again “not impossible”. Be positive if you mean ‘possible’.
The point is that I think 1940-2000 was quite normal. It are the dips [grand minima and smaller ones] that are not ‘normal’
Frank Lansner says:
January 4, 2011 at 2:23 am
And Leif, from you graph, its rather clear that the 1940-2000 general level simply is higher than normal:
http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-recon4.png
And you carefully cherry pick the Figure I use to show that all the old reconstructions are too low before 1945. You should have used:
http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-recon3.png
Bob Tisdale says:
January 4, 2011 at 3:48 am
It’s all in the presentation, Frank.
Indeed.
tallbloke says:
January 4, 2011 at 5:25 am
The last marriage which took place in Hvalsey church on Greenland was in 1408. They disappeared after 1480.
As I said, the Spoerer didn’t do it.
Vuk etc says:
January 4, 2011 at 6:22
should cause you some concern. Data for NAP prior 1650 is scarce
I don’t waste time on NAP.
Pochas, exactly, too see a problem in the temp vs. solar activity you have to believe that a raise in temperature cannot dring[?] more decades during unusually strong solar activity.
Bob, Rain.
– a funny/interesting finding from E.M.Smith, the rain also just happens to follow temperatures way back rather well… that is except for the 20 ´century where the “rain-temperature-indicator” just stops to confirm the traditional temp records – Very well spotted by E.M. Smith:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/12/10/does-rain-call-giss-liars/
Water…. gate 🙂
And if you check out the water content in in atmosphere well surprise, the water-temp relation ship seems confirmed on the shorter scale, but certainly does not support that 2000 should be very much warmer than 1950 and thus that Solar theory should have problems:
http://hidethedecline.eu/pages/posts/feedback-positive-ndash-rdquowhat-makes-co2-heat-dangerousrdquo-29.php
K.R. Frank
Tree rings fail to support strongly rising temperatures too, thus supports Solar theory:
http://hidethedecline.eu/media/climategate/MannDeclineALLsmall.jpg
K.R. Frank
Corals appear to be warm-temperature-lovers:
http://hidethedecline.eu/media/corals%20barrier%20reef/nyc9.jpg
In this example, the Coral “temperature signal” actually shows higher signal recently than 1940, though, but even at the SH in the ocean, we here see an example of strong temperature dive after 1940, and that the rise after 1970 is not extremely much larger than the dive 1940-70 indicating a moderate warmer 2000 than 1940.
this little “coral gate” was taken from:
http://hidethedecline.eu/pages/posts/corals-and-the-great-barrier-reef-43.php
If droughts has anything to do with temps, US does not sopport higher temperatures 2000 than 1940, on the countrary:
http://hidethedecline.eu/media/droughts%20usa/h1.jpg
Rain in Australia appears temperature related, but cannot support higher temperatures 2000 than 1940:
http://hidethedecline.eu/media/droughts/AuastraliaRain.jpg
Melting from Greenland icecap Boxer 2009 does not show recent flow larger than 1930:
http://hidethedecline.eu/media/greenland%20temperatures%20measured%20and%20ice%20cap/c3.jpg
Antarctic UHI free UAH data, same story:
http://hidethedecline.eu/media/antarctic%20air%20temperature%20at%20lower/aaf.jpg
Tree rings combined with UAH shows temps 2000 = 1940 too:
http://hidethedecline.eu/media/medieval%20warm%20period/d7.jpg
Sea level rise again:
http://hidethedecline.eu/pages/posts/sea-level-rise-the-ocean-has-risen-constantly-for-150-years-51.php
Sea level added to the “wrong” graphs :-9
http://hidethedecline.eu/media/temperature%20proxies/g5.jpg
Temperatures Europe, Balling 1997 when UHI removed:
http://hidethedecline.eu/media/UHIworldtour/EuropeUHIBalling1997.jpg
etcetcetcetcetc…
Finally Check out Scaffetta / Solar theory:
http://hidethedecline.eu/pages/posts/solar-theory-ndash-temperatures-vs.-solar-activity-27.php
Leif Svalgaard says:
January 4, 2011 at 7:34 am
tallbloke says:
January 4, 2011 at 5:25 am
The last marriage which took place in Hvalsey church on Greenland was in 1408. They disappeared after 1480.
As I said, the Spoerer didn’t do it.
Nor did the Oort. The Wolf was the start of the trouble, then there was a 25 year improvement from 1325 to 1350. Then the descent into the Spoerer was the nail in the coffin.
http://tallbloke.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/tim-10be.jpg
And here some 0,4K warming adjustments of US temperatures after 1940:
http://hidethedecline.eu/media/temperature%20corrections/f8.jpg
Global 0,07K warming inserted after just combining records:
http://hidethedecline.eu/media/temperature%20corrections%20combined/ADJcombining7006recs.jpg
Is it now we should think that the conventional temperatures are so solid that they coulf be used to dismis Solar teory?
Radiosonde, raobcore: How high are 1940 compared with today?
Ok this is tropical:
http://hidethedecline.eu/media/temperatures%20measured%20from%20satelites%20and%20baloons/g4.jpg
Stalagmite: Notice that on this graph, the stalagmite – red- shows decline until it ends!
http://www.klimadebat.dk/forum/vedhaeftninger/stalagmite.jpg
K.R Frank
and how about a 0,2K difference between CRU and ERA40 GLOBAL over just a few decades…?
Now CRU if ROBUST so i can be used to dismis the whole Solar theory?
http://hidethedecline.eu/media/PERPLEX/fig60.jpg
from
http://hidethedecline.eu/pages/posts/part3-the-perplexing-temperature-data-published-1974-84-and-recent-temperature-data-184.php
Leif Svalgaard says:
January 3, 2011 at 6:33 pm
Robuk says:
January 3, 2011 at 4:07 pm
Why don`t you add CO2 to this graph, don`t bother I`ve already done it.
http://i446.photobucket.com/albums/qq187/bobclive/leif4.jpg
So you demonstrate that temperature change is not by the Sun. This is, however, old hat.
NO, I am saying that a steady increase in TSI from the early 20th century and remaining at that very high level will for a certain length of time keep the temperature rising. The TSI increase ended around the early 1960`s, that high level continued until the peak of solar cycle 23 around 2001 but the temperature stopped increasing in 1995 near the end of solar cycle 22 even though a warm PDO was dominant throughout and CO2 was still increasing. There are 15 years of level temperatures and the only forcing that has not increased during that time is the sun. The sun is the dominant factor.
It`s a travesty we can’t account for the lack of warming.
http://i446.photobucket.com/albums/qq187/bobclive/irradiance.gif
http://i446.photobucket.com/albums/qq187/bobclive/pdo-1.jpg
Suggestion for
Svalgaard, Cliver, Rouillard, Le Sager, Lockwood and McCracken;
get an e-conference going and find out what is Vukcevic up to.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/AllvsVuk.htm
And Bob, finally finally the strongest argument that rocks the robustness of your CRU and GISS data:
“How likely is it that so many data sources should have errors while GHCN based temperature should be correct?”
so-so
And the final blow to CRU + GISS:
How likely is it, that all these data sources just happens to fail in pretty much the same way? – A rather common “error-trend” that happens to take place accross sea-level, Rain, Drought, Glacier, Proxies and much more?
How likely is it that alle these data sources just “fails” in pretty much the same way?
At leastm this problem is big enough for GHCN based data (CRU+GISS) so that these should be handled with care.
K.R. Frank
tallbloke says:
January 4, 2011 at 8:11 am
“As I said, the Spoerer didn’t do it.”
Nor did the Oort.
Now, that we can agree on. None of the solar minima did it. The Earth’s climate did them in, regardless of solar cycles.
Vuk etc says:
January 4, 2011 at 8:32 am
Suggestion for Svalgaard, Cliver, Rouillard, Le Sager, Lockwood and McCracken;
get an e-conference going and find out what is Vukcevic up to.
If you think you have something, publish it.
Robuk says:
January 4, 2011 at 8:32 am
NO, I am saying that a steady increase in TSI from the early 20th century and remaining at that very high level will for a certain length of time keep the temperature rising.
The steady increase in TSI from the early 18th century and remaining at that very high level will for a certain length of time keep the temperature rising during the Dalton Minimum.
Frank Lansner says: “And Bob, finally finally the strongest argument that rocks the robustness of your CRU and GISS data:”
They are not MY data, Frank. They are established and published datasets with known deficiencies. So your argument beyond that point is unfounded.
******
Dave Springer says:
January 4, 2011 at 4:32 am
The water below the thermocline isn’t at 3.0C because that’s the temperature of maximum density. It’s at 3.0C because that’s the average surface temperature over an entire glacial cycle. It’s physically impossible for it to be at that temperature for any other reason.
******
I agree. Oceans are stratified & heat movement considerably limited, so the water stored below is a “relic” of at least the previous thousand yrs, depending on what the cycle-time of the deep water is. Even if it’s only 1000 yrs & doesn’t reflect the previous ice-age, it still shows there’s alot of near-freezing water accumulating in the oceans, enough to fill most of the ocean’s volume! Otherwise the deep water would be around the avg temp of the earth — 15C instead of 4C.
Leif Svalgaard says:
January 4, 2011 at 8:50 am (Edit)
tallbloke says:
January 4, 2011 at 8:11 am
“As I said, the Spoerer didn’t do it.”
Nor did the Oort.
Now, that we can agree on. None of the solar minima did it. The Earth’s climate did them in, regardless of solar cycles.
The way it’s looking to me and Vuk (I think) is that the solar magnetic activity plus the roving around of terrestrial magnetic anomalies add up to regionally strong changes in climate on the centennial scale. So, the Oort minimum wasn’t very pronounced in Greenland, and the Medieval warm period reigned long enough that the Greenland Viking colony established. Then the Wolf minimum and Spoerer minimum finished that episode.
You might remember that when you gave us a link a year or so back to a nice animation of the terrestrial magnetic anomalies reconstructed from 1500 (or was it 1600), I commented that the shift of one of the anomalies from Africa to South america seemed to coincide with their climatic shifts which were pronounced, and seperated by the timescale indicated by the anomalous magnetic traversal of the Atlantic.
tallbloke says:
January 4, 2011 at 11:33 am
seemed to coincide with their climatic shifts which were pronounced
‘Coincidence’ is the correct word. The magnetic field of the Earth has no influence on the climate as such [it might have secondary effects, e.g. on cosmic rays observed]. Regional variations even less. Vuk seems to think that the fields are generate near the surface, they are not, they are the results of convection in the liquid core 3500 km down. Spare me the nonsense, please.
Bob, you say about CHCN based data: “They are established and published datasets with known deficiencies. So your argument beyond that point is unfounded.”
You should be a politician 🙂
Beyond what is officially declared is unfounded you say…
1) Known problem: UHI
So how does Jones from CRU deal wit the known problem UHI?
I will tell you how: Jones says that they have skipped around 35 stations due to UHI problems. Besides that CRU does no UHI corrections. So in all the stations (incl cities) they use, they do no UHI corrections.
So yes, Bob that problem is known – but not dealt with.
Good enough for you Bob – ok thats your opinion, but certainly not a defended viewpoint that allows you to comand others to write and think like you do.
2) Known problem: Tree proxies
So how do we deal with the problem that tree proxies (practically all kinds of trees has mad a united front against the temperature data you know) do not match temperatures just like Solar activity, sea levels, glaciers etcetc?
Like maaaagic! They babtize the problem: “The divergence problem” ohooo!
And so they have delt with that.
And what then “causes” the divergence problem??
Ohh, its the sulphur in the air. Who cares that this sulfur in the air does only excist in near urban areas most tree samplea are from remote areas like Yamal etce.
But they have Bob Tisdale on their side still 🙂
Again, its a free world, but please RESPECT that other peoble certainly has other points of views!
3) Known problem: Altitude
Ok, Bob do you have documentation that shows that its a general worlwide trend that these temperature stations has been moved synchronically to higher and higher altitudes during the years 1900-2010 to legalize warming adjustments?
Or do you just accept that “proberbly” temperatures stations are allways moved up in altitude..??
4) Known problem: TOB, Time of Observation:
Ok, Bob do you have documentation that shows that its a general worlwide trend that these times are taken synchronically later and later in the morning etc accross all kind of states during the years 1900-2010 while these measurements were just ment for local wheater purposes?
– etcetc. and then mismatch with sea levels originally published, glaciers, rain, droughts etc etc are… “known problems” you accept. You sound SO like an AGW´er im sorry.
Well I just dont without any sound argumenting.
In my view you are far far from sceptical at many points, and thus I certainly do not think you are a typical sceptic at all. The problem is then, that you come to a SCEPTIC site and – as I see it – you simply want that other peoble write and think like sceptics often dont.
Hope you can answer 1-4) just very few of the known problems, show me that there is a reason why you accept all these known problems. Im a sceptic and need sound arguments. not “Known problems”!
K.R. Frank
And here some 0,4K warming adjustments of US temperatures after 1940:
http://hidethedecline.eu/media/temperature%20corrections/f8.jpg
############
those adjustments are absolutely required to get accurate records. If you do not do those adjustments ( The TOBS adjustment) You are combining records that were taken at different times of the day. Changing the TOB creates a KNOWN and MEASURED and VERIFIABLE artifact. Consequently it must be accounted for with an adjustment. The issue is the SE of the adjustment and not the adjustment itself.
tallbloke:
I have elsewhere described how variations in the mix of solar wavelengths and particles could be directed in along the magnetic field lines (as regards charged particles that is) so as to achieve maximum effect at the poles.
As you may know, I propose that variations in the mix then cause variations in chemistry at the top of the atmosphere so as to influence ozone concentrations above 45km. That then affects the vertical temperature profile so as to change tropospheric pressure distributions.
If magnetic anomalies themselves move around then I can envisage the point or points of maximum effect also moving around so as to influence the shape of the polar vortices and jetstream meridionality during periods when the sun is less active. To a lesser extent when the sun is active because more zonality reduces the scope for variations in the shape of the circulation whereas more meridionality increases such scope).
Some regions could therefore be affected more than others for particular configurations.
Does that help?
beng said:
” so the water stored below is a “relic” of at least the previous thousand yrs, depending on what the cycle-time of the deep water is.”
The length of the thermohaline circulation (THC) is said to be in the region of 1000 years or so as is the timespan from MWP to Modern Maximum with a dip in between for the LIA.
Elsewhere I have proposed that changes in the quantity of solar shortwave entering the oceans (due to cloudiness and albedo changes) would set up a discontinuity along the horizontal line of the THC surfacing approximately 1000 years later.
I think that that sort of background cycling above and beyond ENSO and PDO is required to explain multicentennial climate trends and also account for the failure of the solar/climate correlations on timescales of less than 500 years.
The solar/climate correlation is very good over 500 year periods but rather sporadic on lesser timescales.