Sunspot group 1158 produces an X class solar flare

Dave Springer says:
February 15, 2011 at 5:37 am
Squidly says:
February 14, 2011 at 6:57 pm
A little OT, sort of, but, Anthony, I am surprised that you haven’t posted anything about this (The Cloud Mystery – Documentary by Henrik Svensmark
http://www.climatechangedispatch.com/home/8608-documentary-the-cloud-mystery
I watched all 5 parts last night and was blown away. In my humble opinion, this is HUGE! .. It would really be swell to read comments on this blog about this documentary. I would love to read opinions about it from people that comment on hear, people that I respect.
I already knew about Svensmark’s GCR cloud regulation hypothesis but this film he made about it is wonderful and well worth watching. Hearing him describe the hostility he met from the CAGW community and how shocking it was to him is a great testimony to how climate scientists convinced of and/or perpetuating the CO2 myth are peddling ideological dogma not science. Those folks are so far off the path of science it’s doubtful they’ll ever find their way back.
http://s446.photobucket.com/albums/qq187/bobclive/?action=view&current=cosmicrays.mp4

James Mayo says:
February 15, 2011 at 12:45 am
Dynamite post, James. Maybe you should post it on each forum daily. 😉

Theo Goodwin says:
February 15, 2011 at 7:52 pm
Leif, we don’t scrap an entire theory on the basis of one false prediction
True, of course, but it is also true that one correct prediction does not:
[as Robert G. Brown says] “reduce any doubt that the events are causally correlated to near zero.”
And that was my point.
And my point wasn’t that if it happens it verifies it or if it doesn’t happen it falsifies it all at once (See: It’s true that no single event will be persuasive… above, and I apologize if I wasn’t clear) it was that if one expects it on the basis of a hypothesis and it happens, it is reasonable to increase one’s degree of belief in the hypothesis and if it doesn’t happen it is equally reasonable to decrease it. Over time, observing a series of predictions that succeed at a rate that rises above the statistical level of noise (the natural fluctuations in cloud cover under the null hypothesis that “solar state is statistically independent of cloud cover”) can reduce the p-value for the null hypothesis to where it is no longer a reasonable alternative. To be precise, as opposed to sloppy. Although arguably, the analysis of past data has already done that (as Svensmark shows) but the response on RealClimate was predictably enough to try to insinuate that he faked the data or otherwise cooked everything up so that they could continue to ignore the strong correlations he shows.
The real point is, as noted that this is a non-nonsense falsifiable, predictive hypothesis of events on relatively short timescales — there is no reason to think that a high GCR level today is going to affect cloud formation four weeks from now; the charged particle cascades and aerosol formation all seem to be real-time events and the particulates formed (probably) have a moderate half-life in the lower atmosphere. Thus every major flare, especially against a generally quiet background, provides an immediate opportunity to test the hypothesis, even though sure, it will probably require many such tests/events for the signal to rise unambiguously above the noise — or not.
CO_2, on the other hand, isn’t falsifiable as far as I can tell — negative or null results are simply reinterpreted as support for the theory. Unusually hot? AGW. Unusually cold? AGW again! Unusually stormy? You got it — AGW. For a meaning of the word “unusually” that as far as I can tell means “usually”, at least on a millennial timescale — unless one short-centers a PCA of 112 proxies in a way that amplifies bristlecone pines as erasers of the MWP and LIA, so that global temperature was basically flat until 1800.
My major problem with the AGW hypothesis is that so far its primary support has been appallingly bad science with hypotheses galore stated as if they were bald fact, generally with enormous political fanfare. I hate it when physics research (which is, fundamentally, what it is) starts to look like medical research with confirmation bias, cherrypicking, and horrendously poor statistical methodology the order of the day. Perhaps is it correct, perhaps not, but the correct statement concerning our knowledge of whether or not it is correct is “we don’t know”, just as the correct statement about just how warm it is today, on average, compared to the non-anthropogenically forced past is “well within 2 sigma” of the mean temperature over the Holocene.
So sure, I like it when I see strong correlations between things like solar state and global climate, especially over very long timescales and relatively short timescales — Svensmark shows both.
And sure — if a series of predictions based on the theory fails, so that the null hypothesis of “no correlation/no effect” remains a reasonable alternative, of course I’d reject (or rather, fail to accept) the theory. Isn’t that the whole point?
What will it take to reject CO_2 and AGW? Multiple decades where temperatures fail to rise (although CO_2 continues to rise) obviously hasn’t been enough. If we are entering a Mauder Minimum (or simply if the current maximum is very weak) then any fall in average temperature will be attributed to volcanos, a weak variation in forcing due to solar state, transient shifts in ocean currents or the PDO that mask the inevitable progression of AGW for ten, twenty, thirty years.
At this point whole careers have been built on AGW, a huge machine is devoted to studying it, it has politicians and eco-environmentalists around the world who have invested their entire credibility in it. I suspect that nothing will make them go “oops, never mind, sorry we were wrong, that’s science for you”. Although a Maunder Minimum and sudden plunge in global average temperatures to levels last seen in the 1600s and 1700s would go a long way…;-)
It is easy to see what the real problem is. I love to build theoretical/statistical models and have spent way too much time doing so, fitting curves to data to try to ferret out some numerology. One can clearly take the last 200 years of moderately accurate global average temperature and fit it by using atmospheric CO_2 as the primary variable — it isn’t quite a linear fit, but there is clearly a monotonic trend to both. Of course temperature hasn’t climbed monotonically or smoothly, while CO_2 has increased almost exponentially smoothly with lovely predictable annual modulation, so you need something to explain the rather strong fluctuations in temperature, multi-decadal deviations in both directions from monotonic increase . You therefore find something that might do so — solar variations, atmospheric sulphates, nuclear testing — that has the pattern of the variations and use it as a relatively small/secondary correction and voila! A decent fit.
Of course the problem occurs when one tries to apply the fit over the last 1000 years to the actual probable average temperature including MWP and LIA (as opposed to the MBH hockey stick). Suddenly one is forced to confront the fact that in the MWP there were no atmospheric sulphates worth mentioning and nuclear bombs hadn’t been invented and the anthropogenic CO_2 levels were basically zero — but damn, it was at the very least nearly as warm as it is today if not warmer.
Solar variations, however, were around back then, and were strongly correlated with the LIA as well, which is very difficult to explain with a dip in anthropogenic CO_2 or sulphur aerosols.
Then one is very naturally tempted to at least try to invert the statistical fit. What if it were solar variation that were the primary driver of global climate and CO_2 the minor modifier? Simply eyeballing the data one can see that this would work, and work damn well. Solar with a CO_2 modulator would work over the last 200 years at least as well as CO_2 with solar as a modulator — both would result in good fits (as is so often the case with nonlinear regression, what one gets even for a two component model depends on where one starts!) Over the Holocene, however, CO_2 as the primary modulator fails badly, obviously — so much so that it is perfectly clear that it can never be taken seriously as a global hypothesis until the primary drivers that determine global climate are accounted for and their background subtracted which we cannot do until we understand them which we don’t. Solar/GCR with CO_2 as a modulator (or neglecting CO_2 entirely) appears to work at least tolerably well over decadal scales (Svensmark), century scales (Lassen and Friis-Christensen, Solanki and Fligge), thousand year timescales across the Holocene (Bond et. al.) and there is at least a strong correlation over hundred million year timescales (Svensmark, again).
Whether or not Svensmark’s particular mechanism is correct, this correlation between solar state as evidenced by e.g. Be10 and C14 levels and various climate proxies is (in my opinion) almost certainly real — it has been reported by many authors and as far as I know contradicted by none. And it isn’t really surprising — the Sun is hardly the constant, quiet, passive entity that the hockey stick crowd make it out to be, it is a vibrant (or perhaps “vibrating”:-), dynamic, variable object that we are just barely starting to understand.
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Wow , this is exciting! I first started following solar data (thx to WUWT) in 2007, after the start of the extended minimum. So this the first time in the short life of my newest hobby that I’ve seen the 10.7cm radio flux go above 100. Some people might reckon that tracking 11 year solar cycles is sort of like watching paint dry, but I think it’s fascinating. I obsessively check the stats like a baseball fan burying his head in box scores after every game.

Ulric Lyons, I was really impressed with your comments about solar wind last summer. Hot, dry wind blowing Eastbound and I couldn’t help but say to myself its like its coming straight from the sun like Ulric said.