New solar reconstruction paper suggests 6x greater solar forcing change than cited by the IPCC

Alan D McIntire says:
May 10, 2011 at 6:15 am
Another reply to John Finn:
I put a pot on the stove, pour soup in the pot, turn the stove burner up to warm and leave it there- there’s no change in burner level over a period of time, yet my soup still warms. Evedently you’ve never warmed soup in a pot.
Evidently you aren’t aware that there was strong warming in the early 20th century. In other there words there was little or no lag. There was also supposedly cooling in the early 19th century after high solar activity during the 18th century – agin no lag is evident.
You need to make up your mind – is there a lag or isn’t there? If there is then the past solar/climate correlation would be less obvious.

“You need to make up your mind – is there a lag or isn’t there? If there is then the past solar/climate correlation would be less obvious.”
There seems to be little lag in the effect on albedo but it then takes a while for the effect of increased or decreased sunlight into the surface waters to become apparent over and above the interannual ENSO cycle and the multidecadal so called PDO cycle.
And there may well be longer low frequency oceanic cycles involving the thermohaline circulation.
So in effect the lag is variable as a result of other internal system features involving primarily the oceans sometimes supplementing and sometimes offsetting the solar effects.
So it is common sense that there will be variable lags due to an ever changing interplay between sun and oceans.
During the early and late 20th century the periods of high solar activity were by and large at the same time as the positive PDO so there was little or no lag in the air.
However in the mid 20th century the warming effect of the high level of solar activity from cycles 18 and 19 was partly offset and when sightly weaker cycle 20 came along the combination with a negative PDO gave a slight cooling.
Since 2000 the sun has been getting quieter and global albedo changed pretty promptly but the residual ocean heat content from the late 20th century is taking a while to dissipate. Nearly gone now though.

vukcevic, I certainly wouldn’t call 10Be “useless”, but I appreciate your caution about misinterpretation. I encourage you to acknowledge that wind drives your pet ocean currents.

Leif Svalgaard,
“John, you miss the point: there is a variable lag to match the record as the believer sees fit.”
Sometimes this impression should be attributed to complexity rather than bias, or lack of intellectual integrity. There are “lags” at several levels in the climate system. The coolest night time temperatures are often not reached until just before sunrise. The climate response to the solar cycle lags a year or over two years, per Lean, et al, and Camp and Tung. The climate commitment studies of Meehl, et al, and Wigley, et al. show that the mixing layer of the ocean achieves most of its response in the first one to three decades, but the deeper ocean was still responding after a millenia. See level rose most rapidly for centuries after the end of the ice age. There are other well documented lags in the earth system. isostatic rebound from the melting of the ice sheets is still occurring.
Can a solar maximum really be ruled out as a contributer to the warmest temperatures seen since the Medieval Warm Period, because of a plateau in activity reached as the a period of mid-century cooling occurred? Or could the climate response to the maximum have been delayed by more than just the thermal capacity of mixing layer of the ocean, something like the same uncertainty in aerosol forcing that allows models with sensitivities as disparate as 2 and 6 degrees C to “match” the recent warming and mid-century cooling. Even a solar maximum can be frustrated by aerosols. The CO2 hypothesis can’t get by without considerable help from aerosols, that is why the IPCC was so careful to group and evaluate natural and anthropogenic forcings separately. Classify aerosols with solar and CO2 starts looking small. Could that be selection bias?

John Finn,
“Look at the top RH graph in Fig 1 above. Where was the lag in ~1900? Surface temperature records show a strong warming (and pause) at the same time as the increase in solar activity. What about the Dalton Minimum? The Maunder Minimum which ended in ~1715? What about solar activity in the 18th century?”
Figure 1 does not have temparature. I think you misunderstand the nature of the lag. The land temperatures respond pretty quickly, it is the ocean state that lags. Coming out of a relatively prolonged cool period like the little ice age, the over all ocean heat content will be less than it would be after a short term excursion to the same temperature. Therefore if a variable warming forcing plateaus, the ocean will still be gradually getting warmer. This happened after the great ice sheets melted, the thermal expansion of the oceans continued for thousands of years because the oceans had been in such a deeply cold state. If a warming forcing dips but still is above the equilibrium state of the ocean and the ocean will keep on absorbing heat. The temperature dip may be deeper than it would have been with a warmer ocean, and if after the dip, the forcing reaches its previous level of forcing, the temperature may be higher due to the warmer ocean. Coming into the solar plateau at the midcentury cooling, the temperature should have continued noticably upward for a decade or so, and the mixing layer of the oceans should have continued heat uptake for a couple more decades beyond that. If the plateau in forcing continued, while the temperature effections would have been minimal, the thermal expansion of the oceans would have continued for centuries. But the climate system, of which the ocean is the major part, never reaches equilibrium because the climate is always changing. Once the mid-century cooling (which wasn’t caused by CO2 BTW), was over still high solar activity could once again resume bring the ocean up in temperature.
“I do think it’s possible that changes in solar activity cause a shift in weather patterns which give an apparent relationship, but assumptions about past climate have been heavily biased by observations in Europe and North America.”
Yes that is where most of the observations have been, but the trend in the science is to find more confirmation that these were global events.

Stephen Wilde wrote:
“The thing is that solar changes seem to alter the surface pressure distribution which has a large effect regionally but conceivably a small effect globally until much later due to the global effect of the oceanic lag times.
So the effect of solar changes on the air circulation and albedo is virtually instant and has a regional effect straight away. The global temperature change is subject to variable oceanic lag effects and only becomes apparent much later. After all, the immediate air circulation effects just send as much energy poleward as equatorward so it’s primarily just a redistribution. Hence the increase in both hot and cold periods especially in the mid latitudes. The global consequence has to await the subsequent manifestation of the increase or decrease of solar energy into the oceans.”
THERE’S NO LAG.

Paul Vaughan says:
May 11, 2011 at 7:11 am
“THERE’S NO LAG.”
The idea that there are no lags within the system seems bizarre to me when we need to consider ENSO, PDO and the Thermohaline circulation all of which alter the rate at which solar energy that has entered the oceans is then released back to the air.
One could say that that is not a true ‘lag’ being merely a product of internal system variability but it amounts to much the same thing.
Given that air circulation shifts have a rapid effect regionally but only a much later effect globally it seems to me that the surface temperature datasets are only a guide to the current energy distribution at the surface and no guide at all to the temperature of the entire system.
We need satellites for the latter.
Effectively the surface temperature datasets and the satellite datasets are measuring entirely different phenomena.
Quite a lot of rethinking should follow on from that.

Another IPCC assumption bites the dust.