Guest post by David Archibald
When I started out in climate science in 2005, the prevailing view in the sceptic community was that carbon dioxide-caused global warming was real but it wouldn’t be anything as bad as it was painted by the AGW crowd. Sceptics generally thought that climate was a random walk and at that stage we hadn’t quantified the carbon dioxide heating effect. Roy Spencer’s paper finding negative feedbacks from warming was at that stage two years off. At the time, I thought that climate was controlled by the Sun and set out to find the relationship. The relationship had been found by Friis-Christensen and Lassen in 1991, and I extended their work to use solar cycle length as a predictive tool.
Now has come the first paper from Northern Hemisphere scientists to use solar cycle length to predict climate. Three Norwegian researchers, led by Professor Jan-Erik Solheim of the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the University of Oslo, have just published a paper entitled “Solar Activity and Svalbard Temperatures”. It is available at: http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.3256
What these eminent scientists are predicting is significant: “We predict an annual mean temperature decrease for Svalbard of 3.5°C from solar cycle 23 to solar cycle 24 (2009–‐20) and a decrease in the winter temperature of ≈6°C.”
A 6°C temperature decrease in under ten years from the present day! This is significant at two levels. Firstly, it is going to get really cold very soon. This predicted cooling is calculated to have a 95% confidence level. Secondly, it gives the sceptic community a climate forecast that is based on physical evidence, with a statistician signing off. When the predictions of these three wise Norwegian are borne out, that is going to be a big thing.
Figure 3 from the Solheim paper is above. Forecasts for SC24 temperatures based on length of SC23 are given with 95% confidence intervals (diamonds with bars) for the year and winter temperatures. Temperatures over the rest of the decade will return to the early 20th Century.
This figure is from Willis Eschenbach’s post of 12th May, 2010. Location of Svalbard is marked by a snowflake and the North Pole is shown as a red star.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your statistics!
It’s like a breath of fresh air to see some calm science in relation to the climate, even with a quoted confidence level and the reasons for it.
What a change from the hysterical screaming that “The Sky Is Falling and you better believe it or you’re an evil heretical denier paid by Big Oil!!!” we constantly get from the “experts”.
Something I have always found strange is that any increase in ice in the Antarctic is dismissed as just being sea ice, but a reduction in sea ice in the Arctic is seen as critical. What is the difference?
David, good find. I love it when scientists actually make falsifiable predictions.
All the best,
w.
David with his observation of solar cycles has been a voice in the wilderness for years. It is pleasing for us and must be heartening for him to have some support. Well done David.
I have notice a 10-12 year lag in some other things. I believe Vukcevic has noticed the same. This would seem to fit a 10 year lag from lower latitude influence migrating to the arctic.
Still … 6 degrees is pretty damned cold. That puts things back to 1900 or so.
I think you would also see any decrease in the Antarctic being suddenly “critical” too. Basically the way it works is any warming anywhere is “catastrophic global warming” and any cooling anywhere is local weather.
Especially as more ice seems to cause more problems than less ice.
“A Russian fishing vessel with 32 people on board has issued a mayday call, after taking on water close to the Antarctic ice shelf.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-16204229
Willis, how can this be a good find as long as you over at tallbloke states that the Svalbard temperature series is crap? And here at WUWT as well (you know…) Making falsifiable predicitons when the basis is crap?
A general note: The fact that Polar Amplification works both ways can also be seen by plotting the trends in the zonal mean temperature anomalies (average temperature anomalies per latitude band) for the warming period of 1976-2010 and the cooling period of 1944-1976:
http://i54.tinypic.com/ruzbxh.jpg
And with the early warming period of 1917-1944 added:
http://i51.tinypic.com/2v8j1gg.jpg
The graphs are from the post “Notes On Polar Amplification”:
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2011/01/15/notes-on-polar-amplification/
Real research based on real time observations. Good work and not a model in sight.
Bad news for us earthlings if it works out to be correct. i will commend this paper to my ‘friends’ at Chris Huhne’s department because they think it is getting warmer because the IPCC say so.
“A 6°C temperature decrease in under ten years from the present day! This is significant at two levels. Firstly, it is going to get really cold very soon”.
6°C has always being quoted as the temp that initiates a full blown ice age. This prediction is not good.
11,500 years. An Ice Age is over due.
Long live Norway!!!
The very truth the Sun provokes the climate change on the Earth , but only it need know how.Numerous scientists are mistaken creating the predictions on base of previous happenings.
It need know the root cause of these phenomena.The science didn’t decipher one and ramble through numerous measurements.I have a solution, if any is interesting in this domain.
Nikola
The importance of this prediction is that it is testable within a short period of time and therefore the prediction is particularly useful.
Furthermore, the location of Svalbard is of importance. According to AGW most warming should be towards the poles. Svalbard is located within the Arctic circle and should therefore be one of the places on Earth where the effects of greenhouse warming is most felt. If natyral variabilty (due possibly to sun cycles) can overcome the greenhouse effect, it will partly demonstrate the weak sensitivity (if any sensitivity) to CO2.
We will have to wait a few years probably at least 5 before we can see whether the prediction is on course. It will be interesting and if it turns out correct, it will be a blow toi any treaties which are meant to come in effect circa 2020.
Dr. Archibald analysis should not be entirely accepted or dismissed.
– Solheim et al. (page4, Fig.2) “The strongest cyclic variations have periods 62‐68, 26, and 15‐17 years.”
These are also periods found in the much longer CET records as it can be seen in this graph http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/Spectra.gif ( last graph from http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CET-NVa.htm )
– According to the Arctic’s four centuries long geomagnetic profile there is as yet not entirely understood apparent correlation to the solar activity, which is more likely to be the cause than the precession of the Moon’s orbital nodes.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CET-NAP-SSN.htm
See also alternative article with alternative interpretation by the same authors on the same research. (Received 16 June 2011)
http://www.klimarealistene.com/web-content/11IdentifyingNaturalContributionsToLateHoloceneClimateChange%20%20HumlumEtAl%20%20GlobalAndPlanetaryChange%201012pdf.pdf
to the one Dr. Archibald quotes:
Submitted to Advances in Meteorology Sept. 14 2011
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1112/1112.3256.pdf
“When the predictions of these three wise Norwegian are borne out, that is going to be a big thing.” – Yes, no reason to wait for the actual data. Their predictions will be borne out! No doubt about it! Global cooling is coming because this non-reviewed paper on the arXiv said it would get colder in Svalbard!
1. Cold in Svalbard doesn’t mean in will be cold everywhere on the planet, does it?
2. Are thjere any other inputs to predictions other than solar cycle length?
3. Would the AMO going negative impact on this??
Dirty pool, asking the Warmists to produce a projection vetted by a professional statistician! You know there just aren’t that many senile statisticians still around for them to recruit. And they’re even harder to pin down and comprehend than pre-senile ones.
Real Science, with the data and mathematics to back it up!
What a breath of fresh air, and chilly air at that!
please tell this to australians PM Gillard she is hell bent on destroying australia with a $26 carbon tax GOD HELP US
My only issue is the statement “when the predictions….”. It should really say “if the predictions…”. But I do agree that testable predictions are what science is all about.
URGENT let AW kniw!
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2011/and-the-leaks-go-on/
The real test of scientists is what they say if is actually falsified. Some ad hoc hypothesis like “The cooling is indeed there but it hid somewhere in the depths”
Professor Solheim’s name, translated from Norwegian, means “sun home” – how apposite.
Even more interesting is the recent paper by Liu Yu et al. in Chinese Science Bulletin 56:2986-2994 (2011). They analyze temperatures from 484 BC to 2000 AD from a long time series of tree ring widths in Tibet with the caterpillar-SSA technique. The first half of the series is used to calibrate the representation and the second half for veification. All the wiggles are apparently reproduced, including the strong minimum in the 17th century (LIA), and also the increase in the 20th century is obtained (without AGW!). They forecast a maximum around 2006 and then a strong decrease in temperature until 2068 (similar to the 20th century increase in Tibet, about 2 deg. C). They ascribe the climate variations to the sun on the millenium time scale, combined with atmospheric oscillations on the decadal time scale. (A note about the uncertain influence of AGW and the need for further investigations is added at the end, perhaps to satisfy the referees?)
Caterpillar-Singular Spectrum Analysis appears to be a very powerfull tool for forecasting, different from but related to principal component analysis. We found a software package on the net and reproduced closely the Liu results for Tibet. We also tried it on Svalbard data with results very similar to those obtained by Solheim et al from a wavelet analysis. Judged from the Liu et al. paper one needs a longer time series for reliable prediction for the coming century.
This will be very interesting to follow, actual empirical data from observed temperatures. Who would have thought that the Sun had any effect on climate (sarc) certianly not the IPCC.
Simple to follow and verify with real data. Let’s see, Hansen is predicting about the very opposite so the divergence between these two should show in as short as two to three years, maybe even shorter.
Thanks David, needed something like that.
If these predictions pan out at all, it would certainly put a dagger through the heart of the AGW hypothesis, which to my mind would be a very wonderful thing. But given what they are predicting I have to hope that they are entirely wrong. I’d rather deal with any but the most hyperbolic of the IPCC’s projections coming true and argue the potential for catastrophe, than face a world which is possibly colder than the worst of the LIA.
The same prediction was made as early as 1989
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Landscheidt
This analysis involves a correlation with a time delay, and is spread over only 10 cycles. I would feel more confident if (A) a plausible physical mechanism were presented for the time delay, and (B) if a longer database (more cycles) were used to perform the analysis. The analytical chemist in me is *extremely* wary of extrapolations, and it is to the author’s credit that he does not attempt to speculate beyond the next single cycle.
One of the greatest failures of the IPCC reports in my eyes was the attempt to speculate the entire 21st century from a crude meta-analysis of data from only the 20th century.
Nikola Milovic says:
December 16, 2011 at 2:00 am
The very truth the Sun provokes the climate change on the Earth , but only it need know how.Numerous scientists are mistaken creating the predictions on base of previous happenings.
It need know the root cause of these phenomena.The science didn’t decipher one and ramble through numerous measurements.I have a solution, if any is interesting in this domain.
Nikola
Nikola, can I introduce you to Paul Vaughan, I’m sure you two will get on famously!
Well, it does, that’s how “global mean temperatures” work, innit ?
Dave Wendt says:
December 16, 2011 at 4:48 am
If these predictions pan out at all, it would certainly put a dagger through the heart of the AGW hypothesis, which to my mind would be a very wonderful thing. But given what they are predicting I have to hope that they are entirely wrong. I’d rather deal with any but the most hyperbolic of the IPCC’s projections coming true and argue the potential for catastrophe, than face a world which is possibly colder than the worst of the LIA.
————————-
The real difference is today’s technology will allow the majority of the people in modern, up-to-date countries to have a strong chance to survive a LIA.
Note: The world better watch out, because we in the USA have hydrocarbons and we’re not afraid to use them.
So will this be good or bad for polar bears?
chuck nolan says:
December 16, 2011 at 5:40 am
The real difference is today’s technology will allow the majority of the people in modern, up-to-date countries to have a strong chance to survive a LIA.
Note: The world better watch out, because we in the USA have hydrocarbons and we’re not afraid to use them.
————————-
At the risk of sounding serious, has anyone done any credible studies on this? It isn’t just the colder average temperature another LIA will bring, but the decreased precipitation and consequent effects on crop production.
I have not read the paper. When I do, I will be reading it with a critical eye towards whether or not the first encountered pathology was RULED OUT as the actual reason for the statistical correlation (a false positive). An extrinsic system such as Solar cycles are long enough to encompass several Earth bound intrinsic oceanic and atmospheric cycles that are well known temperature drivers. I sincerely hope that extrinsic and intrinsic data matching does not form the bulk of the paper.
crosspatch says:
December 16, 2011 at 12:37 am
I have notice a 10-12 year lag in some other things. I believe Vukcevic has noticed the same.
Yes indeed that is the case, even more so a bit further south for the Iceland’s area. The Reykjavik long term both winter and annual temperatures can be forecast with a good degree of certainty and it is not an encouraging prospect for our Icelandic friends as I show here:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/RF.htm
based on my Arctic/North Atlantic research.
Alan Statham says:
Global cooling is coming because this non-reviewed paper on the arXiv said it would get colder in Svalbard!
If you had bothered to even look at the paper, you would have seen that it is already scheduled for publishing in March 2012, and of course it’s peer reviewed (they even thank an anonymous referee in the acknowledgements section).
And even your joke about Svalbard and global cooling just shows how ignorant you are: Svalbard temperatures are closely related to AMO, and so are NH temperatures, and most of the variance in world temperatures is found in the NH, so Svalbard may indeed be an indicator of what’s to come…
Rhys Jaggar says:
December 16, 2011 at 2:57 am
1. Cold in Svalbard doesn’t mean in will be cold everywhere on the planet, does it?
2. Are thjere any other inputs to predictions other than solar cycle length?
3. Would the AMO going negative impact on this??
Svalbard temperatures are AFAIK correlated with the AMO, and thus with the world temperatures. ENSO and AMO going negative simultaneously? I’m beginning to think that in just a couple of years, we’ll have UN representatives jetting around the world trying to figure out how to combat the very immediate and real damage done by global cooling…
Six degrees cooler winters? <Three and a half degrees overall? In a decade? Dear God! OK, I’m not daft enough to believe in the IPCC’s linear extrapolations, I’m inclined to believe that cooling is imminent, but the threat of figures like those is enough to make me hope there’s something amiss in their calculations. If not, this gets serious.
“Gareth Phillips says:
December 16, 2011 at 12:25 am
Something I have always found strange is that any increase in ice in the Antarctic is dismissed as just being sea ice, but a reduction in sea ice in the Arctic is seen as critical.
What is the difference?”
Environmental politics.
It is very interesting to read “The Little Ice Age”. While the author is a CO2/AGW sort, he makes an interesting observation in the rear of the book. As we proceeded into the little ice age and the Maunder minimum, the amount of cloud cover painted in pictures increased. People would have no reason to do anything other than paint what they saw on a day to day basis. Very indirect evidence that the GCR hypothesis has something to say for it.
Looking at the authors, I note one of them is Ole Humlum.
Humlum has in the past claimed CO2 does not act as a forcing based; upon incomplete data from a single highland Greenland ice core – GISP2 – without including the modern instrumental record. Including the full set of data shows his approach to be invalid. Not a promising background…
I am glad to see that they have put forth some predictions (albeit for a single location – one island), over the course of the annual cycle (rather than the ~17 years Santer identifies as necessary for a statistically significant identification of trends), and for a decade in the future. It will be interesting to see if they get things right.
There were 4-6 degree C swings in Canadian winter temperatures over the last 10 years in many parts of Canada , but this was not happening in the rest of the world. However when AMO and PDO indicies both go negative then one can expect late 1970,s kind of climate , not an ice age . This could happen as soon as 2015. Regionally [ the north and inland areas ] a 4 -6 degrees C drop in winter temperatures is quite possible .PDO has already been negative since 2007 and AMO just went negative in November but this may not yet be a sustained negative but a seasonal dip. In my opinion look for the cooling of the Arctcic to initiate the 30 year cooler period .
It is excellent that the authors are making predictions. A few brave other souls are doing the same. Judith Lean, whom I admire, thinks it will be about half a degree warmer in 2 to 3 years (worldwide), based on her understanding of solar cycles. As for me, I have no idea yet.
This is the way science should be — instead of badmouthing other scientists, tell us what your models predict. You may be right, you may be wrong, but it is the way science should be. We can judge your model, your understanding, in part by results.
Gareth Phillips says:
December 16, 2011 at 12:25 am
Something I have always found strange is that any increase in ice in the Antarctic is dismissed as just being sea ice, but a reduction in sea ice in the Arctic is seen as critical. What is the difference?
There’s a good overview at:
http://nsidc.org/seaice/characteristics/difference.html
The Arctic is a mass of sea ice surrounded by land, the the Antarctic is ice-covered land surrounded by ocean – opposites, really. Antarctic sea ice almost completely disappears every year and then reforms – increasing Antarctic sea ice (over the next few decades) was predicted at least 10 years ago, due to changes in wind patterns and melting Antarctic land ice making the Antarctic ocean less salty (fresher water freezes more easily). Note that since Antarctic sea ice vanishes in the summer any changes in sea ice extent there has little effect on albedo or for that matter feedbacks.
Antarctic land ice looks to be decreasing, on the other hand. And the Arctic ice cap is decreasing too, at an accelerating rate (see http://psc.apl.washington.edu/wordpress/research/projects/arctic-sea-ice-volume-anomaly/) – 2011 ice volume looks to be as low or lower than 2007. As that year-round Arctic ice goes away there is a direct effect on decreasing summer albedo – hence a warming feedback.
M.A.Vukcevic says:
December 16, 2011 at 6:23 am
crosspatch says:
December 16, 2011 at 12:37 am
I have notice a 10-12 year lag in some other things. I believe Vukcevic has noticed the same.
One solar cycle. Spooky or what?
KR says:
December 16, 2011 at 7:14 am
Humlum has in the past claimed CO2 does not act as a forcing based; upon incomplete data from a single highland Greenland ice core – GISP2 – without including the modern instrumental record.
How would it make sense to mix the GISP2 proxy with the instrumental record – and for which station, then? (Greenland Summit?)
KR dsays:
“Humlum has in the past claimed CO2 does not act as a forcing based; upon incomplete data from a single highland Greenland ice core – GISP2…”
That’s Doctor Humlum to you, chump. GISP2 is recognized as being among the most accurate proxies for CO2 and temperature during the past several hundred thousand years.
KR complains about extending the instrumental record, in an attempt to whitewash the deceptive “hide the decline” shenanigans by the “Team”. The fact that Dr Humlum did not play the same game is to his credit, and his excellent website is well worth a look.
As usual, when the alarmist crowd cannot dispute the evidence, they engage in ad-hominem attacks like KR’s. That might work at pseudo-science blogs like realclimate and skepticalscience, but ad-homs get called on the carpet here.
Anyone here want to give 20 to 1 odds that this temperature drop will happen? Thats how most of the Public will interpret a 95% confidence interval.
Lets not champion what we so often criticize from the proponents of AGW. This is an interesting scenario and one that deserves further review. However we must make clear to the Public that a 95% confidence interval does not imply an equivalent probability for the projection ultimately being realized in the real world.
What makes me a skeptic is an aversion to overly confident claims. What makes me angry is using confidence intervals to “persuade” non statisticians. I am coming to believe that confidence intervals do more harm than good with respect to the communication of science.
Polar Vortex initiation and teardown dates? These are tied to tropospheric warming which is tied to heating due to radiation? A decrease in radiation means much more efficient cooling while a increase in GCR means less water to block outbound radiation? Leading to a very strong vortex?
I also seem to recall a comment this spring about Arctic Polar Vortex getting so cold that we had a real Ozone hole for the first time in a very long time. Hmm.
Remember that Antartica is cold due to its very strong Vortex.
I wonder if the Vortex is the key??
Smokey is quite correct, the proper reference is “Dr. Humlum, professor of physical geography at UNIS”. Mea culpa on that, I did not intend offense by improper addressing.
Espen, Smokey
The problem with GISP2 (which is valuable data!) is that Dr. Humlum on his website represents one high latitude high altitude local proxy (GISP2) as a global record. Current work in temperature reconstructions use >1000 proxies, not just one. And in addition Dr. Humlum fails to show recent warming (over 2C) at that proxy location, which induces a huge offset from the global temperature record. He also fails to include the modern instrumental CO2 data, showing just the ice core CO2 data, while arguing against a relationship between modern CO2 levels and modern temperature changes.
In short, he assumes a single proxy was global, and argues against recent changes in CO2 and temperature without showing recent data. This does not give me confidence in his work…
—
In regards to the paper discussed in the opening post – I am again pleased that Dr. Humlum and colleagues made testable predictions. I have not yet, however, seen a ‘length of solar cycle’ correlation to climate (other than TSI changes), prove out, so (personal opinion) I’m a bit skeptical in that regard.
Regarding solar cycle length (to be a bit more focused on topic) – there’s little in the literature to support any correlation with climate change:
Benestad 2005 (http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2005…/2005GL023621.shtml):
“There have been speculations about an association between the solar cycle length and Earth’s climate, however, the solar cycle length analysis does not follow Earth’s global mean surface temperature. A further comparison with the monthly sunspot number, cosmic galactic rays and 10.7 cm absolute radio flux since 1950 gives no indication of a systematic trend in the level of solar activity that can explain the most recent global warming.”
Lassen 1999 (http://www.dmi.dk/dmi/sr99-9.pdf) comes to much the same conclusions – there are other papers out there as well.
Solheim et al 2012 makes significant claims to the contrary, and they will have to prove their conclusions correct.
The BS alarm is ringing. Going by the figure above, the curves match with variations of only a few degrees in most cases. The prediction involves a large rapid reversal. It seems to me, most likely there would be an inertia factor (e.g. heat capcity) that would limit the speed of the shift. A temperature decrease may be likely. I wouldn’t be surprised if it did occur. I wonder whether it can happen as fast as predicted. That dramatic temperature swing is a bold prediction. It will be interesting to watch what happens over the next decade.
Jimmy Haigh says:
December 16, 2011 at 7:32 am
One solar cycle. Spooky or what?
Not at all. I have on numerous occasion pointed out that the geomagnetic filed is well correlated to the solar cycle, and the solar cycle is preceded by the interplanetary index IHV by anything up to 8 years, and this is well recognised in the solar science by most scientists from Hathaway to Svalgaard.
IHV index is “derived from magnetometer data recorded at two points on opposite sides of Earth: one in England and another in Australia. IHV data have been taken every day since 1868…. When a gust of solar wind hits Earth’s magnetic field, the impact causes the magnetic field to shake. If it shakes hard enough, we call it a geomagnetic storm.”
Why advance? “The underlying physics is a mystery.”
Here is what that shake looked at the eve of the recent Japan’s devastating earthquake:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/Japan.gif
Nothing spooky, it is that science is moving at the snails pace, anything odd and the academic scientists withdraw into their cosy little shells.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/gms.htm
I take any prediction for catastrophic cooling, or warming, with a grain of salt.
Advances in Meteorology
Volume 2009
Volume 2010
Volume 2011
Volume 2012
WOW! You mean this journal has been around for over 2,000 years?
Hmm, let’s see;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindawi_Publishing_Corporation
“Founded in 1997, Hindawi currently publishes more than 300+ peer-reviewed scientific journals as well as, more recently, a number of scholarly monographs. However, as of 2011-09-07, only 22 of the journals currently have a listed impact factor. The company has its headquarters in Cairo and an office in New York. Hindawi is one of the leading publishers in the open-access publishing movement.”
http://journalseeker.researchbib.com/?issn=16879309
“Start year:2009”
So;
Volume 1 = 2009
Volume 2 = 2010
Volume 3 = 2011
Volume 4 = 2012
And in only, what will be, at most, four years of publication, how many “Special Issues” will “Advances in Meteorology” have? 49? No, not quite, but nine, three in 2010 and six in 2012.
Nice to see that E&E has some competition for incompetent publications.
“…good or bad for polar bears?”
Maybe they’ll go back to Ireland.
ScienceDirect: …Irish Origin for the Modern Polar Bear…
I still have not seen persuasive arguments that warming at the scale being discussed is bad.
Cooling at this scale will be seriously bad.
The dismissing of this paper is already occcuring at RealClimate with the pompous egotists resorting to ridicule. True believers they all are.
http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/observation_images/ssmi1_ice_ext.png
KR says:
And the Arctic ice cap is decreasing too, at an accelerating rate (see http://psc.apl.washington.edu/wordpress/research/projects/arctic-sea-ice-volume-anomaly/) – 2011 ice volume looks to be as low or lower than 2007. As that year-round Arctic ice goes away there is a direct effect on decreasing summer albedo – hence a warming feedback.
KR, you must be confused. Albedo is a surface function not a volume function. The link above that I provide shows that the surface ice for 2011 is (as of 12/15/11) just slightly below the standard deviation for the long term average. And during the full year was at times at the standard and at times below. The arctic surface ice does not appear to be “decreasing” “at an accelerating rate” as far as albedo is concerned.
Skimming over the paper I don’t see a lot of discussion about solar and climate physics, except for a brief mention of albedo and wind patterns etc. But I think the authors made it perfectly clear that this paper is primarily focused on investigating _statistical correlation patterns_ in temperature series records.
Nothing wrong with that approach. They saw a pattern in historical data which they believed expressed a predicable truth about the climate in that region of the world. So they made a hypothesis and based some predictions on that hypothesis. We’ll find out in a few years if the predictions come true. That’s all according to the scientific method.
But if it does get colder, as they predicted, we’ll still have to judge if it was a ‘lucky guess’ or a genuine truth about Nature. Also have to be careful about extrapolating these findings to other regions or eras.
Time will tell.
At the risk of sounding serious, has anyone done any credible studies on this? It isn’t just the colder average temperature another LIA will bring, but the decreased precipitation and consequent effects on crop production.
How can one get anyone interested in this? Everybody “knows” that we’re about to melt down, not freeze up. The real problem is that if we freeze up instead, a) we will be completely unprepared for it, I mean really, really unprepared; b) they will come for scientists the world over with pitchforks and torches as several billion people starve.
To give you a small hint of the problem, consider wheat. The bulk of the world’s wheat is grown in the cooler northern climates — Europe, China, Canada, the US, Russia. Something like 1/2 to 2/3 of this crop is vulnerable to late frost, early frost, midsummer frost, or the drought conditions that often accompany NH cool periods. One “year without a summer” such as historically has occurred when cool cycle conditions coincide with e.g. volcanic aerosol cooling and this crop would be decimated. The cost of bread and livestock feed and (downstream) meat would skyrocket. The cost of beer would go up (damn you, frozen barley!). We could see real starvation and economic collapse in first world countries, not third world countries, as we are all overpopulated for a colder, less productive world.
I think we could survive a single bad (cold) summer, just as we can and have survived single bad (hot) summers and dry summers, but generally the hot and dry has proven to be regional and more associated with e.g. ENSO and the like. Global cold would be so very, very bad.
Volcanoes should not be ignored. In the 1800s there were not one, but two major volcanic — not “eruptions”, explosions: Krakatoa and Tambora. Tambora blasted 38 cubic miles of earth and ash into the air and was heard 2000 miles away; Krakatoa added another 5 cubic miles, and dropped global temperatures by 1-2C in a single year. We haven’t had anything comparable to either one — Mount St. Helens was less than 1 cubic mile.
FWIW, Tambora has been waking up again recently. And there are many other volcanoes that are quite capable of exploding, as did Krakatoa, Tambora, Mt. St Helens, with little warning and great violence.
Truthfully, human impact on the environment is nontrivial in some cases — arguably the Sahara desert was created by the introduction of goatherding into an environment that barely got by binding moisture in the first place, and massive cutting of forestland and replacing it with farmland or city certainly affects local climate. However, our impact is dwarfed compared to the impact of natural events that we can no more control than a flea can control an elephant. We live with such control over our local environments that we forget how vulnerable we are to things like natural climate fluctuations and how little control we have, really, over them.
Of course, sooner or later Nature — I mean the real thing, not the journal — is there to set us straight. The list of events that are probable on a centennial timescale and that can have an enormous effect on human populations is long: Pandemic is probably at the top of the list, but volcanic explosions, “bulls-eye” coronal mass ejections, catastrophic earthquakes (and associated tsunamis). Mere drought — not “human caused” drought, but perfectly natural drought — is inevitable on a century time scale (look at the history of major droughts of the last two or three centuries).
I don’t think people appreciate how good warm is. They take it for granted, even as they underestimate the ability of the planet to buffer and thrive under warm cycle weather. Historical evidence suggests that the really dangerous instability is to cold cycle behavior — once one passes a tipping point there, it’s 90,000 years or so until the next warm cycle. If we do move back towards ice age behavior, little or not, in the great wheat baskets of Canada, the US, Europe, Russia and China, if we do have the cold cycle NH regional droughts that dominated e.g. the Younger Dryas, the first three consecutive cold years that ruin crops will kill billions of years. We might manage one year. We might survive two. Three would exhaust our food stockpiles, destroy a major fraction of the world’s economy as people spend any amount of wealth in pursuit of food as opposed to the luxuries that are now its primary basis, cause world war and massive misery and despair.
Warm is good. Cold is, on the other hand, quite terrifying.
rgb
mkelly
Agreed – direct feedbacks are from ice area/extent, not volume. But thinner ice is more susceptible to bunching up or being driven out of the Arctic by weather, so over the longer term (as weather/currents vary up and down) less volume means less coverage.
If the weather and currents of 2007 were in operation this year, we would have lower extent based upon the ice volume. And the volume keeps decreasing…
ShrNfr,
Lets be careful when using paintings as a proxy for clouds– the rise of impressionism as an example focused artists on certain light conditions- so was there a change in clouds or did painters select certain cloud conditions because they afforded the “right” light? Or did they pick cloudy summer days because it was too hot otherwise given the fashion of the time or fear getting a tan and destroy the illusion of blue-blood? Or did they etc, etc, etc? Interesting but IMHO not useful.
I understand skeptics pleasure at seeing evidence and predictions of cooling, as it falsifies the warming catastrophes of the establishment’s CO2 war. We should never show joy at the re-emergence of cold. With populations reaching 7 billion, cooling cannot improve crop yields and new fertilizers and GM stock do not compensate for a shorter cooler growing season. There will be much suffering under such a scenario. We may see all the gains, brought about by modest warming erased.
What preparation for cold does ANYONE see being actively considered? Where are the giant UN silos located that are full to the rim with emergency food stocks? When will a Joseph, with the multi-colored coat, appear with directions to stockpile grain for seven years of lean?
Instead, all I see is more plans to burn grain, to establish more carbon credit. I hope they all choke on it. GK
On a slightly different topic, I check
spaceweather.com daily to note sunspots, solar flux and the current solar wind. It seemed like the sunspot number generally correlated with the solar flux but lately the solar flux seems considably higher than the appearance of the sun’s face would justify.
I love a conspiracy as much as the next guy so I wonder if that’s the way it should be?
A lot of good comments here.
A lot to digest but there seems to be a 60-65 year cycle and the change is due.
If one of the longer cycles is also due, change we can’t believe?
Previous link to WUWT showed that the earth is now entering a near circular orbit. As such, the prospect of an early return to an ice age is remote. This does not prevent the climate from varying and we are probaly entering a cold period. If solar activity remains low, as suggested, then we may be in for a long period of cooling but not sufficient to trigger an ice age. We may have to hope that the warmists are correct and more CO2 will lift the temp. I believe that in the next few years we will need it. But I enjoyed the post – hope I’m around for the next ten years or so to see how it all works out! Keep burning the carbon! The sad truth is that we simply don’t know enough to make a reasonably educated guess. I have come to the conclusion that climeatology is to climate science as astrology is to astronomy.
Robert Brown says:
December 16, 2011 at 9:08 am
==============
I share your thoughts.
To prepare for that, should we burn our food stocks?
To echo comments above, I just finished reading “The Little Ice Age” by Brian Fagan.
I’m thinking that it’s kind of a bummer that we can’t elevate global temperatures in any measurable way by burning carbon. The IPCC’s 3 – 6 degrees per doubling might have been quite handy for the next big freeze.
Gareth Phillips says:
December 16, 2011 at 12:25 am
Something I have always found strange is that any increase in ice in the Antarctic is dismissed as just being sea ice, but a reduction in sea ice in the Arctic is seen as critical. What is the difference?
___________________________
Confirmation Bias
http://nsidc.org/images/arcticseaicenews/20111004_Figure6.png
KR says:
“And the volume keeps decreasing…”
KR per the link provided above the volume of multi-year ice has been getting larger each year since 2007. In January when all the first year gets added to second and second gets added to third etc there will be a considerable jump in volume of multi-year ice. So again I think you are not correct in your “keeps decreasing” mode.
Things are getting curiouser and curiouser regarding just how tightly coupled terrestrial climate and sensible weather are with space weather. Someone shared with me very recent articles about the Black Box findings regarding the Air France crash off of Brazil. Based on the descriptions and transcripts, it appears that there was overt plasma discharge around and INSIDE the plane prior to all h__ breaking loose with the instruments and controls. After the discharge they smelled strong ozone odors. I’m thinking it was Blue Jet direct hit.
RE: Robert Brown says:
December 16, 2011 at 9:08 am
Nature bats last. (I love to roll out this fabulous old Greenie phrase and wave it in various faces).
Nikola Milovic says:
December 16, 2011 at 2:00 am
The very truth the Sun provokes the climate change on the Earth…. I have a solution, if any is interesting in this domain.
Nikola
_____________________________
You can submit the story/article for WUWT here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/submit-story/
My Husband does technical writing/editing and has offered to fix your article so it is easier for others to read.
Mod see new e-mail address in box and send to Nikola please.
[REPLY: Done. -REP]
I’m looking at Fig.3 and I’m seeing warming if anything. What’s up?
Gareth Phillips says:
December 16, 2011 at 12:25 am
Something I have always found strange is that any increase in ice in the Antarctic is dismissed as just being sea ice, but a reduction in sea ice in the Arctic is seen as critical. What is the difference?
__________________________
The differende is hypocricy.
Njorway says:
December 16, 2011 at 1:49 am
“Long live Norway!!!”
Yes, but it will be because of oil,gas, and hydro powerplants, not windmills or solar panels.
Kohl: What’s up indeed. Current looks lower that recent past which was the point, I think.
mkelly – “KR per the link provided above the volume of multi-year ice has been getting larger each year since 2007”
To be blunt, _no_. I believe you are misreading that chart.
The image you linked to graphs percentages, not total volume, unlike the data I pointed you to (http://psc.apl.washington.edu/wordpress/research/projects/arctic-sea-ice-volume-anomaly/).
There’s certainly year-to-year variation in percentages, and as ice volume gets lower I would expect the variance in that percentage data to increase (with less ice, small volume changes will get magnified as percentages). But the trend in old ice, particularly 4-5+, is very distinctly _down_.
In the early 80’s roughly 35% of the ice volume was 5 years old or older. Now it’s only about 5%…
David A said:
“When the predictions of these three wise Norwegian are borne out, that is going to be a big thing.”
——
I think there is a bit of over-confidence in this statement. Probably better to have said “If the predictions of these three…” in looking at their paper in more detail, it appears that the correlation between solar cycle length and temperatures of the following solar cycle is much weaker after about 1980 (especially in summer and spring), and this has previously been pointed out in other solar cycle length/ temperature studies.
I happen to be one who believes the sun was largely responsible for most of the short-term (i.e non-Milankovitch) climate variability prior to our modern era of rapid greenhouse gas build-up, and I definitely believe that solar cycle length is a good general way to see the correlation with temps, but I also see that the correlation begins to weaken around 1980 or so. It is still there, but another signal, most likely the anthopogenic one, is replacing that solar dominance. So, it is likely we will see some cooling based on the solar cycle length increases in SC23, 24, etc. But this forcing to the cool side will be tempered by the longer-term forcing to the warmer side from anthropogenic greenhouse warming.
As I wrote at RealClimate, we now have a collection of predictions for the upcoming 2 decades, though some of the predictions are called “scenarios”, models, or projections. As time goes by, we shall learn which of the many predictions turns out to be the most accurate. It will be one of the most exciting epochs in the history of science. The total worldwide research effort is and will continue to be huge, spurred in part by worries over climate change, and in part by natural scientific interest. Let a thousand schools of thought contend! (only Mao didn’t really mean it.)
This prediction is interesting because it doesn’t require a wait until 2100 to be proven of disproven, but there are some things to bear in mind:
* The link between the length of the solar cycle and the temperature during the following cycle is weak at best for series (elsewhere) prior to about 1850, so either the relationship after is a coincident or the relationship is temporal and could end at any time.
* The observations for the Svalbard meteorological station only go back to 1975. The 1912-1975 period is a reconstruction. For great parts of the series data from stations several tens of km away have been used, stations which may be in quite different climate zones, and even observations from Greenland or just interpolations, and though there are data from Longyearbyen a few km away for quite a few years, temperatures in the town and at the airport are known to differ quite a bit due to the topology, and not necessarily in a systematic way. Temperature has been observed officially both at the airport and in the town for just two years, which is not that much to base the homogenisation on. I discussed this with Humlum a few years ago, who has spent many years in Longyearbyen, I believe, and he gave me a 9 year private temperature record observed just a few hundred meters from the old official sites in Longyearbyen, and that suggested that the reconstructed series might be nearly 1 degree off (too cold) both during the very warm 20’s and 30’s and the cold 60’s. Still, there can be no doubt whatsoever that the reconstruction shows the warming and cooling periods correctly. Only the exact amplitudes seems a bit uncertain.
* The current winter has so far been fairly mild and doesn’t seem to follow the cooling trend of the previous couple of winters, but that could of course still change. The fjord is still ice free (but that’s not exceptional in December).
I think a 100 year record is a bit too short to establish a certain relationship between solar cycle length and the temperature. The prediction of Solheim et al. might turn out to be correct, but I don’t think I’ll be fully convinced that they’re then right for the right reasons. It will add some credibility to the hypothesis, though.
What Robert Brown said.
Maybe now I’m going to have to pay closer attention to my wife when she talks about moving to a warmer climate. And here I was counting on global warming to stay in the Pacific Northwest.
KR says:
But the trend in old ice, particularly 4-5+, is very distinctly _down_.
The link I provided showed the 4-5 year ice was down, but failed to note in what I said and the graph shows that when updated in January all the first year becomes second, the second becomes third, etc. It will not be until 2013 when any first year ice that was left from 2007 can get to the 5 year mark and be added. But the graph shows an upward total of 1st, 2nd and 3rd year ice. So my point remains: it does not keep decreasing.
“Nice to see that E&E has some competition for incompetent publications.”
So your gold standard for publications is the Vatican Printing Office?
mkelly – “KR per the link provided above the volume of multi-year ice has been getting larger each year since 2007″
Do you understand the difference between percentage composition (the graph you pointed to) and total volume (which I pointed to)? If you do, then you are trying to shift the discussion from ice volume to %.
Furthermore, do you understand short term variations versus a longer term trend?
Ice volume, as I said, is decreasing.
Robert Brown says:
December 16, 2011 at 9:08 am
How can one get anyone interested in this? Everybody “knows” that we’re about to melt down, not freeze up. The real problem is that if we freeze up instead, a) we will be completely unprepared for it, I mean really, really unprepared; b) they will come for scientists the world over with pitchforks and torches as several billion people starve…..
………..
G. Karst says:
December 16, 2011 at 9:36 am
….What preparation for cold does ANYONE see being actively considered? Where are the giant UN silos located that are full to the rim with emergency food stocks? …..
__________________________________________________
We are seeing the preparations for changes in the World Food Supply. Unfortunately they are not the ones Joe Sixpack would like to see. China, the middle east oil countries, large corporations and hedge funds are buying up large tracts of land in Africa and South America. George Soros is buying up lots of US farmland as is the Army Corp of Engineers.
Whether food is the next big “Investment Bubble” or if it is something much more ominous based on undisclosed scientific knowledge I do not know. Either way having the financial sector messing with the food supply like Goldman Sachs et all did in 2008 creating food riots, I consider that a major problem.
Nice Mea Culpa from Clinton but it did not get rid of NAFTA or the WTO nor did it stop anyone especially the World Bank from considering food as a money making commodity and to heck with the farmers trampled or peasants starved.
Interesting that while the World Bank and her banking buddies are screaming about global warming they are at the same time buying land near the equator just as Al Gore bought ocean front property while screaming about the sea level rise….
I am glad that David has done a lot of research on the subject and testified to Congress. Thanks David.
The Food Bubble: How Wall Street Starved Millions and Got Away With It
http://harpers.org/archive/2010/07/0083022
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/7/16/the_food_bubble_how_wall_street
FARMLAND Grab
http://www.pri.org/stories/world/africa/hedge-funds-buy-massive-tracts-of-farm-land-5343.html
http://farmlandgrab.org/
{warning alarmist site but basic info is true}
http://seeker401.wordpress.com/2011/06/30/george-soros-buying-up-flooded-farmland/
mkelly – Also note that 2007 was one of the low spikes in ice volume, melting off a lot of multi-year ice. It is entirely unsurprising that as 2008-2010 ice ages it will change the percentages.
However – this does not override the ongoing decline in total Arctic ice volume. Yearly variation will (as should be obvious) vary the percentages of ice at each age. But that yearly variation around the trend does not change the long term trend of decreasing ice volume.
I think you are not seeing the forest for the trees…
Robert Brown says:
December 16, 2011 at 9:08 am
b) they will come for scientists the world over with pitchforks and torches as several billion people starve…..
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
It is not just the scientists. They will burn the Universities and the banks to the ground while they are at it. History has taught us an angry mob is nothing to fool with and both the Tea Party republicans and the Occupy Wall Street democrats agree they hate the banks.
Large corporate farms and companies like Monsanto could also be targeted.
There has ALREADY been one incident.
Please, do not fall into the Obama administration trap of equating Occupoopers with the Tea Party folks. Tea Party gatherings have always been civil, public-spirited, and responsible, quite unlike the robotic chanting, irrational anarchism, mindless destruction, and even violence that have marked the OWSers.
Now what would happen in the event of severe food shortages in this country is another story; you might well see angry mobs at a level far beyond anything in our current experience. All the more reason, even if dire predictions of ‘global cooling’ are unlikely, to start discussing how we would deal with a crisis of that magnitude, and what we can do now to be ready. The first job is to sweep the ‘global warming’ hysteria off the stage and into the ash can of history. Warm is good; cold is bad.
First step: Get to the candidates running for public office. Maybe some of them will wise up.
/Mr Lynn
R. Gates;
I think there is a bit of over-confidence in this statement.>>>
Like your over confidence taking a bet with me regarding Al Gore’s on air experiment? Or your over confidence in stating that the globes were superflous? Or your over confidence in asserting that the experiment would produce the results illustrated when even a cursory examination of the set up revealed that the source of the heat was an IT lamp and by all the known physics of the last couple of centuries could not possibly produce the results illustrated? You mean like that?
R. Gates;
But this forcing to the cool side will be tempered by the longer-term forcing to the warmer side from anthropogenic greenhouse warming.>>>
You seem so confident in that statement. Given your demonstrably weak grasp of the physics involved, perhaps you should reword in such a fashion as to reflect that this is simply a contrived opinion on your part to continue the AGW meme, and actually has no basis in science.
Indigo Jones long range weather forcasting in australia used the sun and moon and past history he passed away a number of years ago but you look up his life on the web
I been posting too much on the computer threads. That would be an IR lamp, not an IT lamp 🙂
KR says: “And the Arctic ice cap is decreasing too, at an accelerating rate (see http://psc.apl.washington.edu/wordpress/research/projects/arctic-sea-ice-volume-anomaly/) – 2011 ice volume looks to be as low or lower than 2007. As that year-round Arctic ice goes away there is a direct effect on decreasing summer albedo – hence a warming feedback.”
It’s actually not that simple. One should note that KR’s link leads to an arctic sea ice chart that is based on modeling:
“Sea Ice Volume is calculated using the Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS, Zhang and Rothrock, 2003) developed at APL/PSC.”
Also, note that the albedo of open water at high zenith angles, as found at the poles, overlaps the albedo of ice. “Old ice,” for one thing, often exhibits surface effects from weathering and particulates (such as Chinese carbon) that lowers its albedo. Open water during winter has a much higher emittance than ice, and loses heat faster. There will always be ice at the poles in winter. Nor is Arctic ice loss solely related to putative AGW temperatures. Wind and sea currents can accelerate ice loss via transport out of the Arctic sea. It’s not as simple as KR seems to assert.
jorgekafkazar – Ice in the winter (during the Arctic night) isn’t going to affect albedo. Lack of ice in the summer, on the other hand…
“the albedo of open water at high zenith angles, as found at the poles, overlaps the albedo of ice… Old ice,” for one thing, often exhibits surface effects … that lowers its albedo.”
High zenith angles also interact with surface angles – i.e., waves and snow ridges. Note that snow has an albedo of 0.9 (0.8 for more textured Antarctic snow, though), while water in the visible wavelengths has an albedo of 0.1 at 60 degrees, <0.2 until you exceed 75 degrees, and is <0.8 until you reach an angle of about 85-88 degrees – and with waves, you just don't have a flat surface. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albedo – It would require a _lot_ of dirt to reduce snow albedo to the level of ocean water albedo.
So no, nothing (when examined closely enough) is simple. But the overall picture still holds.
—
Re: PIOMAS and models – the PIOMAS method is constantly being checked against submarine soundings, ice cap cores, and other direct observations. Every discussion of the uncertainties of that method that I have seen indicate that it may be conservatively overestimating ice volume. If you have disagreements with their methodology, feel free to point them out, though – I’m sure Zhang and Rothrock would love to refine their technique.
—
Agreed – currents and weather hugely influence volume and extent on a yearly variation basis. That said, however, a lower trending ice volume is far more susceptible to being washed out of the Arctic basin or piled up…
KR,
The North Pole has been ice free during the Holocene, and it may well be ice free again, since the planet is still warming from the LIA. So what? It’s natural variability.
What you are avoiding is claiming that anthropogenic CO2 is the cause of Arctic ice decline. Smart. Anyone who claims that is operating on an evidence-free belief system.
And I might add that the reason alarmists get a tingle running up their leg with Piomass is because of the scary Piomass chart, with the wild y-axis that makes it look like the Arctic will be completely ice free within the next twenty minutes. The antidote is a good healthy dose of John Daly.
R. Gates says:
December 16, 2011 at 12:01 pm
But this forcing to the cool side will be tempered by the longer-term forcing to the warmer side from anthropogenic greenhouse warming.
———————————————————————
Thank you Nostradamus.
You talking about that inexorable, immeasurable non-deviation from the mean ??
Came across this paper today (one Keith Briffa initially said should be rejected for publication with a single sentence review in email 0084.txt. My guess is they jiggered it around to show the current period to be warmer than the MWP and that was enough to get it through review by “the team”)
Anyway:
http://www.jaakkoharjuvaara.com/LUONTO/2009_Helama_et_al_Journal_of_Quaternary_Science_vol_24.pdf
Summer temperature variations in Lapland during the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age relative to natural instability of thermohaline circulation on multi-decadal and multi-centennial scales.
Would tend to validate the notion of coming cooling. Bottom line of the paper is:
Pamela Gray (December 16, 2011 at 6:12 am)
“An extrinsic system such as Solar cycles are long enough to encompass several Earth bound intrinsic oceanic and atmospheric cycles that are well known temperature drivers.”
Yes, we all know the atmosphere & ocean drive the seasons Pamela. (/sarc)
Beware the hazards of anomaly-think.
Espen (December 16, 2011 at 6:28 am) wrote:
“most of the variance in world temperatures is found in the NH”
So asymmetry in solar input over the terrestrial year matters tremendously …and this is exactly what the data say (…but of course most people prefer abstract conception to observation)..
Smokey says:
December 16, 2011 at 4:37 pm
“The North Pole has been ice free during the Holocene, and it may well be ice free again, since the planet is still warming from the LIA.”
Exactly how far back to precise records go, anyway? Something tells me KR is drawing extravagant conclusions from a very small sample size. I’ve never seen any of the curves at most a little more than a decade old.
Is this a typical case where a warming advocate is trying to force a fight on ground of his own choosing, based on assumptions which are unverified?
Not of a lot of clear thinking going on here. Solar cycle length is nonstationary. (That means it doesn’t stay at one length.) Ask a mechanic if drive wheels rotate at the same rate as the crank shaft. They don’t. Why? Differential transmission. So coherence is in the rate of change. The point people are missing is that frequency splitting of dominant terrestrial modes by solar cycles CHANGES over time. At some point in time, there will be some capable people who get serious enough to realize this is what the data say. (No theory — 100% observation.)
M.A.Vukcevic wrote (December 16, 2011 at 8:16 am) wrote:
“science is moving at the snails pace, anything odd and the academic scientists withdraw into their cosy little shells.”
Well said Vukcevic. I remember a prof boasting to a class about how impossible it would be for him to get fired. With a great sense of humor, he stressed that an abstract narrative only has to be “cute” to become accepted & popular among academics. Easy safe street at the ivory tower. None of the stimulation of real cut throat jungle threats we face daily in the private sector business world. Academics are truly brilliant with abstraction, but they need outside help to see nature as it’s actually observed.
Carl Sagan and Steven Schneider claimed the same thing in the 1970’s when we were getting colder yet CO2 emissions were climbing rapidly.
Oh, and the above was apparently in a published peer-reviewed paper at the time. Physics worked the same then as it does now. Why the difference? Politics.
Bart – “Exactly how far back to precise records go, anyway? Something tells me KR is drawing extravagant conclusions from a very small sample size. I’ve never seen any of the curves at most a little more than a decade old.”
Well, you might look at records since 1953 (over 50 years) (http://nsidc.org/sotc/sea_ice.html, in particular http://nsidc.org/sotc/images/mean_anomaly_1953-2011.png) – or since 1900 (http://www.ccrc.unsw.edu.au/Copenhagen/Copenhagen_Diagnosis_FIGURES.pdf – Fig. 13), – perhaps over the last 1450 years (Kinnard 2011, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v479/n7374/full/nature10581.html).
I think that’s more than a decade or so, don’t you?
Before someone deliberately misrepresents what I wrote about asymmetry, let me be crystal clear: I’m NOT referring to north-south asymmetry on the sun. The asymmetry is over the terrestrial year. The phenomenon is known in some fields as aliasing (in this case physical aliasing), but some might prefer to call it a modulation in the context at hand. Aliasing of the solar cycle shows up in many of the geophysical variables we regularly discuss here. Beware metrics of solar-terrestrial relations that ignore (a) terrestrial seasons & (b) changing solar cycle length.
Regarding my previous post – the middle figure is both models (1900 on) and observations (1950’s on), not measurements from 1900, my apologies – the last one, however, is from an extensive bit of work going back 1450 years.
Don’t fall for the latest Fenton Communications generated popular bandwagon. What often happens in cases like these is Monsanto provides seed and a crop is produced. Then the state then collects the seed produced by the cotton plant during ginning and attempts to hand out that seed the following year and it does not sprout because these varieties do not produce viable seed.
Then the local ag minister says it’s not his fault, the seed came from Monsanto (which the first generation seed did).
Regarding Arctic ice – Also see Kinnard et al 2008, http://www.agu.org/journals/ABS/2008/2007GL032507.shtml, where they note the expansion of the seasonal ice range since 1870.
Again, more than a decade…
M.A.Vukcevic says:
December 16, 2011 at 8:16 am
Not at all. I have on numerous occasion pointed out that the geomagnetic field is well correlated to the solar cycle, and the solar cycle is preceded by the interplanetary index IHV by anything up to 8 years, and this is well recognised in the solar science by most scientists from Hathaway to Svalgaard.
IHV index is “derived from magnetometer data recorded at two points on opposite sides of Earth: one in England and another in Australia. IHV data have been taken every day since 1868…. When a gust of solar wind hits Earth’s magnetic field, the impact causes the magnetic field to shake. If it shakes hard enough, we call it a geomagnetic storm.”
Why advance? “The underlying physics is a mystery.”
You are a bit confused. You confuse IHV with the aa -index, and there is no mystery in how either is generated: e.g. http://www.leif.org/research/IAGA2008LS-final.pdf
Sometimes, especially during the declining phase of the cycle, coronal holes are strongly recurrent [i.e. they live for several rotations of the sun]. It is thought that this is related to the polar fields of the sun, the holes being extensions of the polar fields, so the recurrent activity might be a measure of the polar fields which are a good predictor of the strength of the next cycle. So, no mystery there either. The trick is to pick the right recurrence peak if there are several [which there were this time around – pick the wrong one and your prediction is wrong].
Paul Vaughan says:
December 16, 2011 at 8:30 pm
The asymmetry is over the terrestrial year. The phenomenon is known in some fields as aliasing (in this case physical aliasing), but some might prefer to call it a modulation in the context at hand. Aliasing of the solar cycle shows up in many of the geophysical variables we regularly discuss here. Beware metrics of solar-terrestrial relations that ignore (a) terrestrial seasons & (b) changing solar cycle length.
There is no such aliasing ‘over the terrestrial year’. Only cyclomaniacs get confused over changing cycle lengths.
KR, yes, ice has been low. There is NO indication that it is any lower now than it was in the 1930’s because we didn’t have satellite coverage then. First of all while ice was generally declining, it is well-known that 2007 was not a melt event due to temperature. It was a wind anomaly that blew a huge amount of the ice out into the Atlantic. There was a very large loss of ice in 2007 but that was not due to any commensurate warming of the sea surface. That said, one must be careful of sea surface temperatures for the Arctic when there is less ice, for obvious reasons. If you have, say, half the surface area covered by ice this year compared to last year, this year’s “sea surface temperature” for the arctic ocean is going to be higher even with a similar water temperature. It’s pretty darned difficult to correct for.
That said Arctic ice seems to lag by some years what is going on in the rest of the world based on historical behavior. We generally started down globally in temperature only in 2004 at the end of the late 20th century warming. It will take a while for that to reach the Arctic.
At this point I think it is fairly well recognized by a lot of different people reaching their conclusions independently through different research that we appear to be poised to experience a significant drop in temperatures. At the same time such research as Mann’s “hockey stick” has been completely discredited at this point. Tisdale shows in his link above that in the Arctic there is no significant difference between the early 20th century warming and the late 20th century warming. We know with certainty that ice recovered from that event.
There is absolutely no observational evidence that we are experiencing any unusual Arctic conditions. Any claim of catastrophic warming is speculation. Based on natural cyclical patterns seen since the middle 19th century, it is much more likely that we will see 30 years of cooling in the Arctic than any significant warming. The research of CRU and others pointing to catastrophic AGW has already been discredited based on observational divergence from their speculation in addition to questionable data and methods. With every passing year the divergence from the models grows. There is a growing body of literature that suggests we may be headed for significant Arctic cooling. I am willing to see how the next 10 years or so pan out.
KR says:
December 16, 2011 at 8:26 pm
“I think that’s more than a decade or so, don’t you?”
What are the sources of the data? How were they spliced together? How many declines or advances were “hidden”, how many fudge factors and biases were introduced, when disparate data records turned out to be inconsistent where they overlapped?
We’re rather justifiably suspicious these days of what goes into the sausage.
Leif Svalgaard says:
December 16, 2011 at 8:51 pm
You are a bit confused. You confuse IHV with the aa -index,
No sir, notice the quotation marks. I was quoting directly your solar colleagues Dr. Hathaway and Wilson, as still available at the NASA’s website.
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2006/21dec_cycle24/
(paragraph 3 onwards with accompanying clearly marked illustration).
A 95% confidence interval…….Okay Vikings, hand them oars back into the stores, the Greenland trip is cancelled for a bit!
philincalifornia says:
December 16, 2011 at 5:40 pm
R. Gates says:
December 16, 2011 at 12:01 pm
But this forcing to the cool side will be tempered by the longer-term forcing to the warmer side from anthropogenic greenhouse warming.
———————————————————————
Thank you Nostradamus.
You talking about that inexorable, immeasurable non-deviation from the mean ??
———
No, I’m talking about the inevitable, measurable deviation from the temperatures caused by natural forcings when human forcings are added.
KR says:
December 16, 2011 at 7:14 am
“Looking at the authors, I note one of them is Ole Humlum. ”
Oh yes!!! Maybe he smokes? Maybe he believes in God? Maybe he had a seminar once for Statoil? (Yes, as you all know out there; Statoil is the GOVERNMENT Oil company in Norway), or perhaps he questions the Big Bang Theory?
Who knows? So don’t believe a word of what he is saying, don’t check his curves, nothing, I tell you!
Just like Isaac Newton, going to Trinity College, and all……..
I’m not sure if this important paper on the the study of solar cycle length has been mentioned here, but it gives great detail on the natural fluctuations in the length’s:
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0606426
The bottom line is the SCL seems to have a strong natural variability of About 188 years, and some other lessor cycles at about 40 and 87 yesrs, which, to the attentive, has several implications, not the least of which means we are at a period in solar cycle length similar to the Dalton minimum. The other implications of course would make Carl Smith quite happy.
M.A.Vukcevic says:
December 17, 2011 at 1:14 am
No sir, notice the quotation marks. I was quoting directly your solar colleagues Dr. Hathaway and Wilson, as still available at the NASA’s website.
That Hathaway is confused does not mean that you should be too, especially when being told by the inventor of the IHV index [me] that that description is wrong. It pays to actually read the references I have given, which you clearly have not bothered to do. Bad form, I would say. Wouldn’t you in your heart agree?
Leif Svalgaard (December 16, 2011 at 8:55 pm) wrote:
“There is no such aliasing ‘over the terrestrial year’.”
You are incorrect. Check the data a LOT more carefully.
You’re going on abstract misconception. I’m going on observation.
http://www.exploredata.net/
I would love to see someone dump all of the climate datasets into this program.
Willis Eschenbach says:
December 16, 2011 at 12:28 am
“David, good find. I love it when scientists actually make falsifiable predictions.”
Falsifiable prediction?
What the heck is that supposed to be? Predictions are, by definition, falsifiable.
Trivial statements like “I predict either rain or no rain tomorrow” is not really a prediction but rather a statement of fact.
In science, at least in Karl Popper’s philosophy of science, hypotheses are what must be falsifiable. In other words the hypothesis must predict something which, if found to be wrong, falsifies the hypothesis. The classic example Popper used is “All swans are white”. This can never be proven as it is impossible to guarantee that in no obscure corner of the universe a non-white swan isn’t lurking there. Popper’s point is that for a hypothesis to be scientifically valid it need not be provable so long as it is disprovable. Thus the hypothesis that all swans are white is a valid scientiific hypothesis because the observation of a single non-white swan falsifies it.
Got it? Write that down.
So what you really wanted to say is you like it when scientists make predictions and/or you like it when scientists make falsifiable hypotheses.
All the best,
w.
Leif Svalgaard says:
December 17, 2011 at 7:02 am
That Hathaway is confused does not mean that you should be too,
Thanks Doc
Great quote! It’s already on my SSN page .
One thing at a time. Only yesterday I was ‘cloning’ some stuff from: Long-term variation of geomagnetic activity, I; the IHV-index
@R. Gates (December 17, 2011 at 5:50 am)
Some of the variability at Hale subharmonics is due to beats of solar cycle nearest-harmonics with dominant terrestrial temporal modes.
For example, terrestrial season cannot be ignored due to the massive north-south terrestrial asymmetry in variance (due to ocean-continent heat-capacity contrast & ocean-continent geometry). (Note for readers lacking stats background: Leverage is a concept covered in part 2 of Stat 101. Ignoring gradients invites severe, paradoxical data misinterpretation.)
The data indicate with crystal clarity the towering importance of changing seasonal spatial contrast, mercilessly razing laughably naive “uniform 0.1K” solar-terrestrial narratives that have been foolishly & blindly defended by abstractly-misconceiving ‘solar experts’ (who need serious help from climatologists with the concept of thermal wind). In defense of society & civilization, taxpayer-funded abstraction artists need to be called firmly on such egregious errors. (Under present circumstances collegiality can’t take precedence.)
I appreciate your interest in the topic. There remains a tremendous amount of work to be done. There’s plenty of opportunity for sensible parties from across several disciplines to cooperatively share the load.
Regards.
Leif Svalgaard says:
…. coronal holes are strongly recurrent [i.e. they live for several rotations of the sun]. It is thought that this is related to the polar fields of the sun, the holes being extensions of the polar fields,
Yes, it appears that polar rotation is the strongest component
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/Ap-maxSpec.htm
Any additional clarification or correction for the graph?
crosspatch says:
December 16, 2011 at 8:34 pm
Gail Combs says:
December 16, 2011 at 1:26 pm
Don’t fall for the latest Fenton Communications generated popular bandwagon….
________________________________
I was using it as an illustration of an angry mob in the present day. Monsanto is very much disliked for what has been seen as taking advantage of local farmers. In this case “Truth” does not matter when you are being beaten.
If you want another illustration take the witch hunting during years when the crops are poor.
Am I right in thinking that the idea of polar amplification means that their would be a death spiral? If that is correct then KR please explain how the Arctic Ocean recovered from its previous ice-free conditions during some summers of the Holocene (~11,000 year BP).
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007AGUFMPP11A0203F
http://geology.geoscienceworld.org/content/21/3/227.abstract
I’ll keep quiet about the effects of soot for the meantime.
Paul Vaughn,
Thanks for your thoughtful and thorough reply. The next 20 years promise to be the most interesting in terms of our advancement in our knowledge of climate dynamics, one way or another.
Rogers, M.L.; Richards, M.T.; & Richards, D.St.P. (2006). Long-term variability in the length of the solar cycle.
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/0606/0606426v3.pdf
“The resulting (O-C) pattern was normalized by subtracting the linear trend in the data. This trend was found by fitting a least squares line to the (O-C) data.”
Comical. Did anyone notice what went wrong with their conception there? (Hint: anonaly-think.)
The OIW (optimal interval width) determination section is also comical, but I give the authors full credit for realizing the issue is with conventional metrics that don’t capture core patterns.
“Phase Dispersion Minimization (PDM) […] produces better results than the FFT in the case of non-sinusoidal data.”
These authors are far more aware than most others of the potential for summary misinterpretation (for example in the absence of careful diagnostics).
I wasn’t aware of the newer version of this paper. Thanks R. Gates for pointing it out.
@R. Gates (December 17, 2011 at 10:11 am)
I want to start working with academics again.
Paul Vaughan says:
December 17, 2011 at 7:36 am
You are incorrect. Check the data a LOT more carefully.
You’re going on abstract misconception. I’m going on observation.
I know the data intimately having studied this for 40+ years. There is no support for any of your claims.
M.A.Vukcevic says:
December 17, 2011 at 9:10 am
Any additional clarification or correction for the graph?
Basing anything on such a short time series is not reasonable. Compute the spectrum for all Ap since 1844.
Paul
Many authors are misled by inaccurate spectral analysis. No two cycles are the same, but there are two very accurate ‘fundamental’ oscillating periods as the sidebands equidistant from a central frequency :
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/SSN-Vfspec.htm
I shall write more on this, subject to the SC24 V-formula developments.
Leif Svalgaard says:
………
I used daily Ap-max not the average value. More than 10 rotations was sufficient enough to determine that the strongest component comes from the polar regions, at the same time identifying period of polar rotation as 29.3 days.
Jimbo says:
December 17, 2011 at 9:48 am
Am I right in thinking that the idea of polar amplification means that their would be a death spiral?>>>
“polar amplification” is a misnomer designed to mislead. There’s no such thing because it implies that the poles somehow “amplify” the effects of warming (or cooling) which is bull. They just react to any given change in radiance according to their temperature. The formula for an ideal black body (and the earth is close enough to ideal for the purposes of this discussion) that you can use to calculate temperatur of any given surface at any given equilibrium power input (from radiance for example) is calculated by P (in watts per meter squared) being equal to a constant times the temperature in degrees Kelvin raised to the power of 4. The equation reads:
P=5.67*10^-8*K*k*k*k
So it follows that an increase of say 4 w/m2 at a temperature of 233K (-40 C) is going to be several degrees, while an increases of 4 w/m2 at a temperature of 313K (+40 C) is going to be a tiny fraction of a degree.
So, there’s no such thing as “polar amplification”. The poles, which are cold, respond with larger temperature fluctuations to a given change in energy input (regardless of source) than do warm areas.
This is another reason why the whole CAGW meme is so misleading. Not only do the poles not amplify anything, consider what this means from the perspective of global warming being “true”. What would it imply?
It would imply that we would expect very little change in temperature at dat time highs in summer in the hottest areas of earth. We would expect the most change to be in night time lows, in winter, in the coldest areas of earth. The temperature records of GISS and HadCrut show this to be the case. The tropics vary 0.2 degrees and the poles 4 or 5 degrees. But does it make a lot of difference to life in the arctic if night time lows in January fluctuate from -45 to -40 and back again?
I think not.
M.A.Vukcevic says:
December 17, 2011 at 11:25 am
I used daily Ap-max not the average value. More than 10 rotations was sufficient enough to determine that the strongest component comes from the polar regions, at the same time identifying period of polar rotation as 29.3 days.
No, there is not enough data to generalize to all times [hundreds of years, tens of cycles]. It happens to be correct, but not because your plot shows it, but because when we examine ALL the data that is what we see. This is a common mistake that amateurs make, to generalize based on too little data. It could just be a random fluke for 2011 only, the Sun is messy.
@crosspatch
Is that taken directly from the 1971 Rasool paper he co-authored?
The I’ve read that one of the problems with the conclusions was an estimated CO2 sensitivity that was too LOW, compared to other estimates by a factor of THREE ( and noted in the footnotes, as suggested by referees)
Didn’t Schneider retract those conclusions a couple years later?
Samboc,
From here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/16/polar-amplification-works-both-ways/#comment-832772
“6°C has always being quoted as the temp that initiates a full blown ice age. This prediction is not good.
11,500 years. An Ice Age is over due.”
That is the predicted yearly mean change for a location.I think is over optimistic.3 degree C is more likely.
No we are not overdue for a new glacial age.The Milankovitch cycle indicates that we are in Climate Autumn part of the cycle.It has been cooling for around 4,000 years now.The SUMMER insolation at 65 degrees North has been running in negative territory for about 3,000 years.
Glacial age is coming near now.
It is the summer cooling trend in the far north that matters.
I wonder if David Archibald can supply the summer temperature predictions in place of the yearly mean temperature changes?
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/Ap-maxSpec.htm
dr. L.S ” It happens to be correct, but not because your plot shows it, but because when we examine ALL the data that is what we see !
That is more than good enough for me.
“11,500 years. An Ice Age is over due.”
By the way.The Interglacial period is already 16,000 years old.
I’m surprised there wasn’t a post about the 100 whales trapped by ice:
http://www.alaskadispatch.com/article/will-russian-icebreaker-make-it-time-save-100-whales-trapped-arctic-ice
KR: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/16/polar-amplification-works-both-ways/#comment-833074
Come on KR!
The climate at Antarctica has been about the same for the last 14 million years.There is no way it lose much of anything.Because it is at the South Pole.It is encircled by a COLD circular ocean current that blocks out most of the warmer water.It is well below freezing year round for around 98% of the continent.
Here is chart that illustrates it well:
http://www.c3headlines.com/2011/12/ipccs-claim-that-antarcticas-ice-sheets-are-melting-due-to-global-warming-is-found-to-be-fraudulent.html
Since Greenland and Antarctica has 99% of the worlds glaciers total.There is little else left for easy ice melting.It is simply too cold for much of any melting to be concerned with.
They easily survived the warmest part of the interglacial period.That was over 8,000 year ago now.
Leif Svalgaard (December 17, 2011 at 11:03 am) wrote:
“I know the data intimately having studied this for 40+ years. There is no support for any of your claims.”
You’re incorrect.
M.A.Vukcevic says:
December 17, 2011 at 12:16 pm
dr. L.S ” It happens to be correct, but not because your plot shows it, but because when we examine ALL the data that is what we see !”
That is more than good enough for me.
And that is the problem with you. Such acceptance is not good science [or science at all]. So, you should accept it because that is what I told you [based on all the data], not because you found it for 2011, which should not be good enough for anybody.
Sunsettommy says:
“Glacial Age is coming near now.”
——-
Define “near”. Not likely in the next 10,000 years at least.
davidmhoffer (December 17, 2011 at 11:41 am) wrote:
“They just react to any given change in radiance according to their temperature.”
In the polar night??
It’s about circulation. The highest variance is in winter.
Too much focus on averages. Not enough on time rate of change of equator-pole spatial gradients.
I suggest changing abstract conception to match observation.
Word to the wise:
Shooting the messenger doesn’t help when your conflict’s with the data.
KR,
incredibly writes:
“Humlum has in the past claimed CO2 does not act as a forcing based; upon incomplete data from a single highland Greenland ice core – GISP2 – without including the modern instrumental record. Including the full set of data shows his approach to be invalid. Not a promising background…”
Here is what the NOAA has to say about the ice core data:
EXCERPT:
ABSTRACT
Greenland ice-core records provide an exceptionally clear picture of
many aspects of abrupt climate changes, and particularly of those
associated with the Younger Dryas event, as reviewed here.
Well-preserved annual layers can be counted confidently, with only 1%
errors for the age of the end of the Younger Dryas 11,500 years before
present. Ice-flow corrections allow reconstruction of snow accumulation
rates over tens of thousands of years with little additional uncertainty.
Glaciochemical and particulate data record atmospheric-loading changes
with little uncertainty introduced by changes in snow accumulation.
Confident paleothermometry is provided by site-specific calibrations
using ice-isotopic ratios, borehole temperatures, and gas-isotopic ratios.
Near-simultaneous changes in ice-core paleoclimatic indicators of local,
regional, and more-widespread climate conditions demonstrate that much
of the Earth experienced abrupt climate changes synchronous with
Greenland within thirty years or less. Post-Younger Dryas changes
have not duplicated the size, extent and rapidity of these
paleoclimatic changes.
http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/greenland/summit/gisp2/isotopes/gisp2_temp_accum_alley2000.txt
LOL
Paul Vaughan says:
December 17, 2011 at 12:39 pm
“I know the data intimately having studied this for 40+ years. There is no support for any of your claims.”
You’re incorrect.
Unfounded and not supported claims carry no weight.
R.Gates,
“Define “near”. Not likely in the next 10,000 years at least.”
In 10,000 years.Canada will be under the ice.
We are already seeing glaciers that did not exist more than 1,000 years ago.
Fremont Glacier in Wyoming is only about 300 years old.Before that time.There had been no glacier there for many thousands of years.But it is already 150m thick.
It has been cooling for thousands of years now.It is obvious and unmistakable.You and many others here are arguing over a secondary temperature trend of a few decades.The dominant one is the entire interglacial period.The one almost everyone is not thinking about.
As we go deeper into the Climate Autumn.We will see more new glaciers develop and further south too.
Both the Greenland and Vostock ice core data show a clear long term cooling trend.
You can read more on this with a recent publication from John Kehr:
http://theinconvenientskeptic.com/the-book/
This is an area of climate science that is rarely considered.
M.A.Vukcevic (December 17, 2011 at 11:15 am) wrote:
“[…] there are two very accurate ‘fundamental’ oscillating periods as the sidebands equidistant from a central frequency :
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/SSN-Vfspec.htm “
The reason you get symmetry is the date ranges you’ve picked. Even though a bit crude, you’re awareness of the early 20th century phase reversal is encouraging. I again advise you to start windowing your spectra …and be sure to vary windowing parameters.
http://judithcurry.com/2011/12/15/hegerl-et-al-react-to-the-uncertainty-monster-paper/#comment-150267
You might also want to consider windowing some cepstra (that’s not a typo) so you can start gaining a handle on the harmonic families in windowed spectra. Again: Be sure to vary windowing parameters. (If you don’t, that’s like ignoring the focal length knob on your microscope. Microscope has more adjustments than just magnification. You might also consider moving the slide around spatially…)
I appreciate your graphs Vukcevic — might shake something loose in the mainstream so it can fall back into better place…
When the time’s right I’ll have more on the early 20th century phase reversal.
Leif Svalgaard (December 17, 2011 at 1:15 pm) wrote:
“Unfounded and not supported claims carry no weight.”
Ignorance, misinterpretation, & misunderstanding are your choices.
Come on Paul!
DR. Svalgaard is a solar scientist of long and good standing.
I suggest that if you have something useful and factual to present your case.Then by all means do so.
But leave out the disrespect please.
Paul Vaughan says:
December 17, 2011 at 1:34 pm
Ignorance, misinterpretation, & misunderstanding are your choices.
I have noted that many of your post contains words that begin with mis- That ought to make you reflect a bit…
KR: “that since Antarctic sea ice vanishes in the summer any changes in sea ice extent there has little effect on albedo or for that matter feedbacks”
err…no. The current [a few days ago] deficit of sea ice in the Arctic relative to the long term median is less than the current surplus in the antarctic. In the Arctic, there is basically no insolation, because it’s December, and similarly in antarctica the sun is ‘on’ almost 24 hours. Your statement is flat wrong.
RERT – “The current [a few days ago] deficit of sea ice in the Arctic relative to the long term median is less than the current surplus in the antarctic”
I would have to disagree, based upon the actual numbers for seasonal changes – see a good discussion (with those numbers) at http://tamino.wordpress.com/2011/01/14/monckton-skewers-truth/, also another at http://www.skepticalscience.com/arctic-antarctic-sea-ice.htm
Arctic sea ice loss is about 3.3x the Antarctic sea ice gain – and don’t forget that the Western Antarctic ice sheet (WAIS) is losing land ice as well. The Eastern Antarctica ice sheet appears stable so far (a good, no, a seriously good thing, considering the amount of water there).
—
As to summer – Remember that Southern hemispheric summer is in December, Northern hemispheric summer is in June. I try to keep that in mind when discussing things in blogs including folks from NZ and Australia. Measuring Arctic winter by the Antarctic summer (or vice versa), is really not an appropriate comparison.
Paul Vaughan says:
December 17, 2011 at 12:51 pm
davidmhoffer (December 17, 2011 at 11:41 am) wrote:
“They just react to any given change in radiance according to their temperature.”
In the polar night??
It’s about circulation. The highest variance is in winter.>>>
Yes, in the polar night. “Polar amplification” is a term thrown around by warmists as part of the CAGW meme. I used “radiance” as one example to illustrate the physics. The CAGW meme is based on energy being abosrbed and re-radiated by CO2 and other GHG’s. Since they in turn aborb energy from upbound LW radiated by the earth, if it is GHG’s to which we are referring, their effect is 24 x 7. Whatever number of watts/m2 is attributed to CO2, those watts/m2 will have a larger effect on temperature (in degrees) during the polar night as the same number of watts/m2 would have in the tropics at high noon.
Not that I buy the significance of either. They are both overcome by natural variance and circulation. I’m just pointing out that even if the CAGW meme that CO2 is going to cause any measurable warming, most of it will come at cold temps in the depths of winter and very little at high temps in summer. Break the GISS or HadCrut temperature records down by latitude, that’s exactly what you see.
My point being that “polar amplification” is a fiction. Regardless of what is driving the fluctuations, circulation, solar variance, CO2….the temperature variances SHOULD be higher at the poles both on the way up, and on the way down, and the highest variance SHOULD be in the winter. There’s nothing being “amplified”.
@sunsettommy (December 17, 2011 at 1:43 pm)
Dr. Svalgaard is incorrect.
@Leif Svalgaard
Please explain as concisely as possible the conventional mainstream understanding of the R-C & R-M effects, noting any key reservations you might have personally.
Regards.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/16/polar-amplification-works-both-ways/#comment-833434
Publish or Perish? No. Pay and Publish? Yes. $600/article
http://107.20.170.83/journals/amet/apc/
So with 300+ “journals” at say 12/year with 10 papers/journal gives;
300 * 12 * 10 * $600.00 = $21,600,000.00 per year
Number of employees? North of 200 (but let’s just say 500 for now).
Egypt per capita GDP/GNI = $6.200.00 (2010 CIA Factbook) or $2,340.00 (Worldbank 2010) or $2,271.00 (UN 2009) (all in US $). So, for the sake of simplicity the average of those three is $3,600.00/year.
$21,600,000 / 500 = $43,200.00/person or $43,200.00/$3,600.00 = 12X the average income of an Egyptian.
Not a bad business model, if you were to ask me.
Now if the Vatican Printing Office were to charge $600.00/Bible …
Paul Vaughan says:
December 17, 2011 at 4:12 pm
@sunsettommy (December 17, 2011 at 1:43 pm)
Dr. Svalgaard is incorrect.
As I said unfounded and not supported claims carry no weight
Paul Vaughan says:
December 17, 2011 at 4:15 pm
Please explain as concisely as possible the conventional mainstream understanding of the R-C & R-M effects, noting any key reservations you might have personally.
That explanation is decades old. In 1977 I explained it as laid out in section 7-9 of http://www.leif.org/research/suipr699.pdf
Further elaborated here: http://www.leif.org/research/The%20semiannual%20variation%20of%20great%20geomagnetic%20storms.pdf and here: http://www.leif.org/research/Semiannual-Comment.pdf and here: http://www.leif.org/research/Semiannual%20Variation%201954%20and%201996.pdf
None of this has any bearing on aliasing or solar cycle lengths. The local geometry determines a slight modulation of geomagnetic activity. The Sun does not know about this. Your reference to ‘conventional mainstream understanding’ is nonsense as if there were any other viable one. We understand quite well what is going on. There are other modulations as well, which again have nothing to do with what you are peddling. There is some evidence that the internal variations of the sun may play an additional role, e.g. http://www.leif.org/research/Asymmetric%20Rosenberg-Coleman%20Effect.pdf but this is speculative. Most people stick with the classical explanation.
It is going to get really cold very soon. This predicted cooling is calculated to have a 95% confidence level.
Are you really that sure? Yeah really? Really really sure? That you have all the variables right? All those little influences right? All those forcings and feedbacks, and their signs and values? Yeah right, sure.
This display of confidence in ones own calculations is a red flag for me. And in what way does (heliologic?) global cooling alarmism differ from antropologic global warming alarmism? All you need to do is get more people on board that confirm your predictions with more models and more tree ring reconstructions. Form a consensus. Settle the science. You know the drill.
Tony Mach says:
December 17, 2011 at 4:51 pm
Yes I am really sure. That is why a statistician is amongst the authors – so we know just how sure we are (spoken as a non-author). As I said in the post, this is going to be big. Time to quote Shakespeare: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”. Open your mind to the possible, Tony. Longer ski seasons ahead.
Thankyou for suggesting to get more people on board. More papers are in train. Professor Solheim and his co-authors got a signal out of only 100 years of data. There are plenty of temperature records only that long. Start near the poles and work towards the equator. We will be having conferences on the solar cycle length – temperature relationship by 2014.
EFS_Junior – Very interesting, I had not realized that “Advances in Meteorology” was a pay for publishing publication.
Folks – “pay for publishing” journals are just not measuring up to the quality (at any level) of subscription based publications. Please see http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2009/06/10/nonsense-for-dollars/ for a fascinating account of a computer generated jargon jumble being accepted by a supposedly peer reviewed publication accepting $$$ for printing articles.
Personal opinion: “Pay for publishing” journals are a recent development – and completely worthless, as they will accept anything in order to have content.
KR,
Denigrating journals you don’t like [because they publish papers you don’t like] presumes that subscription journals are above board. They’re not. Most if not all mainstream climate journals have been co-opted by the “Team”, and they have completely lost their credibility as a result. Check out this physicist attempt to correct an egregious error in a mainstream journal.
Instead of attacking someone for submitting an article to a journal, let’s see you defend people like this. The fact is that mainstream climate journals have been corrupted, and they have zero objectivity.
KR, different journals have different standards but you are correct in that this journal does publish once an author has been endorsed. I do notice in this case that the initial submission was in September and that there was a revision submitted two month later in November before acceptance for publication so it would appear that some sort of review was done before publication and I also note that this article has been selected for a special issue in 2012. That would indicate some degree of real scrutiny of the article. Unlike “Tamino”, whose article in a different posting on this site was accepted 19 days after submission and is absolute nonsense, these authors apparently were required at least one revision before publication.
We do have rather strong correlation in the record of changes in temperature regime that coincide with changes in solar activity, any specific cause notwithstanding. We can speculate on the reasons for it, but it is pretty clear that we do see it. We also clearly see in the record that highest latitude changes seem to lag these events by some years, usually around 10 or 11 years. Again, the exact mechanism for that can remain unknown to us yet we can accept that they do occur.
My first impression would be that the changes they are proposing in general trend are consistent with similar trends noticed in the past. What is remarkable here is that they quantify the change. The direction of the change and the timing of it would be expected due to the change in solar activity. Quantifying the degree of it is what is interesting here. That they find a strong 62-68 year cyclical variation over the temperature record is also not unusual. It is seen practically everywhere on the globe (though greatly subdued in the tropics and might be more readily seen in precipitation patterns than in temperature records in that region of the planet). And again, the drivers of that cycle can be speculated upon, but we know that they exist and have seen then over the course of temperature records for over a century and a half. The lag between solar activity and temperature change was first noted in the the difference between a short cycle and warming in the Arctic. This is simply an exercise in the opposite mode.
So they will get the direction of the change correct. Their estimation of the amplitude of the drop might be a little high though it will likely fall within the error bars (which are rather generous in that we are nearly there already).
crosspatch – My concern with “pay for publishing”, or more succinctly “pay for play” journals is that (as I noted in the link in my previous post) some of them appear willing to accept totally computer generated nonsense for publication. That means no peer review, and a lack of scientific motive (no motive other than printing for $$$).
Subscription based journals, at least, have some incentive to publish meaningful papers – otherwise they lose subscribers. “Pay for publishing” journals, on the other hand, lack that incentive. And I find that disturbing.
This is not to say that decent science cannot be published in a pay for publishing””, or that bad articles can slide through peer review in a subscription based journal – but it’s not a good starting point.
Another flood of misunderstandings:
Leif Svalgaard (December 17, 2011 at 4:42 pm)
–
Leif Svalgaard (December 17, 2011 at 4:27 pm)
“As I said unfounded and not supported claims carry no weight”
The best example of an unsupported claim is your “uniform 0.1K” solar-terrestrial narrative, which is mercilessly razed by observational data. Trust obliterated.
David Archibald (December 17, 2011 at 7:05 pm) wrote:
“Start near the poles and work towards the equator.”
Excellent.
Some of the pay for publication journals are quite good. For example, if you are published in an Elsevier journal and want to make it open access they charge the author $3000 but it STILL goes through the same peer review process as their regular subscription articles (and appears in the same subscription journals).
Paul Vaughan says:
December 17, 2011 at 10:01 pm
Another flood of misunderstandings:
Leif Svalgaard (December 17, 2011 at 4:42 pm)
I go to the trouble of providing you with the requested explanation and this is the thanks I get….
The best example of an unsupported claim is your “uniform 0.1K” solar-terrestrial narrative, which is mercilessly razed by observational data. Trust obliterated.
I’m not fishing for your trust. Just trying to teach you something.
Paul Vaughan says:
December 16, 2011 at 6:34 pm
“Yes, we all know the atmosphere & ocean drive the seasons Pamela. (/sarc)”
Paul, bad form, bad form. Yours was a catty strawman argument that made no sense in response to my comment. We all know that it ISN’T the Sun, nor the atmosphere or oceans that causes the seasons. And I certainly hope you understand it is the tilt of the Earth that causes various seasonal conditions depending on your latitude/longitude/altitude. But what does that have to do with reading a research article with a discerning eye and discussing anomaly trend drivers?
Leif Svalgaard says:
December 17, 2011 at 4:42 pm
“Most people stick with the classical explanation.”
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Ummm, till death ?
Or until observations make you part 🙂
Thanks for all the info, everyone.
Pamela Gray says:
December 18, 2011 at 6:02 pm
And I certainly hope you understand it is the tilt of the Earth that causes various seasonal conditions depending on your latitude/longitude/altitude
As well as the glaciations.
u.k.(us) says:
December 18, 2011 at 6:30 pm
Or until observations make you part 🙂
Never believe an observation unless it has been validated by theory, and vice versa…
Never believe an observation unless it has been validated by theory, and vice versa…
Tell that to the high temp superconductivity guys.
You can take this dictum too far.
Dennis Ray Wingo says:
December 18, 2011 at 6:57 pm
Never believe an observation unless it has been validated by theory, and vice versa…
Tell that to the high temp superconductivity guys.
You can take this dictum too far.
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List your website.
Show me your video’s , high temp superconductivity .
Ya got a link,
Or don’t ya.
http://www.gap-system.org/~history/Quotations/Eddington.html
“It is also a good rule not to put overmuch confidence in the observational results that are put forward until they are confirmed by theory” 🙂
I vaguely remember someone describing polar vortexes in a post and was wondering if recent bounce in the DMI temperature of the Arctic was related sudden stratospheric warming (not sure if the surface temperature would bounce) and if the blocking high pressure on the West coast might also related to the break up of the Arctic vortex?
I’m assuming the vortex broke up – I don’t know how to check on the status of the vortex.
I did check the vortex page and tried to read the Google book link but it’s virtually impossible to read on my netbook (not to mention I have 60 new posts and over 1000 comments and I’m traveling.)
Leif Svalgaard says:
December 18, 2011 at 8:19 pm
http://www.gap-system.org/~history/Quotations/Eddington.html
“It is also a good rule not to put overmuch confidence in the observational results that are put forward until they are confirmed by theory” 🙂
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Another counter example is Planck’s numerology and the development of quantum mechanics (where we still don’t understand the causation behind how electronic transitions occur or why the electron doesn’t spiral into the nucleus – not to mention the apparent ubiquitous presence of perpetual motion at the atomic level. ) We can make model predictions with incredible precision without knowing the anything about the causation if we follow the rules which were derived from observations.