Guest post by David Archibald
Figure 1: Ap Index 1932 – 2012
The Ap Index is the weakest of the solar activity indicators and has returned below the floor value of solar minima over the last 80 years – the green line in the chart above.
Figure 2: Solar Cycles 20 and 24 Ap Index and Neutron Count
The last time there was a cooling event in the modern instrument record was during Solar Cycle 20. Aligned on the month of minimum, Figure 2 shows that while the Ap Index and neutron count are co-incident to date in Solar Cycle 24, they were quite divergent over two thirds of Solar Cycle 20.
Figure 3: Neutron Counts over Solar Cycles 20 to 24
One big difference between Solar Cycle 20 and the other solar cycles of the modern instrument record is that just over half way through the cycle, the neutron count returned to levels of solar minima and remained there for the balance of the cycle. That is shown in Figure 3 above which also shows that the neutron count of Solar Cycle 24 is yet to depart from levels associated with previous minima, three years into the solar cycle.
Further to the post on Solar Cycle 24 length based on Altrock’s green corona diagram at:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/08/solar-cycle-24-length-and-its-consequences/, Altrock noted the slow progress of Solar Cycle 24 in mid-2011. From Altrock, R.C., 2010, “The Progress of Solar Cycle 24 at High Latitudes”:
“Cycle 24 began its migration at a rate 40% slower than the previous two solar cycles, thus indicating the possibility of a peculiar cycle. However, the onset of the “Rush to the Poles” of polar crown prominences and their associated coronal emission, which has been a precursor to solar maximum in recent cycles (cf. Altrock 2003), has just been identified in the northern hemisphere. Peculiarly, this “rush” is leisurely, at only 50% of the rate in the previous two cycles.”
Altrock’s green corona diagram is available here: http://www.boulder.swri.edu/~deforest/SPD-sunspot-release/6_altrock_rttp.pdf
If Solar Cycle 24 is progressing at 60% of the rate of the previous two cycles, which averaged ten years long, then it is likely to be 16.6 years long. Using that figure of 16.6 years would make Solar Cycle 24 seven years longer than Solar Cycle 22. Using a solar cycle length – temperature relationship for the US – Canadian border of 0.7°C per year of solar cycle length, a total temperature decline of 4.9°C is predicted over a period of about twenty years.
Has a fall of that magnitude happened in that time frame happened in the past? A good place to look is the Dye 3 temperature record from the Greenland Plateau, available here: ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/greenland/gisp/dye3/dye3-1yr.txt
Figure 4: Dye 3 Temperature Record from Oxygen Isotope Ratios
There is plenty of noise in this record and rapid swings in temperature, for example the 5.2°C fall from 526 to 531 at the beginning of the Dark Ages.
Figure 5: Dye 3 Temperature Record 22 Year Smoothed
Averaging the Dye 3 temperature record using the 22 year length of the Hale Cycle produces a lot of detail. What is evident is that there has been a very disciplined temperature decline over the last four thousand years. The whole temperature record is bounded by two parallel lines with a downslope of 0.3°C per thousand years. The fact that no cooling event took the Dye 3 temperature below the lower bounding green line over nearly four thousand years is quite remarkable. It implies that solar events do not exceed a particular combination of frequency and amplitude. From that it can be derived that this particular combination of frequency and amplitude with be ongoing – that is that cooling events will happen just as frequently as they did during the Dye 3 record.
Figure 6: North – South Transect through the Grain Belt
The relationship between temperature and growing conditions at about the latitude of the US – Canadian border is that one degree C will shift growing conditions by about 140 km. With a total 4.9°C temperature decline in train, that means a shift of about 700 km. Figure 6 shows the result of that temperature decline. Witchita will end up with the climate of Sioux Falls, which in turn will be like Saskatoon now. The growing season loses a month at each end.
Interesting Data…
Alarming Conclusions…
I mean this in the nicest way possible… But, I hope you are wrong.
Wichita only has one “t”.
This is rather confusing.
Is this a claim that reduced neutrons cause or are a proxy for something that causes cooling? If this the case ,from the first graph, we should now infer that global temperatures should be below that of the 1970s. Which they are not.
And of course the neutron idea contradicts the idea that the 1970s cooling was due to the peak in post ww2 industrial aerosol emissions.
And it also contradicts the idea that the 1970s cooling was due to ocean cycles. The AMO I think is popular around here.
So where will it be nice?
David
You cite a 5.2Degree C fall from 526 to 531 and quote figure 5. Is the horizontal axis the year and the left hand axis in degres Centigtrade? If so do you mean a fall of 5.2 degrees F?
tonyb
superficial , ‘nice tries’ are a feature of lazy teenager – watch for him to further attempt to steer this data off into some ‘warmest’ tangent.
From that it can be derived that this particular combination of frequency and amplitude with be ongoing
should that be ‘will be ongoing’ ?
Pay attention LazyTeenager. The climate system is multi-dimensional.
As the BBC would say: how worried should we be?
Extremely worried; very worried; worried; very concerned; concerned; slightly concerned; not worried because we are all going to die due to man-made global warming unless we repent our sins and stop producing CO2.
Every time I see David’s name I am reminded of this quote:
“Our generation has known a warm, giving Sun, but the next generation will suffer a Sun that is less giving, and the world will be less fruitful”. — David Archibald
Solar Cycle 24 (2008)
Right or wrong, it makes me think (of Leif, in particular…).
A neutron walks into a bar.
Barman : ‘Would you like a drink, sir?’
Neutron : ‘Yes please, a pint of lager. How much?’
Barman : ‘No charge.’
Which cooling event was this, David? Solar Cycle 20 ran from 1964 to 1976. I’v e checked the Hadcrut record and there was no cooling during this period. In fact there is a small (insignificant) positive trend over that period. The same goes for GISS.
There was cooling in the mid-1940s but that was 2 decades and at least 2 solar cycles earlier.
David, most interesting.
One historical question:
You cite a 5.2°C fall from 526 to 531. Are these dates absolutely certain? I ask because there is considerable evidence of a supervolcanic eruption by Anak Krakatau, or ‘the child of Krakatau,’ in 535. Events are recorded in the Indonesian Book of Kings, and by scribes around the world.
The result was that at this time (535 A.D) the sky went black and a fine, dark dust descended across the world. It rained constantly, and the rain was described as blood red in color, The dust hid the sun and many people froze to death. A mini ice-age gripped the northern hemisphere, snow fell in the summer time, there was only a few hours of light in the day, and floods occurred in normally dry areas. This lasted for two years and led to drought, famine, and disease which killed untold numbers.
Tree rings from the year 535 A.D. show that the world’s climate was extraordinairily cold. Moreover, high levels of carbon and sulfer can be found in the both the northern and southern polar ice caps.
The sun may have caused the drop, but it’s a remarkable co-incidence that the ‘Dark’ in the ‘Dark Ages’ is also now thought to be supervolcanic in origin, and at almost the same time.
And of course the neutron idea contradicts the idea that the 1970s cooling was due to the peak in post ww2 industrial aerosol emissions.
Lazyteenager
While I think David’s analysis and conclusions are badly flawed, I think it’s qiuite easy to show that industrial aersosol emissions were NOT responsible for 1940-70 cooling.
1. The effect of aerosols is regionally specific (Mann & Jones 2003). In other words the highly industrialised areas should have shown the most cooling. They didn’t. My own city should have cooled as fast as anywhere on earth. The temeprature change was about the global average.
2. The arctic cooled 4 times as much as the northern mid-latitudes (See GISS zonal data). Aerosols in the arctic cause warming not cooling due to a phenomenon known as arctic haze (see wiki entry).
3. The aerosol effect required to stop AND reverse the pre-war warming trend would have to be equivalent to at least one, if not two, major volcano eruptions every year.
“Aerosols caused mid-20th century cooling” is a myth.
Global temperatures oscillation
– in the short term (20 -30) years by slow changes in the configuration of the Arctic magnetic field, may be affected by the strong bursts of solar activity (CMEs, flares etc.) which are not specifically linked to the sunspot count.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/Arctic>.htm
Climate change is driven by solar activity so this report is worrying especially for those who have to grow the crops to feed people and farm animals, that in turn feed us. This parallels the Norwegian research from Svalsbad and an expected 6C temperature drop over the next decade or so.
Re: John Finn: Which cooling event …
Time Magazine Cover: April 8, 1977 “How to survive the coming Ice Age”
Hey, if you can’t trust TIME Magazine…..
@Steptoe Fan Thanks for the warming, er, warning. We’ll also watch for your “nice try” analysis.
Try not to be too superficial
Temps lag the AP index by about 6.5 – 7 years. Look at Mr. Archibald’s first image, and see the AP index spike in 2003, which looks alot like the 2009-10 El Nino. The plummet in temps will occur within the next year, it could be happening now…temps are really cooling off for the time being. The IMF flips N towards the end of this year, which should provide a “disagreeing” relative magnetic field interaction between the earth and sun. This should not only increase cloud cover, but drop the global temp a good deal.
Climate lag is a result of oceanic thermal intertia
Solar cycle 24 appears to be an interruption rather than a slowdown in the solar magnetic cycle. It appears solar cycle 24 will be a lead into a Dansgaard-Oesgher event. The magnetic ropes that rise up through the solar convection zone require a minimum field strength to avoid being torn to pieces by movement of plasma in the convection zone. The fact that the magnetic field strength of newly formed sunspots has been linearly declining indicates that the mechanism that creates the magnetic ropes at the solar tachocline has been interrupted. Solar observational evidence to support this assertion is the recent significant increase the number of solar spores (small short lived sunspots) and complex magnetic sunspots that both occur when the magnetic ropes are distorted and pulled apart before they reach the surface of the sun to form sunspots.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1009.0784v1
“Long-term Evolution of Sunspot Magnetic Fields
Independent of the normal solar cycle, a decrease in the sunspot magnetic field strength has been observed using the Zeeman-split 1564.8nm Fe I spectral line at the NSO Kitt Peak McMath-Pierce telescope. Corresponding changes in sunspot brightness and the strength of molecular absorption lines were also seen. This trend was seen to continue in observations of the first sunspots of the new solar Cycle 24, and extrapolating a linear fit to this trend would lead to only half the number of spots in Cycle 24 compared to Cycle 23, and imply virtually no sunspots in Cycle 25.”
There very regular cycles of warming and cooling in the paleoclimatic record (1500 year cycle with 95% confidence the cycle is maintained to better than 12% over at least the last 23 cycles). As this paper notes the observed cycle periodicity is too regular to be caused by an internal planet based mechanism. As there are cosmogenic isotope changes that are concurrent with the planetary temperature changes it is obvious the driver is solar cycle changes. The unknowns concerning the different mechanisms will be resolved if we have an opportunity to directly observe the next Dansgaard-Oeschger event.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2003/2003GL017115.shtml
“Timing of abrupt climate change: A precise clock by Stefan Rahmstorf
Many paleoclimatic data reveal a approx. 1,500 year cyclicity of unknown origin. A crucial question is how stable and regular this cycle is. An analysis of the GISP2 ice core record from Greenland reveals that abrupt climate events appear to be paced by a 1,470-year cycle with a period that is probably stable to within a few percent; with 95% confidence the period is maintained to better than 12% over at least 23 cycles. This highly precise clock points to an origin outside the Earth system; oscillatory modes within the Earth system can be expected to be far more irregular in period.”
Svensmark has an interesting paper that analyzes the record of the cyclic climate changes using ice sheet bore hole temperatures comparing the Antarctic to Greenland Ice sheet temperature. As Svensmark notes in the paper, by analyzing recent top of the atmosphere radiation measurement to temperature, the affect on ice sheet temperature due to an increase in planetary cloud is opposite for the Greenland Ice sheet as compared to the Antarctic ice sheet. The albedo of the Antarctic ice sheet is greater than clouds so an increase in clouds over the ice sheet causes an increase in temperature due to the greenhouse effect of greater moisture above the ice sheet.
http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0612145v1
“The Antarctic climate anomaly and galactic cosmic rays
Borehole temperatures in the ice sheets spanning the past 6000 years show Antarctica repeatedly warming when Greenland cooled, and vice versa (Fig. 1) [13, 14]. North-south oscillations of greater amplitude associated with Dansgaard-Oeschger events are evident in oxygenisotope data from the Wurm-Wisconsin glaciation[15]. The phenomenon has been called the polar see-saw[15, 16], but that implies a north-south symmetry that is absent. Greenland is better coupled to global temperatures than Antarctica is, and the fulcrum of the temperature swings is near the Antarctic Circle. A more apt term for the effect is the Antarctic climate anomaly.
Attempts to account for it have included the hypothesis of a south-flowing warm ocean current crossing the Equator[17] with a built-in time lag supposedly intended to match paleoclimatic data. That there is no significant delay in the Antarctic climate anomaly is already apparent at the high-frequency end of Fig. (1). While mechanisms involving ocean currents might help to intensify or reverse the effects of climate changes, they are too slow to explain the almost instantaneous operation of the Antarctic climate anomaly.”
“Figure (2a) also shows that the polar warming effect of clouds is not symmetrical, being most pronounced beyond 75◦S. In the Arctic it does no more than offset the cooling effect, despite the fact that the Arctic is much cloudier than the Antarctic (Fig. (2b)). The main reason for the difference seems to be the exceptionally high albedo of Antarctica in the absence of clouds.”
neutrons – is that like a burger with the lot ?
actually I’m into small – make mine a mini with neutrinos.
don’t suppose you people know anything about 33 degrees warming ?
I don’t like chilli. “hold the chillies, if I wanna be chilly, I’ll go outside”.
John Finn says:
January 22, 2012 at 1:57 am
The last time there was a cooling event in the modern instrument record was during Solar Cycle 20.
Which cooling event was this, David? Solar Cycle 20 ran from 1964 to 1976. I’v e checked the Hadcrut record and there was no cooling during this period. In fact there is a small (insignificant) positive trend over that period. The same goes for GISS.
There was cooling in the mid-1940s but that was 2 decades and at least 2 solar cycles earlier.
==========================
These history re-writes are becoming sooooo tedious..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling
My bold.
And even the misnomered skeptical scientists discuss the reality of it:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-cooling-mid-20th-century.htm
The temperature records have been continually back-adjusted so you’ll need to find originals to make sense of it.
Actually – please show the pages on which specific records you’re referring to .
@ Ian E:
Hahaha! /sarc
[i]>Which cooling event was this, David? [/i]
The one anyone over 40 years old remembers and all the media raved about at the time, but has recently been deleted from popular records as part of an effort by AGWers to ‘hide the decline’.
Here on WUWT, Willis Eschenbach has quoted the following Freeman Dyson story:
With respect, David Archibald’s analysis also “has neither”, and thus fails Fermi’s test.
For those interested in the history of climate-change science, the American Institute of Physics (AIP) has a very nice web page titled “Past Climate Cycles: Ice Age Speculations.”
The AIP web page begins with a quote that is relevant to this WUWT guest post:
The lesson-learned is that there have been innumerable theoretical predictions of impending ice-ages in the past. The only such predictions that have stood the test of time have been those that were based upon Fermi-quality theoretical models.
@David Archibald
> The Ap Index is the _weakest_ of the solar activity
> indicators and has returned below the floor value
> of solar minima over the last 80 years …
So are you expecting (as Anthony does) the AP/KP indices to be in ‘lock step’ with sunspot counts and solar radio flux levels?
This weak correlation is no surprise, because these indices are mostly driven by the solar wind, which you haven’t even mentioned, which also modulates the neutron (i.e. ‘cosmic ray’) count.
Also, ap index is measuring the change in the Earth’s magnetic field over a short time window, not the absolute level of magnetism. So it quantifies the tiny ‘tremors’ in the terrestial field caused by geomagnetic storms and such, which are greatly affected by changes in the solar wind, CME’s, coronal holes etc.
I am uncomfortablewith graphs that have no scale names and with graphs that have very different timescales with no clear reason.
I am assuming that the -5°C is not a forecast but an indication of what could happen if your proposition is correct. -5°C would be 3/4 the way to the next ice age and seems highly unlikely judging by past ice age arrivals.
John finn you are just fishing. None of your statements are born out by the unadjusted data elsewhere. Danemark, Sweden, France etc.
Figure 4: Dye 3 Temperature Record from Oxygen Isotope Ratios. There is plenty of noise in this record and rapid swings in temperature, for example the 5.2°C fall from 526 to 531 at the beginning of the Dark Ages.
I miss a conclusion.
What is possible to know today, out of some few data and logic, is that i.) there is a decreasing global temperature since the boost 20 ky ago, when the last ice age ends, and ii.) there are a lot of high frequency temperature proxies for the last two millennia, suggesting temperature frequencies of non sinusoid shape, and iii.) that the high global temperature frequencies and rapid swings can be explained in general with synodic heliocentric geometric tide functions, and iv.) that the decreasing global temperature since the boost 20 ky ago can be explained with resonant sawtooth diffusion waves on the Sun (after Robert Ehrlich) and moreover for the last 1 million years. This is shown in this graph 1 , in graph 2, and in graph 3, where are superimposed 3 temperature proxies and 2 synodic solar tide curves between the years 450 AD and 630 AD.
The conclusion is that because all known global temperature proxies can be explained with geometric pattern from the Sun or the solar system, there must be solar physical mechanisms which let change the heat current on Earth.
V.
“John Finn says:
January 22, 2012 at 1:57 am”
No cooling in the late 60’s early-mid 70’s northern hemisphere, UK? Are you joking? We were living through the coming iceage until 1976, then we had a hot summer. The in 1979, we had not only the winter of discontent, it was bitterly cold too. You wont find that in the HadCRUT data because the raw data no longer exists. It has all been…”adjusted”…
@ John Finn
A cooling event did indeed take place within the UK at least, the papers were full of ice age speculation. Perhaps if climate science agencies and individuals were not engaged in behaviour such as shown in the link below you might have been able to look up a 70s cooling event. There are various examples of how different agencies are adjusting data to better suit failed models.
http://www.c3headlines.com/2011/12/science-by-lubchencos-noaa-fake-global-warming-by-changing-historical-temperature-data.html
A physicist at 4:10 am above tries in his usual underhanded way to denigrate one of the true giants in 20th Century physics, Prof Freeman Dyson. According to Dr Richard Feynman, Freeman Dyson was every bit as deserving of the Nobel Prize as he was, but in the hard sciences the prize is limited to three recipients, and Dyson happened to be the newest member of the team.
Freeman Dyson synthesized and reduced to practice the Feynman/Schwinger/Tomonaga solutions to the renormalization problems of quantum electrodynamics. He deserves the sole credit for that accomplishment. The fact that a pipsqueak now tries to put down a great physicist by leaving out the context, because that physicist questions the manmade global warming nonsense, is a reflection on ‘a physicist’, not on Dyson. And it should be remembered that Freeman Dyson is a co-signer on the following statement, another reason the alarmist crowd hates him:
That statement says it all, and the attempt by ‘a physicist’ to belittle someone whose shoes he is not fit to shine shows the lengths to which the alarmist cult uses ad hominem attacks, because they lack the science to make their case.
“There is no convincing evidence” is a very strong statement by more than thirty thousand co-signers with degrees in the hard sciences, including over 9,000 PhD’s. I challenge ‘a physicist’ to co-sign that same OISM petition.
In the last analysis by David Archibald, using a different method, a temperature drop of 3.8C was envisaged at the US Canadian border. So an average of the two is 4.35C this would imply a move South of UK food growing conditions of roughly the entire length of the UK, ie. the distance from Edinburgh to Southampton.
The implications for UK food security and for the rest of the World would make an interesting study and no doubt interesting reading. Should we be worried ?
In 2009 the UK imported 40% of it’s food, I wonder how much that figure will increase as growing conditions move South. In addition we would also have to examine whether or not those same imports may reduce or cease to become available as other countries which are currently net exporters of food find their crop production also declining due to a global drop in temperatures.
The US can probably weather such changes quite readily by reducing the use of food for car fuel. In Europe I would think there is some room for French grain production to move South. The net effect in the UK will be a dramatic increase in food prices, just as we destroy our ability to pay those prices as we are currently (by act of parliament) hell bent on destroying our economy by making our industry uncompetitive with the rest of the World by switching to unaffordable power from windmills.
A series of harsh winters and one or two bad harvests and food shortages / riots and the UK will discover a near miraculous enthusiasm for fracking. The politicians fervour in their religious belief in zealot gas (co2) will undergo a similar miraculous conversion. But will it be too little too late as by then any energy intensive industry will have left UK shores and the UK economy will occupy a new position between the First World and Third World economies, that of a Second World economy.
Would it not be better to say something like:-
“The sun is giving us data, which is different from anything we have seen with modern instrumentation. By the end of SC 25, we hope to have much more data, so that we will have a better idea of precisely how the sun works, and what effects it has on world climate”
A physicist says:
January 22, 2012 at 4:10 am
Here on WUWT, Willis Eschenbach has quoted the following Freeman Dyson story: ‘When I arrived in Fermi’s office, I handed the graphs to Fermi, but he hardly glanced at them…’
There is a clear physical picture of the process calculating the sawtooth heat oscillations of the Sun.
V.
Myrrh says (January 22, 2012 at 3:24 am)
“These history re-writes are becoming sooooo tedious..”
Tsk. Who’s rewriting history, I wonder? Do not believe everything you read in Wikipedia or on Sks!
I’m sure Time magazine came late to the party in 1977 (as they no doubt will when AGW collapses) but In the early 70s there was a real fear of incoming cooler temperatures.
See, for example, this CIA report from 1974:-
http://www.climatemonitor.it/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/1974.pdf
The summary reads “The western world’s leading climatologists have confirmed recent reports of a detrimental global climatic change.” The climate change they refer to is *cooling*. The detriment is on agriculture, etc.
And there are many similar reports from the period 1970-1974. It was only in the mid- to late-70s that much attention was given to greenhouse effects.
A physicist says (January 22, 2012 at 4:10 am)
For the first time on this blog I’m genuinely angry. If you’d read any of Freeman Dysons books or articles, you would realise his style – self-deprecatory, humorous and unaffected, perhaps a remnant of his early British understatement.
To quote this against him is crass.
Any physicist (if you are a physicist and not someone trying to self-aggrandize having failed a degree in basket weaving) would know that, and have the courtesy to acknowledge one of the greatest and most wide-ranging minds of recent scientific history.
‘a physicist’ says:
“The lesson-learned is that there have been innumerable theoretical predictions of impending
ice-ages in the pastrunaway global warming. The …predictionsthat have stood the test of time have been those that were based upon Fermi-quality theoretical modelsare always wrong.”There. Fixed.
A really remarkable article by Dr.David Archibald and it will reflect on the hits count in WUWT. Any measures to be taken or even suggested against “fossil fuels” is simply crazy.
Could you imagine a family trying to heat their house using electricity generated from solar panels or windmills?
Thanks for the helpful comments everyone! I came across an estimate of Solar Cycle 25 amplitude today, based on a physical model, in a Livingston and Penn paper:
http://www.probeinternational.org/Livingston-penn-2010.pdf
They are predicting a peak sunspot number of 7.
It’s no slur against Freeman Dyson to affirm that the science of David Archibald’s guest post falls far short of Dyson/Fermi standards.
Perhaps folks should read that Dyson quote again, and ask themselves the simple question: Does David Archibald’s post supply what the Dyson/Fermi quote specifies: either “a clear physical picture of the process” or “a precise and self-consistent mathematical formalism”?
Neither of these two Fermi/Dyson elements is evident in Archibald’s guest post. If anyone wants to argue otherwise (but so far, no one has so argued), then please do so!
LazyTeenager says:
January 21, 2012 at 11:32 pm
This is rather confusing.
Is this a claim that reduced neutrons cause or are a proxy for something that causes cooling? If this the case ,from the first graph, we should now infer that global temperatures should be below that of the 1970s. Which they are not.
And of course the neutron idea contradicts the idea that the 1970s cooling was due to the peak in post ww2 industrial aerosol emissions.
And it also contradicts the idea that the 1970s cooling was due to ocean cycles. The AMO I think is popular around here.
————————————————————————————————————
You have to count ocean’s heat storage. There is lon delay of cooling because of oceans. When it cools down La Nina pattern start’s to be most common. AMO is consequense, not the cause. The cause is SUN. from 1975 to 2005 oceans gathered lot of heat, so it takes more than 7 years to cool them down.
Oh for heaven’s sake. Ranchers and farmers know quite well where heat, frost, water, and snow come from. What the Sun is doing is a poor substitute for what that rather big pond out West and the jet stream above is doing.
To convince this skeptic, the Sun’s changes in its rays (and any measure you want to use for its rays) must be shown mechanistically to be able to overpower, and change the direction of what these power houses of stored energy are doing. Show me the math, the mechanism, and the robust science to back this idea up. No more talking around what is required in order to be taken seriously by solar scientists, meteorologists, paleoclimatologists, and the like. In other words, no more wriggle matching. I have had it up to here in these lackluster attempts at solar “proof”.
So far I remain entirely unconvinced. The powerful ability of our Earth to move heat and atmosphere up and down, in and out, and here and there in short and long term time spans, and to lose as well as soak up incoming solar IR in Rhythm Jazz fashion, kicks both tiny solar changes and anthropogenic CO2 affects to the curb.
But here is the kicker. If you can convince people to believe in your solar theory, there is no argument to be made against a CO2 theory. Both have an equal chance in hell of moving water and air in a direction they would have gone anyway.
John Marshall says:
Would you please give us the link to that “Norwegian research from Svalsbad”?
David Archibald’s last line says;
“They are predicting a peak sunspot number of 7.”
That should have been the penultimate line. The last line might perhaps be;
Welcome to Hell !
I am convinced that solar cycle length, or more acccurately solar cycle frequency is a good proxy for solar activity and its effect on global climate. Considering how many potential factors influencing global climate there are (recent article at WUWT), the correlation between SC frequency and global temperature is surprisingly good. Higher frequency (greater than ~9 cycles/century, scl < ~11 years) means warming and lower frequency (longer solar cycle) means cooling. Thermal inertia (oceans, ice) also plays a big role – that's the reason the late 20th century was somewhat warmer than 1940s/50s. After and during cold periods, high SC frequency doesn't cause as much warming as after/during warm periods and vice versa. It takes time to change global climate.
On the other hand, the cooling will be much longer than the mid 20th century cooling – SC23 was the longest since ~100 years and SC24 seems to be even longer – solar cycle frequency has decreased. The cooling will really kick in after the SC24 plateau (~2013-2015) and it will be dramatic. I predict ~flat linear trend for 1990-2020, if not negative.
John Finn says:
January 22, 2012 at 1:57 am
John, look at the chart plotting HADCrut3 against CO2 beginning in 1958 found here:
http://www.climate4you.com/ClimateReflections.htm#20080927:%20Reflections%20on%20the%20correlation%20between%20global%20temperature%20and%20atmospheric%20CO2
My eyeballs tell me there was a cooling from 1958 to the mid 1970s, even as CO2 climbed.
I wouldn’t use GISS as it gets ‘adjusted’ to fit the theory on a regular basis.
None of this bodes well for Canada or Canadians. For these people to be concerned with warming is the height of idiocy. Only a extremely effective propaganda campaign could have convinced Canadians to fear beneficial warming. Now possible agricultural decline due to cooling could catch them totally unprepared. They and the people who depend on Canadian agriculture exports need to wake up FAST. Let us hope the world will never see Canadian refugees. GK
William says:
January 22, 2012 at 2:35 am
Your link to “Timing of abrupt climate change: A precise clock” directs to a pay-wall.
You can get the free paper at:
http://pik-potsdam.de/~stefan/Publications/Journals/rahmstorf_grl_2003.pdf
Thank you for the links William.
A D-O event would be catastrophic with the worlds current population load. We have the infrastructure in most areas to stay warm, but under cold conditions, such as experienced during a D-O, we do not have the ability to grow mass quantities of food.
It makes no difference how warm you are if your stomack is empty.
It is very evident that the L&P effect is something that SC24 is experiencing. This indicates that this cycle is remarkable in itself. As far as what is to come after SC24 is anyone’s guess. Our actual knowledge base is not comprehensive enough to make credible projections.
Interesting analysis, but the underlying assumption seems to be that other significant changes in the atmosphere of the planet (i.e. the rapid buildup of greenhouse gases over the past few hundred years) will have no effect on the climate and that the sun trumps everything. This assumption seems to unproven, and so even if the sun goes into a Maunder-type minimum, it would be happening to a planet that is not the same as it was back then.
It will be all more evidence (except of course to hardcore skeptics), of the potency of the increases in greenhouse gases if, rather than go into a period of cooling, that the earth continues to warm over the next few decades. It would mean that the sun has indeed taken a back seat to anthropogenic effects.
David: I don’t understand your point.
Are you simply noting the correlation between AP Index and temperature and atributing causation?
Do you believe neutrons from the sun influence the earth’s temperature? If so, how?
Does this tie in with Svensmark’s theory? If so, how?
Stephan Richards echoes another concern: “I am uncomfortablewith graphs that have no scale names and with graphs that have very different timescales with no clear reason.”
Please label your graphs and follow up with a clear summary of how the AP index influences the earth’s temperature.
Ian E: Nice. Worlds shortest joke: “A baby seal walks into a club.”
The good news is, since the CO2 is higher now, the plants will grow faster allowing for the possibility of still having a successful growing season if it is shorter.
My theory:
1) Surface of the core [where fusion takes place] is depleted of Hydrogen.
2) Less fusion, less neutrons.
3) The Sun, near the core shrinks, doesn’t become more active until the Hydrogen levels increase in density. The density increase takes 20 to 50 years.
4) Two cycles; the ~11 year, the ~400 year [2 x 180 years].
5) We are into the ~400 year cycle.
The neutron count is the easiest way to determine the surface of the core activity. Neutrons are essentially not affected by electrical fields, magnetic fields. Since they have a mass slightly greater than a proton, they are only affected by gravity.
Quiet Sun, colder temperatures on Earth; active Sun, warmer temperatures on Earth.
Question: How does the fusion process affect gravity??
Gates:
… aka the null hypothesis. “The sun did it” is the default position to take; it doesn’t need “proving” in the popular sense of the word.
The CO2 position is the newcomer and it needs to be tested. So far, the few empirical tests designed to demonstrate the CO2 effect have generally falsified it or remained inconclusive which, in scientific terms, is pretty much the same thing. Null hypothesis wins again.
I too hope you’re wrong Mr Archibald. The last thing 8 billion (or however many) people need is less farmland.
Pamela Gray says:
January 22, 2012 at 7:16 am
How did the ‘pond’ get warm in the first place? Volcanism?
Archonix said:
“So far, the few empirical tests designed to demonstrate the CO2 effect have generally falsified it or remained inconclusive…”
_____
Test such as? Please be specific.
Edim says:
“The cooling will really kick in after the SC24 plateau (~2013-2015) and it will be dramatic.”
______
This seems to be the meme among some skeptics. It seems they’ve put their full faith in the belief that the solar variaitons trump everything. I am wondering what new meme they’ll have to embrace if the planet continues to warm after the SC24 plateau. Anything of course, other than accept the possibility that the buildup in greenhouses gases could be significant enough now to overpower solar variations.
Well, scratch planting palm trees in my backyard in Ohio. I was so looking forward to beach front property too.
The True Believer says:
“It will be all more evidence (except of course to hardcore skeptics), of the potency of the increases in greenhouse gases if, rather than go into a period of cooling, that the earth continues to warm over the next few decades. It would mean that the sun has indeed taken a back seat to anthropogenic effects.”
First, there are no “hardcore skeptics”. There are either skeptics [the only honest kind of scientists], or there are those who deceptively try to elevate the AGW conjecture to the status of a theory. CO2 may cause some minor warming, but the warming is a net benefit, as is the added CO2. Skeptics are critical of the “carbon” scare for a very good reason: there is no testable evidence supporting it.
On all time scales from months to hundreds of millennia, ΔCO2 follows ΔT. If CO2 had “potency”, then temperatures would closely track changes in CO2. But we know that is not the case. In fact, it appears that the rise in global temperature and the rise in CO2 is mostly, if not entirely coincidental, because CO2 only began rising with the industrial revolution – but global temperatures have been steadily rising along the same trend line for hundreds of years prior to the recent rise in CO2. That is a fact, so how can anyone credibly attribute the rise in temperature to CO2?
CO2 is harmless, and it is beneficial to the biosphere. More is better. Evidence shows that the largest part of the anthropogenic effect comes from changes in land use, such as the UHI effect. The planet will probably continue to warm along the same long term trend line it has followed since the LIA. To attribute that warming primarily to human-emitted CO2 is stubborn true belief in the face of contrary facts.
Stephen Rasey says:
January 22, 2012 at 2:28 am
Re: John Finn: Which cooling event …
Time Magazine Cover: April 8, 1977 “How to survive the coming Ice Age”
Hey, if you can’t trust TIME Magazine…..
You didn’t read (or didn’t understand) my post properly. The cooling didn’t begin in the 1970s or the 1960s – it began in the 1940s. David is trying to associate the mid-20th century cooling with the weak solar cycle 20 which started in 1964 – i.e. 20 years after the cooling kicked in. In actual fact global temperatures rose slightly after the mid-1960s. That’s using actual data rather than a magazine article.
The cooling had nothing to do with solar cycle 20. The cooling wewas pretty much over by the time solar cycle 20 started.
R. Gates says:
January 22, 2012 at 9:09 am
“Test such as? Please be specific.”
Here’s one:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/climate-fail-files/gore-and-bill-nye-fail-at-doing-a-simple-co2-experiment
Update:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/09/28/video-analysis-and-scene-replication-suggests-that-al-gores-climate-reality-project-fabricated-their-climate-101-video-simple-experiment
A D-O event would indeed be catastrophic because world trade in agri commodities would fall in nonlinear fashion. High commodity prices would induce potential exports from countries not experiencing impacts of cold climate change, but those source populations would then see extreme price moves in their home markets and attempt to enforce food protectionism. Food prices would spike on any news of further disruptions or and potential changes in trade flows from traditional suppliers. Somewhere in that late hour there might actually be a statement from retreating policymakers along the lines of ‘who could have known’ or ‘never let a good crisis go to waste.’
Smokey,
You really missed the whole point in those “experiments”. They said nothing about the function of CO2’s LW absorption spectrum. For you to throw those out as experiments that dissprove basic greenhouse gas theory is laughable in the extreme.
To label “greenhouse gases” a “theory” is laughable in the extreme. A theory makes repeatable, accurate predictions. GHG? LOL. Fail, pseudo-skeptic. The GHG conjecture can’t predict it’s way out of a wet paper bag, and the null hypothesis debunks it. As does Occam’s Razor.
Archonix asked for a test, which was cited. And there is also R.W. Woods experiment that debunked the greenhouse effect. His test has been replicated and confirmed. Not that I would expect a true believer who can’t even get the definition of ‘theory’ right to accept Wood’s experiment, or any other experiment that causes doublethink. Cognitive dissonance closes minds to inconvenient facts.
Smokey said:
“First, there are no “hardcore skeptics”.”
____
I disagree. There are those who, no matter what evidence is given to them, will continue with their beliefs. These “True Believers”, are found in every group, skeptic and warmist alike. They will go to their graves believing that they “know” they are right.
The honest skeptic is willing to change their beliefs, and as such, is skeptical even about their own skepticism…i.e. they are always looking at the true basis of their skepticism, and making sure it hasn’t become a religion.
R Gates imagines:
“ ‘True Believers’, are found in every group, skeptic and warmist alike.”
Not really, Gates. Skeptics are simply saying: “Prove it.” Or at least, provide convincing evidence that CO2=CAGW. The claim is entirely on the part of the alarmist crowd, therefore they are the True Believers because they have no testable evidence to support their beliefs. The onus is never on skeptics to prove a negative, much as you wish it were so.
Smokey said:
“Cognitive dissonance closes minds to inconvenient facts.”
_____
Indeed. I couldn’t agree more. Hence, why I am baffled by the fact that AGW skeptics keep citing the cooling that is upon on or coming or some such thing, and yet 9 of 10 warmest years on instrument record have occurred since the year 2000, with the only one outside of that time period being 1998. How is that skeptics simply dismiss this rather impressive string of warmer years? Furthermore, this tendency to see warmer years (on decadal time scales) is precisely what is expected in the Theory of AGW, that posits that human contributions to greenhouse concentrations in the atmosphere will lead to warmer and warmer conditions over the coming century. I should think this string of inconvenient facts must cause quite a bit of cognitive dissonance to “true believer” skeptics.
R. Gates says (January 22, 2012 at 8:36 am)
“potency of the increases in greenhouse gases”
No correlation between CO2 and temps:
1912 to 1961: temperature increase 0.52C, CO2 increase 18ppm.
1962 to 2011: temperature increase 0.41C, CO2 increase 74ppm.
http://www.thegwpf.org/the-climate-record/4808-100-years-of-co2-rise-and- – temperature lchange.htm
Any comment on “Warming since 1975 to 2008 is slightly more than 1915-44.”? (email 2234, Nov 2009, Phil Jones )
“It’s the sun, stupid” has been the explanation for centuries. CO2 and GHGs for only decades.
Maybe we had truth before we invented error. Frankly, I don’t know what drives the climate, or how, but CO2 is nowhere near having it’s culprit status confirmed.
Oh dear. Try again.
http://www.thegwpf.org/the-climate-record/4808-100-years-of-co2-rise-and-temperature-change.html
In other words, you’re saying that in a free market economy smart money is on an increased demand for energy in the future whereas more Leftist government hegemony over scarce resources and central planning based on the dogma of modern liberal utopianism will result in a lot more misery, poverty and death, right?
R. Gates@9:49
How correct you are. A skeptic looks for causeation and not just correlation. A skeptic looks at all the knowledge that is presently available, and understands that said knowledge is continuously improved and confirmed.
The current abatement in the rate of warming is somewhat alarming. TSI/Sunspot reconstructions indicate that during the 20th century there was very little variation in TSI. What is not as well known is the variation in the bands within said TSI.
Another unknown based on current literature is why we warmed at the same rate during the early 20th century and the late 20th century.
The actual study with instrumentation of our sun is very new. We have a tremendous amount to learn. This cycle, as I stated earlier, is different as there appears to be the L&P effect. What that portends for the future is anyone’s guess.
CO2 is a minor greenhouse gas. It kept rising as the temperatures fell in the past, and I don’t think there will be an exception this time if our primary driver decides to do something out of the ordinary.
R. Gates
“This seems to be the meme among some skeptics. It seems they’ve put their full faith in the belief that the solar variaitons trump everything. I am wondering what new meme they’ll have to embrace if the planet continues to warm after the SC24 plateau. Anything of course, other than accept the possibility that the buildup in greenhouses gases could be significant enough now to overpower solar variations.”
—————–
Solar variation is the knob and it trumps everything. It’s the firing part of the “boiler”. There are of course other variables. Regarding CO2, I agree with Salby that it sits in the back while temperature drives. So, there’s nothing unusual about buildups in atmosphere during warming periods.
The problem is that warmists have put their full faith in the belief that CO2 trumps everything, which is absurd for many reasons. I am wondering what new meme they’ll have to embrace if the climate continues to cool.
Gates,
You are “baffled” because you don’t read what is written. Show me where I’ve *ever* written that ‘cooling is upon us’. I wrote: “it appears that the rise in global temperature and the rise in CO2 is mostly, if not entirely coincidental, because CO2 only began rising with the industrial revolution – but global temperatures have been steadily rising along the same trend line for hundreds of years prior to the recent rise in CO2. That is a fact, so how can anyone credibly attribute the rise in temperature to CO2?”
So far, the rising temperature trend line remains unbroken:
http://i35.tinypic.com/2db1d89.jpg
Looking at that chart, it is obvious that later years will be warmer. It is also obvious that CO2 is not the cause, since CO2 only began rising – slowly – only around 1860. Those plain facts debunk your insistence on using the anti-science term ‘theory’ when referring to the AGW conjecture. When you mis-use words it either addles your mind, or it is the result of an addled mind. Which is it in your case?
Hoser, honestly. We are talking about trends and change, otherwise known as “anomalous” change. Of course solar IR is absorbed by the oceans and results in heat. It even heats land surfaces. That you confuse the two topics (heating, and change in ocean and land temperature trends over long periods of time) speaks volumes.
I find it funny that you guys are arguing over a short temperature trend.
There is nothing unusual going on since the 1850’s.The AGW conjecture has been a proven failure in the idea that CO2 is a significant climate driver.It is telling when R Gates could do no better than ask a question.That has been answered many,many,many times in the last few years.
“Test such as? Please be specific.”
He is still looking for an answer?
ROFLMAO!
cui bono says:
January 22, 2012 at 2:10 am
„You cite a 5.2°C fall from 526 to 531. Are these dates absolutely certain? …
Tree rings from the year 535 A.D. show that the world’s climate was extraordinairily cold.”
It seems to me that the Greenland dates are in question and maybe by 5.5 years for that century. There is a coincidence of the high frequency data from Moberg et al. and the solar tide function of six synodic couples. If these Greenland dates are shifted by +5.5 years, the temperature profiles fits with both.
http://volker-doormann.org/images/gree_com_shift55.gif
Because this shift is not fixed on one year (535 AD), but valid over a century, temporary events cannot be the cause for that temperature gap in 535 AD.
V.
Smokey,
I find it curious that you’d use a Central England Temperature record to reflect what has been happening with global temperatures over the past few centuries. At least use Northern Hemisphere temperatures if you want to even come close to saying something meaningful about global warming. As it is, the CET temperature graph you’ve linked to doesn’t even reflect the full measure of, for example, the Dalton Minimum, in which temperatures declined after making a steady rise from the depths of the LIA. Why do you chose to use such a narrow geographic sample of data when trying to look at something that is global in scale?
Jack Simmons says:
January 22, 2012 at 7:26 am
……..
The CO2-Arctic temperature relationship is pretty well conclusive (there’s none).
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CO2-Arc.htm
see also:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/Arctic>.htm
Smokey says:
January 22, 2012 at 10:00 am
R Gates imagines:
“ ‘True Believers’, are found in every group, skeptic and warmist alike.”
Not really, Gates. Skeptics are simply saying: “Prove it.” Or at least, provide convincing evidence that CO2=CAGW. The claim is entirely on the part of the alarmist crowd, therefore they are the True Believers because they have no testable evidence to support their beliefs. The onus is never on skeptics to prove a negative, much as you wish it were so.
Dear Smokey,
Perfectly stated.
Kind regards.
Geomagnetic storm (hit at ~ 16.00GMT) is in progres:
http://flux.phys.uit.no/cgi-bin/plotgeodata.cgi?Last24&site=tro2a&
Edim says:
The problem is that warmists have put their full faith in the belief that CO2 trumps everything, which is absurd for many reasons. I am wondering what new meme they’ll have to embrace if the climate continues to cool.
_______
“…climate continues to cool…”? It has started to cool? Since when? 9 of the 10 warmest years on instrument record have been since the year 2000, with 2011 in that group. Where exactly is the cooling?
Sorry, but the data would seem to put a few holes in the “climate is cooling” meme. No record of such. At the very most you could say that the climate has not been warming as fast over the past decade, but that is hardly the same as “climate continues to cool”. Really, your choice of words belies you underlying belief structure…
R. Gates, “if the planet continues to warm”? Don’t you mean “if the planet resumes warming”? I think we can agree that gilding one’s lilly is rampant in these various posts and comments and you should, given your credentials, be championing unbiased and accurate statements.
There has been a pause in global warming that you are well aware of. And don’t cough up the trendline hair ball. You know as well as anyone here what an inappropriate statistical measure that is for a sometimes chaotic, always oscillating system equipped with intrinsic, natural, and very powerful drivers of this influential, measurable and supremely difficult to cancel noise.
While I also find the solar post a very poor one, I would advise you not to swing the other way lest you sound just like the author.
That’s funny, Gates. CET was fine when it appeared to show warming but now it shows cooling suddenly it’s unreliable.
When it comes to warming, the sceptical argument has always been “so what?” CO2 and temperatures don’t correlate over anything but very short periods. Temperatures over the last decade have been essentially static (or trending down, but lets just say static) yet CO2 has continued to rise. As has been pointed out, temperatures were rising when humans were emitting no significant amounts of CO2.
Again and again these facts have been pointed out to you. Again and again the CO2 premise has been soundly proven false. Again and again you say “I want more proof!” when you have all the evidence you need.
And then you have the gall to refer to sceptics as “hardcore” and “believers”.
Gates says:
“I find it curious that you’d use a Central England Temperature record to reflect what has been happening with global temperatures over the past few centuries. At least use Northern Hemisphere temperatures…” &etc. Gates, you’re easier to deconstruct than arguing with a 9-year old.
The CET is the best recod in the world in it’s long time frame. Nothing will convince you though, because your mind is made up and closed tight. But if you want more locations, see here:
http://oi52.tinypic.com/2agnous.jpg
Copenhagen, Washington DC, New York, Geneva, Minneapolis, Berlin, St. Petersburg, London. Same gradually rising trend lines, and all starting to rise at the same rate before CO2 began to rise. And none of the warming is accelerating despite rising CO2. I also have a link somewhere for 150 world temperatures. Ask, and I’ll find it and post it. But no amount of evidence will ever convince you, will it?
Once again R. Gates, you are gilding your lilly. A sudden onset, then ramping down signal will have several “records” on the way down. It does not mean that the signal is increasing. Such a conclusion cannot be supported based on the “record highs” you speak of. These kinds of signals are easy to make (I’ve made them), and can be observed in nature sans human influence.
Archonix said:
“When it comes to warming, the sceptical argument has always been “so what?” CO2 and temperatures don’t correlate over anything but very short periods. Temperatures over the last decade have been essentially static (or trending down, but lets just say static) yet CO2 has continued to rise. As has been pointed out, temperatures were rising when humans were emitting no significant amounts of CO2.”
_______
Has “so what” to warming always been the skeptical argument? I think you’d find quite a few skeptics right here at WUWT who’d disagree with that.
But your post indicates the common logical fallacy that seems to permeate quite of bit of skeptical argument– and that’s related to the notion that all effects must have the same cause. Of course temperatures have gone up and down in past time frames when human influence was not a factor, and of course the sun (and other natural fluctuations) played a major role in those sub-Milankovitch temperature fluctuations. Not one climate scientist would disagree with this. But the climate is not a random walk, and temperature fluctuations have specfic causes. Yes, the system is complex and chaotic, but not random. Temperature increases had specific forcings associated with them, and trying to figure out what those were is the heart of climate study. Just because the sun or ocean cycles or volcanic activity play a role in temperature fluctuations, does not preclude that the rapid increases in CO2 and other greenhouse gases, to levels not seen in at least 800,000 years, might not also play a role in temperature increases. It is a both a logical fallacy and scientifically unsupportable to think otherwise.
R. Gates:
We are in a long term warming trend, with short up and down trends intermingled.
As far as cause of warming for that long term trend, please be more specific.
The warming started long before co2 rose significantly.
The rate of warming during 1970-2000 was certainly not significantly different than earlier short term warming periods.
I presented literature showing TSI has been constant for well over 100 years to Always Thougtful.
http://www.leif.org/research/The%20long-term%20variation%20of%20solar%20activity.pdf
I can only suggest that you read the “current” literature and research.
Here is a good place to start:
http://www.leif.org/research/
Another question to ask yourself, are current temperatures and rate of warming significantly different that those experienced during the total Holocene? The answer is a resounding no, but don’t take my word for it, do some research for yourself.
Pamela Gray says:
January 22, 2012 at 10:50 am
Once again R. Gates, you are gilding your lilly. A sudden onset, then ramping down signal will have several “records” on the way down. It does not mean that the signal is increasing. Such a conclusion cannot be supported based on the “record highs” you speak of. These kinds of signals are easy to make (I’ve made them), and can be observed in nature sans human influence.
____
I would agree that if the recent decade of higher temperatures (9 of the 10 warmest years on record) is a natural fluctuation, that from a statistical perspective, even once that peak has been reached, it will continue to set records “on the way down” as you say. This is of course logical.
However, if AGW theory is correct, and the recent string of higher temps is not natural and cyclical, but is caused by a longer term forcing (i.e. the buildup of greenhouse gases to levels not seen in at least 800,000 years), then one would expect that we will not see a “peak” anytime soon, and indeed, so the theory goes, we will not see a peak for many centuries, as even if we somehow stopped immediately in the growth of greenhouse gases, the final equalibrium temperature, when all slow “earth system” feedbacks are taking into account won’t occur until then.
So, for climate scientists (who don’t believe the climate is random walk, else why even study climate), the issue becomes one of looking at the total forcings on the system and trying to acertain which ones do what and to what degree. An excellent recent posting on this can be found at:
http://tinyurl.com/86vhqwc
Post hoc ergo procter hoc ad infinitum, amicus Portii?
Seems there’s a case of special pleading going on here, friend Gates, since you’re bringing up logical fallacies. Whilst you are right in a narrow sense, in the broader scheme the burden of proof for your theory of why, now, a minute change in the amount of CO2 should suddenly override all other effects rests on your broad and manly shoulders. You have not yet disproved the null hypothesis and no amount of flawed inductive logic will change that.
It is easy if your recognize that climate is cyclical. If you look at a cyclical curve like the sine curve, you see a nearly flat plateau as the curve passes over its peak. The straight line projections of the AGW curve assume that temperature is rising at a uniform linear slope. (if you lay the AGW projections along the rising front slope of the cyclical curve they both will agree for a considerable period of time, then suddenly diverge with the rate of change suddenly changing to near zero values.)
It is the belief of many “skeptics” that this is where the AGW crowd is going wrong, they are assuming a linear relationship between temperatures and CO2, to what is really the front rising portion of a cyclical curve of natural variability.
Current annual temperatures more closely match a sine curve near its peak than they do the linear projections proposed based on a direct correlation between warming and CO2 levels.
The indicator of a change in direction of a curve is not when it is falling but when the slope goes to zero over a short time span.
Such as this graphic:
http://www.columbia.edu/itc/sipa/math/images/calc_files/image161a.gif
If the zero slope is preceded by a rising slope you are crossing the top of convex curve (cycle). If the zero slope is preceded by a negative slope you are at the bottom of a concave curve (cycle).
Recent annual temperature numbers would fit very nicely along the top of that curve.
Larry
Gates wrote:
“Just because the sun or ocean cycles or volcanic activity play a role in temperature fluctuations, does not preclude that the rapid increases in CO2 and other greenhouse gases, to levels not seen in at least 800,000 years, might not also play a role in temperature increases.”
*MIGHT* play a role? Do you not understand that when the planet warms the CO2 in sea water comes out of solution and enters the atmosphere?.
Would love to see the neutron count overlaid with data about earthquake and volcanic activity.
CG
Archonix says:
January 22, 2012 at 11:11 am
Post hoc ergo procter hoc ad infinitum, amicus Portii?
Seems there’s a case of special pleading going on here, friend Gates, since you’re bringing up logical fallacies. Whilst you are right in a narrow sense, in the broader scheme the burden of proof for your theory of why, now, a minute change in the amount of CO2 should suddenly override all other effects rests on your broad and manly shoulders. You have not yet disproved the null hypothesis and no amount of flawed inductive logic will change that.
__________
I make no “special pleading”. I simply look at what AGW theory says will be happening and then compare it to the actual data. If 9 of the 10 warmest years on instrument record had not occurred since the year 2000, it would weaken the case (though not completely destroy it).
It terms of CO2 and other greenhouse gases “suddenly” overriding other natural forcings, this is not the position of climate scientists at all. Rather, CO2 and other greenhouse gases have been gradually building up in the atmosphere over centuries due to human activity. If you look at the latest attribution studies, you’ll see that CO2 was less of a factor in the early 20th century than it was in the later part of the century, and of course, that influence continues to grow yearly. So there was no “suddenly” about it. It slowly has grown, and slowly has overtook other natural forcings such as solar, ENSO, volcanic, etc. such that now it is the dominant forcing due to the fact that is is 30 to 40% higher than at any time during the past 800,000 years.
This is a most interesting discussion and article. For the science guy it is nice to see conformation more or less, from others, of conclusions and analysis made by myself. For the philosopher guy, I would however suggest we all use just a few more “should and aught” verbs and pronouns, when making projections or interpretations from models.
Smokey, do you have a link other then tinypic to these temperature records?
http://oi52.tinypic.com/2agnous.jpg
I think they are very impressive and I can use them to convince some AGW chicken littles that the world isn;t ending soon due to AGW
@ R.Gates: It seems to me you are in need of some “tune up”, you are burning too much CO2 🙂
R. Gates,
Over the past decade, the trend was ~flat. The warming stopped, according to the official temperature indices. Of course, the plateau decade (2000s) will be warmer than the previous warming decade (1990s), by definition. Both solar activity and oceanic/atmospheric oscillations are entering (or have entered) a cooling phase.
Again, I predict that 2010s will be no warmer than 1990s, and therefore a flat linear trend for 1990-2020 (30 years). Time will tell.
Gates wrote:
“I make no “special pleading”. I simply look at what AGW theory says will be happening and then compare it to the actual data.”
You have it backwards. Data trumps theory. If the theory predicts something that doesn’t occur then the theory is wrong.
Hotrod (Larry L):
I appreciate your explanation of curves and reaching peaks etc., and it is much the same that Pamela gave, and so my reply is much the same as it was to her. What if this is not part of a natural cyclical event? What if we do in fact see a continual string of warmer decades in the coming century? My question to you and other skeptics, would be: If you are honest skeptics, then you’ll have some conditions whereby you’ll begin to accept the basic AGW Theory. And to be fair, I’ll gladly once more list the conditions whereby I will begin to have doubts about the basic tenets of AGW theory:
1) We see a decade where there are no new temperature records AND which there was no natural fluctuations (such as a series of large volcanic eruptions) to explain the lack of warming.
2) Ocean Heat content begins to decrease on a long-term basis
3) Arctic sea ice begins to expand on a long-term basis
4) Greenland and Antarctica begin to gain net ice as opposed to seeing loses.
So, to you and other honest skeptics, I’d ask: What are the conditions whereby you’d accept the basic tenets of AGW Theory: i.e. the build up o greenhouses gases (mainly CO2) over the past few centuries due to human activity will lead to increasing global temperatures?
Edim says:
January 22, 2012 at 11:26 am
R. Gates,
Over the past decade, the trend was ~flat. The warming stopped, according to the official temperature indices.
_____
This argument, that “the warming stopped”, doesn’t stand up to analysis. Attribution studies, such as this one:
http://tinyurl.com/86vhqwc
Show quite the opposite. The warming from the additional greenhouse gases is still very much present, and can simply be masked by natural fluctuations. Everyone knows, for example, that during La Nina periods, we generally don’t see record high temperatures, but rather, as the oceans take up more net energy, there is less to be releases to the atmosphere. But the fact that 2011 was the warmest La Nina year on record means nothing to skeptics for some reason, yet it should speak volumes about the underlying warming.
Suppose that we get a record warm year in sometime between 2012-2015, with perhaps an El Nino coinciding near solar max 24 (however weak it might be). What will skeptics attribute this to? If we’re entering a “cooling period” how can we have a record warm year? Where is that heat comiing from? Why would it have been warmer than the last big El Nino year of 1998?
R. Gates:
From you link the certainty is not present. Good read tho…..thank you.
“However, our results
imply that CanESM2 overestimates the response to greenhouse
gases, natural forcings, and particularly aerosols, and
we find that its multi-decadal internal climate variability is
lower than that in other models. We therefore recommend
caution in interpreting the scaled projections derived from
this single model, since our uncertainty estimates account
only for possible errors in the magnitude of the simulated
responses to the forcings, and not for possible errors in the
observations, in the forcings, or in the spatio-temporal patterns
of response to those forcings?
R. Gates says:
January 22, 2012 at 11:22 am
“I make no “special pleading”. I simply look at what AGW theory says will be happening and then compare it to the actual data. ”
When I look at what AGW theory said and then compare it to the actual data it is with a feeling of great happiness! Won’t you please come to the party?
Gates wrote:
“Where is that heat comiing from?”
The big yellow ball in the sky.
Bob B,
I’m not sure exactly what you’re asking for. More charts? General information?
The following sites have lots of information and charts:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/05/23/little-ice-age-thermometers-–-history-and-reliability-2
http://www.john-daly.com
http://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=3217&JournalID=69
http://www.greenworldtrust.org.uk/Science/Curious.htm
http://www.climate4you.com
http://www.mrc.org/bmi/uploads/pdf/FireandIce.pdf
http://www.c3headlines.com
[There are more good sites along the WUWT right sidebar under “skeptical views”.]
Here are some charts similar to the one you commented on:
http://img576.imageshack.us/img576/2681/temperaturewithrealbase.gif
http://vortex.accuweather.com/adc2004/pub/includes/columns/climatechange/2011/590x189_12100149_sc_rss_compare_ts_channel_tlt_v03_3.png
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/hadley/Hadley-global-temps-1850-2010-web.jpg
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/USHCNvsCO2.jpg
http://members.shaw.ca/sch25/FOS/GlobalTroposphereTemperaturesAverage.jpg
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cHhMa7ARDDg/SoxiDu0taDI/AAAAAAAABFI/Z2yuZCWtzvc/s1600/Geocarb%2BIII-Mine-03.jpg
http://notrickszone.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Bastardi-10-years.gif
http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c0128772998bd970c-pi
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/8YearTemps.jpg
http://www.climate4you.com/images/HadCRUT3%20GlobalMonthlyTempSince1940%20AndCO2.gif
R Gates:
What would it take to change my position?
Well, I once was an ardent believer in AGW. The more literature I read, the more uncertainty I recognized in the belief. As I observed the failings of some of the major AGW supposed outcomes, such as stratospheric cooling not happening for over 15 years…..in fact a bit of warming….as just one example….my belief went with the science rather than the conjecture.
When I see a break to the upside of significance in the long term rebound since the LIA, and there is not a cause presented for this break to the upside that can be anything but increased co2…that will capture my interest.
Till that time, there is absolutely no evidence that the present rate of warming is extraordinary at all.
R. Gates :
January 22, 2012 at 11:48 am
The greeks had a word for it, hubris. To call “record high temperatures” the temperatures we have now at the end of the holocene is hubris.
When one contemplates the temperatures of the Holocene, one sees fluctuations equal and even larger than the present one. I would say that the record temperatures were about 7500 years ago.
We are long overdue a dip to the next ice age, fortunately.
Hi Gates
Some ideas on the CET, cycles, future extrapolation etc.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CET-NVa.htm
Edim says:
“Again, I predict that 2010s will be no warmer than 1990s”
_____
Then it better start cooling very fast if your prediction is going to come true. 2010 and 2011 have already been warmer than any year in the 1990’s except 1998, and it looks like 2012-2015 at least will also be warmer. This will only give you 2016-2019 for cooling to the 1990’s level, and it would have to be very very severe and rapid to see the decade of the 2010’s not warmer than the 1990’s.
Oh man!
The temperature trends from the 1850’s is falling within the first sigma line.
http://www.globalwarmingskeptics.info/forums/showthread.php?tid=1103&pid=9923#pid9923
The THREE warming trends since the 1850’s are nearly identical.
http://www.globalwarmingskeptics.info/forums/showthread.php?tid=1103&pid=8790#pid8790
There is NO evidence of any warming acceleration at all!
DR. Jones himself admits all this as true.There is nothing unusual going on.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8511670.stm
I am baffled on why this is so hard for AGW believers to grasp.
In reply to R. Gates says:
January 22, 2012 at 10:55 am
“But the climate is not a random walk, and temperature fluctuations have specfic causes. Yes, the system is complex and chaotic, but not random. Temperature increases had specific forcings associated with them, and trying to figure out what those were is the heart of climate study. Just because the sun or ocean cycles or volcanic activity play a role in temperature fluctuations, does not preclude that the rapid increases in CO2 and other greenhouse gases, to levels not seen in at least 800,000 years, might not also play a role in temperature increases. It is a both a logical fallacy and scientifically unsupportable to think otherwise.”
Emphatically stating that is irrational to question the magnitude of the 20th century warming that is attributable to CO2, does not make that that statement correct.
Life can not exist on this planet without CO2. CO2 is not a pollutant. Atmospheric CO2 is the lowest in 500 million years. Plants eat CO2. Commercial greenhouses inject CO2 to reduce growing times and increase yields. The optimum level of CO2 for plant growth is 1000 ppm to 1500 ppm. Increases in atmospheric CO2 is positive for the biosphere if there is not dangerous planet ending warming.
There is in paleo climatic record periods of millions of years when atmospheric CO2 was high and the planet was cold and low when the planet was warm. The paleoclimatic record supports the assertion that planetary cloud cover regulates and resists climate change.
The changes in the cloud regulating mechanism itself is what cause the past ice epochs (ice house periods of millions of years that occur when the solar system passes through the spiral arms of the galaxy and GCR levels increase by a factor of 10 as that is the region where new stars are formed and that has a high stellar density.)
As noted in my comment above there is a second mechanism by which the sun modulates planetary clouds. The first is changes in the solar solar heliosphere (name for the cloud of magnetic flux that the sun creates about the solar system). The solar heliosphere deflects galactic cosmic rays (the name used for high speed mostly protons ). The GCR strike the atmosphere creating MUONs (heavy electron like particles) that create multiple ions in the atmosphere. The Svensmark in his SKY experiment and the CERN CLOUD experiment confirmed the mechanism.
The second mechanism is solar wind bursts which create a space charge in the ionosphere which in turns removes cloud forming ions which is called electroscavenging. The electroscavenging mechanism removes the ions formed by GCR so even if the GCR is high and neutrons are high there is a reduction in planetary cloud and the planet warms rather than cools.
The warming in the late 20th century was due to electroscavenging and due to a third mechanism. Ionization reduces the levels of high altitude cirrus clouds. The high altitude cirrus clouds warm the earth particularly at high latitude locations in the winter.
http://climate4you.com/images
/GISP2%20TemperatureSince10700%20BP%20with%20CO2%20from%20EPICA%20DomeC.gif
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009JA014342.shtml
If the Sun is so quiet, why is the Earth ringing? A comparison of two solar minimum intervals.
Observations from the recent Whole Heliosphere Interval (WHI) solar minimum campaign are compared to last cycle’s Whole Sun Month (WSM) to demonstrate that sunspot numbers, while providing a good measure of solar activity, do not provide sufficient information to gauge solar and heliospheric magnetic complexity and its effect at the Earth. The present solar minimum is exceptionally quiet, with sunspot numbers at their lowest in 75 years and solar wind magnetic field strength lower than ever observed. Despite, or perhaps because of, a global weakness in the heliospheric magnetic field, large near-equatorial coronal holes lingered even as the sunspots disappeared. Consequently, for the months surrounding the WHI campaign, strong, long, and recurring high-speed streams in the solar wind intercepted the Earth in contrast to the weaker and more sporadic streams that occurred around the time of last cycle’s WSM campaign.
See section 5a) Modulation of the global circuit in this review paper, by solar wind burst and the process electroscavenging where by increases in the global electric circuit remove cloud forming ions.
The same review paper summarizes the data that does show correlation between low level clouds and GCR.
http://www.utdallas.edu/physics/pdf/Atmos_060302.pdf
Earth’s varible fission rate is triggered by variations in solar and galactic neutrino bombardments. With 4 PPM Uranium and 7 PPM Thorium there is plenty of fissionable material in the very hot, high pressure mantle for controlled fission to produce varying amounts of heat causing the PDO< AMO etc. This fission creates 'elemental atoms' and 'elemental molecules' as by-products. This is described in "Motive Force for All Climate Change" and "The Neutrino Effect" both posted in the spring of 2009 at Climate Realist. One of the many 'elemental' by-products are Hydrocarbons as described in "Fossil Fuel is Nuclear Waste" posted at Canada Free Press and crosslinked to +11,000 websites within one day. Any uncertainity as to the physical structure of the mantle that allows this process is explained in "Earth's Elemental Petrol Production". We have been systematically lied to about a number of Earth's realities. The Hubbert Peak Oil Hypothesis is as defective as the Carbon Climate Forcing Fraud. Luckily, emperical evidence and trained intuition can overcome propaganda. It is time for a paradigm shift in mankinds thinking.
R Gates said;
” Suppose that we get a record warm year in sometime between 2012-2015, with perhaps an El Nino coinciding near solar max 24 (however weak it might be). What will skeptics attribute this to? If we’re entering a “cooling period” how can we have a record warm year? Where is that heat comiing from? Why would it have been warmer than the last big El Nino year of 1998? ”
———————————-
It’s known that during the depths of the Maunder minimum, England experienced a couple of it’s hottest summers on record.
Betting on La Nina’s and an inactive sun would seem to be a safer bet than a forlorn long shot on a poor El Nino and the sun deciding against all indications that it’s not going to have a bit of a snooze at mankind’s expense.
What did you think of the sunspot number max of 7 to 20 mentioned in the Livingston & Penn PDF ?
http://www.probeinternational.org/Livingston-penn-2010.pdf
Geomagnetic storm is changing rapidly the intensity of Earth’s magnetic field. Any earthquake sensitive area which has already gone ‘critical’ may snap in the next few hours into major quake at Mag 6 or above.
http://flux.phys.uit.no/cgi-bin/plotgeodata.cgi?Last24&site=tro2a&
Camburn says:
January 22, 2012 at 11:55 am
R. Gates:
From you link the certainty is not present. Good read tho…..thank you.
_____
This was intended to show the attribution part of the study, whereby global temperatures were shown with and without the effects of anthropogenic CO2, etc. Without the additional greenhouse gases, temperatures would be flat to slightly lower over the later part of the 20th century and into the 21st. The four graphs on page 2 are especially interesting in this regard. Is this model accurate or does it have a high degree of certainty? The caution given by the authors makes it clear that more such studies are needed, however, it is quite in line with other similar studies of attribution made over the past few years. They all show that anthropogenic CO2 increases have had an increasing role in the climate, with that role eclipsing natural forcings sometime in the later part of the 20th century.
M.A.Vukcevic says:
January 22, 2012 at 12:17 pm
That’s interesting. I’ve been wondering if the dust storm we’re experiencing in West Texas today had it’s origins in the solar storm.
It’s known that during the depths of the Maunder minimum, England experienced a couple of it’s hottest summers on record.
Betting on La Nina’s and an inactive sun would seem to be a safer bet than a forlorn long shot on a poor El Nino and the sun deciding against all indications that it’s not going to have a bit of a snooze at mankind’s expense.
What did you think of the sunspot number max of 7 to 20 mentioned in the Livingston & Penn PDF ?
http://www.probeinternational.org/Livingston-penn-2010.pdf
________
Some models are showing a possbile El Nino beginning this coming fall into winter, which would of course coincide approximately with Solar Max 24. Of course these are all forecasts, but my question to skeptics in general would be: If we get a record warm year in 2012-2015, to what do they would they attribute that?
As far as warm years in England during the Maunder Minimum– of course there were a few. And they were even “record warm” years until they were eclipsed in the 1700’s and of course more recently. Just goes to show you what “natural variability” will do– mainly the NAO in the case of Central England temps. But what should be kept in mind is that most of these natural factors represent short-term fluctuations, but the buildup of CO2 represents and on-going continual forcing that has become a dominant signal upon which the natural fluctuations ride.
R. Gates,
Now the global warming has become virtual (masked by natural fluctuations)? Laughable! Where were your natural fluctuations before? The same old “warming is CO2-caused, but any cooling is just a fluctuation”.
ENSO is just another index and an indicator of warming/cooling. During warming periods, ENSO is more on the warm side and vice versa. In the next decades we will get more (and stronger) La Ninas than El Ninos – it comes with the cooling.
http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/imei.png
2011 might be the the warmest La Nina year on record (there’s some uncertainty, due to the exaggerated 80s/90s/00s warming), but the record is very short. There could/should be hundreds of warmer La Nina years since the Holocene interglacial peak.
What record warm year are you talking about, 2011? It doesn’t look like a record to me.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_Jan_2011.gif
R. Gates:
I read the paper you presented and understand why you presented it.
The level of uncertainty has to be taken into consideration when reading it. I would like to know more of their methology concering what they consider natural verses anthropogenic. And I would also like to know what their levels of solar etc were based on. The newer papers since that paper has been published show a substaintally different level than had been previously considered.
There have been several papers posted just in this thread that bear reading.
I hope that you take the time to read them and share them with other sites. Some of us have tried to do so.
William,
No one would argue with the fact that we need CO2 in our atmosphere for both biological activity as well as the greenhouse benefits. When stating that something is not a “pollutant” however, you’d must be more specific. As Paracelsus said, “The dose makes the poison.” Many things that are beneficial at one level, become harmful at another. Best to probably look at the earth systems from a biological or pharmaceutical perspective in which the balances of different components are critical, and once certain thresholds are passed, what was once a benefit becomes a detriment…i.e. more is better doesn’t work at continually higher levels. Also, saying that CO2 was higher 500 Million years ago means nothing at all to the current biosphere. The sun was also dimmer and the continents in different positions, and whatever human acestors there were were nothing at all like humans of today (maybe something akin to a tree shrew?). Best to look at the closet analog time frame for which CO2 levels were somewhat similar to today’s and that would take us back to the mid-Pliocene or so. Earth’s climate was very different then (i.e. warmer), and this could be where we are headed.
Archonix says:
January 22, 2012 at 10:39 am
That’s funny, Gates. CET was fine when it appeared to show warming but now it shows cooling suddenly it’s unreliable.
It doesn’t show cooling. 2010 was a cool year but 2011 was the second warmest year in the record (the warmest year was 2006). So far (up to Jan 21st), January 2012 is almost 3 deg C above average.
I don’t know what is going on, but the whole atmospheric column is cooling. NOT just the trop, but the strat as well. http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/
@ John Finn
Quote sources, show links.
When it does! So far temperatures lead CO2.
When are you going to show up at a thread, without an empty bag? The shock would be very convincing. GK
G. Karst says:
“When are you going to show up at a thread, without an empty bag?”
Good question. Gates refers to honest skeptics, which is redundant. Non-skeptics are not honest, eg: mis-labeling the AGW conjecture. I showed conclusively that AGW cannot qualify as a theory because it has not been validated. Words have meanings; dishonest people mis-use words as a ploy.
• • •
John Finn says:
“January 2012 is almost 3 deg C above average.”
Average for what?? You only mention 2010 and 2011. Or are you cherry-picking again?
R. Gates:
For good or bad, plant life has not adapted well to lower co2 levels comparred to earths historic level. This is very evident from not only greenhouse experiments, and present day use, but also large scale field experiments.
Biota responds very positively to co2 level at approx 1000 to 1500 ppmv.
In fact, if we continue our warming trend, that higher co2 may be the saving grace as yields rise commensurate with higher co2 levels.
@Babsy: How do you explain the dust storms at Mars, where the air is a thousand times thinner than earth´s?….Electric fields
I don’t doubt that the trend shown in Figure 5 is present in the data shown in Figure 4, but the conclusions drawn from these figures [apparently an example of the likely effects of cooling in Greenland is displayed in Figure 6] do not necessarily follow.
In general conclusions based on extrapolations in time [“the past shows a trend, so the trend must continue”] and space [“it’s happening in one place, so it’s probably happening elsewhere”] without additional supporting data or attribution to the underlying physical cause are not robust.
adolfogiurfa says:
January 22, 2012 at 1:38 pm
It’s my understanding that Mars no longer has a magnetic field. Is this not so? My guess is it’s either George Bush’s fault or CO2! Maybe it was Spirit and Rover’s unfolding of their solar panels! I would suspect the dust storms on Mars arise from the unven heating of the surface by the sun.
Given that temperatures have been steadily increasing for about 11,000 years, it would take a lot to convince me that CO2 due to human activity has anything to do with warming.
1. Someone would need to make a convincing case that CO2 has any connection to this multi-century long term warming. Since human causes CO2 emissions only are significant since about 1940 there is not (past few centuries of significant CO2 emissions.
Until that is accomplished, the default assumption must be, that slow warming out of the last ice age is the norm for our climate over the last 10-11 centuries, and current warming is only more of the same.
2. I would stipulate that some long term warming is present, but I have yet to see how a trailing indicator can be the cause of the effect. If CO2 levels lag temperature increases by 800 years I find no legitimate reason to assume that CO2 is the cause of warming.
3. It is well documented in historical records that the climate oscillates around that long term upward trend in approximately 30 year increments (30 years above the trend, 30 years below the trend). There is no reason to believe the recent warming cycle is not part of that harmonic imposed on the long term trend. What would it take to convince me other wise?
a) A plausible mechanism that ties CO2 emissions to warming. Since there has been an unexplainable intermission in warming in spite of continuing increase in CO2 the current conditions strongly imply that not only is CO2 not the primary cause of warming, but that it has essentially no correlation to the short term warming. Especially when you compare the recent warming cycle against previous warming cycles before man caused CO2 was significant.
b) Without a demonstrated (testable) mechanism I would accept 120-240 years of proven warming in lock step with CO2 levels. So far that breaks down after about 30 years so the relationship is incidental/accidental not causal.
4. The prevailing evidence is that the earth has been far colder than today most of its history since ice ages began, so the logical assumption has to be that colder is the norm in this era, so cooling is far more likely in the future, than continuous unabated warming as postulated by the AGW proponents.
5. The AGW proponents would also have to convince me that their assertions about global average temperature have any meaning. Specifically:
a. That the concept of Global Average temperature has any rational physical meaning.
(as opposed to my view that it is a fabricated metric that is not only useless but misleading)
b. That they can in fact measure that Global Average temperature to the precision/accuracy that they assert.
(I believe they are in fact measuring noise and that the precision, accuracy and biases in their data totally swamp the changes that they assert they are seeing.)
c. They would also have to convince me that they understand the uncertainties in their data. I am convinced that they are engaged in felony level wishful thinking, and either through ignorance, bias confirmation, or malicious intent, cooking the numbers to suit their expectations.
6. They would also have to change my mind that they are not engaged in an intentional effort to misrepresent the facts in favor of their theory/model projections and routinely make one sided adjustments to the data the majority of which only favor their agenda.
Give me any 5 of those 6 items and I would consider changing my view, until then I will be inclined to give more weight to my personal experience and the -30 deg F winters I remember from my childhood during the “cooling period” that the AGW groups swear did not exist.
As a child I remember radio announcements in the 1960’s that several lakes in the Denver Metro area were frozen thick enough to drive on and ice fishing was allowed, and on our way to my grandmothers house driving by one of those lakes and seeing 5-6 cars and about 30 people out ice fishing on the lake.
It has not been frozen that thick in about 40 years. I also remember it being cold enough that my eyes froze shut when I blinked them too long when they were watering due to the intense cold and windchill, while on my paper route at near -30 deg F temperatures, and I had to cup my hands over my eyes to get my eye lids open.
I also remember spending a day trying to thaw a car enough to get it to turn over due to stiff oil in those temperatures in the 1970’s. We had to put a charcoal grill under the cars oil pan for several hours, to get it warm enough that we could get the starter to crank the engine. The oil was like cold honey.
Larry
R Gates most often used words :
if
maybe
perhaps
suppose
could
Bob
You asked for alternative sources of the graph Smokey posted upthread. In my article linked to below I cited numerous old temperature records
http://judithcurry.com/2011/12/01/the-long-slow-thaw/
The one you are after is cited in link 50 but many of the others are well worth looking at. By clicking on my name you will go to my web site where I keep mostly pre1850 temperature records plus related articles.
tonyb
POES is showing strong potential for auroral activity over Russia into the Fritz 1 zone.
Live 3D Aurora viewer available from the Layman’s Sunspot Count Page.
http://tinyurl.com/2dg9u22/?q=node/50
In this entire post what Ap index stands for is not defined. Goggle says it is ’30 day Geomagnetic Disturbance’ but that would be the GD index. Then there is the ‘three hour Kp index’ which is not defined either. What does it measure? Is that is Gauss or gophers, sun spots or snails?
If we readers do not know what you are measuring then the whole thing is as clear as Vuck, and half the time I don’t know what he is talking about either.
“”””” A physicist says:
January 22, 2012 at 4:10 am
Here on WUWT, Willis Eschenbach has quoted the following Freeman Dyson story:
………………………………..
The lesson-learned is that there have been innumerable theoretical predictions of impending >ice-ages and global warming< in the past. The only such predictions that have stood the test of time have been those that were based upon Fermi-quality theoretical models
All these arguments are interesting, and the science is interesting. But…..
In a way, they are all trivial.
Whatever the catastrophe, be it too hot or too cold, we will not be able to deal with it. We (these United States) are bankrupt. As Erskine Bowles said to Congress, the Federal Debt “…is a cancer that will destroy us…”
http://www.c-span.org/Events/Report-on-Debt-Challenges-Goes-Before-Congress/10737420029/
Pray for our country.
Regards,
Steamboat Jack (Jon Jewett’s evil twin)
Steamboat Jack says:
January 22, 2012 at 3:00 pm
There is a solution to this dilemma: Create wealth. Reduce regulations, drill here and drill now.
@Babsy: About Mars:
http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=zg70y10m
R. Gates says:
“Then it better start cooling very fast if your prediction is going to come true. 2010 and 2011 have already been warmer than any year in the 1990′s except 1998, and it looks like 2012-2015 at least will also be warmer. This will only give you 2016-2019 for cooling to the 1990′s level, and it would have to be very very severe and rapid to see the decade of the 2010′s not warmer than the 1990′s.”
Much like the 1900 and 1945 drops then: http://www.climate4you.com/images/GlobalTemp%20HadCRUT3%20since1850%20C4Y.gif
the cooling has already started in sydney the daily temp is around 23 deg c in the middle of summer ?
R. Gates says @ January 22, 2012 at 11:48 am
In order of decreasing significance:
1. Good Luck
2. The weather
3. Two dimensional representation of an indeterminate number of fork handles. (an art form aka. climate graphics).
(The latter is invariably a picture of four candles that shed more heat than light. I have one my wall initialed by the artist – PNS).
@Gates says:
The honest skeptic is willing to change their beliefs, and as such, is skeptical even about their own skepticism…i.e. they are always looking at the true basis of their skepticism, and making sure it hasn’t become a religion.
True, but the true sceptic is therefore also the “rugged individualist” who you instead compare via your own projection’s self knowledge to a cancer cell, but which in any case makes you no more than a mere member of the “dainty collectivist” tumor, something which you continue to prove by your obsession with the meaningless = unhinged from reality verbiage of mainstream Climate Science’s “CO2 = CAGW” Dogma.
The most important question for you personally, Gates, is whether you are able to “grow a pair” and thus become one who is “willing to change their beliefs”, instead of comfortably repeating over and over the holy verbiage of your “CO2 = CAGW” Religion. However, given the consistency and zeal of your dogmatic performance to date, I’m betting against it.
Dr. R. Gates – full marks for perseverence.
But now it’s time for you to have a nice cup of cocoa and toddle right off to bed.
You may well feel much better in the morning.
But if you don’t, then stay right in bed and keep very, very warm until you do.
Remember warm is good – cold is bad.
Just ask yourself why do so many plants, animals and humans live in the tropics, while so few live in the Artic regions?
When you understand that, then you will be well on the road to recovery.
R. Gates – please just remember that if the CO2 story proves to be correct after all, then several things are sure to follow:
(1) Heavier than air machines will be able to fly and carry people in comfort from country to country.
(2) Pigs as well will at last be able to fly quite easily, without outside assistance.
(3) Pig farming will continue as a commercial venture as before, but in future will be attended by cowboys in helicopters.
All of these things will be true, when the CO2 story finally is able to forecast the climate.
Then I may be tempted to take it all seriously.
Until then I’m a sceptic, a doubter, a denier that there is evidence to support this rather amusing fairy story.
JPeden says:
The most important question for you personally, Gates, is whether you are able to “grow a pair” and thus become one who is “willing to change their beliefs”, instead of comfortably repeating over and over the holy verbiage of your “CO2 = CAGW” Religion.
——
As though who actually read what I post here know– I am not one espousing C AGW, so it would be impossible for me to be part of the CO2=CAGW Religion.
Note: in a dust bowl, carry spare wiper blades for the windshields!
I drove from Dallas to Columbus via Nashville, TN & Cincinnati this weekend in sprinklings of rain. Dirt from the dust storms out west coating everything and reeking havoc on the windshield even 1000 miles from Dallas, TX. Kind of unusual.
R. Gates:
You say an honest sceptic is able to change his views based on new research. Why is it then, that your belief only changes based on warmist research, and not on what you would call “skeptic” research? A True Believer is only able to change his views based on research that supports and strengthens his view. I believe this is a much better fit for you.
And a question for you: how can a doubling of CO2 (+4W/m2 taking the IPCC view) be such a catastrophic influence against the enormous fussion reactor a short distance away from us (~1320W/m2)? Wouldn’t you agree that a forcing 0.3% of an existing natural forcing is very inconsequential? Even the daily solar fluctuations are up to 4 times the size of the proposed change due to doubled CO2. CO2 whilst it has a radiative effect, is irrelevant and completely over-shadowed to the size of natural forcings.
Gates wrote:
“Just because the sun or ocean cycles or volcanic activity play a role in temperature fluctuations, does not preclude that the rapid increases in CO2 and other greenhouse gases, to levels not seen in at least 800,000 years, might not also play a role in temperature increases.”
===================
But you’re claiming it does, “might not also” is meaningless here if you can’t ever be bothered to show empirically that it might.
But also, this reply manufactured in the AGWScience Fiction department devoted to producing such junk scientific sounding arguments, still hasn’t come up with the obvious rebuttal to it – that if it made no difference in the great rapid cooling and warming cycles for 800,000 years then it is irrelevant now.
And moreover in which dramatic changes of 300ft sea rises in a few decades of warming, for example, it lagged behind by c800 years, what difference can a few ppm more of it be making now when the amounts of it through all these changes was irrelevant? As the changes came first then the effect of CO2 levels rising and falling seen following way behind shows it is irrelevant, what it “might be” adding to that is in the irrelevant shash.
cui bono says:
January 22, 2012 at 6:04 am
I think you’ve misunderstood the exchange, it’s the cooling in that period that is now being denied by John Finn – “Which cooling event was this, David? Solar Cycle 20 ran from 1964 to 1976. I’v e checked the Hadcrut record and there was no cooling during this period. In fact there is a small (insignificant) positive trend over that period. The same goes for GISS.”
I was pointing out that even his AGW crowd admitted to cooling in that period.
@David Archibald
> Figure 2 shows that while the Ap Index and neutron count
> are co-incident to date in Solar Cycle 24 …
But neutron GCR peaked in 2009 just before SC24 started and Ap is strongly (but not perfectly) correlated to solar activity (i.e. sunspot/radio flux activity). So how can be Ap be ‘co-incident’ with the solar cycle.
In fact GCR neutron activity is inversely proportional to the canonical solar activity. That’s because the solar wind tends to increase (again, not perfectly) with solar activity, which inhibits galactic cosmic rays (GCR). So, wind goes up, GCR goes down etc.
You can clearly see that trend in the Moscow Neutron Monitor archives. Just set the widget to plot monthly reading from 1960 to 2012. Then turn the plot upside down to see the solar cycle influence.
http://cr0.izmiran.rssi.ru/mosc/main.htm
@Louis Hoffstetter
> Do you believe neutrons from the sun influence the earth’s temperature?
Who said these neutrons were coming from the Sun? Yes, the Sun emits neutrons sporadically during flares etc, which are detectable (barely) on Earth. But the neutron plots that David is referring to (Oulu etc) are the continuous background neutron counts induced by galactic cosmic rays, not SCR!.
Right David?
😐
R. Gates says:
January 22, 2012 at 10:43 pm
I am not one espousing C AGW, so it would be impossible for me to be part of the CO2=CAGW Religion.
Thank you for admitting that CO2 = CAGW is in fact a Religion, you great big rugged individualist He-Man, you…sigh…it makes me feel warm all over. Come on over and, together with the Warming Models, we’ll make all the CO2 burnt out from fossil fuel look like it doesn’t exist, and save the World from the next glaciation, to boot!
p.s. – bring along plenty of Big Macs and your usual supply of Whoppers
Yesterday geomagnetic storm was moderate
http://flux.phys.uit.no/cgi-bin/plotgeodata.cgi?Last24&site=tro2a&
All quiet on the ‘western front’ until next one arrives in two days time:
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/rt_plots/Xray.gif
@vuk
> Yesterday geomagnetic storm was moderate.
Did you miss the radiation storm induced by this ‘slow’ M8.7 flare yesterday? Aurora spotted in Europe as a result:
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ftpdir/plots/xray/20120123_xray.gif
Hi John
Apparently Scotland was good for aurora spotters, I am too far south:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-16678405
@John Day: Vuk on earthquakes:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/gms.htm
and on changing GMF´s:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/MF.htm
Adolfo
down the coast from you
MAP 6.2 2012/01/23 16:04:54 -36.415 -73.015 29.7 OFFSHORE BIO-BIO, CHILE
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Maps/10/285_-35.php
@M.A.Vukcevic says:
January 23, 2012 at 10:51 am
Exactly as you forecasted yesterday (including the magnitude)…….here (see above):
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/21/ap-index-neutrons-and-climate/#comment-872632
@adolfogiurfa
> Exactly as you [Vuk] forecasted yesterday …
Not so fast. The USGS reports an average (since 1990) of 134 quakes a year in the range 6-6.9. So I could guess ‘tomorrow a 6mag quake will happen’ and be right 33% of the time.
To rule out these ‘false positives’ you must submit a much larger number of forecasts and correlate the results against unbiased geomagnetic readings (being careful not confuse ‘geomagnetic events caused by earthquakes’ with ‘earthquakes caused by geomagnetic events’).
😐
Hi John
In the last 48h, since geomagnetic storms started, there were 3 earthquakes of magnitude 6 and above or 1 quake each 16 hours, in the previous 21 days or 504 hours there were another 6 or 1 quake every 84 hours, or incidence of M6+ quakes was over 500% greater in the last 48h, then in the previous 10 times longer period.
500% rise in the occurrence can’t possibly be accidental, or could it?
Ahh, statistics can do miracles!
If there is another one in a day or two when (and if ) the new M-flare hits the magnetosphere, then we can idly speculate again.
John Day says:
January 23, 2012 at 7:27 am
Right. A certain level of knowledge is assumed in writing these posts otherwise we would be here all day. Most of the neutrons are created relatively low in the atmosphere from the cascade of collisions from GCRs, some of which impact with the kinetic energy of a tennis ball.
John Day says:
January 23, 2012 at 12:27 pm
The “pebbles universe”, the concept which contended that only the holy law of gravity was the only force among round flints floating around in the universe, it is being replaced by the “plasma universe”/”Electric universe” conception.
http://www.holoscience.com/
@vuk
> Ahh, statistics can do miracles!
Yes, especially when 2 of those 3 latest earthquakes occurred before the M8.7 flare.
Any way you look at it, a “sample of one” is not conducive to robust statistics.
@David Archibald
> A certain level of knowledge is assumed in writing these posts …
But what about your claim about neutron counts being “‘co-incident’ with the solar cycle”? Surely that’s not a general truth, (or another Vuk-like fluke).
😐
For the folks haggling over the “sun did it” vs “the natural cycles do it” vs “volcanoes do it” vs “cosmic rays do it”…
Thanks to a property of orbits called “resonance”, they can all come together when they come.
The same orbital mechanics that cause the solar tides and cause it to ‘skip a beat’ every few hundred years cause the lunar / solar / earth dynamic to have a nearly identical cycle time in tides (and thus in cold water vertical mixing of the oceans). Both are 179.x with the variation in the small bit of a couple of tenths.
These same orbital mechanics cause the solar wind to drop at just that same time (due to the sun being less ‘stirred’ and having a retrograde orbital phase) shifting clouds.
Now, ponder for just a moment, that tides are NOT just a water thing. They also happen in our molten core and the crust flexes more / less. There is a fairly clear correlation of degree of volcanic activity with tidal forces ( the guy who first showed this predicted a quake for just the time when we had a 7.1 here…)
So you see, it isn’t “A xOR B xOR C”, it is “A and B and C caused by D”…
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC18099/
Focuses on the tides connection…
@J. Martin:
Thanks to so many people eating so well, we ought not to have much of a food shortage; just a meat shortage. It takes about 10 lbs of grain to make a pound of beef. For pork and chicken it’s about 3 lbs per pound of meat ( so they are cheaper). Yet that lb of meat is “wet” while the grain is dry, so the actual food value ratio is even higher (just TRY to eat a pound of oatmeal once cooked… I DARE you 😉
So at worst we will need to skip the meat for some meals and just eat the grains directly.
Furthermore, agriculture has a whole lot more options now than in the past and responds MUCH faster to changes. Folks will rapidly shift from wheat to rye, then from rye to barley as the cold zone shifts. Field peas can be swapped for soybeans “right quick” too. (thus the common Dickens Era meal of Rye Bread and Peas Gruel…)
One other point: You don’t need to have zero meat or animal products. Egg production is even more efficient than whole chickens and aquacultured fish is about 1:1 ratio (no magic in that, remember the grain is dry, the fish flesh is about 10% solids, so it’s still a 90% loss in conversion… but sometimes having a pound of fish just is worth it 😉 Things like industrial scale egg laying in environment controlled facilities and aquacultured fish just didn’t exist before. BTW, trout LOVE being raised in cold water 😉
But realistically, there will be dislocations. It all comes down to “pace”. Will farmers be adjusting as fast as the zones move? I think they will, though it will likely take a couple of seasons for some to catch on. In most farm towns, though, if one guy looses his soybeans to cold and the next guy has new pickup truck from his decision to plant field peas, well, next year a lot more folks plant peas…
Oh, and @Lazytenager:
You need to get a sense of history and find more reliable data sources. GISS? HADCrut? Man, those are just SOO cooked…
Sorry John
There was another one as you were writing your rebut of the robust statistics
MAP 6.3 2012/01/24 00:52:06 -24.959 178.611 582.8 SOUTH OF THE FIJI ISLANDS
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Maps/10/180_-25.php
MAP 6.3 2012/01/21 18:47:16 14.963 -93.087 79.5 OFFSHORE CHIAPAS, MEXICO
MAP 6.0 2012/01/22 05:53:41 -56.670 -25.018 9.8 SOUTH SANDWICH ISLANDS REGION
MAP 6.2 2012/01/23 16:04:54 -36.415 -73.015 29.7 OFFSHORE BIO-BIO, CHILE
that makes it 4 in just 3 days, against normally 130/ year’ you do the stats., which in any case are congregating around larger CMEs .
What there is to say that the same disturbance which causes CME (gravito-magnetic) is not having some effect on the geo-tectonic?
What would you require for a define proof, an M6+ quake in Willard Road?
Stand by for more over next 2-3 days.
Additional note:
John, the Excel calculated that to be 2 days and 6 hours. Any doubt in the stats is doubtable.
@R. Gates:
As I watch the snow cover and feel a biting cold (reminiscent of what it was in the last turn to a cold PDO in the 1950s-60s…) and see news reports of folks trying desperately to get an Ice Breaker and fuel in to Nome (due to an earlier onset of cold then ‘expected’…) and as I watch the ’70s like drought conditions in the West with flooding in the East: I’m quite sure there will not be a ‘warmth’ problem.
We got a sample of it in 2008-9 or so, and a slight reprieve as this solar cycle matures. But that’s ending now.
And if we DO have warming going forward? Well, first off, it will need to be real warming, not the fictional warming embodied in the doctored data of HADcrut, GISTemp, and now the NCDC products (who have taken over the splice creation step as I understand the GHCN.v3 reports). It will need to show as warm winters with gentle rains, not cold snows. With a relatively flat jet stream, not the ‘loopy jet stream’ of now (shoving arctic cold down our throats). But if that DOES happen: I will count it a great blessing and be VERY thankful for good old CO2 saving the day
BTW: I happily toss out the ‘Hottest EVER!!!’ years hysterical pronouncements from GIStemp as I’ve read and run their code. It’s pretty rough and does very questionable things with data (that are themselves questionable as they come from NCDC) like fabricating a hot Arctic out of nothing at all… And HADcrut has lost their data so at best they have a ‘polite fiction’. See, some of us are old enough that we lived through times they are now re-writing (and I actually was interested in weather in the ’60s and talked to the old folks to gather their knowledge base). SO I look around an hear “hottest ever” and see “about the same as the 1950s”…
In short, when someone is caught cooking the books, you don’t trust what they say about the bank account being the ‘fullest ever’…
@John Finn:
Here’s a bit of “clue” for you. In my home town it snowed twice in my lifetime of living there. IIRC it was about 1963 and 1974 or so. Didn’t snow in the ’30s, ’40s, or ’50s. (though we DID have very heavy snow in the Sierra Nevada about 1958? ) As a kid, I talked to most folks in the town (small town and we ran a restaurant). The VERY old folks remembered when it had snowed before… way back before the World Wars…
So I’m pretty sure everyone understood your point just fine. You are ignoring the inevitable time lags and stochastic effects of weather to make a political point. Meanwhile, reality has a cycle length of about 60 years for “the usual” cycle (so we’re now having a ‘do over’ of the 1950s on that scale… just after the Very warm late ’30s / ’40s) and with some longer cycles too. One of them runs about 179 years, another runs about 1500 average (but with 1800 year nodes). As the Sun looks to be having a Grand Minimum, the fear (and it is a valid fear…) is that we’ll get what we had last time this happened, and not just a 1960s redux.
Hit the link in my prior comment for “why and how”. Orbital mechanics stirring the oceans, changing the length of day in the process, and stirring up both cold water and potentially more volcanoes. ( In 1914 Mt. Lassen erupted. As a kid I was told about it by the same Old Timers. I’ve been waiting every since, and now at least I know why… magma has tides too…) In 1800 and froze to death it was a much larger volcano. Speculative? Only a bit. There are fairly nice “wiggle matches” to work from and a decent mechanical theory as to how.
So yes, there WAS a regular and normal cold half cycle in the 1960s and 1970s and allowing for time lags it matches nicely.
@ResourceGuy:
Yup. Winners would be the net exporters with large domestic meat consumption (as they could shift to non-meat if desired) so Australia, USA, Canada (modulo that whole loss of northern growing season thing..), Argentina, Brazil. Major losers would be nations that import the bulk of their food and have a largely grain based diet already (or are at the margin of production / consumption balance): China, India, Muslim World (Egypt in particular – being non-OPEC), Korea, Japan. Europe is more of a mixed bag with places like the UK being major importers and places like France more than able to grow enough, but unwilling to swap from wheat to barley and potatoes when things get bad (we have an existence proof of that…) Then there is Russia. Major exporter in good times, but large areas of marginal production in bad times.
Basically, it will be a mess. The good news, though, is that Russia is fully aware that “Global Warming” is not happening and is planning on a 2030-2040 bottom of a very cold dip. I expect they will have stored some food by then…
IMHO, though, it’s not the cold that will matter. It will be the changed water distribution. You can easily swap from wheat to barley ( or even to buckwheat if desperate… 40 days to crop!) But there is no substitute for water. We have historical records of the collapse of empires when the water stopped in prior cold events. The Akkadian Empire fell. Old Egypt fell. Anastazi fell. More recently, France had The French Revolution and a ‘let them eat cake’ moment. In California there is a history of ‘megadroughts’ every few hundred years…. So much for “salad bowl of the nation”…
So I’d suggest farmers brush up on how to farm in flooded fields (Mississippi floods) and in droughts (West coast out to about Colorado). I have some interesting drought tolerant seeds in my seed archive for just such needs . (Tepary beans grow in the desert, for one, and there is a Hopi corn with a taproot…)
So, IMHO, the biggest issue will not be planting cold or short season crops ( as buckwheat has traditionally been used as a ‘catch crop’ in cases of failure of the main crop). It will be having no rain at all, or looking out at a field under a foot of water…
Don’t know what the weather patterns are like in Europe or Asia, but I vaguely remember that in France they had crop loses to too much rain while China had droughts. Egypt and The Levant had droughts too. We have been lulled into a false sense of comfort by our recent warm climate stability. When it turns cold, millions die and empires fall. (So yes, Gates, I really REALLY do hope that CO2 warms things, and mostly fear that it will not… “Warm is good.”)
@EvilIncandescentBulb:
I think that about sums it up…
@Carol Gebert:
No you don’t, it disrupts sleep 😉 (There was also and odd overly strong ozone level just over Fukushima a few days before their quake, too…)
@Anna V.:
The best I can figure it, we’ve been in the entry to the next glacial for about 6000 years now (at least). The trend is so slow, though, that it is not visible in any one lifetime, being easily swamped by the local (in time) variations.
So not to worry, the MWP / LIA ‘wobbles’ are about all we’ll notice, even when looking at ancient historical records. The loss of North African grain as the land cooled (and rains decreased) is a matter of Roman Empire History, but not really noticed by the Romans of today. Folks in England get their wine from France instead of growing it like they once did. Life goes on…
The record of the formation of glaciers looks like about 100,000 years of ice accumulation, then a very rapid melt. The exit is fast, the entry depends on very slow mass flow into snow and deposition.
I’m much more worried about a 60 year cycle than a 179 year event, and both of them much much more so than a 1500 – 1800 year Bond Event cycle. That paper on tides indicates our next real cold period is likely a couple of hundred years in the future (base on lunar tides / ocean overturning). We’ve got a few hundred years, most likely, before we even notice the medium scale swings. The glacial itself is just too slow to show up 😉
John Day says:
Yes, especially when 2 of those 3 latest earthquakes occurred before the M8.7 flare. .
But you forgot there was M3.2 on 19th
A January 19 image provided by NASA shows an M3.2 solar flare captured by the Solar Dynamics Observatory. A potent solar flare has unleashed the biggest radiation storm since 2005
First quake on my list of 4 is 2 days later:
MAP 6.3 2012/01/21 18:47:16 14.963 -93.087 79.5 OFFSHORE CHIAPAS, MEXICO
MAP 6.0 2012/01/22 05:53:41 -56.670 -25.018 9.8 SOUTH SANDWICH ISLANDS REGION
MAP 6.2 2012/01/23 16:04:54 -36.415 -73.015 29.7 OFFSHORE BIO-BIO, CHILE
MAP 6.3 2012/01/24 00:52:06 -24.959 178.611 582.8 SOUTH OF THE FIJI ISLANDS
@vuk
> Sorry John
> There was another one as you were writing
> your rebut of the robust statistics
@John Day
> So I could guess ‘tomorrow a 6mag quake will happen’
> and be right 33% of the time.
Sorry Vuk, that’s _my_ earthquake. :-]
Seriously, your data is interesting. I’m not denying a causal link to other physical phenomena, but I’m not convinced by a few examples.
Global earthquake occurrences seem to be distributed according to the Weibull distribution (the same one used to predict lightbulb failures). So not exactly ‘chaos’, but still hard to predict
To convince me that there is cause and effect going on here you need to
1) State exactly what physical ‘event’ you’re correlating to earthquake occurrences. Flares? Geomagnetic storms? Tides? Radiation storms? Schumann resonances? the last earthquake (i.e. autorecursion)?
2) Pick one of these events and an unbiased measure that quantifies it.
3) Select a random, unbiased sample of this data and correlate to earthquake occurrences. (No ‘cherry picking’ please)
4) … or send me a link to someone’s paper who has already done this.
😐
@E M Smith
> blah blah
Chief, you seem to have wandered into the wrong forum. It’s supposed to be ‘Ap Index and Neutrons’ or some such.
Hi again John
Last thing on my mind is to steal your earthquake.
I do not claim or even suggest that geomagnetic storm is a primary cause of any earthquake. However if conditions for an earthquake are ‘ripe’ i.e. tectonic fault ‘gone critical’, then solar storm could be a trigger (not the cause) for it, and bring it forward for few hours or days.
Most of things you ask are here, but all depends on one’s attitude to the ‘dodgy’ science:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/gms.htm
See also http://www.cosis.net/abstracts/EGU06/01705/EGU06-J-01705.pdf
E.M.Smith says:
January 24, 2012 at 12:18 am
“I’m much more worried about a 60 year cycle than a 179 year event”
A 60yr cycle does not last more than 3 steps (two cycles), it looks like that one will shift next time if you ask me.
Have their ( geomagnetic ) navigation systems been critically affected or even damaged by yesterday’s geomagnetic storm?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/australiaandthepacific/newzealand/9034785/Fight-to-save-whales-stranded-in-New-Zealand.html
The solar system, is embedded in a galaxy. The galaxy is not homgenous throughout, the background changes.
The background changes..most will harp the same old rhetoric, “over longer time scales.” We are finding that the background changes over shorter time scales. Albeit, not always catostrophic, but smaller changes along the way. Smaller cloudletts embedded in our presumed warm ionized background.
The overall trend in the graph is on a downward trend.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/image27.png
Figure 5: Dye 3 Temperature Record 22 Year Smoothed
Averaging the Dye 3 temperature record using the 22 year length of the Hale Cycle produces a lot of detail. What is evident is that there has been a very disciplined temperature decline over the last four thousand years. The whole temperature record is bounded by two parallel lines with a downslope of 0.3°C per thousand years. The fact that no cooling event took the Dye 3 temperature below the lower bounding green line over nearly four thousand years is quite remarkable..
And don’t forget this..
http://www.leif.org/research/CosmicRays-GeoDipole.jpg
@Carla says:
And don’t forget this..
http://www.leif.org/research/CosmicRays-GeoDipole.jpg
A beautiful graph depicting a sine and cosine curves (an alternate current?…Different words for the same phenomena : Watts or Joules?)
The fast solar wind may be the way, a large coronal hole is developing in the southern hemisphere:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/img2.htm
Ulric Lyons any ideas regarding weather ?
Following this post issue, it is possible for our GW friends to have some hope, as being the 24 solar cycle a long cycle, its maximum, though lower, will probably do it for milder winters and hotter summers, and…if you pray to your Saints, perhaps it would give, in a few years, for a dwarf “El Niño”, which will fulfill your dreams and would end your dreadful nightmares , though it will be, again, “the Sun..stu…!”, but, you know, in times of scarcity anything is better than nothing.
New geomagnetic storm has started, at it looks as it may be big one
http://flux.phys.uit.no/cgi-bin/plotgeodata.cgi?Last24&site=tro2a&
E.M. Smith … question for you … what effect does a weakening magnetic field have on iron rich magma?
@M.A.Vukcevic says:
January 24, 2012 at 8:17 am
“The fast solar wind may be the way, a large coronal hole is developing in the southern hemisphere:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/img2.htm
Ulric Lyons any ideas regarding weather ?”
Plenty, but I really wanted to reply to your earthquake comments. The common thread I can see preceding larger EQ`s is actually lower and declining solar wind speeds for a number of days before the event. Here are the solar conditions for recent great quakes (Mag8.0+) with the EQ 1 day before the end date on each link:
http://www.lmsal.com/solarsoft/last_events_20110312_2326/index.html
http://www.lmsal.com/solarsoft/last_events_20100228_0017/index.html
http://www.lmsal.com/solarsoft/last_events_20090930_1004/index.html
http://www.lmsal.com/solarsoft/last_events_20070816_1039/index.html
http://www.lmsal.com/solarsoft/last_events_20070331_1241/index.html (EQ 1st Apr)
http://www.lmsal.com/solarsoft/last_events_20061116_1000/index.html
http://www.lmsal.com/solarsoft/last_events_20060504_1002/index.html
With only one of those you could say the solar wind was speeding up, bearing in mind that the first Japan event in March 2011 was on the 9th. The results with Mag 7+ events look good too, though a proportion of events occur a day or two into a slight rise after the long down slope, mostly with little geomag` storming.
J Martin says:
January 22, 2012 at 1:18 pm
@ John Finn
Quote sources, show links.
Show what?
We were referring to the CET record, right?
This link shows the current January anomaly. Note that up to Jan 23rd the anomaly is +2.8 deg C (or almost 3 deg as I said)
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/cet_info_mean.html
This link shows the mean temperature for each month/year since 1659. The mean temp in 2011 was 10.7 deg which is second warmest behind 2006 (10.82 deg).
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/cetml1659on.dat
E.M.Smith says:
January 24, 2012 at 12:18 am
@John Finn:
So I’m pretty sure everyone understood your point just fine. You are ignoring the inevitable time lags and stochastic effects of weather to make a political point. Meanwhile, reality has a cycle length of about 60 years for “the usual” cycle (so we’re now having a ‘do over’ of the 1950s on that scale… just after the Very warm late ’30s / ’40s) and with some longer cycles too. One of them runs about 179 years, another runs about 1500 average (but with 1800 year nodes). As the Sun looks to be having a Grand Minimum, the fear (and it is a valid fear…) is that we’ll get what we had last time this happened, and not just a 1960s redux.
1. I don’t think everyone did understand my point “just fine” – as evidenced by the comments.
2. I am not ignoring the inevitable time lags and stochastic effects. On the contrary
I claim that there was NO cooling event in the 1970. The cooling period which began in the 1940s ended in the 1970s. The 1970s were actually warmer than the 1960s. That’s because warming began in the mid-1970s. The person who mentioned the cold winter of 1979 (UK) forgot to mention the warm summers of 1975 and 1976.
So let’s look at time lags with respect to David Archibald’s claim. The timeline is as follows:
Cooling begins in the mid-1940s – Agree?
Solar Cycle 20 begins in 1964 – Agree?
Clearly SC 20 cannot possibly be responsible for the cooling (i.e. the effect cannot precede the cause), but let’s continue
Solar Cycle 20 ends in 1976 – Agree?
Warming resumes in ~1975 – Agree?
If there was a time lag in response to SC20 then the years following 1976 should have seen cooling – not warming. In fact, if Davis Archibald’s solar cycle length ‘theory’ is correct significant cooling should have occurred over the period of solar cycle 21 (1976-1986).
Can you address these points and explain how they are in any way political?
John Finn says:
January 25, 2012 at 3:03 am
You peddle the same uninformed nonsense every time this topic appears. You have been informed that isolating solar impact on climate alone is meaningless.
Simple answer, combine ocean cycles with solar cycles.
http://tinyurl.com/2dg9u22/?q=node/236
Pamela Gray says:
January 22, 2012 at 10:17 am
The only thing I might have been confused about was what you were trying to say. A common affliction is to assume your own thoughts are deep and penetrating, and that everyone else should recognize the value in them.