Guest post by David Archibald
The story so far: in this recent post – Ap Index Neutrons and Climate, we had looked at the Dye 3 oxygen isotope-derived temperature record to see how big climate swings have been over the last few thousand years.
Figure 1: Dye 3 Temperature Record from Oxygen Isotope Ratios
As Figure 1 shows, the raw Dye 3 data shows plenty of noise and rapid swings in temperature.
Figure 2: Dye 3 Temperature Record 22 Year Smooth and less Millennial Cooling Trend
Applying a 22 year averaging to the data (the Hale Cycle) and taking off the millennial cooling trend that averages 0.00010915°C per annum produces the data in Figure 2. It is evident that the Medieval Warm Period and the Roman Warm Period occurred as a result of few excursions to the lower bounding line of activity.
Figure 3: Dye 3 Normalised Temperature Distribution
Figure 3 shows the result of sorting the normalised Dye 3 temperature record from lowest to highest and then plotting that up. The vertical lines are deciles of 377 years. What is striking is that the temperature range in the 2nd and 9th deciles is almost the same as that of the 5th and 6th deciles, which means that the average isn’t normal. What is normal is change. If temperature dwelled in the middle of the range and was subject to excursions up and down, then the curve would be flatter in the middle. In fact the temperature is only in the middle if it is on its way to somewhere else, either hotter or colder. Which means that there is no Arcadia of normal bliss – growing ranges are constantly either contracting or expanding like a concertina.
Figure 4: Lagged Dye 3 and CET Temperature with Inverted Be10 Data 1659 – 1750
Nobody lives on top of the Greenland icesheet so how does the Greenland data affect the affairs of Men? Figure 4 plots the Dye 3 temperature data, lagged three years, in red (plus 36°C) against the Central England Temperature (CET) Record in blue with the Dye 3 Be10 data in green. The interval 1659 to 1750 was chosen because this includes the fastest change in the CET record and the biggest spike in the Dye 3 Be10 record. There is a very good correlation between the Dye 3 temperature record and the Dye 3 Be10 record. There is good correlation between the Dye 3 temperature record and the CET record apart from the decades 1690 to 1710.
There is another good reason for looking at the decades 1690 to 1710 and that is that the decades 2010 to 2030 might be a re-run of them. Famines caused by the cold killed roughly 10% of the population in France 1693-94, Norway 1695-96 and Sweden 1696-97, 20% in Estonia 1696-97 and 33% in Finland 1696-97 (Elizabeth Ewan, Janay Nugent (2008) ”Finding the family in medieval and early modern Scotland” Ashgate Publishing. p.153).
Humans expand to fill the habitable zone, but the habitable zone can shrink too. This is a link to the Arbor Day Foundation’s animation of the changes they made to their hardiness zone map in 2006: http://www.arborday.org/media/mapchanges.cfm
Figure 5: Hardiness Zones Map
Figure 5 shows the current hardiness zones map. The 10°F width of these zones just about equates to the 5°C drop in temperature due to the length of Solar Cycle 24 over that of Solar Cycle 22.
The lesson from the Dye 3 temperature data, and that late 17th Century Finnish famine, is this: exploit the expansion in the habitable zone as the Sun becomes more active, but be prepared to run back towards the equator because it isn’t going to last.
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R. Gates says:
January 24, 2012 at 4:21 pm
This is one of the biggest fallacies that skeptics seem to want to keep putting out there. The Earth’s climate system has not even finished reaching equIlibrium temperture from the current level of CO2, and won’t for many decades (if somehow the level locked in around the 392 ppm mark).
The atmosphere’s time constant is fast enough to say that it is for all practical purposes in equilibrium at any moment (given the enormous diurnal temperature changes in comparison to any “signal”, which is still, obviously, not detectable). So what you are saying is that there is another reservoir out there that is not finished storing energy that is being absorbed from the atmosphere, since the atmosphere must have increased in temperature? Correct?
R.Gates: You need to read a bit more of my post than the first paragraph. Solar variations may or may not be the cause of natural cycles: there are many other plausible explanations, some relating to planetary cycles.
I do not depend upon temperature records to debunk the greenhouse effect. I depend upon physics. Radiation from the (cooler) atmosphere cannot be converted to additional thermal energy in the (warmer) surface. Reasons and linked supporting documents are on my site. Fullstop.
I said I would take a look at whether the distribution is very close to an accumulated normal or not. Here is the analysis:
http://naturalclimate.wordpress.com/2012/01/24/dye-3-temperature-is-it-normal/
You’re not going to get much more normal than that…
R. Gates – Cold kills, warm does not. Pray that we do have some chance at moderating the cold. But don’t bet your life on it.
Honest question. If CAGW CO2 amplifications of climate are so crock, why are Svensnmark amplifications taken as read?
If Gates or others wish to discuss natural cycles, then this* plot of rates of increase is most illuminating. It shows a clear indication of the 60 year cycle as well as what is really happening regarding rates of increase. This is consistent with a 900 to 1100 year cycle – having now passed a flex and approaching a maximum within the next 200 years perhaps.
* http://climate-change-theory.com/360month.jpg
Source: http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2011/11/19/17-year-and-30-year-trends-in-sea-surface-temperature-anomalies-the-differences-between-observed-and-ipcc-ar4-climate-models/
Michael D Smith says:
January 24, 2012 at 5:08 pm
R. Gates says:
January 24, 2012 at 4:21 pm
This is one of the biggest fallacies that skeptics seem to want to keep putting out there. The Earth’s climate system has not even finished reaching equIlibrium temperture from the current level of CO2, and won’t for many decades (if somehow the level locked in around the 392 ppm mark).
The atmosphere’s time constant is fast enough to say that it is for all practical purposes in equilibrium at any moment (given the enormous diurnal temperature changes in comparison to any “signal”, which is still, obviously, not detectable). So what you are saying is that there is another reservoir out there that is not finished storing energy that is being absorbed from the atmosphere, since the atmosphere must have increased in temperature? Correct?
———-
It really comes down to slow feedbacks. These “earth system” feedbacks are not storage of energy, but long term responses to the additional energy retained in the system every year. The cryosphere and biosphere are examples of earth system changes, both of which take decades to reach an equilibrium after changes to the energy balance has reached some relative stability. Given that the energy balance continues to change from the continual increases in CO2, methane, and N2O, it will be many decades, and perhaps centuries before all the earth system feedbacks have stabilized and an equilibrium temperature range is found.
Doug Cotton says:
January 24, 2012 at 5:27 pm
R.Gates: You need to read a bit more of my post than the first paragraph. Solar variations may or may not be the cause of natural cycles: there are many other plausible explanations, some relating to planetary cycles.
———
True enough, Solar variations are not “the” cause of natural cycles, as natural cycles is a much more broad category of which solar variations are just one. It still appears to me that solar cycle length was the best single correlation to sub-Milankovitch climate change, prior to the rapid build up of greenhouse gases. If solar cycle length has astronomical origins in planetary cycles, then SSL is good proxy for those cycles and the result is the same. The real question (which we will find an answer to in the near future), is to what degree has the build-up of greenhouses gases to levels not seen in 800,000 or more years trumped the solar influence, whatever the source that causes the sun to change on long or shorter cycles.
Further to the above post regarding the plot of rates of increase*, it is clear that the mean rate of increase of Sea Surface Temperatures is a little less than 0.06 deg.C per decade. But, more importantly, it is decreasing, and so, purely on the basis of this plot, would appear to be dropping towards a mean value of about 0.055 or maybe 0.05 deg.C/decade between now and 2100. So we would expect about 0.5 deg.C above current temperatures by 2100. There is absolutely no grounds for projecting any upturn in the mean rate of increase based on this plot. And there is clearly no evidence whatever of any anthropogenic effect, because the mean rate of increase is actually decreasing in post WWII era.
I have always considered SST to be a much better guide than the means calculated by weighting land measurements by about 30%. The weighting ought to be based on thermal energy content, not surface area, and ocean content is about 15 times that of the land surfaces.
* http://climate-change-theory.com/360month.jpg
R.Gates: You still didn’t get past the first paragraph. Anyway, I posted some more on temperatures for you to peruse.
Pity, though, that you don’t wish to read about why carbon dioxide cannot warm the surface at all.
What the hell is the Dye 3 Ice Core?
Not defined in your article:
Download Data via FTP: Dye 3 Ice Core Data
The Dye 3 ice core was part of the GISP initiative. It was the deepest of the 20 ice cores recovered from the Greenland ice sheet as part of the GISP at 2037 meters. The original GISP fieldwork began at Dye 3, Greenland in 1971 where a continuous 372 meter deep, 10.2 cm diameter core was recovered. This operation was followed by other drillings at various geographical locations (see table at the GISP Homepage). In 1979 drilling began at Dye 3. Drilling from surface to bedrock was completed in 1981 and Dye 3 became the longest core recovered from Greenland to that date. Dye 3 was the primary core of the GISP initiative and much research has been conducted on that core.
R. Gates said @ur momisugly January 24, 2012 at 11:38 am
Well R Gates, Gits are a bit parochial and this one can’t see any significant trend in Southern Hemisphere temperatures over the last 120 years. We are still well below temperatures in the 1890s. Your global warming isn’t global if half the globe is static.
It’s extremely frustrating wanting warming, and being told it is warming when it manifestly is not warming.
“Pity, though, that you don’t wish to read about why carbon dioxide cannot warm the surface at all.”
GHGs do not warm the surface. GHGs cause the earth to radiate from a higher colder point in the atmosphere. This is known as the ERL. When the earth radiates from a higher colder point, the rate of energy loss is decreased. That means the surface responds by cooling less rapidly. In short the surface is warmer that it would be otherwise. C02 plays a role in this as does water vapor, methane and other GHGs.
Gee David,
My eyeballs go into apoplectic fits just looking at your wild crazy dancing data graphs. Couldn’t you just replace the whole darn thing with a nice straight line somewhere; that seems to be the recipe for successful climate science reporting. You take a whole lot of actual real world experimental observational “data” and then you statisticate it, and get a nice straight line; so much better and easier to understand.
I’m totally amazed that you chaps in “the business” can actually get you hands on data like this, gathered over a sufficient period of time, to actually present a story about. And if I look at it long enough, so my eyes stop jumping around, even I can start to see things going on.
I never have understood the penchant for starting with data like this, and throwing it all away to substitute some nice well behaved ho-hum line.
When I worked at Tektronix in the arly 1960s, I tried to tell them that what the world really needed, was much narrower bandwidth oscilloscopes; because the wide bandwidth ones that they manufactured had a habit of taking some beautiful smooth signal input, and adding all sorts of kinks and wrinkles to it, so even its own mother wouldn’t recognize it.
I never did succeed in convincing them to do it.
George
Steven Mosher:
You explain nothing of the supposed mechanisms leading to your claims. The “official” IPCC explanation is that “backradiation” warms the surface, which it doesn’t. So called GH gases actually help to radiate away the thermal energy in the atmosphere, most of which is originally transferred by diffusion from the surface into oxygen and nitrogen molecules which can do very little radiating themselves. These GH gases also absorb some of the Sun’s infra-red incident radiation, and re-radiate it to space, effectively increasing albedo and thus having an additional cooling effect. There is no physical mechanism (neither convection nor radiation) which can cause warming of the surface due to GH gases. The evidence that this does not happen in the real world is there in the plot of temperature gradients since 1880 at the foot of my Home page http://climate-change-theory.com
The Earth doesn’t have to radiate from a “higher colder point” – some higher points are warmer anyway in the stratosphere. Water vapour has a broad spectrum of radiation and can thus radiate from a wide range of altitudes. It can always radiate more if there isn’t enough carbon dioxide, though more carbon dioxide will help in this cooling process. You and the IPCC have it all mixed up, and the temperature evidence shows absolutely nothing but long-established cyclic natural trends which cannot be interpreted as indicating a rise of more than about 0.5 deg.C by 2100 with subsequent declines starting sometime in the next 50 to 200 years and continuing for about 500 years after that maximum. The rate of increase has been decreasing this last decade or so, just as it did (from a higher level) about 60 years earlier. The trend in the rate of increase is slightly downwards (ever since 1880) from about 0.06 deg.C/decade, heading for about 0.05 deg.C/decade by the end of this century. When you have a spare hour, study my sites.
In the meantime, please at least read all my posts above before posting any response – and perhaps you would like to be the first to explain why gases do not absorb radiation from cooler emitters.
Ach… I got about half way through these comments and gave up in disgust. Can anyone explain to this layman how CO2 in the atmosphere, which is always, always colder than the surface of the earth below, WARM that surface by any amount? Because the warmer surface does indeed warm the CO2 therefore we would have a positive feedback system that would make life unbearable in just days, never mind centuries. Phooey to all this talk of CO2 warming anything.
PS Steven:
You seem to be thinking that the lapse rate is dependent upon GHG content. It is not. See: http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2011/04/18/the-lapse-rate-is-independent-of-greenhouse-gas-content/
In other words, not only does no warming of the surface occur, but neither is the rate of surface cooling slowed. In fact the atmosphere cools faster than the surface at night anyway as Prof Nahle measured in September 2011.
Even if some layer of the atmosphere were warmer (let’s say -30 deg.C instead of -35 deg.C) this does not cause some sort of traffic jam that extends down to the surface. Instead an analogy would be a creek flowing down a mountain which has a small dam at the base. The dam may fill and overflow (with more radiation) but it will never cause a flood at the top of the mountain. But any such warmer layer is unlikely to be due to carbon dioxide because it actually helps to radiate thermal energy out of the atmosphere – energy that it can acquire by collision processes with warmer oxygen and nitrogen molecules that don’t radiate themselves, but get cooled in the collisions.
Who cares if the atmosphere somewhere way up there is slightly less cold anyway? It will not affect anyone except a few skiers on high mountains who may find less snow I suppose.
PPS A correction to my previous post: that plot is from 1900, not 1880. However we know temperatures declined from 1880 to 1900, so the statement I made is still correct since 1880. Also, the trend is heading for less than 0.04 deg.C/decade by 2100, but the mean would be higher between now and then. Because of the cyclic nature, I would expect a slight downward curve in that trend anyway, so that it might get to zero within 150 to 250 years, if not sooner, this representing the long-term (~1,000 year maximum) prior to a 500 year decline towards another Little Ice Age. Hence it is unlikely that the world will see the long-term trend go more than about 1 deg.C above current levels, at least in the current ~1,000 year cycle. I repeat that there is no evidence of any effect due to carbon dioxide as you can see for yourself.
.
Doug Cotton says:
January 24, 2012 at 8:09 pm
R.Gates: You still didn’t get past the first paragraph. Anyway, I posted some more on temperatures for you to peruse.
Pity, though, that you don’t wish to read about why carbon dioxide cannot warm the surface at all.
I’ve read the ‘explanation’ on your blog of why “carbon dioxide cannot warm th surface” and I think it’s wrong. You use a “coffee in the flask” analogy but the earth is not like coffee in a flask. The earth has a constant (or almost constant) heat source, i.e. the sun. The coffee in the flask doesn’t.
Unless the flask is a perfect insulator, the coffee will still lose energy so it will still cool – albeit at a slower rate than it otherwiswe would in a cup.
The earth, on the other hand, continues to receive energy 24 hours a day. If the rate at which it loses energy is reduced then the earth will warm. This is basic thermodynamics, i.e.
incoming > outgoing -> warming
incoming cooling
incoming = outgoing -> stable temperature
I’m afraid yours is yet another web-site which does nothing for the credibilty of the reasonable sceptic argument.
Re: my earlier post
I used the right angle bracket to denote ‘less than’. For obvious reasons this was not accepted. In the post
“incoming cooling” should read “incoming less than outgoing -> cooling”
Does anyone know if it works in quotes?
Doug Cotton says:
January 24, 2012 at 2:46 pm
If we look only at measured temperature data for the last 120 to 200 or so years the trend tends to appear near linear in any particular location, as would be expected when considering only 10% to 20% of the above cycle. One of the longest records for any one location is that dating from 1796 for Northern Ireland as shown on my Home page at http://climate-change-theory.com – a nice linear trend
You’re using the Armagh record – rather misleadingly I would suggest.
1. You’re using a 2 deg interval for each increment on the vertical axis. Clearly that would reduce the visual effect of any rise.
2. The graph only goes up to 2002. The 5 warmest years in Northern Ireland have all occurred since 2002.
There has been a strong warming trend at Armagh since ~1975. In fact it’s warming faster at Armagh than it is at Aldergrove airport (Belfast).
Michael D Smith said: “This looks like a textbook cumulative normal distribution to me. ”
The tails are pointing the wrong way for that aren’t they? Looks like a cumulative inverse normal distribution but that isn’t what it is given the description.
CO2 was flat over this period, at 275 ppm for almost the entire period.
So any changes in the climate over the period were not caused by CO2.
In fact, CO2 exhibits almost no correlation to the climate over any time period you look at.
R. Gates and the pro-AGW people think it is one-for-one, mostly because they just believe it rather than see if it actually does so.
I would also like some elaboration to the notation about a neutron flux that resulted in deaths in Finland. See bottom middle of Figure 4.
R. Gates:
Most of us don’t agree with you, but I do find the back and forth exchange entertaining.
Keep your powder dry (and your facts straight)!
Jeroen B. says:
January 24, 2012 at 10:11 am
Thankyou for the kind words and the correction.
Don B says:
January 24, 2012 at 10:30 am
Yes, Oulu neutron count looks like it wants to flat-line. Solar wind flow pressure remains below levels of previous minima.
Willis Eschenbach says:
January 24, 2012 at 10:53 am
The reference to Finland remains in. They were killed by famine, the famine was caused by cold, the cold was caused by an inactive Sun with a big spike in C14 and Be10 in the record. All the other cold periods in the last 600 years are associated with a spike in Be10.
Robin Edwards says:
January 24, 2012 at 4:04 pm
Thanks for doing the work.
Michael D Smith says:
January 24, 2012 at 6:05 pm
Thankyou also for providing guidance.