Foreword: Dr Sebastian Lüning and Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt, authors of a new controversial skeptic book now hitting German bookstores, have asked me to post their response to comments made by climate scientist Georg Feulner of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in an interview by NTV television. Feulner insists that CO2 plays the major role in climate change and that the sun has little impact.
You can read about the new book just published in Germany that is causing an uproar in the German green establishment here. The response is so vitriolic that one is newspaper (TAZ) is headlining “Skeptics are like viruses“. Greenpeace Germany has now gotten into the act, denoucing Lüning and Varrenholt (formerly a champion of the global warming cause) as an Ice Cold Denier.
The website (in German) for the new book (that has become a bestseller on three outlets) from Lüning and Vahrenholt is here. An English version is also planned which I will announce at WUWT. Sincere thanks to Pierre Gosselin of notrickszone.com for translation. -Anthony
Georg Feulner of the PIK runs in circles
Guest post by Sebastian Lüning and Fritz Vahrenholt
On the Germany television website Georg Feulner of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research comments on our recently published book “Die kalte Sonne”. As we have criticized his work in our book, we are not at all surprised by his rejection of our position.
First he disputes global warming has stopped for the time being. To do this he uses a special chart from a blog depicting a stepwise temperature development, which makes no sense for the particular topic at hand. The temperature plateau that we’ve had since the year 2000 is disputed by Feulner. However, the missing warming of the last 12 years is no fabrication made up by the authors of “Die kalte Sonne“. Anybody can plot it by going over to Woodfortrees.org. Or you can read up about it up in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, e.g. Kaufmann et al (2011). Even Prof. Ottmar Edenhofer of Feulner’s own Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research seems to see it the same way. Climate researcher Prof. Jochem Marotzke of Hamburg just confirmed it once again in a recent interview with the German TAZ daily (9 February 2012).
Next, Feulner tries to score points by using the 30-year climate rule. In some official definitions, climate is defined as the 30-year mean of weather. While this makes sense for some considerations, this rigid rule obstructs the discussion on the mechanisms that are involved in climate. It’s becoming increasingly clear that natural decadal cycles have been greatly under-estimated in the past. For example the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) is characterized by a warm and a cold phase, each lasting 20 to 30 years. They have a significant impact on global temperature. Should that 30-year-climate window unfortunately get placed between both phases, then the trends get mixed up and we end up comparing apples and oranges. The corresponding “climate“ results end up depending more on the choice of the start point of the 30-year window and less on the real, shorter-scale temperature trends. Consequently, looking at 10-year temperature trends is not only legitimate, but it also makes sense.
In discussing the sun, Feulner attempts to show that in the event of an impending significant drop in solar activity to Dalton or Maunder Minimum-levels, which he foresees as well, no considerable cooling is to be expected. Here he fails to mention that he forgot to include any solar amplification in his climate models. This is essential because it is only with such solar amplifiers that one is able to explain the synchronicity between the sun and the temperature, with at least a 1°C pulsating climate development, over the last 10,000 years. The climate model used by Feulner cannot explain the past, and therefore naturally is not suitable for projecting the future. To explain the Maunder-Minimum 300 years ago, Feulner resorts to the dubious volcano joker. But this still does not explain the overlying fundamental problem that there is a good sun-climate coupling over the other well-documented millennial cycles of the last 10,000 years.
When it comes to the Svensmark solar amplification effect, whose existence is supported by much evidence in peer-reviewed literature (see Chapter 6 and Svensmark guest contribution on page 209 in “Die kalte Sonne”), Feulner simply pushes it off the table without providing a good argument. Not a word on the independent confirmations of the important sub-processes of the effect (e.g. Usoskin et al. 2004, Laken et al. 2010, Kirkby et al. 2011).
The NTV interview illustrates just how much Georg Feulner runs in circles with his arguments. The arguments he presents are weak. When will the Potsdam Institute get around to addressing the millennium cycles of the last 10,000 years? On page 68-75 of our book (“The sun’s impact over the last 10,000 years”) we find one of the most important keys to the climate discussion. Strangely not a single media report following publication of our book has looked into this. Day eight and counting.
Example for millennial climate cycles: Studies of dripstones in Oman for the period 7500-4500 BC show a high degree of synchronicity between solar activity and temperature development. Figure modified after Neff et al. (2001)
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Yes, just when we thought the science was settled (we did, didn’t we?), these two guys come along and try to unsettle it, even in the greenest of our 190+ nations. The bandwagon of settled science in climatology has done a lot of what Vahrenholt says Feulner tried, to just sweep contradictory findings under the rug/off the table. Pretending the studies don’t exist – how childish is that? Especially when you get caught at it!
We may not be winning yet, but we aren’t doing too bad. When we finally win, will we be better winners than the Hockey Team/Feulner?
I can’t wait for the English version. I could possibly muddle through the German one, but I may not live long enough to finish it. LOL
Steve Garcia
There is something deeply uncomfortable about Germans calling people “deniers” and seeking to discredit, isolate and throw hate at people who challenge the “concensus”.
The lessons of the past are obviously lost in Merkels Green Reich.
Robertvdl says:
February 13, 2012 at 2:25 pm
Dr. Tim Ball thanks for the hard work you have done for so many years.They have attacked you on all possible ways but you stood firm in the storm. Never have so many owed so much to a man so humiliated.
Robert van de Leur
I’ll second that.
DirkH @ur momisugly February 13, 2012 at 8:11 pm
George E. Smith; says
“Well Dirk, I can only relay what they told me; as for my German skills, I astonished them by telling them that I was able to literally tour all over Munich on the weekend by picking a road and following that road all over the city. They didn’t know of any such road so they asked me which road that was; “Einbahnstrasse” was my reply. They then clued me in as to what street that really was.”
🙂
For Non-German readers: Einbahnstrasse is one-way street
Don’t spoil it. I like to show videos of the Autobahn to illustrate that they all lead to “Ausfahrt” 😉
We have but one source of energy, It supplies us heat , magnetic flux and a stirring of gravity, the moon and planetary stirrings, effect the pudding a little as does our position in the galaxy. Thus the sun is our main man, it is a tad temperamental, I would suggest in a feminine way, that makes it some what unpredictable but in the long term understandable kind of, if your live long enough.
I respect people such as these, who have a slow long look around and come to a conclusion totally at odds with which they have been associated. Well done.
Dr. Svalgaard’s “Sun has nothing to do with climate” nonsense is officially finished, I hope?
Whatever is the exact nature of the functional connection between the Solar activity and the Earth’s climate (I suspect that there are several such mechanisms interrelated, as usual in nature), to deny that there is such a connection would be a sheer obscurantism now (personally, considering the amount of power, money and human resources behind the AGW establishment, I always suspected that Dr. Svalgaard was marching in a column next beyond the fourth one).
Dripstones in Oman contain both the cosmic ray and temperature trends for the past 8,000 years? Who would have known?
Will Nitschke and JJ:
You’re both misreading Glenn Tamblyn about the 10 degrees and the 30 degrees. Tamblyn did not attribute 30C directly to CO2. He attributed 10C directly to CO2.
Glenn Tamblyn:
Your remarks to Gary Meyers are probably not helpful to him. He seems to be arguing that the sun is responsible for far more warming (i.e., from absolute zero or something) than is claimed for CO2. No one denies that. In fact, no one even claims that CO2 warms the earth in the sense of being a furnace. But Gary seems to think that it falsifies global warming by CO2.
Steve from Rockwood says:
February 14, 2012 at 4:07 am
Dripstones in Oman contain both the cosmic ray and temperature trends for the past 8,000 years? Who would have known?
—————————————————
What is a ‘drip stone’. How do they record ‘cosmic ray’ trends and ‘temperature trends’ (presumably seperately) and where in Oman are they located and who’s working on it?? Are their fingings published??
Interesting comment Steve.
@Will Nitschke
The results of all 3200 who responded was published and they result was around 90% thought that temperatures had risen when asked
“When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively consta
nt?”
82% thought that human activity is a significant contributing factor when asked
“Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?”
The 79 scientists are those actively publishing in climate science were 97% answered yes to the 2nd question. Even outside of those working in climate science the agreement is very convincing!
Profession polling companies can estimate election results to within 1% based on a survey sample of around 0.0001%. You are criticising the sample size but that would only be a problem if statistically this group wasn’t representative of the population as a whole and the probability of that is extremely low I’m afraid. This figure is likely to be with a 1% of the opinion of the whole population.
“ask a vague question that even most sceptics would agree to.”
Really? So how many skeptics here think “human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures”?
“John” says:
February 14, 2012 at 4:43 am
The 79 scientists are those actively publishing in climate science were 97% answered yes to the 2nd question. Even outside of those working in climate science the agreement is very convincing!
60 years ago, 100% of Soviet scientists polled would say in public that genetics is a bourgeois pseudo-science, and that so-called “geneticists” are paid agents of the decaying capitalist regimes unfit for any serious scientific publication (and deserving to die in labor camps) — for the very same reason you boast your “global warming consensus” today.
Disgusting.
John,
The problem with the survey you quote is what is known as a self selecting sample. In other words, any answers that come from such a survey are merely confirmation of the prejudices of the sample population, and are utterly useless.
In answer to your question, yep human activity would seem to be a significant contributor to changing global mean temperatures. It is, after all, humans who are constantly fiddling the data to get the results they want to see. Although I am not at all sure what use such a metric is in any event, other than PR.
Earlier some have wondered what effect removing all CO2 from the atmosphere would be on temperatures; Really, it hardly matters since almost all life would be extinguished when the level fell below 90ppm, most higher forms at around 140ppm.
Shaviv has quite clearly demonstrated that a solar amplification mechanism exists. He did that by showing that the amount of heat going into the oceans in the solar cycles is much larger than what you would expect from the variations in the solar flux alone. This implies that anyone trying to explain past climate variations with just changes in the sun’s brightness is doomed to fail.
Have a look here: http://www.sciencebits.com/calorimeter
Regarding 30 years as a base for calculation of average weather:
The number 30 comes from random statistical sampling. With a RANDOM
set of 30, taking a sample using the t test , you’re at the 95%
confidence interval with a standard deviation of 1.7. The NORMAL
distribution, with an infinite set has a standard deviation of 1.645
at the 95% level. Using a normally distributed set of 30, you can
disregard the t test for small samples when making 95% probability
statements. The problem with the 30 years is that each year is not an independent random event- temperatures run in cycles.
Consider these propositions and note the similar fallacy:
30 is a reasonable number for a statistical test, so if I check the
temperature 30 times over the next 30 minutes I will have a reasonable
average for the temperatures for the whole day with 95% confidence.
If I take the high and low temperatures over the next 30 days, I will
be able to project the average temperature swings for the full year
with 95% confidence,
30 YEARS is NOT a normal random climate subset due to PDO cycles of 60
years or more, 22 year solar cycles, etc., just as 30 minutes is NOT a
random sample of daily temps, nor is 30 days a random sample of YEARLY
temps.
Johnnythelowery says:
February 14, 2012 at 4:39 am
Steve from Rockwood says:
February 14, 2012 at 4:07 am
Dripstones in Oman contain both the cosmic ray and temperature trends for the past 8,000 years? Who would have known?
—————————————————
What is a ‘drip stone’.
—————————————————
Stalactites and stalagmites. Minerals precipitated out of water as it drips into sub-surface cavities, the precipitates forming layers of stone, providing a sequential history of minerals and their isotopes.
John says:
February 14, 2012 at 4:43 am
@Will Nitschke
The results of all 3200 who responded was published and they result was around 90% thought that temperatures had risen when asked
“When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?”
If those people are “scientists” with any knowledge of the planets climate, then shouldn’t that figure be “risen” 100% or at least 98% with a +/- of 2%?
If one doesn’t know that we’ve been warming since the end of the LIA, then their opinion really is worthless in this discussion in my opinion. (Note we are not being specific on the rate or amount of the increased warming, just that it has occurred.)
The survey is useless except as a demonstration of how not to conduct a proper survey.
It does not surprise me that supporters of the CAGW by CO2 concept embrace it.
John,
Prior to 1800 the world was in the grip of the Little Ice Age. Of course scientists, including climate skeptics, agree that the world has warmed since then. The 10% who voted “no” were possibly thinking of the Medieval Warm Period or one of the other several warm periods which also occurred before 1800. It’s a pity the question wasn’t phrased more tightly. But what does this prove ? If the world weren’t warmer than in the Little Ice Age then we would really have something to worry about !
Has the contribution of humans to this warming been significant ? Well, what do you mean by significant ? Most ( but not all ) skeptics are lukewarmers, meaning that they agree that CO2 warms the world, but by nothing like the amounts postulated by the IPCC. Such skeptics would probably say that maybe 0.3 degC out of the 0.8 degC warming since 1850 might be due to CO2 or some similar figure. Is this significant ? It’s significant as a proportion of the total warming but insignificant as an absolute level of warming. So how should a skeptic answer the question ? Again, it should have been more tightly phrased.
And how many of the people who took part in the survey have actually studied the evidence as opposed to assuming that “the scientists” must know what they’re talking about. It’s a natural human trait to jump on a bandwagon ? Most of the people who frequent this blog started off as CAGW believers until they began looking at the evidence for themselves and using their critical thinking skills.
And what about the scientists who weren’t invited to take part ? The survey was distributed to Earth Scientists. So, solar physicists who may find the cosmic ray theory convincing were not polled. Engineers who may assert that the whole greenhouse gas theory breaks the laws of thermodynamics were not polled. Botanists who are aware that stomata studies contradict the accepted history of CO2 concentrations were not polled, Etc, etc.
And finally, SO WHAT !!!! Science is not decided by consensus, but by evidence.
Those that hang on to tiny solar variability are marching in the fourth column with those who hang onto tiny CO2 variability. Earth’s own intrinsic drivers of variability have WAY more energy in the many oscillations to create cooling and warming trends.
Unbiased, unfudged math should trump belief, and the null hypothesis should prevail on both sides. But in reading the comments above from both sides (solar vs CO2), belief trumps all and the null hypothesis has been hijacked.
Can you please show us where Dr. Svalgaard has ever said such a thing? I believe what you meant to say is that he has shown that TSI from the Sun isn’t variable enough to account for large climate shifts. That’s a far cry from saying “Sun has nothing to do with climate”.
Steven says:
The majority of scientists have concluded that Global warming is real. (its 97% to 3% but it varies 1 to 2% based on what poll your using) Deniers are betting millions of lives, destruction and devastation, and damages that could bankrupt the world. And even if there is no global warming, which I highly doubt, going “green” is still a smart choice.
JF: Cut that majority ( consensus) Gump, it does not wash! If you want to believe in CAGW that is up to you. But do yourself a favour and crack a few books. You will find you have been conned.
ScienceBlogs has an article titled, “Global Warming Is Ruining The Minnesota Winter”, and of course places the blame for the above average warmth in the continental US on global warming. It concludes with “Yup, Global Warming is a) Real; b) complex and c) a serious matter.”
I just left the following message and I’m curious to see what response I get, if any, or even if it passes the moderator’s shepherds hook.
Johnnythelowery says:
February 13, 2012 at 7:44 pm
Re “Great Global Warming Swindle”
Full version.
Johnnythelowery says:
February 14, 2012 at 4:39 am
Johnny,
From Neff et al paper in Nature, May 2001:
“The 18-O [oxygen isotope] record from the stalagmite, which serves as a proxy for variations in the tropical circulation and monsoon rainfall, allows us to make a direct comparison of the 18-O record with the 14-C [carbon isotope] record from tree rings, which largely reflects changes in solar activity. The excellent correlation between the two records suggests that one of the primary controls on centennial- to decadal-scale changes in tropical rainfall and monsoon intensity during this time are variations in solar radiation.”
Sebastian Lüning and Fritz Vahrenholt show a graph of cosmic ray (intensity?) versus time and temperature versus time to show the close correlation between temperature change and cosmic ray intensity. The correlation is quite incredible (it makes me wonder if it is real). The correlation is so incredible in fact, that I wonder why this is not done routinely from every tropical cave containing stalagmites (and if it is – who is hiding the data). They can’t use stalactites because the correlation is inverted .
John:
“Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?”
“The 79 scientists are those actively publishing in climate science were 97% answered yes to the 2nd question. Even outside of those working in climate science the agreement is very convincing!”
…
Profession polling companies can estimate election results to within 1% based on a survey sample of around 0.0001%. You are criticising the sample size but that would only be a problem if statistically this group wasn’t representative of the population as a whole and the probability of that is extremely low I’m afraid. This figure is likely to be with a 1% of the opinion of the whole population.
============================
Unfortunately, the question was intentionality deceptive because to the wider public “significant” means “major” but to the scientific community, “[statistical] significance” means measured within specified certainty bounds. A measurable 5% effect with 95% confidence can therefore be “significant”.
Given that criteria, as a sceptic myself, I would also have to answer ‘yes’ to such a question. There are virtually no scientific sceptics who disagree with the proposition that CO2 has an effect. The disagreement is that most sceptics consider it relatively small, while most alarmists consider it huge.
The problem with your second claim is that the tiny size of the sample is not the only problem, but the selection criteria. It is telling that the author of the study had a much larger sample they could have reported on, but did not choose to do so. Why? One can only speculate but a reasonable surmise might be that the larger sample did not achieve the desired rhetorical effect.
The fallacy if interpreting NOAA’s OHC graphs as “the missing heat” overlooks that in reality they represent nothing more than the ocean’s latent response to the warming of the earth throughout the Holocene interglacial and possibly rebound from the LIA. I would expect to see increasing OHC. For those who don’t understand the charts, they’re not measuring temperature but rather estimated heat content calculated from water density, salinity, halosteric and thermosteric changes, and temperature. There are other factors involved which are difficult to quantify but could be significant. Since NOAA doesn’t lay out their calculations we’re left to guess at whether OHC has any true relevance to the AWG narrative but it’s a good straw for alarmists to grab onto.
To claim that OHC is rising and somehow capturing the heat gone missing during stagnation of global warming over the past decade and that it will later result in a sudden release of that heat requires that we resolve several rather problematic propositions:
1) The OHC graphs don’t appear to be accounting for the missing warming of the past decade else there would be a sudden uptick coincidental to it and it isn’t there. If you zoom in on graph 1, there appears to be the opposite – a leveling trend of OHC from 2002 forward. OHC is not increasing to account for the global warming hiatus.
2) We accept that there is a switch of unknown mechanism that flipped, causing the ocean to suddenly start storing heat and that switch will un-flip at some point in the future to suddenly resume global warming with a vengeance. There exists no such switch except possibly the transport speed of the thermohaline conveyers which you allude to but…
3) The thermohaline conveyors must speed up and slow down suddenly to change the heat transport between ocean and atmosphere. The inertial mass of the conveyers dictate that this can’t happen in the course of a few years as would need to happen to account for the hiatus. What is the mechanism that causes the sudden shift of gears (please don’t quote models)?
4) The sudden conveyance of SST heat to lower depths somehow snuck past the entire ARGO array.
5) This unknown mechanism is a powerful negative feedback. AGW theory relies on positive feedbacks to explain the role of CO2 in GCM’s. If this powerful negative feedback switches to positive somehow, then how do we rule out that it has been driving the warming of recent decades?
Hank H…..
you are right that there must be a powerful mechanism out there, to this day little known.
This mechanism is Earth’s orbital forcing due to orbit OSCULATION, easy explained
in my booklet, on German Amazon.de: ISBN978-3-86805-604-4,
Das Ende der globalen Erwaermung
The mechanism is demonstrated in detail, no models used, all based on plain facts…
JS