Guest post by David Archibald
This is a little bit amusing. In February, I had a post on the solar – sea level relationship which quantified the sea level fall to come to the end of Solar Cycle 25:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/03/quantifying-sea-level-fall/
The site “Skeptical Science” has to date carried two pieces in response to that February post: http://www.skepticalscience.com/Why_David_Archibald_is_wrong_about_solar_sea_level.html
and http://www.skepticalscience.com/Why_David_Archibald_is_wrong_about_solar_sea_level_1B.html
My February post was 624 words and 6 figures. The Skeptical Science responses to date total 3,446 words and 17 figures. The relationship I found between solar activity and sea level is 0.045 mm per unit of annual sunspot number. The threshold between rising and falling seal level is a sunspot amplitude of 40. Below 40, sea level falls. Above that, it rises.
So let’s apply that relationship to the know sunspot record back to the beginning of the Maunder Minimum and see what it tells us. This is the result:
Figure 1: Back-tested Sea Level from 1645
The figure shows sea level falling through the Maunder Minimum due to the lack of sunspots and then fluctuating in a band about 60 mm wide before increasing rapidly from 1934. It then shows sea level peaking in 2003 before declining 40 mm to 2040.
That is pretty much in agreement with the data from the last 150 years, as per this figure combining coastal tide gauge records to 2001 and the satellite record thereafter:
Figure 2: Sea Level Rise 1850 with a Projection 2040
The glaciers started retreating in 1859, with sea level responding with a rise of 1 mm per annum up to 1930. There was an inflection point in 1930 with the rate of sea level rise almost doubling to 1.9 mm per annum. Sea level also stopped rising from 2003. So the back-tested model and the sea level record are in agreement for at least the last 150 years.
Jevrejeva et al (http://www.psmsl.org/products/reconstructions/2008GL033611.pdf) reconstructed sea level back to 1700:
Figure 3: Global Mean Sea Level Reconstruction since 1700
This longer term reconstruction shows the rise of sea level once the glaciers started retreating. It also shows the acceleration of sea level rise from the early 1930s. As Solanki noted in 2004, the Sun was more active in the second half of the 20th Century than at any time in the previous 8,000 years: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/view.php?id=25538 A sea level response to that would be expected.
In summary, the sea level trend fluctuations driven by the internal variability of the ocean-atmosphere coupled system were overprinted by higher solar activity from 1933 to 2003. The period of best fit within that, from 1948 to 1987, has allowed the solar component of sea level rise to be elucidated.
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edbarbar says: @ur momisugly April 22, 2012 at 6:02 pm
See what happens when science is abused?
______________________________________
Now that should be the quote of the week. Politics should not become part of science and “Peer-review” should at least weed out papers that make idiotic claims to accuracy. When I was in college we were taught about significant figures and at least a little something about statistics. Now people are tossed packaged statistical programs and are not even taught the difference between Attribute or Discrete data and Continuous data.
This looks like a good blog on Quantifying the error in the central limit theorem
I especially like this quote since it applies to climate models.
OOPs, my link to John D Cook’s quote did not work http://www.johndcook.com/blog/
rgbatduke says:
April 24, 2012 at 9:48 am
I’m only insanely busy with my own stuff as it is (which is largely predictive modeling, Monte Carlo, teaching, and random numbers)
Then you might be interested in this chapter of my book about a certain computer:
My definition of a random number: it is a number that I can compute but that you cannot.
http://www.leif.org/AS400/mlp022.doc
http://www.leif.org/as400/mlp022.doc
@Leif
Thanks for the correction: “The 10Be is caused by cosmic rays that do not follow the spiral [as they are much too energetic], and the planets have nothing to do with 10Be.”
I was surprised to see all the references to 10Be are for ice cores. What I read before was about 10Be in the ground and trees and so on. Are the deposition rates in the trees and soil the same as those in polar ice cores? Surely not?
The charts at http://members.shaw.ca/sch25/FOS/Climate_Change_Science.html (search for 10Be and it takes you to them) show the chart from Svensmark 2007 with El Nino, the North Atlantic Oscillation, volcanic aerosols and a linear trend of 0.14 Celsius/decade removed. It is not specifically stated that the 10Be were derived from ice cores but the inverse correlation with temperature is strong, to say the least. I am not sure what Beer, J. and Joos, C. F. (1994): “10Be as an indicator of solar variability and climate” had to say because I can’t find it. You know them, no doubt. There are no shortage of claims for 10Be to be a reliable indicator of solar activity. The upcoming conference is certainly an interesting-looking event. I will watch for the outcomes.
What seems to fit the least is the idea that swirling winds are creating an uneven deposit of 10Be that is not an indicator of 10Be formation by cosmic rays. There are just so many charts people have drawn showing a clear relationship. They are all over the place. Are they all produced by circular argument?
I will try to keep up on the alternative hypotheses. As with the medical variety, I have time for alternative medical approaches because I have been malpracticed upon so many times by the those claiming to posses the ‘right way’, the way of consensus. It seems neither science nor medicine should be practised by consensus (the latter not necessarily being rooted in the former).
Crispin back in Waterloo says:
April 24, 2012 at 6:20 pm
I was surprised to see all the references to 10Be are for ice cores. What I read before was about 10Be in the ground and trees and so on. Are the deposition rates in the trees and soil the same as those in polar ice cores? Surely not?
Trees and soil are not ‘stable’ archives, but ice is and ice cores go back a million years.
I am not sure what Beer, J. and Joos, C. F. (1994): “10Be as an indicator of solar variability and climate” had to say because I can’t find it. You know them, no doubt. There are no shortage of claims for 10Be to be a reliable indicator of solar activity.
That was what was thought a decade ago. Today we are not so sure.
Are they all produced by circular argument?
Perhaps willful thinking 🙂
It seems neither science nor medicine should be practised by consensus (the latter not necessarily being rooted in the former).
At least in science, consensus often signals widespread agreement that a theory fits the data we have so far. [it may still be wrong, but it is the best one we have]. Consensus among experts means that those scientists have become convinced by the argument and the data.
I found Usoskin’s “A History of Solar Activity over Millennia” (2008?) with its spectacular 31 page bibliography and some excellent charts. In his Figure 4 he notes, “Figure 4:
Schematic representation of 14C (left) and 10Be (right) production chains. The flux of cosmic rays impinging on the Earth is affected by both heliospheric modulation and geomagnetic field changes. The climate may affect the redistribution of the isotopes between different reservoirs. Dashed line denotes a possible influence of solar activity on climate.”
His Figure 15 shows the very good correlation between 10Be and Sun spot numbers. If sun spots are an indicator of solar activity then there it is reasonable to use 10Be as a proxy for solar activity, certainly at large scale resolution. Is this seriously in error?
Crispin back in Waterloo says:
April 24, 2012 at 7:06 pm
If sun spots are an indicator of solar activity then there it is reasonable to use 10Be as a proxy for solar activity, certainly at large scale resolution. Is this seriously in error?
Unfortunately yes. On slide 6 of http://www.leif.org/research/The%20long-term%20variation%20of%20solar%20activity.pdf you can see how the top [Usoskin] curve which is the sunspot record record grafted onto the 14C curve [which is close to the 10Be curve] does not match at the right hand edge. the main problem is that Usoskin uses the Group Sunspot Number which is wrongly calibrated, see http://www.leif.org/research/What-is-Wrong-with-GSN.pdf
Next month all experts on this will meet in Berne, Switzerland to discuss the various problem and try to decide [if we can] what the facts are: http://www.leif.org/research/Svalgaard_ISSI_Proposal_Base.pdf
@Leif
I have just returned from an IWA/ISO meeting at the Hague where ‘the experts’ met to try to hammer out an International Working Agreement (which cannot be edited after the fact, unfortunately). The insurmountable problem was that prior collaboration between three groups had stacked the panel with the intention to have their research methods and understandings become the only way that facts can be viewed. They don’t get half-close to tacking chart lines together and worrying about calibration errors. It seemed to be more about naked ambition. I hope you don’t face the same problem – or create one. In the end the IWA resolved nothing and the chaos continues.
Your slide 6 on solar activity shows good correlation between14C and 10Be. Your slide 40 shows a clear ramping of the heliospheric strength with a 1/2 cycle length of about 85 years from 1890 to 1975. The statement that there has been no recent grand solar maximum is looking a bit like a quibble. OK it is not all that grand, but there clearly is a sustained early rise and late wane during the 20th century. If the Earth has anything like a hysteresis of 20-30 years the temperature response has been ‘expectable’ if not ‘immediate’.
What seems to me to be a waste of breath is endless yawning arguments about TSI as being some measure of solar influence. Surely by now it is obvious AGW warmists, trying to sell CO2 as the driver of terrestrial temperature, are clutching at the (negative proof) of the TSI straw? If your SSN correction (change of multiplier) is bang-on, if your reanalysis of HMF(B) is informative, if you locate a GCR burster in 1892, there is still a strong indication that solar activity and the size of the heliosphere, and therefore the modulation of GCR and 10Be, is correlated with it.
My bottom line is that the correlation of HMF(B), 10Be and temperature (with well known and well characterised causes in the case of 10Be) is a heck of a lot better than CO2 and temperature, on just about any scale, going back millennia. I am just as sure you are going to win your argument about how to count the SSN as I am that CO2 alarmists are going to lose their case claiming that human emissions of CO2 are causing ‘climate disruption’.
Have fun in Berne. Good coffee there.
Crispin back in Waterloo says:
April 25, 2012 at 3:11 am
The statement that there has been no recent grand solar maximum is looking a bit like a quibble. OK it is not all that grand, but there clearly is a sustained early rise and late wane during the 20th century.
As there also were in the 19th and the 18th.