Guest post by Alec Rawls
Miller et al. 2012 recently provided some pretty strong evidence for a solar driver of climate. “This is the first time anyone has clearly identified the specific onset of the cold times marking the start of the Little Ice Age,” said lead author Gifford Miller in January. And the dates?
LIA summer cold and ice growth began abruptly between 1275 and 1300 AD, followed by a substantial intensification 1430-1455 AD.
As you can see in the graphic above (from Usoskin 2003) these dates correspond pretty much with the midpoints of the Wolf and Spörer solar minima. (Usoskin 2007 centers Wolf at 1305 with a duration of 70 years and Spörer at 1470 with a duration of 160 years.)
Yet Miller never noted this coincidence. In fact, he tried to hide it, claiming that the onset of snow and ice growth coincided with periods of especially high volcanism (debunked both by Willis and by Wired), while dismissing the solar explanation with a misleading reference to the Maunder Minimum:
Our precisely dated records demonstrate that the expansion of ice caps after Medieval times was initiated by an abrupt and persistent snowline depression late in the 13th Century, and amplified in the mid 15th Century, coincident with episodes of repeated explosive volcanism centuries before the widely cited Maunder sunspot minimum (1645–1715 AD [Eddy, 1976]).
This is a remarkably blatant deception, acceded to by 13 co-authors plus the reviewers and editors at Geophysical Research Letters. It takes no expertise to know about the Wolf and Spörer minima. There is no physics involved, so who do these people think they are fooling?
Nobody. They just don’t think it is their job to make the case for what they regard as “the other side.” The anti-CO2 alarmists are behaving like lawyers in an adversarial legal proceeding, hiding what hurts their own case while overstating what can be fashioned in support. In the courts an adversarial system is able to elicit a measure of truth only because there is a judge to maintain rules of evidence and a hopefully unbiased jury examining the facts. These conditions do not obtain in science. The anti-CO2 alarmists are both the peer-review jury and the judge/editors, devolving into a pre-scientific ethic where acceptance is determined by power, not reason and evidence.
The lawyerly behavior of Miller et al. lead them to embrace a particular excuse for ignoring the evidence for a powerful solar driver of climate (even evidence that they themselves uncover). They don’t “need” it. But they were not the pioneers of this anti-scientific ploy. That dishonor goes to Gavin Schmidt.
Miller’s two null hypotheses, specific and general
The specific hypothesis of Miller’s paper is a feedback mechanism by which the cooling from volcanic episodes could get amplified into longer term cooling. It is “tested” via climate model. From Miller’s University of Colorado press release:
The models showed sustained cooling from volcanoes would have sent some of the expanding Arctic sea ice down along the eastern coast of Greenland until it eventually melted in the North Atlantic. Since sea ice contains almost no salt, when it melted the surface water became less dense, preventing it from mixing with deeper North Atlantic water. This weakened heat transport back to the Arctic and creating a self-sustaining feedback system on the sea ice long after the effects of the volcanic aerosols subsided.
But the real null hypothesis of the paper, the one that expresses the authors’ motivation, as revealed by blatant cover-up of their own evidence for a solar driver of climate, is more general. It appears in the last line of their abstract, which says that in order to explain the Little Ice Age, “large changes in solar irradiance are not required.”
The timings Miller found point like a neon sign to a solar explanation but he is determinedly oblivious to that evidence. He is only interested in whether there could be some other possible explanation, and as long as that null hypothesis is not absolutely falsified, he takes that as a rationale for ignoring the alternative hypothesis and the evidence for it.
What exactly is the alternative hypothesis? According to Miller’s wording, it is that the Little Ice Age was actually caused by “large changes in solar irradiance.” But nobody thinks that there have been large changes in solar irradiance. There is broad agreement that while solar magnetic activity fluctuates dramatically, solar irradiance remains almost constant. Irradiance shifts towards the UV when solar activity is high, but the change in Total Solar Irradiance is too small to bring about much decadal or century scale variation in climate.
In contrast, there is a great deal of evidence for a solar-magnetic driver of climate (second section here). This is the real alternate hypothesis, and there is at least one well developed theory for how it could occur: Henrik Svensmark’s GCR-cloud.
As a good adversarial lawyer, Miller is unwilling to betray any hint that this alternate hypothesis is even a possibility. Like Voldemart, it is the foe that “must not be named.” Thus Miller refers to the possible solar-magnetic driver of climate indirectly and incorrectly as “large changes in solar irradiance.”
Lawyerly advocacy is not science
In his role as an advocate, Miller’s fear is fully justified. A strong solar-magnetic effect on climate would be a death knell for anti-CO2 alarmism. Any late 20th century warming that can be attributed to that era’s continued high levels of solar activity reduces by the same amount the warming that can possibly be attributed to CO2, which in tern reduces the implied sensitivity of climate to CO2. Even worse, if solar-magnetic effects actually outweigh CO2 effects (my own surmise, by a wide margin) then the present danger is cooling, not warming, thanks to our now quiescent sun.
But lawyerly advocacy is not science. To only examine the evidence for non-solar explanations is to throw away information, violating the most basic scientific rationality, yet this is what the “consensus” has been doing for many years. My review of the first draft of the next IPCC report documents how “vast evidence for solar climate driver rates one oblique sentence in AR5.” AR4 listed Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) as the only solar effect on climate, as did the Third Assessment Report (scroll to TSI). “The Team” simply omits what they wish to avoid.
Miller plays this game from the get go, where his opening literature review assumes that the only solar effect is TSI:
Episodes of anomalously cold summers primarily are attributed to some combination of reductions in solar irradiance, especially the LIA Maunder sunspot minimum [Eddy, 1976], explosive volcanism, and changes in the internal modes of variability in the ocean–atmosphere system [Crowley, 2000; Wanner et al., 2011]. However, the natural radiative forcings are either weak or, in the case of explosive volcanism, shortlived [Robock, 2000], thus requiring substantial internal feedback.
Robock 2000 only addresses the volcanic issue, so Miller’s only grounds for calling solar forcing a “weak” effect is his own analysis, where he only looks at TSI (using the TSI reconstruction of Schmidt et al. 2011).
That’s a phony literature review. Miller’s repeated deceptions—hiding the Wolf and Spörer minima, referring to large solar effects as “large changes in solar irradiance” when there is no such hypothesis—can only be to hide the possible role of solar magnetic activity, but this actual object of Miller’s paper goes unmentioned in what is supposed to be a survey of the most relevant science. The literature review is a place where an adversarial approach is explicitly rejected by well established scientific standards, but the alarmists are not playing by the rules.
There is nothing wrong with Miller et al. testing their hypothesis that solar activity does not play a significant role (which they do by “setting solar radiation at a constant level in the climate models”). But when they pair this non-falsification of their pet theory with blatant misdirection about their own discovered evidence for the alternative hypothesis, that is bad. It is using the “not needed” claim as an implicit justification for the omitted variable fraud that the entire consensus is engaged in.
Gavin Schmidt is a pioneer of the “not needed” excuse for ignoring possible solar magnetic effects
Some history on this particular ploy, for anyone who is interested. Miller and his co-authors are not the first to pull the “not needed” gambit. Eleven years ago Shindell, Schmidt, Mann, Rind and Waple published a paper in Science that is remarkably similar to Miller 2012. Like Miller, Schmidt and his co-authors propose a North Atlantic mechanism for amplifying cooling effects, though the mechanism itself is quite different. The spectral shift that accompanies decreased solar activity is hypothesized to alter atmospheric ozone composition in a cooling direction, setting in motion atmospheric flows (“planet waves”) that in turn are hypothesized to drive the North Atlantic Oscillation. Their null hypothesis is the same as Miller’s: that they can account for the Little Ice Age without invoking any solar effects beyond the expected variations in solar irradiance, and their test is also the same: they run a model.
If the UV shift that goes with low solar activity can explain much of the Little Ice Age, couldn’t the UV shift from high solar activity explain a similar amount of 20th century warming? No say Shindell et al. Changes in atmospheric composition from the pre-industrial to the industrial period supposedly cause the effect of the UV shift to reverse (p. 2151):
Ozone’s reversal from a positive (preindustrial) to a negative feedback supports results showing that solar forcing has been a relatively minor contributor to late 20th-century surface warming (7, 19, 31).
Thus the CO2 explanation for recent warming is not undercut, enabling claims of future catastrophic warming to go forward. Of course Schmidt’s references “showing that solar forcing has been a relatively minor contributor to late 20th-century surface warming” only look at TSI, and his “ozone reversal” is not an empirical finding but a model result. They’ve got all the doors manned.
In 2005, this 2001 paper became the centerpiece of a public exchange between Gavin Schmidt and science fiction author Jerry Pournelle. Schmidt was vigorously insisting on the scientific integrity of himself and everyone he knew:
None, not one, of the climate scientists I meet at conferences or workshops or that I correspond with fit the stereotype you paint of catastrophists making up worries to gain grant money. Personally, I don’t think I’ve ever made a dramatic statement in papers, public speechs, grant applications or letters to the editor. Yet I still manage to keep my job and support a couple of graduate students. This is the same in every institution and university. … I do not go around being a doom sayer – but it is incumbent on scientists to explain to people what it is we think we understand, and what it is we don’t.
To explain the sober science that causes him to dismiss the solar-warming hypothesis, Schmidt invoked his 2001 paper with Shindell et al.. It shows that there is no “need” to bring in any suspicious “new physics” (Schmidt’s Voldmartian euphemism for the solar-magnetic hypothesis that must not be named):
I was a co-author of a paper in Science in 2001, that looked at whether climate models could replicate this pattern given the known physics of solar change. We found that two features were key, allowing the solar irradiance to vary more in the UV than in the visible (consistent with what is seen over the sunspot cycle), and allowing the ozone field to vary as a function of the UV and temperature in the stratosphere. With both of these effects, the model produced global cooling (as you would expect) but also a robust change to the circulation (a weakened NAO) that amplified the cooling in western Eurasia and over the mid-latitude continents. Obviously given the uncertainties in the forcing, the data that we were trying to match, and uncertainty in the model response, we can’t use this a proof that we got all of it right. However, in the absence of better data, there is no obvious need for ‘new’ or unknown physics to explain what was going on. This was just a first cut, and better models and more data are being brought to bear on the problem, so the conclusion may change in the future. As of now though, this is still the current state of thinking.
“New or unknown physics” is obviously a reference to to GCR-cloud, which Schmidt finds lacking as a theory. Fine, but that is no excuse for ignoring the ever growing mountain of evidence that there is some mechanism by which solar activity is having a much larger effect on climate than can be explained by changes in solar irradiance. I compile some of that evidence in the second section here. For the state of that evidence in 2001, the Third Assessment Report’s section 6.11.2.2 on “Cosmic rays and clouds” is well worth a look.
While AR4 and AR5 have progressively excised the evidence for solar activity as a powerful driver of global temperature, TAR actually began with several paragraphs of studies that found substantial correlations between solar activity and climate. Only then did it judge the proposed mechanisms that might account for these correlations to be too uncertain to include in their modeling.
That would be okay if they still took the discovered correlations into account in formulating their climate predictions, but of course they did not. This is the highly improper step that invalidates the IPCC’s entire enterprise. They are using theory (in particular, their dissatisfaction with Svensmark’s GCR-cloud theory) as an excuse to ignore the evidence that supports the theory, excising its known predictive power from their predictive scheme.
Evidence is supposed to trump theory, not vice versa. The IPCC is inverting the scientific method. It is literal, definitional, anti-science, and Schmidt’s “no need” excuse is simply another justification for doing the same thing. Since there is no need to invoke a strong solar driver of climate, he is going to ignore the evidence for a strong solar driver of climate, and this is what Schmidt holds up to Pournelle as an example of his integrity: the very point where he justifies the omitted variable fraud that is being perpetrated by himself and his cohorts. If only he were capable of embarrassment.
Who is actually doing a suspicious new kind of physics?
Schmidt looks askance at GCR-cloud as “new physics,” but it isn’t new in any fundamental sense. The cloud micro-physics that Svensmark, Kirkby and others are looking at is presumed to follow established particle physics models. It is a new application of current physics. What Schmidt is really suggesting with his jaundiced eye is that we should be reluctant to extrapolate our current understanding of physical principles to illuminate the biggest scientific controversy of the day.
At the same time, he and Miller and the rest of the alarmists have introduced something that really is new and problematic. They are using model runs to test their hypotheses. They are using theory to test theory, with no empirical test needed. Here Miller describes how he “tests” his theory about ocean feedbacks (page 3 of 5):
Climate modeling reveals one such possible feedback mechanism. Following Zhong et al. [2011], we tested whether abrupt LIA snowline depressions could be initiated by decadally paced explosive volcanism and maintained by subsequent sea-ice/ocean feedbacks. We completed a 550-year transient experiment (1150–1700 AD) using Community Climate System Model 3 [Collins et al., 2006] with interactive sea ice [Holland et al., 2006] at T42 x 1 resolution. Our transient simulation was branched off a 1000 AD control run, and forced solely by a reconstructed history of stratospheric volcanic aerosols and relatively weak solar irradiance changes (Figure 2b) [Gao et al., 2008].
Models are not reality, and in the above case the model is known to be wrong. Total solar effects are presumed to be “weak”? That is what the alarmists all assume but it is not what the empirical evidence says, and while they may be able to tweak their models enough to keep them from being strictly falsified by the LIA, the last decade of no significant warming has them stumped completely.
General Circulation Models are the most elaborate hypotheses ever concocted. They involve thousands of questionable steps, iterated thousands of times. To illustrate, the Shindell-Schmidt paper is good enough to provide us with a highly abridged description of the hypothetical steps that their model works through. It gives some idea of the volume and sweep of what they are theorizing (p. 2150). (If you are actually going to read this, brace yourself):
Our previous studies have demonstrated how external forcings can excite the AO/ NAO in the GISS GCM (22, 25). Briefly, the mechanism works as follows, using a shift toward the high-index AO/NAO as an example: (i) tropical and subtropical SSTs warm, leading to (ii) a warmer tropical and subtropical upper troposphere via moist convective processes. This results in (iii) an increased latitudinal temperature gradient at around 100 to 200 mbar, because these pressures are in the stratosphere at higher latitudes, and so do not feel the surface warming (26). The temperature gradient leads to (iv) enhanced lower stratospheric westerly winds, which (v) refract upward-propagating tropospheric planetary waves equatorward. This causes (vi) increased angular momentum transport to high latitudes and enhanced tropospheric westerlies, and the associated temperature and pressure changes corresponding to a high AO/NAO index. Observations support a planetary wave modulation of the AO/NAO (27, 28), and zonal wind and planetary wave propagation changes over recent decades are well reproduced in the model (22).
Reduced irradiance during the Maunder Minimum causes a shift toward the lowindex AO/NAO state via this same mechanism. During December to February, the surface in the tropics and subtropics cools by 0.4° to 0.5°C because of reduced incoming radiation and the upper stratospheric ozone increase. Cooling in the tropical and subtropical upper troposphere is even more pronounced (;0.8°C) because of cloud feedbacks, including an ;0.5% decrease in high cloud cover induced by ozone through surface effects. A similar response was seen in simulations with a finer resolution version of the GISS GCM (14). This cooling substantially reduces the latitudinal temperature gradient in the tropopause region, decreasing the zonal wind there at ;40°N. Planetary waves coming up from the surface at mid-latitudes, which are especially abundant during winter, are then deflected toward the equator less than before (equatorward Eliassen-Palm flux is reduced by 0.41 m2/s2, 12° to 35°N, 300 to 100 mbar average), instead propagating up into the stratosphere (increased vertical flux of 6.3 3 1024 m2/s2, 35° to 60°N, 100 to 5 mbar average) (29). This increases the wavedriven stratospheric residual circulation, which warms the polar lower stratosphere (up to 1°C), providing a positive feedback by further weakening the latitudinal temperature gradient. The wave propagation changes imply a reduction in northward angular momentum transport, hence a slowing down of the middle- and high-latitude westerlies and a shift toward the low AO/NAO index. Because the oceans are relatively warm during the winter owing to their large heat capacity, the diminished flow creates a cold-land/ warm-ocean surface pattern (Fig. 1).
That is a LOT of speculation. Normally it is all hidden. They just say, “we did a model run,” but this is what it actually means: ten thousand questionable steps iterated a hundred thousand times. It is fine for people to be working on these models and trying to make progress with them, but to use them to make claims about what is actually happening in the world is insane, and using them as an excuse for ignoring actual empirical evidence is worse than insane.
This really is a new kind of science, and not one that stands up to scrutiny. We are being asked to turn our world upside down on the strength of the most elaborate speculations in the history of mankind, yet Schmidt thinks it is cloud microphysics—traditional science!—that should be eschewed. All to justify the destruction of the modern world, now well underway.
Alec Rawls says:
April 29, 2012 at 7:05 pm
i>Leif also writes: “By the same token [ionizing GCR is] also too energetic to be affected by changes in the sun’s magnetism.”
Not quite. If I may quote Leif’s quote the other day from Svensmark’s recent paper:
Svensmark points out:
“The energetic GCR that ionize the lower atmosphere are only weakly influenced by variations in the geomagnetic field or by solar magnetic activity.
So here he says that the both influences are weak. You exaggerated that to say there was ‘none’ for the geomagnetic field and I carried that same exaggeration over to the sun. What he is saying is that the two effects are comparable.
Over decades to millennia the GCR influx to the Solar System scarcely changes.”
So, the obvious conclusion is that “the climate scarcely changes as well”.
“weakly influenced” here means weakly compared to the magnitude of GCR variation that comes from the presence or absence of nearby novae.
That ‘weakly influence’ clearly does not apply to the geomagnetic field, having nothing to do with nearby supernovae.
no prima facie reason to think that a 10% change in GCR effects is small rather than large compared to CO2 effects.
The effect of GCRs has nothing to do with CO2. You could equally say there is no prima facie reason to think the effect is large compared to CO2. The two effects simply have nothing to do with each other. On top of that Svensmark believes that CO2 has a significant effect. On page 19 he says: “if a cooling reduces the loss of CO2 to geochemical weathering, that could lead to a buildup of CO2 if other sinks and sources of CO2 remain constant, and so dampen or reverse the cooling” [my bold]
little is still known about the possible magnitude of the phenomenon.
So little can be concluded.
Alec Rawls says:
April 29, 2012 at 6:51 pm
should cause warming, and if it had continued longer would have continued still longer to cause warming. If Leif disagrees, can he say why?
Generally people consider the time constant of the oceans as far as influence on global temperatures to be of the order of 7 years., e.g. see http://www.ecd.bnl.gov/pubs/BNL-76939-2006-AB.pdf
“From energy balance considerations such a global heat capacity yields for the time constant of climate system response (time for e-fold decay of a perturbation) a value of 2.5 years in the absence of feedbacks; inclusion of a feedback factor of up to several fold yields a time constant of up to a decade or so. Similarly short values of the time constant are obtained from analysis of autocorrelation of time series of GMST and ocean heat content.”
There appears to be some sort of denialist conspiracy. The sun was at its highest activity level in 8000 years during later half of the twentieth century. The sun has abruptly changed to something that is related to but different from a Maunder minimum.
Based on what has happened in past – i.e. the paleclimatic record, cycles of abrupt climate change- the planet is about to cool with most of the cooling occurring at high latitude regions, particularly in high latitude Northern regions. The forcing function is a reduction in cirrus clouds (high altitude cirrus clouds warm the planet due to the greenhouse effect). The Antarctic is so cold and dry there is minimal warming due to a reduction in the cirrus clouds.
http://www.climate4you.com/
(see figure 3)
Fig.3. The upper panel shows the air temperature at the summit of the Greenland Ice Sheet, reconstructed by Alley (2000) from GISP2 ice core data. The time scale shows years before modern time, which is shown at the right hand side of the diagram. The rapid temperature rise to the left indicate the final part of the even more pronounced temperature increase following the last ice age. The temperature scale at the right hand side of the upper panel suggests a very approximate comparison with the global average temperature (see comment below). The GISP2 record ends around 1855, and the red dotted line indicate the approximate temperature increase since then. The small reddish bar in the lower right indicate the extension of the longest global temperature record (since 1850), based on meteorological observations (HadCRUT3). The lower panel shows the past atmospheric CO2 content, as found from the EPICA Dome C Ice Core in the Antarctic (Monnin et al. 2004). The Dome C atmospheric CO2 record ends in the year 1777.
Let the AGW back peddling commence.
Press Release June, 2011: Discussing, three papers that were presented at the annual meeting of the Solar Physics Division of the American Astronomical Society.
http://www2.nso.edu/press/SolarActivityDrop.html
“What’s Down with the Sun? Major Drop in Solar Activity Predicted,
A missing jet stream, fading spots, and slower activity near the poles say that our Sun is heading for a rest period even as it is acting up for the first time in years, according to scientists at the National Solar Observatory (NSO) and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL).”
“As the current sunspot cycle, Cycle 24, begins to ramp up toward maximum, independent studies of the solar interior, visible surface, and the corona indicate that the next 11-year solar sunspot cycle, Cycle 25, will be greatly reduced or may not happen at all. The results were announced at the annual meeting of the Solar Physics Division of the American Astronomical Society, which is being held this week at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces:
….“This is highly unusual and unexpected,” Dr. Frank Hill, associate director of the NSO’s Solar Synoptic Network, said of the results. “But the fact that three completely different views of the Sun point in the same direction is a powerful indicator that the sunspot cycle may be going into hibernation.” Spot numbers and other solar activity rise and fall about every 11 years, which is half of the Sun’s 22-year magnetic interval since the Sun’s magnetic poles reverse with each cycle. An immediate question is whether this slowdown presages a second Maunder Minimum, a 70-year period with virtually no sunspots during 1645-1715.
Hill is the lead author on one of three papers on these results being presented this week. Using data from the Global Oscillation Network Group (GONG) of six observing stations around the world, the team translates surface pulsations caused by sound reverberating through the Sun into models of the internal structure. One of their discoveries is an east-west zonal wind flow inside the Sun, called the torsional oscillation, which starts at mid-latitudes and migrates towards the equator. The latitude of this wind stream matches the new spot formation in each cycle, and successfully predicted the late onset of the current Cycle 24.
“We expected to see the start of the zonal flow for Cycle 25 by now,” Hill explained, “but we see no sign of it. This indicates that the start of Cycle 25 may be delayed to 2021 or 2022, or may not happen at all.” In the second paper, Matt Penn and William Livingston see a long-term weakening trend in the strength of sunspots, and predict that by Cycle 25 magnetic fields erupting on the Sun will be so weak that few if any sunspots will be formed. Spots are formed when intense magnetic flux tubes erupt from the interior and keep cooled gas from circulating back to the interior. For typical sunspots this magnetism has a strength of 2,500 to 3,500 gauss (Earth’s magnetic field is less than 1 gauss at the surface); the field must reach at least 1,500 gauss to form a dark spot. Using more than 13 years of sunspot data collected at the McMath-Pierce Telescope at Kitt Peak in Arizona, Penn and Livingston observed that the average field strength declined about 50 gauss per year during Cycle 23 and now in Cycle 24. They also observed that spot temperatures have risen exactly as expected for such changes in the magnetic field. If the trend continues, the field strength will drop below the 1,500 gauss threshold and spots will largely disappear as the magnetic field is no longer strong enough to overcome convective forces on the solar surface.
Moving outward, Richard Altrock, manager of the Air Force’s coronal research program at NSO’s Sunspot, NM, facilities has observed a slowing of the “rush to the poles,” the rapid poleward march of magnetic activity observed in the Sun’s faint corona. Altrock used four decades of observations with NSO’s 40-cm (16-inch) coronagraphic telescope at Sunspot. “A key thing to understand is that those wonderful, delicate coronal features are actually powerful, robust magnetic structures rooted in the interior of the Sun,” Altrock explained. “Changes we see in the corona reflect changes deep inside the Sun.” Altrock used a photometer to map iron heated to 2 million degrees C (3.6 million F). Stripped of half of its electrons, it is easily concentrated by magnetism rising from the Sun. In a well-known pattern, new solar activity emerges first at about 70 degrees latitude at the start of a cycle, then towards the equator as the cycle ages. At the same time, the new magnetic fields push remnants of the older cycle as far as 85 degrees poleward. “In cycles 21 through 23, solar maximum occurred when this rush appeared at an average latitude of 76 degrees,” Altrock said. “Cycle 24 started out late and slow and may not be strong enough to create a rush to the poles, indicating we’ll see a very weak solar maximum in 2013, if at all. If the rush to the poles fails to complete, this creates a tremendous dilemma for the theorists, as it would mean that Cycle 23’s magnetic field will not completely disappear from the polar regions (the rush to the poles accomplishes this feat). ”
“No one knows what the Sun will do in that case.” All three of these lines of research to point to the familiar sunspot cycle shutting down for a while. “If we are right,” Hill concluded, “this could be the last solar maximum we’ll see for a few decades. That would affect everything from space exploration to Earth’s climate.”
It is perturbation time + jerk amplitude that matters more so than the stagnant power of a forcing, in a chaotic open system such as our climate. Forget closed system mechanics, they cannot be verified or falsified. Whether or not Leif is correct about the stagnant power of external forcing, it is meaningless. Claiming otherwise is irrelavent fluff.
The global temperature can be calculated easily with 4 variables:
– Solar cycle length
– The magnetic Hale cycle with a 44.5yr governing imput charge-amplitude
– Variations in the AP/AA index for the sake of perturbation only
-Thermal inertia within the climate system, operating on a lag of about 7 years.
ENSO is not climate neutral, neither is the PDO, NAO, AMO, etc. ENSO is climate change in action. Anyone who wishes to understand the aspects of thermal inertia, why a major El Nino will occur during every solar minimum/magnetic polarity arrival interface change, can easily do so. The climate is governed by extreme negative feedbacks to change in stagnant forcing. The opposite is true of perturbation time amplitude change, flow dynamics must be altered so the energy management must redirect to fit a broad scale (reconfigured) photon ‘resonator pulse’.
resonat*ing*^^ [typo]
William Astley says:
April 29, 2012 at 8:19 pm
The sun was at its highest activity level in 8000 years during later half of the twentieth century.
Actually not: http://www.leif.org/research/The%20long-term%20variation%20of%20solar%20activity.pdf
Using more than 13 years of sunspot data collected at the McMath-Pierce Telescope at Kitt Peak in Arizona, Penn and Livingston observed that the average field strength declined about 50 gauss per year during Cycle 23 and now in Cycle 24.
I was actually a co-author of that paper.
I know a secret.
Albertalad observes-
‘It seems to me after years of WUWT articles and questions raised here – the more questions and articles presented the less we actually know about how this planet works.’
That’s the quintessential difference between climate alarmists and climate realists. The alarmists reckon they know it all right now, while we realists are simply gobsmacked at the complexity of it all, that our seemingly feeble scientific forays are just beginning to come to grips with.
You can immediately see the fatal attraction for leftists in blind certainty vis a vis those of us who celebrate individual diversity, not to mention our miniscule and humble part in it all. It is that certainty of the vision splendid and the concomitant grand plan that has slaughtered millions and you can smell it all again acridly in the climate alarmists and their credo.
Using edcaryl as my touchstone — how about a new award — the Rube Goldberg Climate Modeling Prize. It might even get a newspaper mention. But what should the prize be? Maybe 1st 2nd 3rd places? What the prizes? The collected works of Lysenko? A box of tinkerstoys? An all expense paid backyard snipe hunt?
Eugene WR Gallun
“The anti-CO2 alarmists are behaving like lawyers”
Maybe this is because the AGW advocates happen to either be lawyers, or carefully trained by lawyers, instead of in science?
Leif Svalgaard says:
April 29, 2012 at 8:53 am
The southern magnetic pole moves too:
http://www.mrinbetween.com/S_magpl.PDF
http://www.mrinbetween.com/N_magpl.PDF
Lief’s charts explain my point exactly. The north magnetic pole is moving TOWARDS the geographic pole, resulting in warming in the Arctic. At the same time the south magnetic pole is moving AWAY from the south geographic pole, resulting in cooling. The rate of movement is slower in the south pole, resulting in a slower change in temperature.
Hat tip to Lief for filling in the missing information. Here is the theory stated once more, with Lief’s information added:
ferd berple says:
April 29, 2012 at 6:26 am
Why is the Arctic warming while the Antarctic is not, as evidenced by ice extent? This cannot be explained by CO2 or aerosols or indeed any product of industrialization.
The most obvious cause is the rapid change underway at the earth’s north magnetic pole. The north magenetic poles is moving from Canada towards Siberia, faster than at any observed time in modern history. As the magnetic pole approaches the geographic pole, polar temperature rise.
At the same time a similar, but slower movement is underway at the south pole, where the magnetic pole is moving away from the geographic pole, result in a cooling, but at a slower rate.
The cause of this climate change is currently unknown to science, but has been widely observed in the past from examination of paleo records. One possible mechanism is the influx of ionized particles from the solar wind entering the earth’s atmosphere at the poles, changing the atmospheric chemistry of the polar regions.
Leif Svalgaard says:
April 29, 2012 at 7:02 pm
If it takes three hundred years for the oceans to warm up, it also takes three hundred years for them to cool down, so the cold period 1400-1700 AD should be the response to low solar activity 300 years before that, in other words the climate should lag 300 behind solar activity. If so, the ‘obvious’ correlation goes away.
=======
The lag would be some sort of exponential function, with most of the change occurring early. In effect, it takes the oceans infinitely long to respond fully to any change, but the residual over time becomes so small as to be meaningless. The idea that a change today will not have any effect for 300 years, then suddenly change the ocean temperatures all at once is of course a nonsense.
Leif writes:
Transport of energy into and out of lower depths doesn’t have to occur at the same speed, but it is probably a reasonable approximation. That doesn’t mean, however, that a 300 year warming input won’t show up for 300 years! It means that it will take until 300 years after the pulse is ended for the warm influence to be expended. But it would START immediately, or in 7 years, which is where the surface temperature response to short term changes shows up.
Leif again:
No. “The GCR influx to the Solar System” refers to the amount of GCR the solar system is receiving from our current neck of the galaxy. It could change quickly if a supernova were to erupt nearby, but I guess Svensmark is here talking about the average, which varies as we travel through spiral arms, and from the view of decades to millenia would essentially be constant.
This says nothing about how much this incoming GCR is being modulated within the solar system by solar activity and by the earth’s magnetic field. These modulations Svensmark puts in the neighborhood of 10%, which could turn out to have a lot of climactic significance, or a little. We don’t know yet. It depends on what % of clouds are being nucleated by GCR and on who knows what else. We have correlation evidence that there is SOME process by which solar activity has a large effect on climate (compared to unamplified TSI changes), but we don’t know if it is Svensmark’s proposed mechanism or not.
Leif:
Probably best if we don’t amplify each other’s exaggerations.
Alec Rawls says:
April 29, 2012 at 11:09 pm
That doesn’t mean, however, that a 300 year warming input won’t show up for 300 years!
Agree
This says nothing about how much this incoming GCR is being modulated within the solar system by solar activity and by the earth’s magnetic field.
Agree
Modern science. When the boss says prove A=B, you produce a paper showing A=B, or start looking for a new job. The advantage of the weekend scientists – no boss to tell you the “right” answer.
“One possible mechanism is the influx of ionized particles from the solar wind entering the earth’s atmosphere at the poles, changing the atmospheric chemistry of the polar regions.”
And / or wavelength changes especially in the UV which affects ozone chemistry differemtly at different levels to alter the vertical temperature profile in the way that would be needed to produce the observed latitudinal shifting of the climate zones with consequent global cloudiness and albedo effects.
“If it takes three hundred years for the oceans to warm up, it also takes three hundred years for them to cool down,”
The ocean temperature starts to change as soon as global cloudiness starts to change.
I say that the jetstream tracks moved steadily but irregularly more poleward throughout the period of rising solar activity from Maunder Minimun to recent Modern Maximum so throughout that period cloudiness decreased and the oceans warmed as the lines of air mass mixing became shorter due to increased zonality and poleward positioning.
Only when cloudiness began to increase again in the late 90s as the level of solar activity began to decline significantly would the rate of solar energy injection into the oceans have begun to decline and indeed from about 2003 ocean heat content appears to have stopped increasing.
Meanwhile the jetstream tracks are indeed more equatorward / meridional (and so longer) that they were during the late 20th century.
As long as the sun remains less active the jetstream tracks will continue to be more meridional / equatorward than they were and ocean heat content will continue to drop.
It appears to work on a 1000 year cycle as per MWP to LIA to date. In fact it could be a 1000 to 1500 year cycle which would bring it into line with lots of other evidence of cyclical climate changes of 1500 years in length.
There could well be some phasing interference with the solar cycle effects from the length of the thermohaline circulation causing variability between 1000 years and 1500 years.
“Why is the Arctic warming while the Antarctic is not, as evidenced by ice extent?”
The Arctic being an ocean is primarily affected by warm water flowing under the ice from earlier El Nino events in the equatorial regions.
The Antarctic being a continent is primarily affected by air flows in and out which is linked to the zonality / poleward positioning of the air circulation around it.
A warming period induced by higher solar activity both
(i) increases El Nino strength from decreased cloudiness and more energy getting into the oceans AND
ii) pulls the jets poleward to increase the zonality of the winds.
Thus (i) results in melting Arctic ice from below and a warming Arctic.
(ii) results in tighter air flow around Antarctica which isolates the interior more from warm air penetration so the interior gets colder.
Stephen Wilde says:
April 30, 2012 at 12:00 am
In fact it could be a 1000 to 1500 year cycle which would bring it into line with lots of other evidence of cyclical climate changes of 1500 years in length.
It would appear from WP that we are about due for a Bond Event.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bond_event
List of Bond events
≈1,400 BP (Bond event 1)
≈2,800 BP (Bond event 2) — correlates with an early 1st millennium BC drought in the Eastern Mediterranean, possibly triggering the collapse of Late Bronze Age cultures.[9][10]
≈4,200 BP (Bond event 3) — correlates also with the collapse of the Akkadian Empire and the end of the Egyptian Old Kingdom.[11][12]
≈5,900 BP (Bond event 4)
≈8,100 BP (Bond event 5)
≈9,400 BP (Bond event 6) — correlates with the Erdalen event of glacier activity in Norway,[13] as well as with a cold event in China.[14]
≈10,300 BP (Bond event 7)
≈11,100 BP (Bond event 8) — coincides with the transition from the Younger Dryas to the boreal.[15]
The possibility of colder northern hemispherical winters is still interesting, over 600 lost their lives in europe this year 2012. and we have a wettest drought ever in the UK.
It’s all warm and dandy tho! isn’t it ~
Our Climate Changes over a period of time uninfluenced by man, this is a fact!
Alec,
Thankyou. A very succinct expose of the modus operandi of the Schmidt et. al. pseudo-scientific creed. I regard your following conclusions as having particular importance:
“It is fine for people to be working on these models and trying to make progress with them, but to use them to make claims about what is actually happening in the world is insane, and using them as an excuse for ignoring actual empirical evidence is worse than insane.”
“This really is a new kind of science, and not one that stands up to scrutiny. We are being asked to turn our world upside down on the strength of the most elaborate speculations in the history of mankind, yet Schmidt thinks it is cloud microphysics—traditional science!—that should be eschewed. All to justify the destruction of the modern world, now well underway.”
Indeed. It is oft-said but no less true for it, that we are entering an ‘Orwellian’ truth-inverted reality. And it is happening so quickly!
Without informed and knowledgeable people like you, and websites like WUWT, what chance has the layman of seeing past the conjurors like Schmidt and his fellow CAGW cultists?
For five centuries the Enlightenment has progressed inch by inch – in the early days, marked by the blood of the truly brave ‘reason’ and ‘knowledge’. But has the CAGW cult now marked its high water mark. It’s zenith? Only time will tell, of course. But it certainly is of great cause for concern that the rapid ascendance of these cultists to positions of authority within our once-esteemed ‘learned’ institutions, and the megaphones our politically-driven propagandists have put in fornt of them, points to a sinister trend unfolding before our eyes and ears in our time.
Voices like yours are very important.
In reply to Leif Svalgaard,
Leif Svalgaard says:
April 29, 2012 at 8:54 pm
William Astley says:
April 29, 2012 at 8:19 pm
The sun was at its highest activity level in 8000 years during later half of the twentieth century.
Actually not: http://www.leif.org/research/The%20long-term%20variation%20of%20solar%20activity.pdf
Using more than 13 years of sunspot data collected at the McMath-Pierce Telescope at Kitt Peak in Arizona, Penn and Livingston observed that the average field strength declined about 50 gauss per year during Cycle 23 and now in Cycle 24. I was actually a co-author of that paper.
Thank-you for your comment and your contribution to this forum. I have read your papers.
I believe there will be observational evidence – solar and terrestrial – to support what I said in my comment. Cycles require a forcing function, cycles repeat.
There are cycles of warming in the paleo climatic record followed by cooling and in some case abrupt cooling.
As “Schmidt 2005 and Miller 2012” noted there is also an increase volcanic activity during the cycle. Volcanic eruptions only cool the planet for a short period of time and hence cannot explain cyclic cooling of 400 years to 1200 years. Schmidt and Miller do not provide an explanation of the warming portion of the cycle. There is concurrent with the abrupt cooling an abrupt change in the geomagnetic field. It is the abrupt change in the geomagnetic field that causes the long term terrestrial cooling. (The sun returns to its normal cycle.) The geomagnetic field specialists appealed to planetary cooling somehow (no mechanism provided) causing changes to geomagnetic field.
There are concurrent changes in cosmogenic isotopes during the cycle. It appears the sun is causing the warming, the increase in volcanic activity, and the abrupt change to the geomagnetic field.
http://academic.evergreen.edu/z/zita/teaching/CClittell/readings/Jan31_Overpeck_and_Cole_2006.pdf
ABRUPT CHANGE IN EARTH’S CLIMATE SYSTEM
What do we mean by abrupt change? Alley et al. (2), in a seminal paper arising from a U.S. National Academy of Sciences report (5), followed on the original definition of abrupt change (6): an abrupt climate change occurs when the climate system is forced to cross some threshold, triggering a transition to a new state at a rate determined by the climate system itself and faster than the cause. Others have defined it simply as a large change within less than 30 years (7) or as a transition in the climate system whose duration is fast relative to the duration of the preceding or subsequent state (8).
Further analysis of diverse records has distinguished two types of millennial events (13). Dansgaard/Oeschger (D/O) events are alternations between warm (interstadial) and cold (stadial) states that recur approximately every 1500 years, although this rhythm is variable. Heinrich events are intervals of extreme cold contemporaneous with intervals of ice-rafted detritus in the northern North Atlantic (24–26); these recur irregularly on the order of ca. 10,000 years apart and are typically followed by the warmest D/O interstadials.
Cold-climate abrupt change occurs with a characteristic timescale of appro.1500 years, a feature that must be explained by any proposed mechanism. North Atlantic and the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 (GISP2) records exhibit a period of approx.1470 years (64, 65). However, the adjacent ice core isotope record from the Greenland Ice Core Project (GRIP) site exhibits periods closer to 1670 and 1130–1330 years, which is in agreement with the independently dated record from Hulu Cave (49, 66). Time series studies generally converge on a picture of a noisy climate system paced by a regular, perhaps external, forcing, with the sensitivity of the system to the forcing varying depending on background conditions or stochastic variability [e.g., (67– 69)]. Solar forcing, although subtle, is the leading candidate for external forcing and has been found to be consistent with either a 1450–1470–year period (70, 71) or the 1667- and 1130-year periods (66).
List of Bond events
Most Bond events do not have a clear climate signal; some correspond to periods of cooling, others are coincident with aridification in some regions.
• ≈1,400 BP (Bond event 1) — roughly correlates with the Migration Period pessimum(450–900 AD)
• ≈2,800 BP (Bond event 2) — roughly correlates with the Iron Age Cold Epoch (900–300 BC)[8]
• ≈4,200 BP (Bond event 3) — correlates with the 4.2 kiloyear event
• ≈5,900 BP (Bond event 4) — correlates with the 5.9 kiloyear event
• ≈8,100 BP (Bond event 5) — correlates with the 8.2 kiloyear event
• ≈9,400 BP (Bond event 6) — correlates with the Erdalen event of glacier activity in Norway,[9] as well as with a cold event in China.[10]
• ≈10,300 BP (Bond event 7) — unnamed event
• ≈11,100 BP (Bond event 8) — coincides with the transition from the Younger Dryas to the boreal
http://www.geo.uu.nl/~forth/people/Hirokuni/Hiro2002a.pdf
Orbital Influence on Earth’s Magnetic Field: 100,000-Year Periodicity in Inclination
A continuous record of the inclination and intensity of Earth’s magnetic field, during the past 2.25 million years, was obtained from a marine sediment core of 42 meters in length. This record reveals the presence of 100,000-year periodicity in inclination and intensity,…
My comment: The cyclic changes orbital inclination does not cause the cyclic changes to the geomagnetic field. It is orbital inclination and the timing of perihelion determines the hemisphere which is primarily affected when the interrupted solar magnetic cycle restarts. It is the sun that causes the geomagnetic field changes.
http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/416/
Is the geodynamo process intrinsically unstable?
Recent palaeomagnetic studies suggest that excursions of the geomagnetic field, during which the intensity drops suddenly by a factor of 5 to 10 and the local direction changes dramatically, are more common than previously expected. The `normal’ state of the geomagnetic field, dominated by an axial dipole, seems to be interrupted every 30 to 100 kyr; it may not therefore be as stable as we thought.
Recent studies suggest that the Earth’s magnetic field has fallen dramatically in magnitude and changed direction repeatedly since the last reversal 700 kyr ago (Langereis et al. 1997; Lund et al. 1998). These important results paint a rather different picture of the long-term behaviour of the field from the conventional one of a steady dipole reversing at random intervals: instead, the field appears to spend up to 20 per cent of its time in a weak, non-dipole state (Lund et al. 1998).
Peter Kovachev says:
“I read the Abstract of your article, which is as far as my science can take it, and it’s refreshingly unassuming, especially about the mechanism for the magnetic field possibly affecting climate.”
If you download the paper it is quite easy to read, basically it shows the correlations and cites some very interesting papers. Courtillot et al, and others found correlations between the local magnetic field preserved in pottery and local climates so it does suggest there is a link between magnetism and climate, even if we cannot be sure what it is. It’s worth reading this in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters (EPSL) entitled “Are there connections between the Earth’s magnetic field and climate?” by V. Courtillot, Y. Gallet, J.-L. Le Mouël, F. Fluteau, A. Genevey (2007) EPSL 253, 328.
I was lucky to meet Prof. Courtillot and he told me of the terrible attacks of the French press on his paper just because it suggested the CO2 theories might not be the source of our climate change and global warming. He was also disappointed that he could not therefore, give his students climate related subjects for their Phds as “ their careers would be over before they started”
What seems likely to me is that GCRs and solar particles follow the force lines and where they meet at the poles, presumably more particles reach the lower atmosphere as there is less resistance here and somehow have an influence on the climate, but I would welcome any comments. The pottery studies suggest that some other mechanism might be at work. Those studies go back a lot further in time, I was limited because the instrument temperature record was only available since the 1830s. I was fortunate that after the paper was published Dr Simon Bray of the University of Southampton ran the Spearman Pearson Product Moment test on my correlations that in addition to my statistics basically showed there is very little chance of the correlations being due to chance.
Thanks for the comments about my art. I found doodling helped me concentrate at meetings and all the black and white ones were done at meetings.
Here is the abstract for anyone interested.
Abstract:
Many natural mechanisms have been proposed for climate change during the past millennia, however, none of these appears to have accounted for the change in global temperature seen over the second half of the last century. As such the rise in temperature has been attributed to man made mechanisms. Analysis of the movement of the Earth’s magnetic poles over the last 105 years demonstrates strong correlations between the position of the north magnetic, and geomagnetic poles, and both northern hemisphere and global temperatures. Although these correlations are surprising, a statistical analysis shows there is a less than one percent chance they are random, but it is not clear how movements of the poles affect climate. Links between changes in the Earth’s magnetic field and climate change, have been proposed previously although the exact mechanism is disputed. These include: The Earth’s magnetic field affects the energy transfer rates from the solar wind to the Earth’s atmosphere which in turn affects the North Atlantic Oscillation. Movement of the poles changes the geographic distribution of galactic and solar cosmic rays, moving them to particularly climate sensitive areas. Changes in distribution of ultraviolet rays resulting from the movement of the magnetic field, may result in increases in the death rates of carbon sinking oceanic plant life such as phytoplankton.
If anyone wants the data to study I can supply it.
Alec Rawls says:
April 29, 2012 at 11:09 pm
But it would START immediately, or in 7 years, which is where the surface temperature response to short term changes shows up.
As I said, there is no significant lag expected between solar forcing and climate.
This says nothing about how much this incoming GCR is being modulated within the solar system by solar activity and by the earth’s magnetic field.
He says they are modulated equally by both, in contrast to your claim that they were not.
We have correlation evidence that there is SOME process by which solar activity has a large effect on climate (compared to unamplified TSI changes), but we don’t know if it is Svensmark’s proposed mechanism or not.
With no lag it seems. BTW, the cosmic ray proxies are influenced by climate. Webber estimates at least 50% of the signal is climate related. Solar cycle activity does cause a 0.1C climate variation, but there is no evidence for a large change. Quite the contrary. Solar magnetic activity now is down to the level of a century ago, while climate is not. Solar magnetic activity in the latter half of the 18th century and the middle of the 19th was on par with that of the latter half of the 20th, yet the climate was different.
William Astley says:
April 30, 2012 at 3:16 am
I believe there will be observational evidence – solar and terrestrial – to support what I said in my comment. Cycles require a forcing function, cycles repeat.
There will be evidence, is very different from there is evidence.
I have read your papers.
And yet you persists with: “The sun was at its highest activity level in 8000 years during later half of the twentieth century”
William Astley (April 30, 2012 at 3:16 am) wrote:
“The geomagnetic field specialists appealed to planetary cooling somehow (no mechanism provided) causing changes to geomagnetic field.”
According to Sidorenkov & Barkin:
distribution of water over the planetary surface
3 states of water
depression & rebound of crust by ice
all a function of circulation which is a function of temperature gradients which are a function of season and to a lesser extent thermal inertia (ENSO) and to an even lesser exent the solar cycle — although the latter’s small, it’s cross-ENSO-phase-averaged semiannual component accumulates into the multidecadal component, which cannot be detected empirically without the proper use of tuned multiparameter complex aggregation
coherence is complex due to differing field asymmetries and time-differential spatial-change across depth, medium, & height
tons more calculations to do – a lifetime worth
no time for formality — off to 80 more hours of work…