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.
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Thanks for your confidence in my hereto undiscovered abilities to process scientific papers, Adrian. I’m going to give this an honest shot, so I began as I usually do things by sniffing at the general background of the issue and around the “peripheries.” This I did by looking at Prof Courtillot’s paper, “Are there connections between the Earth’s magnetic field and climate?” and a critique by E. Bard and G. Delaygue, gleefully re-posted in RealClimate at http://www.realclimate.org/images/BardDelaygue.pdf. It seems that, as usual, the arguments are about the quality and interpretation of temperature data sets. I wish I didn’t hyperventilate at graphs and numbers. However, I am concerned that it may be impolite to hijack Alec Rawl’s excellent paper and I still think you should present a piece to Anthony. With the heavy-hitters here, you will get the kind of peer review the Warmistas only pretend to get.
On a slightly different topic, and my apologies for going OT, but I noted that you publicised your getting harrassed by the now-infamous Norfok Police for making a humdrum FOIA request to East Anglia U. Judging by your description and looking at things with Canadian eyes, your rights were clearly violated and it’s your local police force which needs to be examined with an 8″-wide sand paper-coated speculum by a drunk proctologist. It seems to me, too, that this event was not sufficiently covered which, in spite of the officials’ usual requests to keep such things quiet, makes you and others much more vulnerable. I’m sure you are aware that the skeptic blogger, “Tall Bloke,” has also been bullied, I think around the same time, by the same constabulary. To me, living in Canada, the idea that the nation which gave birth to the principles of civil rights allows such blatant violations is a shocker. Here, it would be front page matter, and the case would, rightfully be described as police corruption, resulting in heads rolling, especially those of the senior investigators and the chief of the police division. I’ve been mulling about collectively forming an international group based around a website which would aggressively publicise such cases of intimidation and misconduct, seek funding for aggressive publicity and legal actions, and pre-arrange pro bono representation by “recruiting” interested organizations and attorneys. Off-hand, I’d say you and Tall Bloke should chat and perhaps together you should be communicating with skeptic celebrities like James Dellingpole and Lord Montford. This is a looming battle, on that’ll be heating up as this scam unravels, and with a lot of angry people who have reputations and a lot of money riding on it. Unfortnately, the skeptics’ strength which is in the independence and lack of centralized direction is also its weakness; litigous individuals and organizations with unlimited funds and compliant or corrupted authorities will able to quietly go after the “irritants” one by one. Data security and bullying by authorities have been a topic here at WUTW and should be brought again more seriously. Of course, this is up to Anthony. I’m ready to volunteer my time and skills, having worked with colleagues on setting up secure server sites for sensitive commercial data and hard-to-track communication, and would be glad to assist in any way I can. Canada, whose government is currently involved in pushing back the warmist monololies and foreign attempts to scuttle our energy policies (e.g., NGOs such as Tides Foundation and the Saudis), is an ideal electronic “meeting place” for such a venture. And, as I mentioned before, the social and political “climate” here is very harsh on the kind of semi-legal bullying and casual rights-trampling which seems to be increasingly occuring in the EU.
Paul, you then must also believe that CO2 is causing warming. Its proposed (and yet to be proven) driver of the supposed amplification of water vapor is as believable as your amplifications related to solar metrics. In fact more so.
Stephen Wilde, do you think maybe you’re diverting too much attribution from circulation to cloudiness? (And do you think THC is independent of atmospheric circulation?)
I made a comment a couple of years ago along the lines that maybe the poles were driving climate rather than the other way around. It was in response to claims of polar amplification. I was simply trying to point out that we lack so much knowledge of the climate system that we could have things completely backwards.
Now, could it be there is something to this idea? We know that heat moves from the equator to the poles as part the Earth’s mechanism to remove heat from the system. If the poles warm then that flow of energy will slow down. And, that could lead to warming of the non-polar regions. So, in fact, all it would take is a warming of the poles to cause a warming of the planet.
After reading the comment about movement of the magnetic poles leading to either warming or cooling of the polar regions do we now have a mechanism to warm the poles independently? If so, then it seems we also have a mechanism to warm the planet. Wouldn’t it be ironic if the changes in climate we’ve seen from the MWP to the LIA to the present is caused by this simple mechanism. Instead of polar amplification we would have the poles driving the overall global temperature.
Now for another big “what if”. Since the magnetic poles can move independently we’d have a way for the SH to cool while the NH warms. What if a buildup in this heat imbalance led to a change in the major air flow patterns of the planet. What if all of a sudden we had heat from the NH directed to the SH to balance the heat flow of the planet. What if this led to extreme cooling of the NH. What if glaciers started to form, enhance this cooling and lead to glaciation. And, finally, what if it takes about 90K years for the Sun to direct enough heat towards the NH to melt those glaciers and start the next interglacial period.
The last what if … what if this process started on 12/21/12? 😉
OK, that’s a lot of “what ifs” and unlikely to be true. My real point is, once again, we could have no idea about the major factors influencing climate.
Leif Svalgaard says:
April 30, 2012 at 5:52 am
“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.”
Cosmic ray flux was much different in the 20th century than during those periods, if judged from older studies made in the less political era like the Be-10 reconstruction highlighted in Beer et al. 1994 (before the post-Mann-era):
http://www.freeimagehosting.net/newuploads/319xq.jpg
You left our argument in the prior thread, which has its references, as soon as I posted it in reply:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/11/does-co2-correlate-with-temperature-history-a-look-at-multiple-timescales-in-the-context-of-the-shakun-et-al-paper/
Presumably, when confronted this directly, you’ll be forced to reply, but replying by implying that the older studies were so vastly wrong and that you are right in being in utter contrast to them would only be convincing if someone has reason to trust you to be unbiased.
Alec Rawls says:
April 29, 2012 at 11:09 pm
“Leif again:
>> “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”.
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%”
You are quite correct to point such out.
The thing is, though, Dr. Svalgaard already knew that, anything else being impossible with his background. If one rules out accidental inaccuracy from lack of knowledge, only one possibility remains. Dr. Mann (of hockey stick fame) and Dr. Hansen have done their part for revisionism of the temperature side of aiming to disprove the link between the sun/GCRs and temperature, but the CAGW-promoting side is not foolish enough to only revise one aspect of history at a time. Dr. Svalgaard’s writings about cosmic ray flux (and solar activity) having not changed much over the past several centuries, such as recent history compared to the LIA, is in utter contrast to such as Beer et al. 1994 (made in a less political era, as is the case with Eddy 1976):
http://www.freeimagehosting.net/newuploads/319xq.jpg
with references given near the end of the comment section in:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/11/does-co2-correlate-with-temperature-history-a-look-at-multiple-timescales-in-the-context-of-the-shakun-et-al-paper/
Some skeptics are too trusting of anyone who makes an one-liner remark claiming to not support the CO2-dominant hypothesis where it conveniently causes some to let down their guard, but look at someone’s actual overall direction of argument, of publications, etc. to see reality.
If we had the measuring equipment of today would the Maunder and Dalton minima record EUV & FUV measurements anywhere near what would be expected of SC19?
Not even close.
Pamela Gray (April 30, 2012 at 6:21 am)
“Paul, you then must also believe that CO2 is causing warming. Its proposed (and yet to be proven) driver of the supposed amplification of water vapor is as believable as your amplifications related to solar metrics. In fact more so.”
I go on data, not theory. And indeed there’s a ‘warming signal’ at semi-annual & annual, but how can we rule out the possibility that it’s due to slow deep ocean warming as the continents continue rebounding from ice depression (or a combo)? I want to work on this with the mainstream, but most (all?) are afraid to touch it (fearful of losing grant money, administrative politics, etc.) Another administrative problem: No local academic I’ve spoken to in person feels qualified to supervise a PhD on this – and to be frank: I agree. With proper support I could move orders of magnitude faster.
@Leif
>Alec Rawls says:
>April 29, 2012 at 11:30 am
>Michael Whittemore refers to the Laschamp event as a contra-indication to the GCR-cloud theory. >At that time, about 40,000 yrs ago, the planet’s magnetic field was very weak, allowing lots of GCR >to reach the surface, which shows up in the 10be isotope record, yet there was no dramatic cooling >as Svensmark’s early work suggested there should be:
>http://ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warming/myths/images/galactic-cosmic-rays/LaschampAnomaly.jpg
As I recall from an earlier discusssion, the variation in the 10Be record in the Greenland ice cores you attributed (part of its variation at least) to differing wind patterns depositing 10Be unevenly (with the presumption that even if it had been created ‘smoothly’ the deposits were uneven) and that the face value of the deposits were unreliable.
I have a nagging question from that discussion and a new question from this one. The 10Be record not from ice cores from at a more equatorial position may give a more accurate record of GCR, revealing less dependence on winds reaching the poles. I wondered if that had been investigated comparing it with the ice record. This new angle begs the same question:
>But Svensmark solved that riddle. The planet’s magnetic field only deflects the weakest cosmic rays >while the one’s that ionize the atmosphere are the strongest cosmic rays. The 10be record measures >both so when the record jumps due to a weak planetary magnetic field 10be ceases to be a predictor >of climate.
If the planetary magnetic field is varying resasonably independently of the Sun’s, and the planetary one is not strongly affecting the GCR (because it is so much smaller), then the 10Be records in equatorial and high latitude records both need to be ‘corrected’ to separate the high energy GCR from the low. It occurs to me that the relative proportions of 10Be, 13C and 14C might provide that clue.
It is unlikely that high energy GCR’s reaching the Earth won’t create very small cloud condensation nuclei. It is unlikely that in their absence they will form spontaneously. Before we devote much time to pooh-poohing GCR => 10Be + CCN being a significant cooling influence, we should address these two tweaks to the 10Be record: 1) using records that depend less on wind (if that was not a red herring in the first place) and 2) separating 10Be created by high and low(er) GCR’s. After all, Svensmark’s claim is not really that cosmic rays create cloud condensation nuclei, it is that very high energy ones do.
Henry Clark says:
April 30, 2012 at 6:41 am
Presumably, when confronted this directly, you’ll be forced to reply, but replying by implying that the older studies were so vastly wrong and that you are right in being in utter contrast to them would only be convincing if someone has reason to trust you to be unbiased.
I trust myself as being unbiased with no dog in the race. All the experts [Beer, Usoskin, Solanki, Lockwood, me, and assorted other luminaries] in this are have agreed to assemble in Berne, Switzerland under my leadership a week from today to discuss the matter: http://www.leif.org/research/Svalgaard_ISSI_Proposal_Base.pdf
If you look at Figure 2 you can see that the cosmic ray proxies have been rather constant the past 300 years. As the cosmic ray modulation is believed to be controlled by the sun’s magnetic field as drawn out into interplanetary space [the Heliosphere] the level of the cosmic rays is often expressed as the equivalent magnetic field strength [the one that would yield the observed radionuclides].
ferd berple says:
April 29, 2012 at 10:28 pm
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.
This is just coincidences. And the poles at the surface which the maps showed are not the poles the solar wind sees. Those have hardly moved at all. The magnetic poles seen by the particles are the so-called ‘corrected geomagnetic poles’.
Paul Vaughan asked:
“Stephen Wilde, do you think maybe you’re diverting too much attribution from circulation to cloudiness? (And do you think THC is independent of atmospheric circulation?)”
Not really, because air circulation changes in themselves would not affect the amount of solar energy getting into the oceans. Only cloudiness and albedo changes will achieve that.
The THC is not independent of air circulation but nor is it independent of sea surface temperatures. Both are relevant and each leads to a response to solar changes on different timescales which is why we should acknowledge that the effects of the THC could be either in or out of phase with solar variability at any given time.
So, the sun might well vary on an approximate millenial timescale but the THC takes longer and so alters the timing of the climate response which could explain why the frequency of Bond events is not exactly the same as the millennial solar variability.
Geoff Sharp says:
April 30, 2012 at 7:12 am
If we had the measuring equipment of today would the Maunder and Dalton minima record EUV & FUV measurements anywhere near what would be expected of SC19?
Not even close.
But they would be very close to those measured at every solar minimum, e.g. 1954 just before cycle 19 and 2008 just before cycle 24: Figure 1 of http://www.leif.org/research/Solar-Flux-and-Sunspot-Number.pdf
One of the most telling deficiencies in the Shindell-Schmidt GISS GCM as quoted by Alec above is: “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.” One half of one percent variation in the parametrized value of one of the least effectively modeled variables of a chaotic climate system causes eight tenths of a degree centigrade change in temperature! Does anyone really believe that high cloud cover might not vary by one half of one percent over time as result of any number of natural processes including the possibilities of Svensmark’s GCR-cloud or simple randomness within a chaotic system as has been suggested by Richard Lindzen? Shindell-Schmidt go on to say: “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.” Talk about the butterfly effect! And precisely and accurately attributed to “ozone through surface effects”?
Stephen Wilde (April 30, 2012 at 8:30 am) responded:
“Not really, because air circulation changes in themselves would not affect the amount of solar energy getting into the oceans. Only cloudiness and albedo changes will achieve that.”
What of equator-pole flows (with coriolis deflection), ocean-continent contrasts, & related summary leveraging? Plenty of opportunity for statistical paradox, particularly given water’s 3 states & rapid atmospheric water pumping (don’t forget latent).
I’m not convinced by your cloud argument because it can’t be backed up with data, but you make good points about thermal wind (jets) …and those points will be even better when you work seasonal variability into your narrative.
Best Regards.
Samurai says: @ur momisugly April 29, 2012 at 8:23 am
…..Given these realities, it would seem essential for climatologist to reconsider their position on the Svensmark Effect, because if they are wrong in their assumptions, $TRILLIONS could be wasted in CO2 initiatives, and food preparations need to be taken now, because some of the worst famines in human history took place during the Wolf and Maunder Minima.
Again, despicable.
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Given the politics surrounding CAGW, I have no doubt at all that those in power are well aware that we are headed into a Minimum with the accompanying famines. If they are not aware of it they are very much trying to force a famine in the near future anyway. However you look at it politicians are aware of the prospect of a coming famine and making sure their corporate buddies reap the full benefit: All you have to do is look at the 25x’25 Renewable Energy Initiative
Here is the Media Hype:
25x’25 Vision: By 2025, America’s farms, forests and ranches will provide 25 percent of the total energy consumed in the United States, while continuing to produce safe, abundant, and affordable food, feed and fiber.
The resolution passed both houses. WUWT has the newest iteration here.
Here is the the actual reality of the situation.
In six of the last seven years, total world grain production has fallen short of use. As a result, world carryover stocks of grain have been drawn down to 57 days of consumption, the lowest level in 34 years. Briefing before U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Chair, June 13, 2007
A study published in 2007 by two US scholars, Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer, calculated that biofuel production will cause the doubling of starvation figures in the world: by 2025. They estimate there will be 1.2 billion people starving. In 2008: “We were criticized for being alarmist at the time,” Mr. Runge said. “I think our views, looking back a year, were probably too conservative.”
With one-third of world population lacking food security now, FAO estimates that world food production would have to double to provide food security for the 8 billion people projected as world population in 2025.
About half of the world’s maize (corn) is grown in the United States link yet Congress has signed a resolution requiring 25% of US energy needs to be supplied by our “Working land” (bio-fuels)
An interesting letter to president Bush
And here is the actual reason for the letter:
It also explains the massive land grab now going on. You can start with NAFTA removing about 75% of the farmers in Mexico as setting the precedence.
More info: http://prospectjournal.ucsd.edu/index.php/2010/04/nafta-and-u-s-corn-subsidies-explaining-the-displacement-of-mexicos-corn-farmers/
Study on NAFTA by Tufts Univ. http://www.ase.tufts.edu/gdae/Pubs/rp/NAFTAsUntoldStoriesJune03TW.pdf
The World Trade Organization is NAFTA taken to a worldwide scale. Clinton ratified both treaties. The result was the bankrupting of third world countries’ farmers. 8 million people in India have quit farming, and the spate of farm suicides – the largest sustained wave recorded in history – causes a farmer to suicide every 30 minutes. link
Two years later another Mia Culpa from the world leaders. Note how they think we forgot all about the first time and the fact they had been warned of the coming problems in 2007, well, actually as early as 1974
After you boot the peasants off the land and brought their governments to near bankruptcy, it is time to move in for the kill….
First world farmers are not immune to political backstabbing either.
Leif Svalgaard says:
April 30, 2012 at 8:26 am
I trust myself as being unbiased with no dog in the race. All the experts [Beer, Usoskin, Solanki, Lockwood, me, and assorted other luminaries] in this are have agreed to assemble in Berne, Switzerland under my leadership a week from today to discuss the matter: http://www.leif.org/research/Svalgaard_ISSI_Proposal_Base.pdf
If you look at Figure 2 you can see that the cosmic ray proxies have been rather constant the past 300 years. As the cosmic ray modulation is believed to be controlled by the sun’s magnetic field as drawn out into interplanetary space [the Heliosphere] the level of the cosmic rays is often expressed as the equivalent magnetic field strength [the one that would yield the observed radionuclides].
No, both Be-10 and C-14 cosmic ray proxies have not been remotely constant during the past 300 years, when seen in typical data published prior to the past 10-15 years. Your figure 2 differs substantially from such as the following C-14 cosmic ray / solar activity reconstruction:
http://chiefio.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/1000px-carbon14_with_activity_labels-svg.png?w=640
which is from figure 3 within Dean, 2000, a publication of the USGS back then at
http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs-0095-00/fs-0095-00.pdf
Your figure 2 is also vastly different from the Be-10 cosmic ray reconstruction of Beer et al. 1994 which is from the Dye 3 data:
http://www.freeimagehosting.net/newuploads/319xq.jpg
also illustrated within
http://napink.com/Global%20Warming%20and%20Phanerozoic%20Climate%20Changes_Page_17.jpg
And, of course, your figure 2 utterly contrasts with Svensmark’s reconstruction of change in C-14 during the last 1000 years:
http://www.global-warming-and-the-climate.com/images/C14-anomlies.gif
where the image is from figure 1 of
http://ruby.fgcu.edu/courses/twimberley/EnviroPhilo/Svensmark.pdf
While there are also others such as Eddy 1976, the above sampling of both Be-10 and Carbon-14 reconstructions published before the past decade shows them finding cosmic ray flux to be substantially different than in the LIA, than in the prior several centuries before the 20th century. Solar activity in the 20th century was unusually high compared to prior centuries since the end of the MWP.
Someone doesn’t post many times in every WUWT thread about solar/GCR-temperature connections, sometimes within 5 or 10 minutes of an article being published, always arguing against solar-climate connections, because they simply have “no dog in the race.” People don’t expend great effort without serious motivation. That is more like the style of members of the Wikipedia “consensus”-enforcing team like William Connolley.
Yes, you are a professional member of the well-funded “consensus,” even your paper using the term “consensus,” much like Dr. Mann who himself greatly contradicted prior studies made in an earlier era before the AGW “consensus” starting getting practically enforced, his graph highlighted in the IPCC’s political Summary for Policymakers representing the “consensus” of the IPCC’s numerous scientists (or so they would say, although someone attending a conference or submitting comments does not mean they agree with everything).
Henry Clark says:
April 30, 2012 at 10:09 am
Yes, you are a professional member of the well-funded “consensus,”
All the graphs you have shown are by the established consensus, traditional wisdom, trotted out again and again, without regard to the latest developments. What I’m trying to do is departing from the consensus, from the die-hard myths, from established ‘knowledge’. All those things you defend. That I have managed to get all the producers of those established myths to sit up and take notice and agree to come to our workshop should tell you that perhaps those myths are not well-founded as you think.
My motivation is very simple: to bring the latest exciting research on trends in solar activity to a wider audience, so they can make their own judgment.
Leif said:
I think that is a bit of a non-sequitur. There are many asymmetric processes. As a specific example, the ice builds up over about 100,000 years in a glacial, then all melts off in just a few thousand. One is mass transport evaporation rate limited to snow. The other is mass transport unlimited rate and enhanced via rain as runoff.
The resultant ice graphs look very much like a long slow rise and rapid drop in ice volume.
Surface heating will tend to stagnate warm water at the top. Cooling will form cold descending fluid columns and more rapid mixing. Salinity decreases will sit on top. Salinity increases will accelerate turnover via density driven decent of fluids. etc.
So to me it looks like the assumption of symmetrical heat flow rates is unsupported.
Also, you did a bit of selective quoting from that paper you cited:
http://www.ecd.bnl.gov/pubs/BNL-76939-2006-AB.pdf
There is an explicit recognition of external climate driving events of many time periods, many durations. We then find that their estimate of only those things that change GMST in time periods of interest to them have an error of 50%. Further, we find that this short time period has to do with the degree to which the GMST is coupled to the ocean mixing layer. It says very little about what would happen with shifts to the size of the ocean mixing layer, changes in the thermohaline circulation, or even just very long duration overturning of the ocean deeps.
It looks to me like they have a short cycle bandbass on their study area of interest and you then use their short term findings as justification that there are no longer term cycles. I find that unconvincing.
@Hu McCulloch:
You were looking at sunspots and not finding a nice temperature wiggle match:
Look at this graph of Magnetic Storms.
http://www.geomag.bgs.ac.uk/images/image022.jpg
While it gives a nicer ‘wiggle match’ to temperature curves, Leif doesn’t like it and asserts it is in error. I’m in no place to arbitrate between the British Geological Survey and Leif, so you will need to look at both and decide for yourself who has it right.
Henry Clark says:
April 30, 2012 at 10:09 am
someone attending a conference or submitting comments does not mean they agree with everything
That is not what the workshops are for. We are having them because the establishment [whom you quote all the time] have seen that something is not right and need to be fixed.
E.M.Smith says:
April 30, 2012 at 10:51 am
As a specific example, the ice builds up over about 100,000 years in a glacial, then all melts off in just a few thousand.
Very different from ocean heating.
There is an explicit recognition of external climate driving events of many time periods, many durations. It looks to me like they have a short cycle bandbass on their study area of interest and you then use their short term findings as justification that there are no longer term cycles. I find that unconvincing.
a few centuries is short term. There are certainly much longer term changes, e.g. orbital ones.
While it gives a nicer ‘wiggle match’ to temperature curves, Lief doesn’t like it and asserts it is in error. I’m in no place to arbitrate between the British Geological Survey and Lief, so you will need to look at both and decide for yourself who has it right.
That graph is based on a threshold analysis of the aa-index which everyone nowadays agree is in error [too high after 1957]. E.g. ” Various tests have indicated that there are some problems with the homogeneity of the calibration of the aa index, particularly after 1957 (Svalgaard & Cliver 2007a; Rouillard et al. 2007; Lockwood et al. 2009b).” from http://iopscience.iop.org/0004-637X/700/2/937/fulltext/ and see their Figure 11.
Well, we have a consensus:
http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/06/judithgate-ipcc-relied-on-one-solar.html
Also even speaking only about TSI there is a point that needs to be clarified:
The TSI reconstruction that we see also in woodfortrees is only the PMOD composite is strongly contested.
The ACRIM composite which shows a slight increase and not a decrease as PMOD is being pushed back – even if it relies only on measurement and not on more unreliable proxy:
http://www.acrim.com/TSI%20Monitoring.htm
Another interesting point to see is the error bar : I understand that now the 1360 W/m2 becomes the cannonical number for solar irradiance – the instruments measured various other number and – even 1372 W/m2 – and needed to be cross-calibrated. But the accuracy in measuring earth energy balance is pretended to be 0,1 W/m2
Even PMOD is showing 1365 W/m2
“Yet Miller never noted this coincidence. In fact, he tried to hide it,” – the good – or bad part about this – depends how one looks at it – is that if this is theory is confirmed in the future they cannot claim any contribution to it, leaving room for other scientists to advance science.
We have seen many times in the past the consensus trying to keep the established theories and stop progress, this is no new news unfortunately, it was the way how science advanced most of the time.
davidmhoffer says:
April 29, 2012 at 2:46 pm
Richard B Woods;
In addition to ice extent, ice thickness needs to be considered. There is thinning in the Antarctic as well as the Arctic.
>>>>>>>>
Some places yes some places no. But extent trumps thickness anyway. For ice to form on salt water, all the water below the surface right to the bottom must first cool to the freezing point. A thin layer of ice represents a gigantic amount of water cooling.
Nice attempt at a misdirect though. Are you a lawyer?
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David I think Richard B Woods is this guy:
Dr. Richard B Woods
Lars P. says:
April 30, 2012 at 11:12 am
Another interesting point to see is the error bar : I understand that now the 1360 W/m2 becomes the cannonical number for solar irradiance – the instruments measured various other number and – even 1372 W/m2 – and needed to be cross-calibrated. But the accuracy in measuring earth energy balance is pretended to be 0,1 W/m2
You are confusing systematic errors with random [measurement] errors. What is important is the relative precision of the variation, and that is 0.007 W/m2. The systematic errors tend to be constant, e.g. the difference between 1360 and 1365. For ACRIM and earlier instruments there is a systematic error of about 5 W/m2 due to scattered light, i.e. light that reaches the sensor from elsewhere that directly through the entrance hole. This is now well understood and agreed upon: http://www.leif.org/EOS/2010GL045777.pdf
Leif Svalgaard says:
April 30, 2012 at 11:51 am
“You are confusing systematic errors with random [measurement] errors. ”
If there has been a systematic error of 5 W/m2 for “energy in” has there been another systematic error of 5 W/m2 of “energy out”? Where?
Dr. Tim Ball says: April 29, 2012 at 8:14 am
Through IPCC and the few people, mostly at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), became the Cabal that created, promoted, and protected “the Cause”.
It is regrettable that few of those IPCC scientists know of, and even fewer if any understand the sun – earth – temperature multi-decadal link.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/TSA.htm