The Sun has changed its character

The 1.5B$ New zealanders have paid in to the ETS have given us one of the coldest Junes on recorord.
Next thing they be saying is look the tax works.

“Ap Index is now projected to trail off to a new low next decade.”
Projected by whom, exactly?

vukcevic says:
July 2, 2012 at 11:29 am
Sun has changed its character
Sun is doing what it has done many times before.
What was probably meant was that the change is with reference to the past few centuries. If so, the Livingston & Penn effect [if real] would be as significant change.
From Hugh Hudson’s summary of the 2nd SSN workshop http://www.leif.org/research/SSN/Hudson.pdf
“Livingston-Penn effect
• There’s no question that something is happening that
we have not seen before
– We should be proud of this, and exploit it
– We should ignore wild-sounding claims about
sunspots disappearing completely
• The data are weak, but the theory is weaker”

That chart-graphic looks OK to me up until the crazy brown-line appended projection.
Not saying I have a science argument, just an aesthetics one. How about some dotted min-max lines around a confidence interval or something.

vukcevic says:
July 2, 2012 at 11:53 am
His prediction went wrong because he misunderstood results of Dr. Joan (sister of Richard) Feynman’s work.
Not true, it went wrong because he peaked the wrong peak: slide 25ff of http://www.leif.org/research/Predicting%20the%20Solar%20Cycle%20%28SORCE%202010%29.pdf
because I think I found out why it works.
It actually doesn’t work. What does work is the polar fields and proxies for those: slides 22 and 23 of the above.

Thankfully ENSO is now into El Nino territory. It may counteract some of the negative effects.

Leif, I think You looked at wrong picture at Climate4you
Here is the one for tropical clouds and global temperatures:
http://climate4you.com/images/HadCRUT3%20and%20TropicalCloudCoverISCCP.gif

Bloke down the pub says:
July 2, 2012 at 12:22 pm
I suppose it was a foregone certainty that as soon as I bought solar panels the sun would go to sleep.
______________________
Meanwhile, just think how you’re saving the planet.

Bloke down the pub says:
July 2, 2012 at 12:22 pm
I suppose it was a foregone certainty that as soon as I bought solar panels the sun would go to sleep.

LOL. I made the opposite bet last year. I bought a snow blower in the fall of 2010 and got lots of use out of it that winter. This winter, on the other hand, I didn’t get to use it even once. You could say that I bet $1000 that we would be in a cooling trend for the next few decades.

Coldlynx says:
July 2, 2012 at 12:43 pm
Leif, I think You looked at wrong picture at Climate4you
Here is the one for tropical clouds and global temperatures
Doesn’t make any difference, cloud cover has to be UP because solar activity is down and thus cosmic rays are up.
Vukcevic says:
July 2, 2012 at 12:45 pm
( rem- if he picked correct peak it would have worked )
There are several peaks and one would not know ahead of time which one to pick.
“It actually doesn’t work.”>
What works is the amount of geomagnetic activity near minimum [and that has a weak relationship to the recurrence peak] so it is not the recurrence peak that works, but geomagnetic activity as Wang and Sheeley point out.

1 Not enough data to draw any real conclusions about what will happen next.
1932 to today is not long for the sun which has been around a while.(4.5 billion years) Archibald really misuses data to create spurious scientific claims.
2 proxies go back further , so use them and then come back with some claims
(see http://blog.chess.com/Rickj/more-on-the-maunder-minimum , which uses ssn proxies)

In the beginning of the 1950s when I was in my last few years of primary school education I learnt that we (or the Solar Physicists who study the Sun) knew very little about the Sun, it’s cycles and other behaviours.
However one theory’s correctness they were certain about back in those days was that The Sun was the primary driver of all happenings in the Solar System, hence the name.
If happenings like those forecast by the “The Milankovitch theory” was ever to be proved to be correct, then it was argued that it was likely to be “cycles in the Sun” – yet unknown – that was the driver that changes the elliptical path of the Earth’s orbit.
They admitted back then that they knew a little bit about “Sun Spot Cycles” but ziltch about any other possible “Cycles”.
However as I mentioned Milutin’s Theory, it was – back in those days – seen by many, as impossible that the shape of the Earth’s orbit could bring on an Ice Age. – After all, when the Earth is as far away from the Sun as it can be during the present orbital shape, it is “Summertime” in the Northern Hemisphere. – And if the clouds stay away Colorado can be a darned hot place at the moment – or in this orbital spot.
So, what has changed during the past 60 years? – Knowledge ways, that is?

Steve C says:
July 2, 2012 at 2:41 pm
Although, if that claimed link between long sunspot cycles and reducing temperatures is anywhere near right
It isn’t: http://www.leif.org/research/Cycle%20Length%20Temperature%20Correlation.pdf

What is the lag time associated with this? We’ve been beating the solar-drum for a while now, certainly the last 4-5 years. When are we going to start seeing the effects?

If L&P are right and if the trends of umbral intensity and magnetic field are linear in the short-to-medium term, the sunspot minimum may well appear to arrive in 2021 or 2022 as we wouldn’t be able to see any. Ap is another matter…

Oops, sorry for the misspelling, Leif. I blame learning German at school. I have the same trouble with ‘Neil’.

Leif Svalgaard says July 2, 2012 at 1:47 pm
quote
[]cloud cover has to be UP because solar activity is down and thus cosmic rays are up.
unquote
Unless we have disturbed low level cloud formation by some means. So your statement should be ‘all things being equal — pollution, aerosols, biological activity etc — cloud cover has to be UP because solar activity is down and thus cosmic rays are up’.
HTH
JF

It is quite sad to have this solar maximum having comparable activity to many of the last solar minimums, doesn’t bode well for AGE believers. If those predictions are indeed correct, the earth could very well enter the icebox that it was during the Little Ice Age and Maunder Minimum, but only time will tell. Certainly with one major climate factor, the sun, beginning to drastically change it’s energy output something significant is bound to happen.

“It is an edged cliché that the world is most pleasant in the years of a Waning Sun. It is true that the weather is not so driven, that everywhere there is a sense of slowing down, and most places experience a few years where the summers do not burn and the winters are not yet overly fierce. It is the classic time of romance. It’s a time that seductively beckons higher creatures to relax, postpone. It’s the last chance to prepare for the end of the world.”
-_A Deepness in the Sky_, Chapter 4, Vernor Vinge, 1992

Thank you Leif. I enjoy reading your concise and logical pin pricks to the balloon-headed solar “theorists”. You keep us laymen from getting carried away by fanciful plausible-sounding stories.

Great discussion … it seems there is a lot we don’t know about our sun and its effects on our weather and climate.
Oh how easy it must be to be a CAGW proponent where everything is known and discovered, and all is certain.

Sorry to ask a really dumb question … but what is the Ap index and what is the significance of it being low?

vukcevic says:
July 3, 2012 at 5:25 am
From climate point of view, subject most of us are interested in, I think AA (or even better IHV) index tells more, only problem I have with is Bartels rotation, Carrington tables would be more useful.
Geomagnetic activity is recurrent in the Bartels rotation scheme, not in Carrington rotations.

Dr. Lurtz says, July 3, 2012 at 5:58 am
Any thoughts on the appearance of NLCs 2 years after Krakatoa errupted in 1883, stratospheric ozone depletion related perhaps?
Any NLC relationship to large partical events causing ozone depletions at high altitudes?
http://www.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/ProtonOzone
It does seem PSCs and NLCs might be canaries in the coal mine but understanding what they’re chirping about is a different matter. How far has the science advanced recently in this respect?

This article’s figure 5 for cosmic ray flux versus cloud cover gives no source for its data beyond Humlum, but it is most likely graphing cloud cover as reported by the ISCCP. The ISCCP is like the IPCC of cloud cover data (and also used in climate4you.com cloud cover graphs).
However, there is a giant problem with that, using a compromised data source (the analogue of using Mann’s hockey stick for temperature history) which is contradictory to other sources which in contrast rather show the effect of cosmic rays.
A little background:
The ISCCP figures for global cloud cover (portrayed at http://climate4you.com/images/CloudCoverTotalObservationsSince1983.gif ) claim a slight decrease in average cloud cover over 2004-2009, as do their figures for low-level clouds in particular. Such would superficially seem contrary to how average cosmic ray flux overall increased over that time period. However, what is really going on can be realized by comparing the prior ISCCP-reported cloud trend with a plot of Earth’s albedo as can be seen at http://www.pensee-unique.fr/images/pallesciencefig.jpg and http://www.pensee-unique.fr/images/palle2009.jpg
The decrease in Earth’s albedo (decrease in reflectance) observed over 1986 to around 1997 corresponds to a period of declining cloud cover. (Reflecting less sunlight was a top cause of global warming, up to the famous peak of temperatures in 1998, followed by subsequent stagnation to decline in temperatures relative to 1998). That’s to be expected. Fewer white clouds cause less reflection of sunlight, an albedo decrease. Conversely, the increase in albedo over 2000-2004 corresponds to a period of increased cloud cover, again as to be physically expected.
Suddenly, though, everything changes for whether the ISCCP’s reported cloud trends match the actual observed albedo change. Look now at 2004-2009. There ISCCP cloud data supposedly disproves cosmic ray theory, with supposedly an overall decrease in cloud cover during the 2004-2009 period of cosmic ray flux increasing. Yet that is exactly when the ISCCP fudges their publicized cloud trend, as may be seen comparing to the albedo change. Observed albedo increased over that time period.
True average cloud cover change over that time period was an increase rather than the ISCCP’s reported fraction of a percent decrease 2004-2009. Cloud cover trends didn’t actually start going in the opposite direction of albedo change contrary to physics and past history. Rather, what was special about the year 2004 and onwards is that the CAGW movement recognized one of the greatest threats they have ever faced, with Dr. Shaviv’s landmark discoveries and published papers of 2003.
Eliminating the correlation between change in cosmic ray flux and the cloud cover reported by the dominant IPCC-like ISCCP source was utterly critical. Such was just as important as the following other sample examples of about exactly the same idea, the standard pattern:
* The Medieval Warm Period was critical to eliminate. Thus we got Mann’s hockey stick, as familiar to many skeptics (indeed to most skeptics, aside from those here who are undercover CAGW proponents trying to keep skeptics steered away from dangerous observations). But not all data sources could be conveniently adjusted, so cross-checking with other sources disproves the hockey stick, even comparing to about any history published prior to the era of political “science.”
* That arctic ice extent was comparably low in the 1930s to the recent period of hype was also critical to eliminate from common public knowledge, so, thus, again there is utter contrast between what top enviropolitical institutes present as historical (such as the first graph commented on in http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/05/03/icy-arctic-variations-in-variability/ ) and what cross-checking with historical sea ice charts reveals as http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/05/02/cache-of-historical-arctic-sea-ice-maps-discovered/ discusses.
* The ISCCP adjustment is not even the first amongst satellites. As http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/12/envisats-satellite-failure-launches-mysteries/ shows with graphs, reporting of data from the Envisat satellite had an inconvenient sea level slope suddenly “go up from 0.76 mm/year to 2.33 mm/year!”
The Envisat “adjustment” was far more blatant and risky than the ISCCP’s subtle cloud cover trend change, yet it was done anyway.
The ISCCP has been very effective, as even most skeptics of CAGW don’t realize what happened. (This is one subcomponent of a major strategy of adjusting data and revising history until solar-GCR climate connections are no longer as readily seen as otherwise the case,* including probably at least a few undercover agents pretending to be skeptics — not universally or centrally orchestrated but just natural when people of similar ideologies, motivations, and dishonesty tend to copy each other’s tactics after seeing what works).
Even pulling off the mask in my comment here is unfortunately not remotely enough as too few people will scroll all of the way down here to read it, perhaps a figure 1 to 2 orders of magnitude less than the number being misled by the figure 5 graph in this article based on falsified data.
Hopefully someday some submitter of WUWT front page articles will see what would be more helpful. If David Archibald were to correct his article, I would respect him for honesty, and, in that event, one could assume the misleading part of this article’s presentation was just an unintentional result of not knowing how wide corruption amongst some data sources has spread by now.
* Temperatures themselves appear to be influenced by a complex superposition of internal forcings from the 60-year PDO & AMO ocean cycles, the shorter ENSO, and others on top of the solar/GCR external forcings, but cloud cover correlation with cosmic rays is particularly high, as shown in the links below.
A good intro to cosmoclimatology:
http://www.space.dtu.dk/upload/institutter/space/forskning/05_afdelinger/sun-climate/full_text_publications/svensmark_2007cosmoclimatology.pdf
The adjustment of post-2004 ISCCP satellite data is one in a whole series of dishonest tactics trying to discredit the evidence for GCR effects:
http://www.sciencebits.com/RealClimateSlurs
http://www.sciencebits.com/SloanAndWolfendale
http://www.sciencebits.com/HUdebate

HenryP says, July 3, 2012 at 8:45 am
However, my mathematics tells me that this is all part of a natural process. Man had little or nothing to do with it. Please tell me if anyone here disagrees with me?
You may be overlooking ozone depletion by CFCs etc., which appears to be on the mend but may take a good while yet. You might like to look at the paper published in 2006 that Leif recently posted a link to on WUWT, published by his daughter-in-law (Signe) who Leif says is “the ozone expert in the family”.
http://www.leif.org/EOS/Nature/nature04746-Ozone-Recovery-Signe.pdf

vukcevic says:
July 3, 2012 at 12:39 pm
Sunspot’s last 6 months daily record shows 23.32 days rotation period for the ‘preferred’ longitude.
I would like to take a look at 6-12 months of daily Aa or Ap index, but can’t find a download link.
It doesn’t make much sense to look for a rotational signal in only a few months of data. To forestall meaningless ‘analysis’ I better not tell you how to find the data 🙂
But anyway, one place is here http://www.geomag.bgs.ac.uk/data_service/data/magnetic_indices/aaindex.html

vukcevic says:
July 3, 2012 at 1:14 pm
for last 12 months Aa spectrum 3 peaks of interest
There are three basic periods in the solar wind [and thus Aa]: 28.5 days due to mid-latitude coronal holes,
26.85 days during first half of the solar cycle, and 27.15 days during the last half of the cycle. The two latter ones [with average 27.0 days] due to low-latitude coronal holes. Due to overlaps, for short intervals, you may find just about anything you want in the range 26-29 days, depending on when. Sunspots are sporadic and don’t give you any long duration period.

Leif Svalgaard says:
July 3, 2012 at 11:32 am
“You might benefit from reading about independent measurements of the Earth’s albedo: http://www.leif.org/EOS/Palle_etal_earthshine.pdf”
Their implied goal is to make the ISCCP data fit and utilize it, e.g. such as:
“Our models use ISCCP mean cloud amount data as an input to ERBE scene models (Goode et al., 2001) from which we retrieve apparent and Bond albedo values.”
Statements like the following examples highlight how much depends on their choice of details in recalibration and adjustments, details not directly seen by an outside observer or reader:
“Outliers were cast out and the process repeated until it converged (after about five iterations). This had the consequence of systematically casting out about 10% of the nights, which is only a few percent more than were cast out in our old, night-by-night evaluation.”
“However, since the publication of the earlier results, a calibration error in one of the SW filters was identified and the CERES TOA albedo anomalies have been re-analyzed using an improved six year-long climatology (Takmeng Wong, priv. comm.).“

Henry Clark says:
July 3, 2012 at 1:47 pm
“You might benefit from reading about independent measurements of the Earth’s albedo”
Their implied goal is to make the ISCCP data fit and utilize it
Absolutely not. I know Enric Palle personally and I know that their goal is to accurately measure the albedo. If their measurements validate ISCCP so be it. You should not attribute dishonesty and manipulation just because you don’t like what the data shows.

HenryP says:
July 3, 2012 at 2:29 pm
“…there are other factors…
but they are still minor”
For that after my prior reply, somehow I get the feeling that writing more would not be productive…
This is not really either, but:
Leif Svalgaard says:
July 3, 2012 at 2:06 pm
I know Enric Palle personally and I know that their goal is to accurately measure the albedo.”
That’s an appeal to personal lack of bias, basically “trust me” if not “trust us.” In the cases I’ve seen where people at Skeptical Science have commented specifically, they consider your efforts as part of what they want: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=svalgaard+site%3Askepticalscience.com . Can you link to any several posts in a row, anywhere out of hundreds to thousands of posts, on WUWT or elsewhere else where you spent paragraphs seriously arguing against any substantial element of the CAGW movement’s claims, in a manner not helpful to it? I don’t even mean 10% of posts or even 1% but just a few, something that someone unbiased and interested only in promoting scientific truth should end up engaged in sooner or later.
I don’t mean a throw-away one-liner which obviously would never really be harmful to the CAGW movement, not just something in passing aimed at getting skeptics to let down their guard. I don’t mean merely the same idea by once in a while submitting a link tip at WUWT to a solar-climate connection paper or an article debatedly unfavorable to CAGW but already published anyway, with none of it your own words. And I don’t mean a web page post equivalent to a few one-liners, just listing what you want people to think your beliefs are without actively really trying to convince someone of anything counter to CAGW, without a tenth of the passionate motivation you show for aiming to counter solar-GCR climate linkage studies and data.
I don’t pretend to be unbiased myself: I’ve watched false claims on major rise in hurricanes (global frequency flat to declining in recent decades as Florida State University shows if going beyond Skeptical Science’s North Atlantic cherrypicking), tornadoes, mosquitoes, sea level (no faster rise in the late 20th century than the late 19th despite more than a factor of 10 rise in human emissions as discussed in my comment on the latest “official” falsehood of 1 foot California sea level rise within 10 years at http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-06/study-says-california-sea-levels-will-rise-more-five-feet-century ), droughts, floods, polar bears, the Medieval Warm Period, the Holocene Climate Optimum, etc. At some point, I’m not inclined to trust the ??th claim from individuals funded by an overlapping alliance of groups who basically never apologize for supporting falsehoods on any of the rest of these matters. I don’t trust without asking exactly why.

Henry Clark says:
July 3, 2012 at 5:32 pm
without actively really trying to convince someone of anything counter to CAGW, without a tenth of the passionate motivation you show for aiming to counter solar-GCR climate linkage studies and data.
The CAGW cult is a lost cause to begin with and trying to counter them by playing the shaky solar card is worse than useless, as the CAGW crew also needs the solar connection to account for changes before modern times. Perhaps the best way to counter CAGW is to show that their beloved solar connection doesn’t work, forcing them to accept that there are (perhaps) a multitude of other natural variations in the complex climate system. But, I feel that arguing that point with you and your ilk is just as fruitless as with the CAGW cult. Each side has their own religion and associated set of dogmas and ad-hom patterns. The only thing I can do is to present data and conclusions about a subject of which I happen to actually know something. What you do with it [or not – at your peril] is up to you.

Leif Svalgaard (July 3, 2012 at 6:03 pm)
“[…] playing the shaky solar card is worse than useless […] beloved solar connection doesn’t work”
The sun modulates westerly winds (via equator-pole temperature gradients):
http://i49.tinypic.com/219q848.png
This robust observation from LOD is rigidly founded on:
A. Law of Conservation of Angular Momentum.
B. Central Limit Theorem.

Paul Vaughan says:
July 3, 2012 at 9:44 pm
The sun modulates westerly winds (via equator-pole temperature gradients)
It does more than that. Also provides the energy that makes the Earth habitable and enables there to be a climate at all.But solar activity [being energetically weak] modulates the basic input at the barely observable limit.
Brian H says:
July 3, 2012 at 10:17 pm
Well, you and your ilk ooze sneering argument from authority (especially your own) from every pore.
Presenting data and discussing evidence for everyone to make up his/hers mind in an informed manner is the right thing to do. The authority is in the data not in the person. Time for you to discover the difference.

Leif Svalgaard says:
July 3, 2012 at 6:03 pm
………Perhaps the best way to counter CAGW is to show that their beloved solar connection doesn’t work, forcing them to accept that there are (perhaps) a multitude of other natural variations in the complex climate system…….
Absolutely. The claimed solar-climate link actually supports AGW at the moment. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that if there really is (or was) a strong link then it’s broken down over the past 20 years or so and has been replaced by a more dominant driver.

Henry Clark says
Ozone is a separate topic, but the albedo change was outright major in its radiative forcing.
Henry@Henry
You have to see the cause and effect.
On its own, ozone deflects ca. 20-25% of all incoming sunlight, in the range of its highest energy,
i.e. 0-0.5 microns.
for the change in ozone, see here:
http://www.iac.ethz.ch/en/research/chemie/tpeter/totozon.html
from 1970 to 1995 ozone dropped by about 10% (ca. 30 DU)
so there is your (main) reason for the observed warming
obviously with more heat coming in, you also get more water evaporation and more clouds, etc. and a variety of other weapons that earth has in its arsenal, come into action, that may put a brake on run away warming.
– which is why there is life on earth at all.
However, since 1995, I am sure due to what is happening on the sun,
ozone is on the increase again,
\
and indeed, global cooling is here:
http://www.letterdash.com/henryp/global-cooling-is-here
Dont bother replying, somehow I get the feeling that writing more would not be productive…

****
vukcevic says:
July 3, 2012 at 11:56 pm
Leif Svalgaard says:
July 3, 2012 at 3:46 pm
…………..
As a practical and experienced engineer I respectfully disagree.
****
As an engineer, one of the first rules I learned was not to waste time & effort reinventing the wheel. Empirical TSI measurements & its variability (insignificant) are the “wheel”.
Magnetic fields do not affect a mechanical TSI/albedo/water/water-vapor heat engine. OK, magnetic fields could conceivably affect cloudiness via GCRs, but this is far from being shown to be a significant effect.

Leif Svalgaard says:
July 3, 2012 at 6:03 pm
“Perhaps the best way to counter CAGW is to show that their beloved solar connection doesn’t work, forcing them to accept that there are (perhaps) a multitude of other natural variations in the complex climate system.”
The climatologist William Connolley — who is one of the top several CAGW movement agents in the team on the website with the most readers of all (Wikipedia) — can be seen at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Solar_variation&diff=225168755&oldid=225139260 adding “if any” to the solar variation article in order that more of the public would think solar variation has had no effect on climate whatsoever. There are other examples such as eliminating references and info which people are not supposed to ever see at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Solar_variation&diff=295047907&oldid=294874813 and http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Solar_variation&diff=38166555&oldid=38156487
As for the IPCC versus solar/GCR effects on climate: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/22/omitted-variable-fraud-vast-evidence-for-solar-climate-driver-rates-one-oblique-sentence-in-ar5/
(One can tell what the IPCC really doesn’t like by what they minimize, like only mentioning carbon fertilization in passing in several sentences in their giant reports to practically dismiss it in vagueness, rather than mentioning the major growth increase under elevated CO2 — +300 ppm CO2 resulting in around +36% to rice yields, even +24% for the C4 plant of corn, +33% to wheat, and so on under appropriate fertilizer application meanwhile — or the 40 billion ton increase in biomass of global terrestrial vegetation 1910->1990 estimated by ORNL during a small fraction as much relative CO2 increase mixed with climate variation, etc).
Your response to such as Dr. Spencer’s http://www.drroyspencer.com/2011/05/indirect-solar-forcing-of-climate-by-galactic-cosmic-rays-an-observational-estimate/ will be either (1) skip over it (2) try to discredit it — utterly predictable. (Likewise on http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009GL038429.shtml etc). #1 / #2 are the same as those of the CAGW proponents I used to argue with elsewhere.
With this weak cycle 24, solar activity has overall gone down since 2002 in sunspots but not particularly until since the start of 2004 in effect on observed cosmic ray flux. But actually MSU global temperature data since the start of 2004 does shows relative cooling since then as a plot at
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:2004/to:2013/plot/rss/from:2004/to:2013/trend highlights, even though of course superimposed on other influences like the AMO/PDO/ENSO/etc. ocean oscillations.
Leif Svalgaard says:
July 3, 2012 at 5:51 pm
I’m not responsible for what other people think of my ‘effort’. Here is what I think about the sun’s influence on climate http://www.leif.org/research/Does%20The%20Sun%20Vary%20Enough.pdf
If you look at slide 3 and 20 you may want to assert that I attribute the MWP to them darn vikings and their SUVs as the logical conclusion of your rant.
You don’t say anything in those slides one way or another about the cause of the MWP or LIA (or Holocene Climate Optimum for that matter) except for the theme of your presentation being portraying solar variation as not being a cause.
If you were to manage to get your revising of solar reconstructions increasingly prevalent, that would help others slip across claims such as the LIA being just due to volcanoes (like http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/13/dronning-maud-meets-the-little-ice-age/ discussing one such claim — wrong timing) or due to variation in the human population of the time, as in “Europe’s “Little Ice Age” may have been triggered by the 14th Century Black Death plague, according to a new study” at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4755328.stm
But, anyway, that is not what I was asking for, which was rather:
“Can you link to any several posts in a row, anywhere out of hundreds to thousands of posts, on WUWT or elsewhere else where you spent paragraphs seriously arguing against any substantial element of the CAGW movement’s claims, in a manner not helpful to it? I don’t even mean 10% of posts or even 1% but just a few, something that someone unbiased and interested only in promoting scientific truth should end up engaged in sooner or later … [with] a tenth of the passionate motivation you show for aiming to counter solar-GCR climate linkage studies and data”
If having no such post to link, such is a rather one-sided pattern, considering you’ve made probably thousands of posts against there being substantial solar contributions to post-LIA global warming — certainly hundreds at an utter minimum.
This is reminiscent of, long ago, my first suspicions on so-called “mainstream” global warming presentations, which started to arise when noticing article after article practically solely presented global warming as causing negative effects — very suspicious for supposed lack of bias, when a fraction of a degree temperature change is in large portions similar to that seen if someone moves tens of miles closer to the equator (something at worst close to almost an even mixture of benefits versus tradeoffs in climate, wildlife, etc).
Leif Svalgaard says:
July 3, 2012 at 5:51 pm
“And sometimes you have to trust people [in particular me] especially if they don’t have a dog in the race.
Or I can trust, in particular, other people, like Dr. Spencer, Dr. Shaviv, Dr. Svensmark, Dr. Lindzen, Dr. Abdussamatov, etc

It’s easy to overlook the changes to the global jet streams, which arrived circa 2009. They being the sluggishness with which they take High & Low Pressure systems Eastward. As for the low clouds, they appeared likewise in 2009 and peaked. All that awaits now is for the Solar Activity to slide back down to 2009 levels, where I would rationally expect the GCR’s (Neutron Counts) to once again shoot upwards. It is no small coincidence that the GCR’s peaked in 2009, the pit of SC23/24 Solar Activity. Fast forward to this year, 2012, where weather systems are stuck like flies on sticky paper, deluging the Pacific Northwest and the UK while the main mass of the US heartland has been roasted by a monolithic High Pressure system.
No, there are no changes evident to Earth’s Climate systems, just a little bit of Twilight Zone weather. A little dab will do you.

Henry@HenryC
The paper you quote says;
8. Summary
[56] Satellite measurements of ozone and cloud plus
aerosol reflectivity have been used to estimate zonal average
changes in UV irradiance (300 to 325 nm) over the past
30 years (1979 to 2008) using a simplified radiative transfer
approach based on Beer’s Law for both monochromatic and
action spectrum weighted irradiances.
Now carefully look here:
http://albums.24.com/DisplayImage.aspx?id=cb274da9-f8a1-44cf-bb0e-4ae906f3fd9d&t=o
do you see that the major portion of the energy being cut off by the ozone lies between 0.2 and 0.3 microns? (200-300 nm). So the measurements at 300-325, although indicative, do not help me much…..
Also remember that water absorbs strongly in the 200-300 nm region, which is then converted to heat.
I don’t think that the things I see happening have really yet been properly researched.
If you have a 10% decrease in ozone then obviously that (white) portion in between the red line and the red body will (at least) become 10% smaller? It is that extra heat coming in and slamming (mostly) into the oceans that caused the global warming 1970-1994.
Don’t forget that according to my own analysis global warming turned to cooling somewhere in 1994
\ so far I have been only able to correlate this with the increase and decrease in the observed ozone concentration

Paul Vaughan (July 3, 2012 at 9:44 pm) wrote:
“The sun modulates westerly winds (via equator-pole temperature gradients):
http://i49.tinypic.com/219q848.png
This robust observation from LOD is rigidly founded on:
A. Law of Conservation of Angular Momentum.
B. Central Limit Theorem.”
–
Leif Svalgaard (July 3, 2012 at 11:22 pm) responded:
“It does more than that. […] But solar activity […] modulates the basic input at the barely observable limit.”
—————————————–
The signal is robust and easily observed using dozens of methods. Here’s a different angle on it: http://i46.tinypic.com/2yw7711.png . If you consider the signal “barely observable”, you’re relying on grossly suboptimal (in this context) methods. Although incredibly useful, a hammer isn’t the right tool for gracefully sinking a screw.

@Leif Svalgaard (July 4, 2012 at 7:31 pm)
As previously explained:
http://i46.tinypic.com/2yw7711.png
CH = Coronal Holes
nCRm = neutron Count Rate (moscow)
M.5 & P.5 = Schwabe-extent (11 year) Morlet & Paul wavelet power of semi-annual Length of Day (LOD)

Paul Vaughan says:
July 4, 2012 at 8:04 pm
As previously explained
You cannot assume that such is remembered over any length of time.
But, now that you reminf me, we have had this discussion before and your new graph adds nothing new, except committing the elementary error of plotting the extensively smoothed values together with the ragged unsmoothed real solar data. Now because of the solar cycle variation of TSI implies a [barely detectable] temperature variation of 0.1C, one would expect some response in atmospheric parameters that depend on temperature. Is that what you think you are seeing?

@Leif Svalgaard (July 4, 2012 at 8:47 pm)
I’m finished dealing with you.

Leif says
No, Ozone does not ‘deflect’ anything. Ozone absorbs the UV and is heated in the process.
Henry says
ooh please….
don’t tell me you have been listening to Phil.
Plse refer to:
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/the-greenhouse-effect-and-the-principle-of-re-radiation-11-Aug-2011
You better study that – and challenge me on that, if you dare. Your meme of absorption being converted to heat is a general misconception that I have heard a lot but it is not consistent with actual observations.
In the case of incoming UV, we must also consider the reaction of oxygen with UV,
producing the ozone;

HenryP says:
July 4, 2012 at 9:24 pm
You better study that – and challenge me on that, if you dare.
Or perhaps this http://www.ozonelayer.noaa.gov/science/basics.htm is more accessible

HenryP says:
July 4, 2012 at 9:55 pm
but do you understand the principle of re-radiation?
there is no such principle. UV is absorbed, heating the stratosphere [that is why temperature doesn’t decrease with altitude there, why there is a stratosphere in the first place]. Some of the absorbed light is re-radiated at a longer wavelength. The notion that Ozone ‘deflects’ all UV back to space is nonsense. You did not tell us what you understood from the paper I directed you to.

Henry@Leif
I wonder. Maybe you are Phil.?

Leif says:
If it is absorbed it goes into heat, and all of it is absorbed [nothing reaches the ground].
Henry says:
NO!!!
most of it is deflected.
Clearly you do not even understand the definition of the GH effect (causing warming) and the anti GH effect (causing cooling).
Please read it. It is at the top of my blog.
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/the-greenhouse-effect-and-the-principle-of-re-radiation-11-Aug-2011

HenryP says:
July 5, 2012 at 12:19 am
NO!!! most of it is deflected.
To help you out, here is some discussion of the five pathways solar radiation can take when entering the atmosphere: http://geography.about.com/od/physicalgeography/a/solarradiation.htm
Which one is your ‘deflection’?

Henry@Leif
from your quote:
“Absorption is the fourth type of solar radiation pathway and is the conversion of energy from one form into another. For example, when solar radiation is absorbed by water, its energy shifts to the water and raises its temperature. This is common of all absorbing surfaces from a tree’s leaf to asphalt.”
Note that I will agree with this statement as far as water and solid substances is concerned when it is hit by solar radiation in the absorptive region.
But with a molecule of a GHG in the atmosphere, there is little or no mass and most of the neighbouring main gasses (O2 and N2) are “transparent ” over most of the whole spectrum. So when the molecule of a GHG is hit by radiation it fills up in the absorptive regions, is saturated with heat, (cannot absorb more heat because it has no mass), and starts re-emitting the photons in same absorptive region.
I am sure I have explained this many times before.
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/the-greenhouse-effect-and-the-principle-of-re-radiation-11-Aug-2011

@Leif Svalgaard
You have contradicted yourself by admitting the solar cycle modulates the westerlies (first time you have ever admitted this so far as I am aware) and then turning around and writing this…
Leif Svalgaard (July 4, 2012 at 8:47 pm) wrote:
“[…] committing the elementary error of plotting the extensively smoothed values together with the ragged unsmoothed real solar data.”
The ongoing misunderstanding is a product of a gaping hole in your elementary-level stats foundations. I do not have enough information to diagnose exactly what building block(s) you are missing, but it appears to be related to nonstationarity &/or aggregation criteria. I have enough information to know with certainty that your problem is at the level of fundamentals because you are wrong on absolute logic.
—
Leif Svalgaard (July 4, 2012 at 8:47 pm) wrote:
“Now because of the solar cycle variation of TSI implies a [barely detectable] temperature variation of 0.1C, one would expect some response in atmospheric parameters that depend on temperature. Is that what you think you are seeing?”
Thermal wind is a function of temperature GRADIENTS. You are guilty of protracted ignorance &/or distortion by never emphasizing this.
There’s something grossly suboptimal about the methods you’re using if you’re finding signals “barely detectable”.
—
If you are unable &/or unwilling to be more careful with absolute logic:
a) there’s no basis for communication.
b) trust is fatally undermined.

Leif Svalgaard says
…but how about answering my last post at 8:43 am?
Henry says
Actually I did make an interesting observation about this, some time ago.
I have a big aluminium sliding door in one of our sitting rooms. I had the glass mirrored. In the afternoons the sunshine comes in and falls on the (floor) tiles. So I wanted to see what the effect was of the mirroring. Carefully, with an IR thermometer, I measured the temperature at one spot in the middle of a particular tile before I opened the door. It was 27 C. I measured one minute after opening the door. It was 30 C. I measured 5 minutes after I opened the door. It was 30 again.
I measured again after 5 minutes and then 10 minutes.
Temperature of that spot remained at 30 C.
So I figured that what had happened was this:
The mirroring does work, i.e. it sends some radiation back. But the tile (I mean: the molecules of the tile) can only absorb a limited amount of photons that raises its temperature. As soon as its reaches its capacity (which seems pretty soon) it starts re-radiating that same radiation (that increased its temperature from 27 to 30).
Just remember that the molecules of a tile have much more mass then a GHG molecule. So the instant a GHG is hit by radiation, the GHG molecule starts re-radiating, i.e. acting like a little sferical mirror in the absorptive region. The idea that this absorption is continuously converted to heat (only) is completely rediculous.
Yet, such is the state of all the profs and dr’s in our universities (e.g. Phil.)
There is (absolutely) no one who can think for himself.

Leif Svalgaard says
See, without any textbooks or papers, you have a good explanation of the greenhouse effect (1) and global warming (2), fully in line with the most rabid AGW position. 3)”
Henry says
1) Several times now, I have given you the explanation that GHG’s work both ways: it re-radiates (=deflects, etc.) sunshine 0-5 um (if there is apparent absorption in the spectra of the GHG) causing cooling and it re-radiates earthshine 5-15 um (if there is apparent absorption in the spectra of the GHG) causing warming.
If you want to know what an increase in GHG causes, you have to make up a balance sheet that would show how much W/m2 cooling and warming is caused by the % increase of that GHG,
taking into account that there 12 hours sunshine per day and 24 hours earthshine per day.
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/the-greenhouse-effect-and-the-principle-of-re-radiation-11-Aug-2011
2) If you know anything about statistics and probability theory you would know that you can be 99.5% sure from my results on a random sample of 45 weather stations that global warming stopped somewhere in 1994.
http://www.letterdash.com/henryp/global-cooling-is-here
3) the nature of the relationship that I find between the warming and cooling of the earth over the past 37 years is binominal (parabolic), indicating a natural process. At the end of the day, it is clear (to me) that the cooling and warming component caused by an increase/decrease in CO2 /H20 has cancelled each other out.
Whether that natural process involves the sun-UV-ozone factor, is what I am still trying to figure out.
(BTW, by adding a few more weather stations to my sample, I have now ramped up my correlation coefficient for the drop in maxima to 0.996).

Obviously, radiation only moves in straight lines. You must know that from the sun shining through a partially open curtain. If it cannot go (further) down it and if no further absorption is possible, i.e. it has to re-radiate, it would (I think) move at opposite incoming and outgoing angles.
But I have to think a bit about that.

From my experience I would say that in all cases, whether gas, liquid or solid, re-radiation works spherical in every direction, from each molecule, that re-radiates. It is just that with a gas there is much less heat transfer possible. That means that the heat (=re-radiation) that you feel above the sun-warmed street will try and find its way back out to space and since most of it is of wavelength 5-15 um it will not find much obstacles in the sky, (O2 and N2 are transparent) except if it hits on clouds or water vapor (which is the main GHG) on the way up.

Solar-Ozone Graph:
http://i48.tinypic.com/349fbs2.png

Ozone (from KNMI Climate Explorer) hits extrema on odd 1/4-cycles.
__
Related reading:
Coughlin, K.T.; & Tung, K.K. (2005). Empirical mode decomposition of climate variability.
http://depts.washington.edu/amath/research/articles/Tung/journals/coughlin-tungHHT05.pdf
Coughlin, K.T.; & Tung, K.K. (2004). 11-year solar cycle in the stratosphere extracted by the empirical mode decomposition method. Advances in Space Research 34, 323-329.
http://spl.mt.ntnu.edu.tw/courses_data/%E7%A2%A9%E5%A3%AB%E7%8F%AD/99/%E6%9E%97%E5%AE%B6%E9%BD%8A/EMD%E8%AB%96%E6%96%87/EMD/%E5%85%B6%E4%BB%96/%E7%A0%94%E8%A8%8E%E6%9C%83/11-year%20solar%20cycle%20in%20the%20stratosphere%20extracted%20by%20the%20empirical%20mode%20decomposition%20method.pdf
Coughlin, K.T.; & Tung, K.K. (2004). Eleven-year solar cycle signal throughout the lower atmosphere. Journal Of Geophysical Research 109, D21105. doi:10.1029/2004JD004873.
http://depts.washington.edu/amath/research/articles/Tung/journals/coughlin-tung04solar.pdf
( draft version: http://depts.washington.edu/amath/research/articles/Tung/journals/coughlin04b.pdf )

Leif Svalgaard (July 7, 2012 at 4:48 pm) wrote:
“There is already a beginning problem at the minimum in 1996, as the IMF-4 seems to precede the solar flux, but 2009 would be the real test.”
That’s a misinterpretation.
Once again we see you not differentiating between data & stats (which differ fundamentally).
IMF4 is a string of stats (based on a sliding window). Accurate interpretation of stats requires awareness of what goes into them (in this case they centrally summarize a series of events contained in a sliding window, so they do NOT represent something about single, specific events, as do data).
Also keep in mind that we are looking at spatial averages, so our “data” aren’t even data. Almost no one involved in the climate discussion pays sufficient attention to aggregation fundamentals. This is THE main reason why the discussion is such a mess.
The aggregate peaks will vary +/- QBO to LF ENSO. Someone of your rank should be lucidly aware of this.
Solar-Ozone/Wind Graph
http://i48.tinypic.com/349fbs2.png
Ozone’s rate of change is coherent with the solar cycle.

Paul Vaughan says:
July 7, 2012 at 8:42 pm
IMF4 is a string of stats (based on a sliding window). Accurate interpretation of stats requires awareness of what goes into them (in this case they centrally summarize a series of events contained in a sliding window, so they do NOT represent something about single, specific events, as do data).
If that summary of events go out of phase with the solar flux while they were in phase before, then the supposition that they are causally related break down. As simple as that. The summary is then also ‘data’. Not fundamentally different from a simple running mean.

@Leif Svalgaard
You’re either missing fundamentals or engaged in deep deception.
Either way, it isn’t sensible to continue dealing with you.

HenryP says:
July 8, 2012 at 10:48 am
My mathematics reveals that the parabolic nature of the global warming/cooling shows that some kind of natural process happens on the sun that drives the UV-…
You seem to be in good shape to answer my seven questions:
1: you say that GHGs reflect [‘deflect’] the radiation back where it came from [hence UV does not reach the ground].
2: Now, the Sun warms the ground [try to walk barefoot on asphalt on a sunny day to verify that]
3: and the hot ground via conduction, convection, and radiation heats the air above it [you can feel the IR radiation from the asphalt by holding your hand a few inches above the ground, and any hot object radiates].
4: Now, according to you, the upwards radiation is ‘deflected’ back to where it came from [the ground],
5: so according to the re-radiation principle, CO2 [and H2O] works its magic by preventing IR from escaping to space [as it is ‘deflected’ back to earth when trying to escape].
6: See, without any textbooks or papers, you have a good explanation of the greenhouse effect and global warming,
7: fully in line with the most rabid AGW position.
Paul Vaughan says:
July 8, 2012 at 12:49 am
You’re either missing fundamentals or engaged in deep deception.
and
IMF4 is a string of stats (based on a sliding window). Accurate interpretation of stats requires awareness of what goes into them (in this case they centrally summarize a series of events contained in a sliding window, so they do NOT represent something about single, specific events, as do data).
The solar flux is then also a string of stats [based on a sliding wind of half a solar rotation on a spatial average over the disk] centrally summarizing the series of microwave emission events within the window]. The purpose of Tung’s Figure was surely to show the phase coincidence [coherence of the signals, if you understand that better] between the two stats, solar flux and IMF-4. Since the latest minimum in the flux stat [2009] is several years later that the extrapolation of the of the 10-yr cycle would give, the minimum of the IMF-4 stat would also expected to be similarly delayed, if there is a physical causal relationship. If so, that would be strong support for causality. If not, causality can be excluded. It is perhaps telling that Tung has not published [AFAIK] on this using up-to-date data.

HenryP says:
July 8, 2012 at 1:33 pm
Obviously you did not get that I am here to pick brains of people who thought abt what I had been thinking about.
In a previous post you said you were here to teach us all about it. One can only comment on something you have have expressed clearly, so, here is another chance:
1: you say that GHGs reflect [‘deflect’] the radiation back where it came from [hence UV does not reach the ground].
2: Now, the Sun warms the ground [try to walk barefoot on asphalt on a sunny day to verify that]
3: and the hot ground via conduction, convection, and radiation heats the air above it [you can feel the IR radiation from the asphalt by holding your hand a few inches above the ground, and any hot object radiates].
4: Now, according to you, the upwards radiation is ‘deflected’ back to where it came from [the ground],
5: so according to the re-radiation principle, CO2 [and H2O] works its magic by preventing IR from escaping to space [as it is ‘deflected’ back to earth when trying to escape].
6: See, without any textbooks or papers, you have a good explanation of the greenhouse effect and global warming,
7: fully in line with the most rabid AGW position.
Now, it is OK if you give up and confess that you are not up to answering.

@Leif Svalgaard
Your interpretation of the window summaries is not sound.

Paul Vaughan says
The changepoint is ~1997.
If you’re seeing 1994, that’s distorted by QBO & solar.
Henry@Paul
I have made a small mistake in the calculation where I determine the point where maxima started turning to cooling (turn negative). I realize now that I had looked at all the data from the weather stations from 1974 up to and including December of the year 2011. So my reference point is 2012.0
That is also 38 years ago, not 37.
Looking at where y=o (when there was no warming or cooling) in the binominal plot for maxima, (which now has a correlation coefficient of 0.997) , I now get X=16.4 and X=64.96
That means global warming started in 2012-64.96= 1947,0 = 1947
That means global cooling started in 2012-16.4=1995.6 = 1996,
as seen from the energy that we get directly from the sun.
I guess it will hoover around for about a year in any case in the zero area so I am reasonably happy with your 1997. If I look at the Swiss ozone results and I fit those results in a polynominal of the 3 order, I definitely see a bending point at just before 1950 and yours at 1996 or 1997. Amazing.
Does this ring a bell with you?
(I made corrections in my blog, but have not yet updated the tables)