Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Richard Muller and the good folks over at the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project have released their temperature analysis back to 1750, and are making their usual unsupportable claims. I don’t mean his risible statements that the temperature changes are due to CO2 because the curves look alike—that joke has been widely discussed and discounted, even by anthropogenic global warming (AGW) supporters. Heck, even Michael Mann jumped on him for that one, saying
It seems, in the end–quite sadly–that this is all really about Richard Muller’s self-aggrandizement 🙁
And if anyone should know about “self-aggrandizement”, it’s Michael Mann … but I’m not talking about Muller’s claim that humans caused the warming. No, I mean the following statement:
The historic temperature pattern we observe has abrupt dips that match the emissions of known explosive volcanic eruptions; the particulates from such events reflect sunlight and cool the Earth’s surface for a few years.
In support of this statement, Richard Muller offers up the following chart:
Figure 1. BEST claims about temperature and volcanoes. SOURCE
So what’s not to like?
Well, first it appears he has included and excluded volcanoes depending on whether they show up in his temperature record. If we look at big eruptions, eruptions with a “volcanic explosively index” (VEI) of 6 or above, since 1750 we have the following volcanoes:
Mount Pinatubo, 1991
Novarupta, 1912
Santa María, 1902
Krakatoa, 1883
Mount Tambora, 1815
Grímsvötn and Laki, 1783
So Muller has left off Santa Maria and Novarupta, and included El Chichon and Cosiguina. But that’s not the real problem. The real problem is that many of these occurred after or during the temperature drop that they are supposed to have caused … here’s the BEST data including all relevant volcanoes, without the style of overlay that they have used that obscures the actual timing:
Figure 2. BEST temperature data and dates of volcanoes. Red line is a four-year centered Gaussian average of the temperature data. Photo shows Mt. Redoubt in Alaska.
So let’s look at the volcanoes, one by one:
LAKI, 1783: Occurred near the end of the fall in temperature that it is supposed to have caused.
TAMBORA, 1815: Occurred at the end of the fall in temperature that it is supposed to have caused.
COSIGUINA, 1835: Occurred near the middle of the fall in temperature that it is supposed to have caused.
KRAKATOA, 1883: Occurred at the end of the fall in temperature that it is supposed to have caused.
SANTA MARIA, 1902: Occurred in the middle of the fall in temperature that it is supposed to have caused.
NOVARUPTA, 1912: I can see why Muller omitted this eruption, which occurred just before a rise in temperature …
EL CHICHON, 1982: Occurred during the fall in temperature that it is supposed to have caused.
PINATUBO, 1991: This is arguably the only one of the eight volcanoes that could legitimately be claimed to cause a detectable fall in temperature … a whopping fall of 0.15°C or so.
So while volcanoes certainly may cause a minor drop in global temperature, the claim of Richard Muller and the BEST folks that there are “abrupt dips that match the emissions of known explosive volcanic eruptions” is simply not true. There are abrupt dips, but they don’t match up with the volcanic eruptions.
w.
[Update] Further reading:
Prediction is hard, especially of the future discusses the GISS analysis of Pinatubo.
Missing the Missing Summer is about the eruption of Tambora.
Dronning Maud Meets the Little Ice Age investigates a claim that the Little Ice Age was triggered by vulcanism.
Volcanic Disruptions plays the game “Spot the Volcano”
[Update] Another way to investigate the question is to look at the average temperature anomaly during the two years before and the two years after the eruption. Figure 3 shows that result.
Figure 3. Average temperature anomaly two years before and two years after the eruptions. Black lines show the standard error of the mean.
After some eruptions it cooled a bit, after some it warmed a bit, and after some there was no change … go figure.
Ulric Lyons says:
July 31, 2012 at 3:06 pm
correction: at least though there were El Nino conditions in 1884:
http://www.jisao.washington.edu/data/cti/
A very important point, we are dealing with a control system that exhibits hysteresis.
Like the thermostat in a home that is set to turn on the AC at 74 deg F, it comes on at 74, but the AC does not cool the room back to 74 Deg but to a set point some interval below the trigger point. Then the room slowly warms back up over time.
This characteristic alone explains a lot of natural variability if many of the weather process that drive climate have similar behavior. Sometimes multiple processes which tend to cool or heat the atmosphere (climate) will get into sync and all be going in the same direction at the same time. That results in heat waves or cold snaps, droughts or ice ages depending on the net sum of all their actions.
Like a magnetic relay has a characteristic latching time and release time and delays as the coil changes its magnetism as the electrical current and voltage changes, each of the weather processes will have their own characteristic cycle time (sometimes dependent on other similar cycles). As a result there are an infinite number of possible perturbations around the mean.
We have no where near the understanding of the processes involved to even come close to predicting all those interactions. At best we can come to a conclusion about a trend, just as we know in September in the Northern Hemisphere that the weather will tend to cool as the month winds down but that does not prevent an occasional stifling hot day from occurring in September.
Larry
Justice4Rinka says:
Why do these people keep lying and keep thinking they can get away with it?
Because they do get away with it!
Ulric Lyons-I agree there was an El Nino. But not a very strong El Nino.
Hi Willis,
Apparent step change to lower strat temp following El Chichon and Mt Pinatubo is kind of interesting. Maybe SO2 injection has a more lasting effect on atmospheric chemistry further up the column.
http://www.remss.com/data/msu/graphics/tls/plots/sc_Rss_compare_TS_channel_tls_v03_3.png
AJB says: “Apparent step change to lower strat temp following El Chichon and Mt Pinatubo is kind of interesting.”
Not really. Although it looks like a “step change” the stratospheric data from satellites is looking at an area where that cooling is dominated by ozone depletion. Note that, due to government regulations, increases in concentrations of some (all?) CFC’s began to decline in about the mid 1990’s (note, I am not commenting on whether this was a wise policy). This coincidences with the halting of lower stratospheric cooling. Modeling the stratospheric temps as a function of stratospheric aerosols and CFCs would account for most of the variability and leave little to be explained by a “step” at all.
Bernie,
Beautiful sunsets were not all that we sensed. I want to throw in a data point to corroborate your observation of the duration of the effect, if not its magnitude. When El Chichon erupted, we were living near Moscow in Russia, and something truly remarkable happened, although we did not know about the eruption when we began observing what we now think were its effects. My father had a Grundig Satellit 3000, a very able radio set, whose FM range was mostly silent because the Russian FM band almost did not everlap the European band, and where they did overlap, the stations were too far away, so all we received was noise. Local broadcasters did not hit the band at all; all we could receive in that range were harmonics from lousy transmitters operating at lower frequencies, so the band was essentially vacant and I used it a lot to monitor my own radio toys. Just to make it clear to those of us who may not be aware: FM radio is strictly a line-of-sight radio. You can’t receive a signal unless you can see the tower it is transmitted from.
Imagine our surprise when we suddenly started hearing a cacophony of multilingual broadcasts, some of which came through loud and clear. They were sporadic at first, but then a pattern emerged. There was nothing to be heard until about 10 a.m., at which time he heard Turkey and sometimes Israel. They were stable for about an hour, then faded away. At about the same time, by tuning around, we could pick up Grece and Balkan countries. Then, later in the day, Italy and Austria, then, by late afternoon, Germany. We could even listen to accident reports and weather briefs from there Autobahn transmitters, which are normally directional, besides being far away. Sometimes we heard voices from further west, but not often, and usually the radio went silent by 6 or 7 p.m. Aside from the shifting pattern that appeared to followed the sun, the signal was loud and clear, and it felt totally surreal.
Thus we entertained ourselves all summer. My father’s theory (which did rather seem like a fact) was that there was a giant hot spot in the ionosphere reflecting the signals our way. The more theoretical conjecture was that the hot spot was caused by the sun (given the temporal pattern we observed). The news of El Chichon, when it finally reached us on one of those radio waves, made my father scream in excitement. He told me it was ash from El Chichon enhancing radio reflectivity on the day side. The effect began fading out by September, but broadcasts were still legible. By the end of October, they fell below the FM threshold, with only sporadic chirps getting through, and in winter the entire band went quiet, as it had always been around those parts.
So the observable effect lasted roughly six months (April thru October).
timetochooseagain says, July 31, 2012 at 7:47 pm
Yep, probably. Hard to say really:
http://www.iac.ethz.ch/en/research/chemie/tpeter/totozone_arosa_yearly.png
timetochooseagain says:
July 31, 2012 at 7:47 pm (Edit)
Thanks, timetochooseagain. And you have evidence of this? I must admit that matching some kind of long term trend in the climate to some long term trend in X (CO2, ozone, CFCs, aerosols) is singularly unconvincing. You might be correct, but without some other evidence, correlation is absolutely not causation …
w.
”
Larry Ledwick (hotrod) says:
July 31, 2012 at 3:41 pm
Most importantly, thunderstorms can cool the surface down to below the initiation temperature. Note that this is different from simple feedback.
A very important point, we are dealing with a control system that exhibits hysteresis.
Like the thermostat in a home that is set to turn on the AC at 74 deg F, it comes on at 74, but the AC does not cool the room back to 74 Deg but to a set point some interval below the trigger point. Then the room slowly warms back up over time
”
***************
I would suggest it is more of a PID with continual adjustment of control outputs based upon T such that there is a fairly small delta T from the actual setpoint in order to provide the proper amount of control output. In other words I think it’s an analog world, not a digital one on the macro scale.
Willis,
Have you ever tried to put in very large nuclear atmospheric tests or clusters of tests in the graph? After all, it seems that a number of these nutjobs from the CAGW ranks were first trying to tell us that as few as one open air nuke test was enough to push the world into a new ice age.
Gene
What a neat story. And maybe another way to monitor global ash clouds. I dealt with radios and transmitters some in my past pre-retirement life. There are some interesting things that go on in the ionosphere due to a number of natural events but this is the first time I’ve heard of this. I will talk with some of my engineering friends about it. Thanks.
Bernie
I suspect you were getting FM frequency ducting or Sporadic E propagation (E-skip) and the
eruption might have enhanced that behavior far beyond normal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_and_FM_DX
A volcanic eruption would be a perfectly logical explanation for a sudden change in vertical moisture content to create the ducting layer.
I used to work in the Colorado State EOC as assistant communications officer and one of our frequencies was in the VHF-Low Band: 25 MHz to 50 MHz near the 45-49 mhz (I don’t recall the actual frequency any more) and in the early morning would get very strong skip (in Colorado) of communications traffic on the same frequency from the New Jersey Turnpike.
Larry
cba says:
August 1, 2012 at 4:00 am
Actually, been there, blogged that … they made no detectable climate signal.
w.
Willis,
I can believe that a single test wouldn’t be detectable but wasn’t there a whole batch of them over a relatively short time and wouldn’t that possible give a really spread out low intensity signal – unlike a volcanic erruption?
If not, sounds like the nuclear winter whackjobs may be out yet another catastrophe to obsess over.
Perhaps one should take the data set of CAGW whackjobs and test it for correlation with the nuclear winter whackjob data set and extract out the pure lunatics from the dataset. 😉
cba says:
August 1, 2012 at 5:00 pm
cba, I discussed and graphed all the tests at that link … at least I think I did, hang on … yeah, I did, I showed all of the tests.
w.
I was devoting full time to attending the Joint Statistical Meetings and missed some of the most important days in the time that I have been reading here.
Good work Willis.
phlogiston says:
July 30, 2012 at 5:06 am
Maybe the cooling CAUSES the volcanos – i.e. making the earth’s mantle more brittle or something?
/sarc off
Eruption frequencies are linked with lower solar activity in longer term geological time scale studies. There has been a large number of powerful earthquakes and eruptions since the Sun went quiet in 2005.
tallbloke says:
August 2, 2012 at 4:08 pm
Eruption frequencies are linked with lower solar activity in longer term geological time scale studies. There has been a large number of powerful earthquakes and eruptions since the Sun went quiet in 2005.
There is evidence after Hung (NASA) that special heliocentric aspects of the planets are in relation with big solar flares: http://www.volker-doormann.org/ghi_solar_s.pdf
It can also be shown that these aspects as geocentric aspects are related to earthquakes:
http://www.volker-doormann.org/images/china_2.gif
I do not think that statistic helps to understand the mechanism. BTW. What is ‘solar activity’ in physics? As long as people ignore the sun and its ‘music’ from the planets the mechanism of the solar system and its energy pattern, it’s an arrogant geocentric view of climate. There were no astronomers in the hearing of the government days ago.
Dr. Roy Spencer has given the UAH global temperatures for July 2012. The solar tide functions of 11 planets can be calculated from 3000 BC until 3000 CE with a resolution of better than days. The comparison for the last 3 years shows that there is a relation.
http://www.volker-doormann.org/images/uah_gl_july_2012.gif
Indeed it seems to me that there are time intervals which match not with the tide function simulation, but I think further work on subtracting can give new insights in both the effect of vulcanos and the effect from the sun.
V.
tallbloke says:
August 2, 2012 at 4:08 pm
Volker Doormann says:
August 2, 2012 at 11:39 pm
Yes, and as long as people ignore the subject of a thread and instead want to discuss their favorite theories of the solar system and its energy pattern, it’s an arrogant heliocentric view of their own planetary sized egos …
Volker, how about you take your brilliant ideas over to tallbloke’s website? He welcomes all folks over there, gravity-heads and cyclo-maniacs, pressure-freaks and solar tidal surfers, people saying they’ve discovered perpetual motion, anyone at all, no theory is too outré for the talkshop.
Because that way, you two can assure each other that the planets rule the earthquakes, and congratulate each other on how smart you are, without bothering people who are talking about the effects of volcanoes on the climate … you know, the subject of the thread.
w.
Willis Eschenbach says:Volker Doormann says:
August 2, 2012 at 11:39 pm
… As long as people ignore the sun and its ‘music’ from the planets the mechanism of the solar system and its energy pattern, it’s an arrogant geocentric view of climate.
Yes, and as long as people ignore the subject of a thread and instead want to discuss their favorite theories of the solar system and its energy pattern, it’s an arrogant heliocentric view of their own planetary sized egos …
Volker, how about you take your brilliant ideas over to tallbloke’s website? …without bothering people who are talking about the effects of volcanoes on the climate … you know, the subject of the thread.
The simple point is that Willis Eschenbach never come to hand to any of my given arguments on the subject obove, but discredit my unique work with ‘all folks over there, gravity-heads and cyclo-maniacs, pressure-freaks and solar tidal surfers, people saying they’ve discovered perpetual motion, anyone at all’.
You can know that my reply has discussed the similar situation of planetary aspects und the sun and solar flares alike the outbreak of vulcanos or earthquakes. Planetary aspects of dividing the circle of the ecliptic in integer parts can as well be related to earthquakes and outbreaks of vulcanos:
On 1883, August 27th at 10:02 Local Time there were an outbreak of the Krakatao and the following aspects between the ecliptical lengths:
Jupiter/Moon: 114.55° – 87.70° = 26.85° = 30°-3.15°
Venus/Jupiter: 146.75 – 114.55° = 32.20° = 30°+2.20°
Mercury/Venus: 176.27° – 146.75° = 29.52° = 30°-0.48°
Mercury/Jupiter: 176.27° – 114.55° = 61.72° = 60°+1.72°
Venus/Moon: 146.75° – 87.70° = 59.05° = 60°-0.95°
Merkur/Moond 176.45° – 87.70° = 88.75° = 90°-1.25°
Sun/Medium coeli (M.C.): 153.474° – 123.11° = 30.362° = 0°+0.362°
Sun /Chiron: 153.474° – 63.52° = 89.957° = 90°-0.043°
M.C./Neptune: 123.11° – 51.1° = 72.01° = 72°+0.01°
Uranus/Neptune: 172.55° – 51.1° = 121.45° = 120°+1.45°
Mars/Pluto: 91.88° – 61.23° = 30.65° = 30°+0.65°
M.C./Mars: 123.11° – 91.88° = 31.23° = 30°+1.23°
M.C./Pluto: 123.11° – 61.23° = 61.88° = 30°+1.88°
Jupiter/Saturn: 114.55° – 69.52° = 45.03° = 45°+0.03°
ASC/Saturn: 219.40° – 69.527° = 149.88° = 150°-0.127°
http://www.volker-doormann.org/1883_08_27b.bmp
There are 15 aspects visible from the location of the volcano outbrake which are integer number divisions of the ecliptic circle.
I think it is On Topic with the subject to discuss the physically causes of terrestrial climate in connection with the physically causes of the trigger of Volcano outbreaks.
BTW. What is a motion of angular momentum (of planets or galaxies) other than a perpetual motion? Is there any loss in angular momentum?
V.
Volker Doormann says:
August 2, 2012 at 11:39 pm
“..I think further work on subtracting can give new insights in both the effect of vulcanos and the effect from the sun.”
I have no doubt that temperature deviations are driving the events, and are of a solar origin:
(e.g. like this plasma speed/temperature uplift leading up to 2/3 days before Pinatubo:
http://omniweb.gsfc.nasa.gov/tmp/images/ret_27267.gif)
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/17/volcanoes-cause-climate-change/#comment-370886
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/28/sumatran-volcano-erupts-first-time-since-1600/#comment-469479
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/05/indonesian-volcano-eruptions-increasing/#comment-523740
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/08/31/royal-society-wants-man-made-volcanoes-to-fight-climat-change/#comment-181509
Willis Eschenbach says:
August 3, 2012 at 12:30 am
Volker, how about you take your brilliant ideas over to tallbloke’s website? He welcomes all folks over there, gravity-heads and cyclo-maniacs, pressure-freaks and solar tidal surfers, people saying they’ve discovered perpetual motion, anyone at all, no theory is too outré for the talkshop. Because that way, you two can assure each other that the planets rule the earthquakes, and congratulate each other on how smart you are, without bothering people who are talking about the effects of volcanoes on the climate … you know, the subject of the thread.
[Reply]
Because my first posted reply to this proposal is deleted without a comment reply of a moderator as usual, it shows me that some one of this WUWT blog likes it to use ad hominem arguments and like it deleting valid scientific arguments.
Bad science.
V.
[REPLY: Your first comment was caught in the spam folder. Please do not assume nefarious persecutory motives when the answer is simply a loack of moderation coverage for the time window in question. -REP]
[REPLY: Your first comment was caught in the spam folder. Please do not assume nefarious persecutory motives when the answer is simply a loack of moderation coverage for the time window in question. -REP]
No comment
V.
Ulric Lyons says:
August 3, 2012 at 3:46 am
Volker Doormann says:
August 2, 2012 at 11:39 pm
“..I think further work on subtracting can give new insights in both the effect of vulcanos and the effect from the sun.”
I have no doubt that temperature deviations are driving the events, and are of a solar origin …
Hi, in this thread my contributions are qualified by the thread creator as bother.
I do respect that.
EOD.
V.