When will it start cooling?

Guest post by David Archibald

My papers and those of Jan-Erik Solheim et al predict a significant cooling over Solar Cycle 24 relative to Solar Cycle 23. Solheim’s model predicts that Solar Cycle 24, for the northern hemisphere, will be 0.9º C cooler than Solar Cycle 23. It hasn’t cooled yet and we are three and a half years into the current cycle. The longer the temperature stays where it is, the more cooling has to come over the rest of the cycle for the predicted average reduction to occur.

So when will it cool? As Nir Shaviv and others have noted, the biggest calorimeter on the plant is the oceans. My work on sea level response to solar activity (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/03/quantifying-sea-level-fall/) found that the breakover between sea level rise and sea level fall is a sunspot amplitude of 40:

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As this graph from SIDC shows, the current solar amplitude is about 60 in the run-up to solar maximum, expected in May 2013:

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The two remaining variables in our quest are the timing of the sunspot number fall below 40 and the length of Solar Cycle 24. So far, Solar Cycle 24 is shaping up almost exactly like Solar Cycle 5, the first half of the Dalton Minimum:

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The heliospheric current sheet tilt angle has reached the level at which solar maximum occurs. It usually spends a year at this level before heading back down again:

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Similarly, the solar polar field strength (from the Wilcox Solar Observatory) suggest that solar maximum may be up to a year away:

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Notwithstanding that solar maximum, as predicted from heliocentric current sheet tilt angle and solar polar field strength, is still a little way off, if Solar Cycle 24 continues to shape up like Solar Cycle 5, sunspot amplitude will fall below 40 from mid-2013. Altrock’s green corona emissions diagramme (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/08/solar-cycle-24-length-and-its-consequences/) suggests that Solar Cycle 24 will be 17 years long, ending in 2026. That leaves twelve and a half years of cooling from mid-2013.

From all that, for Solheim’s predicted temperature decline of 0.9º C over the whole of Solar Cycle 24 to be achieved, the decline from mid-2013 will be 1.2º C on average over the then remaining twelve and a half years of the cycle. No doubt the cooling will be back-loaded, making the further decline predicted over Solar Cycle 25 relative to Solar Cycle 24 more readily achievable.

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Trevor
August 13, 2012 3:37 am

Thanks for the update David, clear and concise as usual. Gee it will be interesting to see how this pans out, and if it does where the warmist crowd will run.

Jeff M
August 13, 2012 3:40 am

So you are saying any time now? Does this mean likley weasily seen lower values in 2013 or are we looking at 2015+ before the global averages befgin to drop? Waht are teh oveans doing? Last I heard to total heat content of the Pacific was significantly down and could be linked to the drought conditions in much of North America.

Ian W
August 13, 2012 3:42 am

“the decline from mid-2013 will be 1.2º C on average over the then remaining twelve and a half years of the cycle.”
What will be the effect of a 1.2º C drop in temperatures on the ‘grow line’ for food crops? Cold tends to be dry so more drought hitting grain and it looks like the Northern plain states may even get frost before the end of the month after the supposed ‘hottest July on record’ which won’t improve the soy harvest.
Its probably a good time to increase the long term food storage.

wayne Job
August 13, 2012 4:03 am

The ocean page is showing that the oceans are not hot. The only warm water is gathered around very northern climes, much of it impinging on the arctic.
This is not a good place for warm water to expect a long life. The temperature of the ocean off the West Coast of USA is cool to say the least. Australia is suffering a very cold winter even in tropical and sub tropical areas. I think the cooling has already started and it is only fudged thermometers that is saying different.

August 13, 2012 4:10 am

Altrock’s green corona emissions diagramme… suggests that Solar Cycle 24 will be 17 years long, ending in 2026.
In his presentation at the SPD meeting in June 2012, Altrock suggests:
“the maximum smoothed sunspot number in the northern hemisphere ALREADY OCCURRED at 2011.6 ± 0.3” making cycle 24 short.

August 13, 2012 4:11 am

Our generation has known a warm, giving Sun, but the next generation will suffer a Sun that is less giving, and the Earth will be less fruitful.” — David Archibald – March, 2008

(International Conference on Climate Change – Solar Cycle 24: Implications for the United States)

Bloke down the pub
August 13, 2012 4:16 am

From the perspective of here in the UK, this year has already been cooling.

August 13, 2012 4:17 am

So far, Solar Cycle 24 is shaping up almost exactly like Solar Cycle 5
Solar cycle 5 is VERY uncertain http://www.leif.org/research/Solar-Activity-1785-1810.png so ‘almost exactly’ is not really applicable [and SC5 was not 17 years long]. SC24 may look more like cycle 14 http://www.leif.org/research/SC14-and-24.png

August 13, 2012 4:29 am

It hasn’t cooled yet and we are three and a half years into the current cycle. The longer the temperature stays where it is, the more cooling has to come over the rest of the cycle for the predicted average reduction to occur.
Or rather, that the prediction is already rapidly proving wrong.

climatereason
Editor
August 13, 2012 4:35 am

Bloke down the pub
According to the Met Office the UK has been cooling since the year 2000. Our temperature anomaly is now the same as during the 1730’s
tonyb

Alexandre
August 13, 2012 4:57 am

Some 0.9ºC cooling until 2026?
That’s a bold prediction. I wish all the media gives full attention to it and follow the results over that period. That would definetely show who knows the science around here…

F. Guimaraes
August 13, 2012 5:02 am

The solar polar field strength
http://wso.stanford.edu/gifs/Polar.gif
shows that the last 3 reversals occurred on approx. 1980, 1990 and 2000, with a periodicity of ~ 10 years between them, and the inclination of the curve of the polar field with time pretty much defined the rate at which the field would evolve (up or down) into the next period- it’s a straight line at the point of reversal.
The reversal of cycle-24 has not occurred yet and we are nearly 13 years after the last one and the rate of change of the polar field is decreasing (on the average) with time, while in the previous cycles it showed a tendency to increase when approaching the point of reversal.
This seems to suggest that we could have to wait a lot more for the reversal to occur (if it occurs) and, similarly to what happened in the previous cycles, we would be entering a period when the polar field would stay for a long time close to zero after the reversal.
This sounds like a grand minimum of Maunder type to me, which would also be in agreement with the initial predictions/suggestions of the original Livingston-Penn paper, which put a deadline, so to speak, in 2015 after which the sunspots would not be observed for some time.

F. Guimaraes
August 13, 2012 5:05 am

The Livingston-Penn paper I was referring to is the “unpublished” one,
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/livingston-penn_sunspots2.pdf

August 13, 2012 5:13 am

Thanks, very interesting!
Habibullo Abdussamatov has predicted the temperature fall for around 2014.

August 13, 2012 5:27 am

I wouldn’t put much money on any individual cycle to cause either warming or cooling. Earth has its own faint magnetic cycles with similar ones found in the N. hemisphere temperature records:
Earth…. 85, 50, 35, 28
Arctic… 82, 54, 32, 25
– AMO…- -, 64, 35, 22-26
– CET…. 90, 55, 35, 28
The assembly of the CET cycles is at the peak, so cooling in near future appears to be inevitable. Here is what the extrapolation (with sunspot cycles superimposed) suggests for the near future:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CET-NV.htm

Allan MacRae
August 13, 2012 5:36 am

Good timing. I wrote the following yesterday.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/08/10/oxburghs-climate-madness/#comment-1056398
[excerpt]
I (we) also predicted in a separate 2002 article that global cooling would return by about 2020 to 2030.
There has been no net global warming for 10-15 years.
I suggest that natural global cooling is imminent, and is a far greater threat to humanity and the environment than global warming ever was.
I see little evidence that this threat of global cooling is recognized, or that any sensible plans are being developed to adapt to it.
Hope I’m wrong about global cooling, but I like our track record to date.
_________
This earlier post summarizes my serious concerns about imminent global cooling.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/15/missing-the-missing-summer/#comment-958620
[excerpts]
… In 2003 I wrote that global cooling would resume by about 2020 to 2030.

So what happens if I’m wrong? There is some modest (NOT catastrophic) warming, and the majority of humanity actually benefits. History shows that humanity and the environment benefit during warm periods.
And what happens if I’m right? That depends how much global cooling occurs. If cooling is moderate, more early frosts will reduce the grain harvest locally – not a huge problem. If global cooling is severe, frequent and widespread early frosts will significantly reduce the grain harvest, driving up food prices and having a major negative impact on humanity, and particularly the poor.
All in all, I’d prefer to be wrong. I could live with that – and so could many other people.
In the meantime, our politicians continue to obsess about mythical catastrophic manmade global warming (CAGW), despite the fact that there has been NO net global warming for ~10-15 years.
Should severe global cooling occur, humanity will be woefully unprepared.

DirkH
August 13, 2012 5:38 am

Thanks a lot, good to see someone stick his neck out and dare a prediction. So I have some time to get prepared.

August 13, 2012 5:38 am

Jeff M says:
Last I heard to total heat content of the Pacific was significantly down and could be linked to the drought conditions in much of North America.
see my posts:
hansen-is-just-wrong – 1
and
hansen-is-just-wrong – 2

beng
August 13, 2012 5:45 am

Answer — right now. Summer is already on decline — mid-fifties this morning for the first time.

F. Guimaraes
August 13, 2012 6:04 am

says:August 13, 2012 at 4:35 am
“According to the Met Office the UK has been cooling since the year 2000. Our temperature anomaly is now the same as during the 1730′s”
The analysis of Artic seaice extent of the Met Office seems more reliable than the NOAA analysis in my opinion:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadisst/charts/NHEM_extanom.png
It shows a coherent prompt response of the ice extent to solar radiation in the last 30 years, which is also coherent with the increased snowfall in Alaska since 2008. The graph of NOAA simply shows nothing. (or, possibly, some political bias mixed with the data… )

August 13, 2012 6:09 am

David Archibald says:
It hasn’t cooled yet and we are three and a half years into the current cycle. The longer the temperature stays where it is, the more cooling has to come over the rest of the cycle for the predicted average reduction to occur.
Leif Svalgaard says
Or rather, that the prediction is already rapidly proving wrong.
Henry says
No, rather, it already started cooling, as observed from the drop in energy coming through the atmosphere.
http://www.letterdash.com/henryp/global-cooling-is-here
There is something wrong with the people doing the measuring (“hide the decline – my job depends on it!”) or with the results of the measurements themselves. Old story. 3M’s. It is either the man, the method or the machine.

Editor
August 13, 2012 6:12 am

beng says:
August 13, 2012 at 5:45 am
> Answer — right now. Summer is already on decline — mid-fifties this morning for the first time.
In New England, I look for the first wonderful Canadian air mass around mid August. Hasn’t happened yet. This year and past years aren’t anomalous, and we can still roast on Labor Day.

F. Guimaraes
August 13, 2012 6:17 am

There has been a spike in the solar radiation since mid 2011, that’s what I think is causing a little delay in the cooling trend. How long the delay will last depends on the exact character of the present grand minimum. If it reveal itself as a Dalton type the delay could last a little longer, if it’s a Maunder-type the cooling should be pronounced and start more quickly. The observation of solar radiation in the next year or so will bring the answer to this definition.
Thanks David, for your very interesting post.

August 13, 2012 6:19 am

A friend of mine bought a snow blower a year and a half ago, after the brutal winter. I don’t think he got to use it this last winter.
I just bought a new air conditioner for my house, so the cooling should start in 3 … 2 … 1 …

August 13, 2012 6:52 am

I’ve commented for about the last year, that melting arctic ice would expose more warm waters that originated in the tropics to frigid polar sky’s and would make an effective cooling system, similar in design to an automotive cooling system that’s thermostatically controlled.

AnonyMoose
August 13, 2012 6:54 am

“biggest calorimeter on the plant is the oceans”
You might want to fix that typo to make reuse of the text more pleasant.

August 13, 2012 7:23 am

Reblogged this on evilincandescentbulb and commented:
Question: Shall prospects of global cooling be considered a disaster too?
Answer: Note: Nikola Scafetta believes that, “The partial forecast indicates that climate may stabilize or cool until 2030-2040.” Scafetta’s forecast is based upon, ‘physical mechanisms’ and ‘the phenomenon of collective synchronization of coupled oscillators,’ such as for examples, ENSO effects and solar activity. Qing-Bin Lu believes that, “a long-term global cooling starting around 2002 is expected to continue for next five to seven decades.” Humanity will adapt and global cooling need not necessarily be considered a disaster for everyone. Even so there will be many challenges, as for example, Canadian wheat production. And, there always is the possibility of disaster. Walter Starck noted that if only humans really were able to heat the globe, “and it helps to prevent another ice age, this would be the most fortunate thing that has happened to our species since we barely escaped extinction from an especially cold period during the last ice age some 75,000 years ago.”
http://evilincandescentbulb.wordpress.com/2012/04/06/answer-key-to/

highflight56433
August 13, 2012 7:25 am

Leif Svalgaard says:
August 13, 2012 at 4:29 am
It hasn’t cooled yet and we are three and a half years into the current cycle. The longer the temperature stays where it is, the more cooling has to come over the rest of the cycle for the predicted average reduction to occur.
Or rather, that the prediction is already rapidly proving wrong.
However, we keep getting the word that UHI temps have polluted the average temperature change, and are not a measurement to which we depend to make. In the last century having had a more active sun followed by an increase in global temp, would we not expect that if Mr. sunshine takes a nap that there would follow over time less warming/more cooling?
Furthermore, in reading news from outside the US mainstream media that ignores anything like what happen last winter in SE Europe etc. And as another mentioned happening in Australia, S. Africa, etc. Maybe the old timers in Alaska fishing industry who claim last winter Bering Sea ice was more than they had ever seen should be a consideration as well. Just these little examples that are outside the “lab” that have real time effects on life.
All the “experts” have a scattering of reasons for their “but” arguing. BUT … so do the folks who experience changes in weather where they live a life time. Do the local lakes freeze over in winter? Nope… did they 60 years ago yep. Simple real life observations. BUT… 🙂

Jose
August 13, 2012 7:26 am

According to “tonyb”…
“According to the Met Office the UK has been cooling since the year 2000. Our temperature anomaly is now the same as during the 1730′s”
According to the Met Office:
CET average temperature in the 1730s: 9.86
CET average temperature since 2000: 10.26
CET average temperature for 2011: 10.70, the second warmest on record after 2006.
Which UK does “tonyb” live in?

John
August 13, 2012 7:41 am

It wouldn’t surprise me if it doesn’t cool, or cools very little and for a short period of time. If the amount of warming we get from CO2, black carbon, tropospheric ozone, and methane is toward the low end of projections — perhaps even close to Richard Lindzen’s projections — we are still in a warming world. Unless the solar influence is quite a bit larger than most of the solar community think, then to me it would make sense that cooling due to the current solar cycle might not be enough to cool the earth, but might be enough to cancel warming for a few years, everything else equal. That may be what we have been seeing the last few years.
Everything else may not be equal. Real data is the only thing that matters to me at this point. We haven’t seen warming for about 15 years. Arctic sea ice is now lower than during the previous low period, 2007. Chinese sulfate emissions have been steadily increasing. The PDO switched modes about 15 years go. Lots of moving parts. I don’t want to prejudge, let’s just see what happens going forward.

aaron
August 13, 2012 7:55 am

Leif, could the solar cycle be forward skewed; can the tail drag out?

August 13, 2012 8:01 am

cooling in Alaska, Anchorage, is worrying. Check my tables.

Doug Proctor
August 13, 2012 8:21 am

The cooling of 0.9C: global, global land, continental USA, mid-central-north United States?
The ratios of regions to global is economically and socially of greatest signficance. The multiplier going up in the Arctic is 3.5 to 5.0 X the alleged global rate right now; the cooling should be of a similar nature.
Your earlier work was focused on New Haven, New Hampshire, I believe, invovling a 2.4C drop (I could be mistaken in the detail) locally. Globally it was much less. Is this the 0.9C you are writing about?

TRM
August 13, 2012 8:22 am

David Archibald, HenryP & Leif Svalgaard:
Thanks. I always enjoy these reasoned discussions. You all provide some food for thought.
Cheers and may it be the temp you want where you are for water or snow skiing.

Michael Schaefer
August 13, 2012 8:53 am

I say cooling is on it’s way already.
“The Summer That Wasn’t” – here in Germany.
I know, I know – Weather is not Climate. Tell me about it when I mount snow tires on my car in September…

Jimbo
August 13, 2012 8:54 am

Let’s hope it doesn’t start cooling soon as it would be devastating for the poor frogs whose decline was previously blamed on global warming.

BBC, Roger Black, 12 August 2012
More changeable temperatures, a consequence of global warming, may be helping to abet the threat that a lethal fungal disease poses to frogs……………..
On its own, the fungus fared better in cooler conditions, and when the temperature changes were regular.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19199197

August 13, 2012 8:58 am

Thank you, David Archibald, always enjoy your writings.
K.R. Frank

Lawrence beatty
August 13, 2012 9:04 am

Now I know this may sound daft but if any cooling due to low sunspot activity is taking place then surely it’s to do with Svensgard’s extra cloud cover; but is this actually happening?
Also if it is and average cloud cover increases doesn’t this too trap heat thus initially making the world warmer or sustaining in a more even temperature which is what the satellite data has been showing over the last 12 years a kind of levelling. Of course the key to this is whether according to still yet unproved theory a quite sun increases cloud cover. If cloud cover has increased I would then suggest heat trapping until a critical point is reached where the oceans lose their heat due to lack of shortwave heating and eventually the heat drains although heat loss was slowed down due to those very same clouds that prevent or slow ocean heating. And surely if all this tripe I’m suggesting were true then there could be a very long (relative to our human impatience) stalemate heating budget situation where less is going in but less is also going out.
But hey what do I know.
It could turn out that the warmist and the coolists don’t know what the hell they are talking about

August 13, 2012 9:22 am

aaron says:
August 13, 2012 at 7:55 am
Leif, could the solar cycle be forward skewed; can the tail drag out?
Cycle 5 is very ill-defined [not enough observation] and the large ‘opening spike’ is likely not real. The general rule is that for low cycles, the rise time is long, and the ‘tail’ is correspondingly short. So cycle 24 is not going to be 17 years long. More like 12 or 13. So only 9 years to go. The North Pole is reversing polarity right now and the South Pole perhaps in a year or so. Here is a recent talk about polar field reversals http://www.leif.org/research/Asymmetric-Solar-Polar-Field-Reversals-talk.pdf The text for each slide is here http://www.leif.org/research/Talking_Points_for_Asymmetric_Reversals.pdf

Allen
August 13, 2012 9:37 am

When will we have the data to test this hypothesis? Do we have to wait until 2050?

August 13, 2012 9:44 am

Henry@jose
Now, can you bring me the calibration certificate of the thermometer that they used in 1730?

August 13, 2012 9:45 am

MiCro says (on August 13, 2012 at 6:52 am), “I’ve commented for about the last year, that melting arctic ice would expose more warm waters that originated in the tropics to frigid polar sky’s and would make an effective cooling system, similar in design to an automotive cooling system that’s thermostatically controlled.”
Now that is one of the more interesting comments I’ve read in a while.
What you’re describing is a “negative feedback” mechanism. One of the alarmists’ major arguments for an unstable climate (high “climate sensitivity” to “forcings”) is that reduced albedo of the sea from melting arctic ice would cause increased absorption of sunlight (a “positive feedback”), and accelerated global warming. But does that make sense?
If we ask, “what part of the globe should that cause to warm?” the answer is obviously, “the part with the reduced albedo, of course – i.e., the Arctic Ocean.” But, will reduced ice cover really warm the thus-exposed water? Reduced albedo works both ways: it reduces emission as well as absorption, and a layer of ice insulates the water below, preventing the agitation that transports heat to and from the surface.
Does someone here know the answer to this question: what are the heat flows for open Arctic Ocean water during the summer (which is mostly daytime)? Does heat gained from absorption of sunlight exceed heat lost from longwave radiation emitted? Or are ocean currents, moving water from warmer latitudes, the only reason that Arctic Ocean water ever warms at all, even in the summer?
In other words, is reduction of Arctic sea ice in a warmer world a net positive feedback mechanism (due to increased sunlight absorption), or a net negative feedback mechanism (due to increased radiative heat loss, per MiCro’s observation)?

Matt
August 13, 2012 10:05 am

Or maybe the prediction is wrong 🙂

David Larsen
August 13, 2012 10:08 am

The warmist crowd can move back into their caves.

Edim
August 13, 2012 10:13 am

It kinda already started, but the real thing (very rapid cooling) will start when the solar cycle starts declining (after 2014/2015). By 2020 we will have 30 years of no warming.

August 13, 2012 10:18 am

Here is a clear and fair comparison of SC24, SC14 and SC5.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/SC24-14-5.htm

August 13, 2012 10:22 am

vukcevic says:
August 13, 2012 at 10:18 am
Here is a clear and fair comparison of SC24, SC14 and SC5.
Since we know very little about SC5 [not enough observations], it is impossible to make a ‘fair’ comparison.

MikeP
August 13, 2012 10:30 am

DaveBurton, Clouds will complicate the feedbacks for the Arctic just as they do elsewhere. More open water means more evaporation which means potentially more clouds which means less sunlight reaching the ocean surface. Or more open water means more evaporation which means more rain in the summer and more snow in early winter which means less overall clouds and more sunlight reaching the ocean surface. This kind of handwaving has already been used to justify greater NH snowfall in the recent past. However, I believe that the reality is complex enough that I don’t think one can simply stare at the ceiling and say exactly what will happen. We need to know a lot more than we already do.

August 13, 2012 10:33 am

daveburton says:
August 13, 2012 at 9:45 am
” One of the alarmists’ major arguments for an unstable climate (high “climate sensitivity” to “forcings”) is that reduced albedo of the sea from melting arctic ice would cause increased absorption of sunlight (a “positive feedback”), and accelerated global warming. ”
You might enjoy this paper:
http://sun.iwu.edu/~gpouch/Climate/RawData/WaterAlbedo001.pdf
Basically, above 70-80 degrees Lat, a lot of the incoming solar energy gets reflected, not absorbed by water. You can see this as glare on wet surfaces.
I don’t know how to quantify whether the feedback is positive or negative in the long run, but I suspect it’s a lot more difficult to answer than what the warmest would have us believe.

Jeff L
August 13, 2012 10:46 am

David,
“Solheim’s model predicts that Solar Cycle 24, for the northern hemisphere, will be 0.9º C cooler than Solar Cycle 23. It hasn’t cooled yet and we are three and a half years into the current cycle. The longer the temperature stays where it is, the more cooling has to come over the rest of the cycle for the predicted average reduction to occur.”
1) What is the standard deviation on the 0.9° C reduction forecast. Obviously the r^2 isn’t 1, so there are some error bars. Are we currently within those error bars ?
2) At what point in time do you consider the forecast to be a bust ? The reality might be more complicated – just as temps aren’t just about CO2, they may not also be just about the sun & these complications could lead to a bust in forecast – which isn’t the end of the world – just a good learning opportunity to try to develop a better model, which is in contrast to those chanting the CO2 mantra – there is no desire on that side of the argument to improve the model – just a desire to use their current model to control people’s behaviors.
Looking fwd to your thoughts on these 2 questions.

Editor
August 13, 2012 11:05 am

David and Jan-Erik’s cooling predictions are for surface temperatures, which historically have been predictable by the preceding solar cycle. There are two ways to account for that predictive power. It could be that the heat content of the planet starts dropping immediately when solar activity falls but it takes a while to be detectable thanks to “lags” in the system (signal dampening by the ocean heat-sink presumably), or it could be that the current solar cycle predicts something about what is going to happen to heat-content during the next solar cycle (or a combination of the two).
Hence David’s attention to sea level as an ocean calorimeter. If only we had a decent measure of current heat content, we’d have a much clearer picture of what is going on. In this post David is not looking at lags, or ocean dampening, but is looking at what is likely to happen with the sun during cycle 24. But if he is right, aren’t the effects on surface temperature still going to be dampened, so that their most visible effect on surface temperatures is seen during solar cycle 25?
I’m not reading too much into the lack of cooling at present. It’s hard to read anything into the vagaries of surface temperature when they are primarily determined by ocean fluctuations. The end of warming is already pretty strong confirmation that solar variation is at least as powerful driver of climate as CO2. If there is anything to read so quickly into the lack of cooling, I would say it provides a modicum of support for Nir Shaviv’s estimate that solar variation and CO2 have similarly sized effects on climate.
Hard to imagine that the world could be so lucky. All the predictions that CO2 will cause dangerous global warming are based on the assumption that ALL late 20th century warming was caused by CO2, indicating a very high climate sensitivity. If half of it was caused by the sun then all that scary multiplying-up of CO2 forcing effects disappears and the only thing in prospect is the benign warming seen during the Roman Optimum and the MWP, while at the same time CO2 would still be powerful enough a warming agent to provide us effective control over planetary temperature. We can stave off the next descent into glaciation just by continuing to release stored CO2 into the atmosphere, which we can easily do at least for the couple hundred years it will take us to advance technologically to the point where we can stave off glaciation by putting some giant reflectors into orbit to give us as much sun as we want.
Yet another Goldilocks coincidence in favor of our blessed blue marble? If so, I’d call it a modicum of evidence that there really is a God.

August 13, 2012 11:08 am

Lawrence beatty says:
August 13, 2012 at 9:04 am
All good points but I think the answer is as follows:
i) A quieter sun seems to cause more meridional jets in the mid latitudes with larger polar air masses developing at the expense of smaller equatorial air masses. In the process I suspect that the net latitudinal position of the jets and all the climate zones shift equatorward. I have proposed a possible mechanism previously. Svensmark’s cosmic rays are unlikely to be the cause, I think they are just a coincidental proxy for other mechanisms but there may be a small contribution. More likely is differential effects on ozone concentrations at different heights in the atmosphere which alter the vertical temperature profile.The gradient of the tropopause height changes between equator and pole to allow latitudinal sliding of the climate zones beneath the tropopause.That alters the rate of energy flow from surface to space.An entirely negative system response which serves to ensure long term system stability whatever the forcing mechanism. The baseline is set by atmospheric pressure at the surface but that is for another day.
ii) Either way, the effect is to increase the length of the lines of air mass mixing to produce more clouds globally. There is evidence that there have been more meridional jets and increased global cloudiness with higher global albedo since around 2000.
iii) As you say, clouds both insulate and reflect but insulation only slows the rate at which energy is lost from the system (primarily the oceans) whereas reflection denies energy to the system altogether so over enough time the cumulative effect is net system cooling.
iv) That solar effect on albedo skews the net thermal effect of the ENSO process towards warming El Ninos if the sun is active and towards cooling La Ninas if the sun is inactive. Changes in albedo have most effect either side of the equator where the ENSO phenomenon is generated.
iv) The logical implication is that a quiet sun encourages net system cooling by increasing global albedo for less energy into the oceans. An active sun does the opposite.The only remaining issue is as to the length of the lag times. On the basis of the 1997/8 El Nino having caused the 2007 Arctic ice loss about ten years seem right.I expect the effect of trhe recent solar minimum with the record negative Arctic Oscillation to show its full effect in about 8 years time.
I think David is correct in general terms but the precise values need to be ascertained from future observations. I would be surprised if he is exactly correct but he is surely on the right track.

August 13, 2012 11:14 am

Alec Rawls says:
August 13, 2012 at 11:05 am
David and Jan-Erik’s cooling predictions are for surface temperatures, which historically have been predictable by the preceding solar cycle.
Not so: http://www.leif.org/research/Cycle%20Length%20Temperature%20Correlation.pdf

Gail Combs
August 13, 2012 11:15 am

HenryP says:
August 13, 2012 at 8:01 am
cooling in Alaska, Anchorage, is worrying. Check my tables.
_________________________
Beat me to it. The record snowfall is not melting out: Accuweather.com: Endless Winter for Alaska’s Mountains This Year

… The all-time record snowfall of 133.6 inches last winter – just over 11 feet – could give Anchorage an endless winter….The combination of heavy snowfall and a cool spring caused the lingering snow, said United States Department of Agriculture Snow Survey Supervisor Rick McClure. He said that it’s unusual to see snow still remaining in some of the mountains that surround Anchorage…

Given the oceans act as a giant hot watter bottle, I would not expect to see cooling temperatures from a quiet sun to be evident short term.
NASA: Quiet Sun Means Cooling of Earth’s Upper Atmosphere

New measurements from a NASA satellite show a dramatic cooling in the upper atmosphere that correlates with the declining phase of the current solar cycle. For the first time, researchers can show a timely link between the Sun and the climate of Earth’s thermosphere….

The Graphs in the article of the “Energy emitted by the upper atmosphere as infrared (IR) radiation in 2002 (top) and 2008 (bottom)” are interesting since they show a decrease with Nitric Oxide (NO) as the IR emitter in one set of graphs and CO2 as the IR emitter in the other set of graphs.

The long sunspot cycle 23 predicts a significant temperature decrease in cycle 24
Abstract
Relations between the length of a sunspot cycle and the average temperature in the same and the next cycle are calculated for a number of meteorological stations in Norway and in the North Atlantic region. No significant trend is found between the length of a cycle and the average temperature in the same cycle, but a significant negative trend is found between the length of a cycle and the temperature in the next cycle. This provides a tool to predict an average temperature decrease of at least 1.0 ◦ C from solar cycle 23 to 24 for the stations and areas analyzed. We find for the Norwegian local stations investigated that 25–56% of the temperature increase the last 150 years may be attributed to the Sun. For 3 North Atlantic stations we get 63–72% solar contribution. This points to the Atlantic currents as reinforcing a solar signal…..

Here is one for Vukcevic if he has not seen it already: NASA: Giant Breach in Earth’s Magnetic Field Discovered

…”At first I didn’t believe it,” says THEMIS project scientist David Sibeck of the Goddard Space Flight Center. “This finding fundamentally alters our understanding of the solar wind-magnetosphere interaction.”
The magnetosphere is a bubble of magnetism that surrounds Earth and protects us from solar wind. Exploring the bubble is a key goal of the THEMIS mission, launched in February 2007. The big discovery came on June 3, 2007, when the five probes serendipitously flew through the breach just as it was opening. Onboard sensors recorded a torrent of solar wind particles streaming into the magnetosphere, signaling an event of unexpected size and importance…..

AJB
August 13, 2012 11:18 am

Leif Svalgaard says, August 13, 2012 at 9:22 am
Interesting slide on page 25. Here is an extract from SDO HMI today:
http://s7.postimage.org/tvvkqjyaz/South_Pole.png
Hard to tell with the south pole tipped away from us at the moment but do you really think it’ll take another year for it to switch? Looks to be happening fairly quickly.

Gail Combs
August 13, 2012 11:18 am

HenryP says:
August 13, 2012 at 9:44 am
Henry@jose
Now, can you bring me the calibration certificate of the thermometer that they used in 1730?
_______________________
Spoken like a true chemist.

August 13, 2012 11:20 am

Posted on August 13, 2012 by Anthony Watts
Guest post by David Archibald
My papers and those of Jan-Erik Solheim et al predict a significant cooling over Solar Cycle 24 relative to Solar Cycle 23. Solheim’s model predicts that Solar Cycle 24, for the northern hemisphere, will be 0.9º C cooler than Solar Cycle 23. It hasn’t cooled yet and we are three and a half years into the current cycle. The longer the temperature stays where it is, the more cooling has to come over the rest of the cycle for the predicted average reduction to occur.

There is a stable solar sun spot clock of 11.196 years which is modified in its frequency by an unknown mechanism. Shifts to lower frequencies results in decreasing temperatures and vice versa.
http://www.volker-doormann.org/images/sun_shift_buent.gif
http://www.volker-doormann.org/images/shift_ssn_comp1.gif
The Solheim method uses the solar sun spot number function and has a time resolution of about 11 years. Using solar tide functions the time resolution can be refined to two month:
http://www.volker-doormann.org/images/uah_gl_july_2012.gif
However, it’s the Sun.
V.

August 13, 2012 11:21 am

MiCro
I have been trying to tell AGW proponents for some years that warm water surfaces at the North Pole where the sun is weakest are going to accelerate system cooling rather than warming.
The extra sunlight into the water in high summer will be more than offset by more heat loss to the air in spring and autumn. Indeed even in high summer the heat loss from the exposed water might exceed the extra energy in from sunlight.
My favourite analogy is the speed at which a bald man can lose body heat when going without a hat in cold weather.Any extra light on his head will count for nothing.
I see the current low levels of Arctic ice as draining energy from the currently warm north atlantic more quickly whilst at the same time the available replacement energy from equatorial regions is being depleted by increased global cloudiness skewing ENSO in favour of cooling La Ninas.
I expect a drop in global air temperatures as soon as the cooling of the north atlantic combines with the cooling observed in parts of the equatorial oceans.
Many are suggesting a noticeable impact within 2 years and I think that is a reasonable estimate but the oceans are a big energy store so it could be up to another 8 years for the main event. That is just a guess though, it might well be sooner.

August 13, 2012 11:27 am

AJB says:
August 13, 2012 at 11:18 am
Hard to tell with the south pole tipped away from us at the moment but do you really think it’ll take another year for it to switch? Looks to be happening fairly quickly.
One can debate what ‘reversal’ means. My definition is that all the old polarity at all longitudes must be replaced by new polarity, and a year to go looks reasonable judging from previous reversals.

August 13, 2012 11:33 am

“If there is anything to read so quickly into the lack of cooling, I would say it provides a modicum of support for Nir Shaviv’s estimate that solar variation and CO2 have similarly sized effects on climate.”
I’m doubtful that they are anywhere close to similar.
If one looks at the size of the climate zone and jetstream shifts from MWP to LIA and LIA to date they appear to be in the region of 1000 miles latitudinally.
I accept that in principle more CO2 from human emissions should cause a system response but on what scale ?
The climate zones moved poleward when the sun was active and seem now to be moving back equatorward with the less active sun.
Our CO2 emissions seems to have made no difference to the change in trend since around 2000.
If forced to guess I’d say that our emissions might shift the system up to a mile as compared to the 1000 mile shifts from sun and oceans.
During ice age / interglacial transitions I suspect shifts of well over 1000 miles latitudinally.

tallbloke
August 13, 2012 11:36 am

Leif Svalgaard says:
August 13, 2012 at 4:10 am
Altrock’s green corona emissions diagramme… suggests that Solar Cycle 24 will be 17 years long, ending in 2026.
In his presentation at the SPD meeting in June 2012, Altrock suggests:
“the maximum smoothed sunspot number in the northern hemisphere ALREADY OCCURRED at 2011.6 ± 0.3″ making cycle 24 short.

On average, the solar cycle splits such that the rise time is a bit under two thirds the length of the fall time. However, all bets are off for cycles 24/25. There may not be a clear minimum between them. We may not be in a position to argue about it for many years, since it may not be clear whether cycle 24 had a long low double peak, or whether it merged into cycle 25. The anomalous trailing hump on the cycle(s) preceding the Dalton MInimum may be the nearest analogue, though I would expect the split to be more even this time. Our definition of a solar cycle is based on past experience. But as any investment company will tell you, past performance is no guarantee of future trends. Expect the unexpected.

August 13, 2012 11:37 am

Gail Combs says:
August 13, 2012 at 11:15 am
NASA: Giant Breach in Earth’s Magnetic Field Discovered
…”At first I didn’t believe it,” says THEMIS project scientist David Sibeck of the Goddard Space Flight Center. “This finding fundamentally alters our understanding of the solar wind-magnetosphere interaction.”

This is just the usual NASA hype. No alteration is needed. That the magnetosphere opens up when the magnetic field in the solar wind turns southwards was predicted by Dungey in 1961 and proven by in-situ measurements in 1968.

Johanus
August 13, 2012 11:42 am

David Archibald says:
“So when will it cool? As Nir Shaviv and others have noted, the biggest calorimeter on the plant is the oceans. ”
… yes, but measurements therefrom are noisy and somewhat uncertain due to instrumentation issues (as discussed frequently in these WUWT pages).
A much more reliable calorimeter is on-board the SORCE space-craft. It also has had “calibration” issues, but these have been successfully addressed according to the experts.
http://spot.colorado.edu/~koppg/TSI/
Total solar irradiance (TSI) only varies (in luminosity) by 0.07% between solar minima and maxima (with more variance in shorter EUV wavelengths).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_solar_irradiance#Solar_irradiance
So, based on this direct solar observation, why should we expect more cooling at the minima?

August 13, 2012 11:45 am

Henry beatty
Nothing “daft” if you come here to find out something.
I have come to believe that the effect of more or less clouds and cloudiness may sort of cancel each other out, if there is more or less of it. During the day, when there is “more” clouds you do get more deflection of sunlight. But during the night, it traps more heat. So which effect is more?
Studying my own results,
http://www.letterdash.com/henryp/global-cooling-is-here
I think the effect of more or less clouds is minor.
There is a clear natural relationship, parabolic, nogal, when you plot the change in maxima in degrees C per annum against time. Checking my current zero point on the x-axis I find that earth has started getting less energy from the sun around 1995 and checking my zero point on the y-axis (2012) I find that it is currently cooling by about -0.08 degree C per annum on the maxima. The nature of the graph for means is one that lags a bit on the graph for maxima: earth has a store where it keeps its energy and a lot of that energy only comes out a bit later. I would generally agree with the available datasets like RSS, UAH, Hadcrut3 and Hadsst2 that maximum energy output by earth must have been a few years after 1995. But it will soon pick up on that fall in the maxima. In fact, I think it is happening already. There is simply less energy coming through. I am surprised that nobody has picked it up yet. I am still studying the reasons, but the Sun-UV-ozone cycle and/or the shrinking of the atmosphere, either way, creating (relatively) more ozone in the upper atmosphere, is the most likely cause for the cooling.
My results also seem to indicate that it is not one single sun cycle that brought us here, in a cooling zone. We were warming from about 1944 to 1995. We are now cycling back and (I gather) around 2045 we will be back where we were in 1945. Those old enough will remember that the winter of 1944 was bitterly cold. In Europe they called it the “hunger” winter. Many people lost their lives, not (only)because of the war, but because of the cold and the lack of food….

August 13, 2012 11:55 am

“why should we expect more cooling at the minima?”
Because something other than raw TSI affects global cloudiness and albedo which in turn affects the amount of energy received by the oceans and the oceans affect tropospheric energy flows.
Quiet sun more clouids / active sun less clouds.

August 13, 2012 11:56 am

tallbloke says:
August 13, 2012 at 11:36 am
Our definition of a solar cycle is based on past experience. But as any investment company will tell you, past performance is no guarantee of future trends.
Tell that to Archibald. I count four ‘may be’s in your comment. Too many weasel words for my taste.
Your example is flawed, as solar cycles are based on physics while investments are not.
I would expect the split to be more even this time….Expect the unexpected.
So your expectation is not based on anything.

August 13, 2012 12:01 pm

Stephen Wilde says:
August 13, 2012 at 11:55 am
Quiet sun more clouds / active sun less clouds.
Observations show otherwise: http://climate4you.com/images/CloudCoverAllLevel%20AndWaterColumnSince1983.gif

Editor
August 13, 2012 12:05 pm

Stephen: Thanks for the estimate of the relative size of solar and CO2 effects in your ozone driven model. As for Shaviv’s estimate of similar sized solar and CO2 effects
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0273117711007411
I don’t put much stock it it. High correlations between GCR and global temperature go back many thousands of years (many millions in Shaviv’s study), while Shaviv’s estimate of solar vs. CO2 effects is only based on the last 100 years of instrumental data.

August 13, 2012 12:08 pm

We have to be realistic about direct link between solar cycles and global temperatures
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/SSN-GT.htm
Sun has its cycles, the Earth has its cycles too, question is:
Can sun trigger Earth’s interior non-synchronous oscillations?
I think it can:
Ap -volcanic index: http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/Ap-VI.htm
Earth’s core – global temperatures: http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/GSC1.htm
I have nearly finished an article which will attempt to explain how this might work.

August 13, 2012 12:12 pm

HenryP says:
August 13, 2012 at 11:45 am
“During the day, when there is “more” clouds you do get more deflection of sunlight. But during the night, it traps more heat. So which effect is more?”
My studies of the difference in Daily Rising temps minus Daily Falling temps (follow the link in my name) shows very little difference between the two.
In fact if anything, periods where there’s a little more cooling, temperatures seem to go up.

matt v.
August 13, 2012 12:27 pm

The potential cooling of 1.2C applies mostly to the North Atlantic region and Norway , the area of study by Jan- Erik Solheim et al. Globally the temperature decline will be less as we saw with the global atmospheric temperature decline during the last three low solar cycles between 1878 and 1913 when the global averge annual anomalies [HADCRUT 3]dropped from about oC to- 0.2C to about -o.6C to -0.8C , a drop closer to about 0.6 C . On the other hand isolated years and certain inland areas may cool faster and the 1.2C for these areas may be about right or even higher. The start of the cooling in my opinion is not dependent at all on the current solar cycle but by the lagged timing and amount of heat already put into the oceans during the latter phases of solar cycle #23. There may be no major new atmospheric cooling until the global SST starts to drop also in a more constant pattern[ like betwen 1880-1910.] The global SST is again rising this year but was dropping between 2002 and 2011. My best guess for the cooling to pick up again is probably 2015 when AMO may again go negative or cooler.

tallbloke
August 13, 2012 12:31 pm

Leif Svalgaard says:
August 13, 2012 at 11:56 am
solar cycles are based on physics

Solar cycles are the human interpretation of observed phenomena. No-one, especially including you, knows what the physics is yet. Which is why there are as many opinions about the Sun’s physics as there are solar physicists.
So your expectation is not based on anything.
You’re wrong about that too. When I said “expect the unexpected” I was referring to your assumption that cycle 24 will be short because there has been a lull in activity after mid 2011 which you believe to be ‘solar maximum’.
My own expectations are based on the solar-planetary theory, which has proven itself better able to make predictions of solar activity than the dynamologists can.

August 13, 2012 12:40 pm

Leif,
Thank you for this link:
http://climate4you.com/images/CloudCoverAllLevel%20AndWaterColumnSince1983.gif
I’ve been using the Earthshine project and I see that the high level clouds in your link follow that dataset.
High level clouds appear to have been declining up to about 2000 and then started to increase.
I would suggest that until 2000 solar activity was at a sufficiently high level on average to cause a slow decline in high clouds but around 2000 the level of activity fell below the necessary threshold and since then high clouds have been increasing.
As for the precise details of the changing relationship between cloud heights and cloud quantities it would appear that that remains uncertain but going by the Earthshine project the net effect has been declining albedo until 2000 but increasing albedo since.
Just as I said 🙂

August 13, 2012 12:48 pm

Gail Combs says
HenryP says:
August 13, 2012 at 8:01 am
cooling in Alaska, Anchorage, is worrying. Check my tables.
_________________________
Beat me to it. The record snowfall is not melting out: Accuweather.com: Endless Winter for Alaska’s Mountains This Year
Henry says
Hi Gail, I think they are still very optimistic if they think that it (the heavy snow cover on Anchorage mountains) is only for one year. My results show a clear continuous cooling trend there. If I were living there, I would seriously consider packing my bags. Because we have not even seen the worst yet, not for a long, long, time….I reckon only in 2045 will we see warming coming back again.
(On the Norwegian arctic the trend is different because -I suspect- they pick up some heat from the increased condensation due to the cooling of earth, going in that direction, in general; that also seems to apply to the USA east coast)

August 13, 2012 12:52 pm

Stephen Wilde says:
August 13, 2012 at 12:40 pm
High level clouds appear to have been declining up to about 2000 and then started to increase.
Other cloud enthusiasts follow Svensmark and claim that the effect is in the low clouds, so you claim they are all wrong.

August 13, 2012 12:57 pm

tallbloke says:
August 13, 2012 at 12:31 pm
Which is why there are as many opinions about the Sun’s physics as there are solar physicists.
Obviously not true.
I was referring to your assumption that cycle 24 will be short because there has been a lull in activity after mid 2011 which you believe to be ‘solar maximum’.
SC24 will not be ‘short’. It will be what small cycles are: longish, but not 17 years, thus shorter than Archibald’s claim. The polar fields reverse at maximum and are reversing in the North right now, so the North has maximum. The South is likely a year away.
My own expectations are based on the solar-planetary theory, which has proven itself better able to make predictions of solar activity than the dynamologists can.
the solar-planetary ‘theory’ is nonsense and has no predictive power.

Steven Hill
August 13, 2012 1:27 pm

Interesting comments…..looks like the Obama budget projections, that’s right, we have no budget. 😉

tallbloke
August 13, 2012 1:43 pm

Leif Svalgaard says:
August 13, 2012 at 12:57 pm
SC24 will not be ‘short’.

Leif Svalgaard says:
August 13, 2012 at 4:10 am
Altrock suggests:
“the maximum smoothed sunspot number in the northern hemisphere ALREADY OCCURRED at 2011.6 ± 0.3″ making cycle 24 short.
Leif Svalgaard says:
August 13, 2012 at 9:22 am
The general rule is that for low cycles, the rise time is long, and the ‘tail’ is correspondingly short. So cycle 24 is not going to be 17 years long. More like 12 or 13.

You even disagree with yourself between posts. No wonder dynamology is in such disarray. According to your “general rule” cycle 24 should be extremely short, given that it’s rise time to maximum is less than two years and the ‘tail’ should be “correspondingly short”.
Truth is, you haven’t got a clue what cycle 24 will do.

August 13, 2012 1:45 pm

Gail Combs says: August 13, 2012 at 11:15 am
…….
Hi Ms Combs
Thanks, it is an interesting article, I did see it some time ago. In last 2-3 years there were number of follow-ups. Some of the NASA experts are now focusing on the ideas which I would consider not to be dissimilar to what I have been suggesting since 2009.

August 13, 2012 1:50 pm

I don’t normally participate in these solar discussions, but I’ll point out one thing.
Annual average temperature is a meaningless metric for whether the climate is warming or cooling. You need to look at winter averages, because any warming in the rest of the year not retained in the winter is ‘heat’ that isn’t retained in the climate system for more than a year, and thus irrelevant to whether the climate is warming/cooling over longer timescales.
And I think you will find winter averages have indeed cooled markedly in recent years.

August 13, 2012 1:52 pm

Leif Svalgaard says:
August 13, 2012 at 12:57 pm
“the solar-planetary ‘theory’ is nonsense and has no predictive power.”
My “feeling” is that the Sun orbiting around the CoG of the Solar System would have an impact on both it’s fusion engine, as well as it’s circulatory patterns, and graphs of solar activity seem to follow planetary configurations.
Why should I believe it’s nonsense?

August 13, 2012 1:52 pm

tallbloke says:
August 13, 2012 at 12:31 pm
My own expectations are based on the solar-planetary theory, which has proven itself better able to make predictions of solar activity than the dynamologists can.
The dynamo theory prediction of SC24 is borne out quite well. So, if your expectations do not come to pass you will claim that solar-planetary theory has been falsified.

August 13, 2012 1:53 pm

“Other cloud enthusiasts follow Svensmark and claim that the effect is in the low clouds, so you claim they are all wrong..”
Looks that way from the data you produced.
I think that the cosmic rays have little effect but maybe some and are merely a coincidental proxy for solar variations. The real cause of cloud and albedo variations is the change in the length of the lines of air mass mixing when the jets become more (or less) meridional.

Werner Brozek
August 13, 2012 1:57 pm

matt v. says:
August 13, 2012 at 12:27 pm
The global SST is again rising this year but was dropping between 2002 and 2011.

‘Rising’ compared to what? Here is how I see the overall picture. With the sea surface anomaly for June at 0.351, the average for the first six months of the year is (0.203 + 0.230 + 0.242 + 0.292 + 0.339 + 0.351)/6 = 0.276. This is about the same as in 2011 when it was 0.273 and ranked 12th for that year. 1998 was the warmest at 0.451. The highest ever monthly anomaly was in August of 1998 when it reached 0.555. If the June anomaly continued for the rest of the year, 2012 would end up 10th. In order for a new record to be set in 2012, the average for the last 6 months of the year would need to be 0.63. Since this is above the highest monthly anomaly ever recorded, it is virtually impossible for 2012 to set a new record. Sea surface temperatures are flat since January 1997 or 15 years, 6 months (goes to June). (I realize the last 3 months are not on WFT, but knowing their values, I know the slope would be flat to June had they been present.) See
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1997/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1997/trend

August 13, 2012 1:58 pm

tallbloke says:
August 13, 2012 at 1:43 pm
Altrock suggests: …
You even disagree with yourself between posts. No wonder dynamology is in such disarray. According to your “general rule” cycle 24 should be extremely short, given that it’s rise time to maximum is less than two years and the ‘tail’ should be “correspondingly short”.
It would help you if you could read.
SC24 will be about 12 years as small cycles usually are, e.g. SC5, SC6, SC14. If the maximum is late in the cycle, the tail will be reduced correspondingly. Small cycles have a long drawn-out maximum lasting several years. Again SC14 is a good example.

August 13, 2012 2:02 pm

MiCro says:
August 13, 2012 at 1:52 pm
My “feeling” is that the Sun orbiting around the CoG of the Solar System would have an impact on both it’s fusion engine, as well as it’s circulatory patterns, and graphs of solar activity seem to follow planetary configurations. Why should I believe it’s nonsense?
Because the Sun is in free fall and feel no forces [except extremely small tidal forces]. Also, any changes in the core of sun would take hundreds of thousands of years to make their way to the surface.

tallbloke
August 13, 2012 2:11 pm

Leif Svalgaard says:
August 13, 2012 at 1:58 pm
It would help you if you could read.

It would help if you could remember what you wrote.
SC24 will be about 12 years as small cycles usually are.
I’ll nail that to the predictions page on the blog, thanks.

August 13, 2012 2:18 pm

tallbloke says:
August 13, 2012 at 2:11 pm
It would help if you could remember what you wrote.
Anybody can just check the comments to see your misrepresentations for themselves.
“SC24 will be about 12 years as small cycles usually are.”
I’ll nail that to the predictions page on the blog, thanks.

Remember to give me due credit as the predication comes to pass.

Gail Combs
August 13, 2012 2:25 pm

Looks like NASA can not make up its mind.

Solar Cycle [24] Prediction (Updated 2012/08/02)
….The current prediction for Sunspot Cycle 24 gives a smoothed sunspot number maximum of about 60 in the Spring of 2013….
The prediction method has been slightly revised. The previous method found a fit for both the amplitude and the starting time of the cycle along with a weighted estimate of the amplitude from precursor predictions (polar fields and geomagnetic activity near cycle minimum). Recent work [see Hathaway Solar Physics; 273, 221 (2011)] indicates that the equatorward drift of the sunspot latitudes as seen in the Butterfly Diagram follows a standard path for all cycles provided the dates are taken relative to a starting time determined by fitting the full cycle. Using data for the current sunspot cycle indicates a starting date of May of 2008. Fixing this date and then finding the cycle amplitude that best fits the sunspot number data yields the current (revised) prediction….
A number of techniques are used to predict the amplitude of a cycle during the time near and before sunspot minimum. Relationships have been found between the size of the next cycle maximum and the length of the previous cycle, the level of activity at sunspot minimum, and the size of the previous cycle.
Among the most reliable techniques are those that use the measurements of changes in the Earth’s magnetic field at, and before, sunspot minimum. These changes in the Earth’s magnetic field are known to be caused by solar storms but the precise connections between them and future solar activity levels is still uncertain.
Of these “geomagnetic precursor” techniques three stand out…..

I will have to go along with Tallbloke, scientists are still getting surprised by the sun and this solar cycle. Just as the last minimum was long, low and drawn out. I think we are looking at a low flat maximum like was seen in cycle 14. (wiggle matching) I also think this long drawn out maximum will mean a long cycle.
NOAA: Solar Cycle 24 Prediction Updated May 2009

SteveSadlov
August 13, 2012 2:35 pm

Thank goodness for the current, weak El Nino. If not for that, we’d be screwed.

August 13, 2012 2:44 pm

Gail Combs says:
August 13, 2012 at 2:25 pm
Looks like NASA can not make up its mind.
Hathaway’s forecast [Not prediction. The difference is that a prediction is made before the cycle, but a forecast is continuously updated with current data] is his own. Not NASA’s.
I think we are looking at a low flat maximum like was seen in cycle 14. (wiggle matching) I also think this long drawn out maximum will mean a long cycle.
Cycle 14 was 11.8 years long…

tallbloke
August 13, 2012 2:48 pm

MiCro says:
August 13, 2012 at 1:52 pm
My “feeling” is that the Sun orbiting around the CoG of the Solar System would have an impact on both it’s fusion engine, as well as it’s circulatory patterns, and graphs of solar activity seem to follow planetary configurations. Why should I believe it’s nonsense?
You shouldn’t. See the numerous articles on my blog covering peer reviewed papers from people better qualified to elucidate the possible physical mechanisms than Leif. He speaks with false certainty.

Jim G
August 13, 2012 2:49 pm

tallbloke says:
August 13, 2012 at 1:43 pm
Leif Svalgaard says:
August 13, 2012 at 12:57 pm
SC24 will not be ‘short’.
“You even disagree with yourself between posts. No wonder dynamology is in such disarray. According to your “general rule” cycle 24 should be extremely short, given that it’s rise time to maximum is less than two years and the ‘tail’ should be “correspondingly short”.
Truth is, you haven’t got a clue what cycle 24 will do.”
It is probably due to that dark matter, which no one is able to detect in our local neighborhood, which Leif says has been theorized by some to be “inside the sun”. You know, that stuff that only interacts gravitationally with other matter and energy and has been conveniently hypothesized to exist in order to explain why our other theories of mass and gravity, though ASSUMED to be correct and complete, are not proving out well based upon actual observations. If so. it may be the fly in the solar ointment, so to speak.

James Abbott
August 13, 2012 3:01 pm

“My papers and those of Jan-Erik Solheim et al predict a significant cooling over Solar Cycle 24 relative to Solar Cycle 23. Solheim’s model predicts that Solar Cycle 24, for the northern hemisphere, will be 0.9º C cooler than Solar Cycle 23. It hasn’t cooled yet and we are three and a half years into the current cycle. The longer the temperature stays where it is, the more cooling has to come over the rest of the cycle for the predicted average reduction to occur.”
0.9 C ? That would take the northern hemisphere back to the mean seen about a century ago
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/Fig.A3.gif
We have just been through a prolonged solar minimum and there was no/very slight cooling. The solar min was more likely a factor in the temperature standstill seen since 2003, countering the rise in CO2 concentration.
Charles D. Camp and Ka Kit Tung
http://www.amath.washington.edu/research/articles/Tung/journals/GRL-solar-07.pdf
found a global warming signal of 0.18 C attributable to the 11-year solar cycle with larger changes near the poles, but nowhere near 0.9 C over a whole hemisphere.
This rather gives the game away:-
“It hasn’t cooled yet and we are three and a half years into the current cycle. The longer the temperature stays where it is, the more cooling has to come over the rest of the cycle for the predicted average reduction to occur.”
Or the prediction was completely wrong and is really speculation/wishful thinking.

August 13, 2012 3:05 pm

Leif Svalgaard says:
August 13, 2012 at 2:02 pm
“Because the Sun is in free fall and feel no forces [except extremely small tidal forces]. Also, any changes in the core of sun would take hundreds of thousands of years to make their way to the surface.”
It’s in free fall until it has to change direction since the CoG is moving. As for the hundreds of thousands of years, that’s potentially a good point, but even if true, the sun was falling around a moving CoG hundreds of thousands of year ago as well.

August 13, 2012 3:07 pm

tallbloke says:
August 13, 2012 at 2:48 pm
my blog covering peer reviewed papers from people better qualified to elucidate the possible physical mechanisms than Leif.
What did Wolff and Patrone say about Gough’s debunking of their paper: http://www.leif.org/research/Gough-Comment-on-Wolff-Patrone.doc
“I have no advice to offer the authors that I believe they might take. What they should do is go back to the original publications of Rayleigh and Chandrasekhar and try to understand them. If they succeed, and if they are honest, they would then withdraw the paper.”
I have not seen the retraction. Perhaps you could provide a link…

August 13, 2012 3:12 pm

Jim G says:
August 13, 2012 at 2:49 pm
stuff that only interacts gravitationally with other matter and energy and has been conveniently hypothesized to exist in order to explain why our other theories of mass and gravity, though ASSUMED to be correct and complete, are not proving out well based upon actual observations.
The theories about mass and gravity are not affected by the actual observations of dark matter and dark energy [are in fact used to detect those things]

August 13, 2012 3:14 pm

MiCro says:
August 13, 2012 at 3:05 pm
It’s in free fall until it has to change direction since the CoG is moving.
Not at all. an astronaut is weightless because he is in free fall. The CoG of him and the Earth is moving too as the astronaut circles the Earth.

August 13, 2012 3:30 pm

Among the most reliable techniques are those that use the measurements of changes in the Earth’s magnetic field at, and before, sunspot minimum. These changes in the Earth’s magnetic field are known to be caused by solar storms but the precise connections between them and future solar activity levels is still uncertain.
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/predict.shtml
The above makes sense only if NASA accepts (which paradoxically they do not) existence of electric & magnetic feedback circuit between sun and major magnetospheres via ‘magnetic cloud’ also known as ‘magnetic rope’(goggle either). Major players here are two gas giants’ magnetospheres, while the Earth with its minor magnetosphere gets caught in between.
This is bases of my sunspot number formula, with extrapolation providing a rough guidance of future solar activity.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/SSN.htm

tallbloke
August 13, 2012 3:35 pm

Leif Svalgaard says:
August 13, 2012 at 3:07 pm
tallbloke says:
August 13, 2012 at 2:48 pm
my blog covering peer reviewed papers from people better qualified to elucidate the possible physical mechanisms than Leif.
What did Wolff and Patrone say about Gough’s debunking of their paper:

They said they’d not had such a good laugh in a while and that there was no need to respond until Gough got his ‘criticism’ past peer review.

tallbloke
August 13, 2012 3:40 pm

Leif Svalgaard says:
August 13, 2012 at 3:14 pm
MiCro says:
August 13, 2012 at 3:05 pm
It’s in free fall until it has to change direction since the CoG is moving.
Not at all. an astronaut is weightless because he is in free fall. The CoG of him and the Earth is moving too as the astronaut circles the Earth.

Equating a two body problem with constant accelerations with the Sun’s situation caught betwixt nine large planets all moving at different velocities is a problematic oversimplification.

August 13, 2012 3:42 pm

James Abbott says:
August 13, 2012 at 3:01 pm
Or the prediction was completely wrong and is really speculation/wishful thinking.
Indeed. Now, this is, of course, testable. In a few years we shall know. Note, however that by postulating longer and longer cycles, the moment of reckoning is pushed further and further out.

August 13, 2012 3:46 pm

MiCro says:
August 13, 2012 at 3:05 pm
As for the hundreds of thousands of years, that’s potentially a good point, but even if true
The number is based on well-known physics and is true. One can quibble a bit about the exact value [depending on the composition]. but the order of magnitude is correct
the sun was falling around a moving CoG hundreds of thousands of year ago as well.
The point is that because of the very long travel time [by random diffusion] any periodicity of the order of decades or centuries will be completely washed out.

August 13, 2012 3:53 pm

tallbloke says:
August 13, 2012 at 3:40 pm
Equating a two body problem with constant accelerations with the Sun’s situation caught betwixt nine large planets all moving at different velocities is a problematic oversimplification.
Make the astronaut’s orbit non-circular. It makes no difference. And there are not nine large planets, they are a thousandth or less the solar mass and are far away. And it wouldn’t matter anyway. All the bodies are in free fall in their combined gravitational field [omitting tiny general relativity effects].

August 13, 2012 4:00 pm

vukcevic says:
August 13, 2012 at 3:30 pm
These changes in the Earth’s magnetic field are known to be caused by solar storms
You are confusing things. There are currents in space around the Earth that are caused by solar storms and are rather well understood. E.g. given solar wind data we can calculate with good accuracy what those currents are. The internal field originating in the core is not affected.
The above makes sense only if NASA accepts (which paradoxically they do not) existence of electric & magnetic feedback circuit between sun and major magnetospheres via ‘magnetic cloud’ also known as ‘magnetic rope’(goggle either).
NASA does not accept this because there is no such feedback current.
tallbloke says:
August 13, 2012 at 3:35 pm
“What did Wolff and Patrone say about Gough’s debunking of their paper”
They said they’d not had such a good laugh in a while and that there was no need to respond until Gough got his ‘criticism’ past peer review.

So, they [and you] chicken out. Perhaps you could copy us the email where W&P said that…

Henry Clark
August 13, 2012 4:07 pm

As can be seen, for example, at http://cosmicrays.oulu.fi/webform/query.cgi?startday=01&startmonth=01&startyear=2008&starttime=00%3A00&endday=30&endmonth=08&endyear=2012&endtime=00%3A00&resolution=Automatic+choice&picture=on in this year so far 2% more cosmic rays have been deflected on average than in 2011, and solar activity is still rising at the moment. Perhaps it will peak by the May 2013 prediction though. Solar-GCR effects are superimposed upon the 60-year ocean cycle, while on shorter timescales there is the ENSO oscillation.
The 60-year ocean cycle’s impact appears on such as the high temperatures in the late 1930s-1940s then also more recently. One good example is http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/ArcticIce/Images/arctic_temp_trends_rt.gif first for the arctic (showing temperatures then were comparably warm to more recent temperatures), and, secondly, for the average over the Northern Hemisphere as a whole when without dishonest revisionism of past temperature measurements, in http://img111.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=43034_ScreenHunter_296_Apr._08_09.29_122_441lo.jpg (original National Academy of Sciences graph before the political era) when combined with http://hidethedecline.eu/media/PERPLEX/fig75.jpg as well as the other data referenced in my comments at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/08/06/nasas-james-hansens-big-cherry-pick
Dr. Abdussamatov predicts cooling to start around 2014, with cooling rising over subsequent years and decades. (That’s without trying to take into account the ENSO, though, so personally I wouldn’t count on single-year precision but just wager sometime between 2013 and 2016 as about the start, since the AMO will be going down too). We need the current solar cycle to peak first.
His estimate extends to:
“The Earth as a planet will henceforward have negative balance in the energy budget which will result in the temperature drop [starting] in approximately 2014.” “The onset of the deep bicentennial minimum of TSI is expected in 2042±11, that of the 19th Little Ice Age in the past 7500 years – in 2055±11.”
http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/apr/article/view/14754
With that said, even though I would describe the past decade or so mostly as a plateau (and near the AMO oscillation index high point), temperatures have bordered on cooling since the 1997 albedo (cloud cover) change and the 1998 El Nino, as seen in http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss-land/from:1998/to:2013/plot/rss/from:1998/to:2013/trend for RSS satellite data while there is also what HenryP’s data shows.

Henry Clark
August 13, 2012 4:08 pm

HenryP says:
August 13, 2012 at 6:09 am
http://www.letterdash.com/henryp/global-cooling-is-here
I’ve looked at such before when you posted it, and I just wanted to thank you for interesting data, including showing how averages versus minimums and maximums are quite different quantities.

August 13, 2012 4:11 pm

tallbloke says:
August 13, 2012 at 3:40 pm
Equating a two body problem…
And it is not a two-body problem. Rather a three-body problem as the astronaut is in free fall in the combined gravitational field of the Earth and the Moon. Or a four-body problem if you include the Sun, or a MANY-body if you include the 588618 asteroids, 3157 comets, 176 planetary satellites, 8 planets, and the [large] Sun known today. None of this matters, as it didn’t matter to Gravity-B http://einstein.stanford.edu/

Graeme W
August 13, 2012 4:20 pm

tallbloke says:
August 13, 2012 at 3:40 pm

Equating a two body problem with constant accelerations with the Sun’s situation caught betwixt nine large planets all moving at different velocities is a problematic oversimplification.

Sorry, but the astronaut orbiting the Earth is not a two body problem. The Earth itself is moving in an elliptical orbit around the Sun (with varying velocities). The moon also has a gravitational effect on the astronaut, as does every other body in the Solar System (and, indeed, the universe). What defines free fall is that the body is freely “falling” in response to whatever current gravitation net vector is being experienced. The gravitational net vector does not have to be constant – a body will still be in free fall even if the gravitational net vector varies over time.

August 13, 2012 4:33 pm

Henry Clark says:
August 13, 2012 at 4:07 pm
Dr. Abdussamatov predicts cooling to start around 2014, with cooling rising over subsequent years and decades … http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/apr/article/view/14754
His prediction is based on [see his Figures 1 and 2] an assumed decrease of TSI during the last minimum. This decrease did not happen. It is an artifact due to the erroneous assumption that an instrument that is not exposed to solar radiation [but still in space] does not degrade. This assumption has been shown to be incorrect [and so is Abdussamatov]: http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/news/2011ScienceMeeting/docs/presentations/1g_Schmutz_SORCE_13.9.11.pdf slides 31 and 33: “Observed data do not support a measureable TSI trend between the minima in 1996 and 2008”.

E.M.Smith
Editor
August 13, 2012 4:53 pm

What Henry Clark said…
I see the Tallbloke vs Leif “does so does not” is on again…
We started cooling in 1998 (all down hill from there – but with some wobble) and took a bit of a pause on the current cycle “peak” that isn’t much. As we round over the top of it ( 2013 ) we start down again.
At one of the presentations in Chicago a couple of years back they worked in a short movie by one presenter on ocean temperature patterns. Showed how cold / hot cycles at the Pacific equator took 18 years to work their way up to the Bering Straight. (We took a “cold dagger” to the center Pacific a few years back…) so it takes a while for the “global” to catch up with the “first change”.
IMHO, the change of circumpolar current whacking into Drake Passage sends more or less cold water up the spine of South America and out into the Central Pacific. From there it takes 18 years to reach Alaska and who knows how long to cross the Pacific, run down Africa in the Indian, and then up the Atlantic.
So, IMHO, Habibullo has it right and the oceans smear the process out over that flow pattern by about 1998 to 2055… But we’re past the hump and headed (slowly) down.
To the extent it has a sine wave shape, crossing the peak takes a while but once ‘mid change’ things pick up…

August 13, 2012 5:00 pm

E.M.Smith says:
August 13, 2012 at 4:53 pm
the oceans smear the process out over that flow pattern by about 1998 to 2055… But we’re past the hump and headed (slowly) down.
The issue is if we’ll cool by one degree in the next decade as Archibald speculates [due to the sun, there might be other reasons]. I think we’ll not cool that much due to lower solar activity, if you think otherwise and support Archibald, tell us.

E.M.Smith
Editor
August 13, 2012 5:06 pm

@Leif:
When I heard the presentation by Dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov he said it was based on observed changes of the diameter of the sun. ( I presumed due to either ‘standard understood things’ or ‘something new’ – but didn’t have a chance to ask ‘due to what?’ )
Do you have any insight into the “solar diameter” reference or changes? ( i.e. Red Herring or “yeah it changes, see flow model” or…)

August 13, 2012 5:09 pm

In his announcement last year, Altrock said that the progress of the green corona emissions was 40% slower than the previous two cycles. All things being equal, that means that Solar Cycle 24 would be 40% longer than the previous two cycles, which makes it 17 years long. For all things not to be equal, it would have to either speed up or stop short of 10 degrees. Hell’s bells, from that 17 year figure, we even know the year of Solar Cycle 25 maximum, which is 2032. There is a 17 year period in the numbered solar cycles, from the maximum of Solar Cycle 4 to the maximum of Solar Cycle 5.
In other news, I am now a DC academic: http://www.iwp.edu/faculty/page/David-Archibald. The Institute of World Politics is a graduate school for all US intelligences agencies, the State Department and Department of Defense. Gail Combs please email me at david.archibald@westnet.com.au

tango
August 13, 2012 5:29 pm

Australia has been in a cooling cycle for the last three years record low temptures every where a good snow depth 1.6 mt. bring on global warming

Spector
August 13, 2012 5:47 pm

If the Svensmark theory is correct, I think we should be looking at plots of cosmic radiation intensity for a clue on this issue. That should be the bottom line. In his video, ‘The Cloud Mystery,’ he shows a full cycle of close correlation between global cloud cover and cosmic ray intensity at about the 9:20 minute mark. For most other correlations used in ‘Climate Science’ our non-proxy observation window is less than a quarter of a cycle.
Ref: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANMTPF1blpQ
One thing I seem to note is that there appears to be no clear comprehensive theory of water vapor condensation presented in basic meteorology texts. If condensation is controlled by cosmic radiation flux, then relative humidity depends on the cosmic ray intensity as clouds begin to form when the water vapor concentration is such that the rate of condensation exceeds the rate of evaporation at any given temperature and cosmic radiation controls the the rate of condensation. I think this would make the real moist adiabatic lapse rate dependent on the cosmic radiation flux.
My personal thought is that this effect may affect temperatures more by promoting thermal convection rather than by the equal opportunity cloud reflection of sunlight coming down and long-wave infra-red radiation going up from the Earth. The thermal time delay of this effect may, in part, be due to the time required for the atmosphere to respond to changes in environmental lapse rate forcing.

August 13, 2012 6:39 pm

E.M.Smith says:
August 13, 2012 at 5:06 pm
Dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov he said it was based on observed changes of the diameter of the sun.
How about reading his paper?
Do you have any insight into the “solar diameter” reference or changes?
The measurements were not accurate enough in the past to deduce anything. A modern satellite is dedicated to such measurements: http://smsc.cnes.fr/PICARD/ no results yet.
David Archibald says:
August 13, 2012 at 5:09 pm
In his announcement last year, Altrock said …
Why use out of date data? [ah, when they fit, of course – silly me]. It is not correct to simply extrapolate using such a short interval. Two month’s ago, Altrock [using the green corona] pronounced maximum in the Northern hemisphere to be already passed in 2011.
There is a 17 year period in the numbered solar cycles, from the maximum of Solar Cycle 4 to the maximum of Solar Cycle 5.
SC 4 was 13.6 years.
Spector says:
August 13, 2012 at 5:47 pm
If the Svensmark theory is correct
Svensmark claims that solar activity controls the low clouds, which is falsified here: http://climate4you.com/images/CloudCoverAllLevel%20AndWaterColumnSince1983.gif

Henry Clark
August 13, 2012 6:41 pm

Dr. Abdussamatov’s data has cycles 22 and 23 being merely just 0.17 W/m^2 apart on average as seen in figure 2 of his paper at http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/apr/article/view/14754
He is chief of solar research done through the Russian segment of the International Space Station, as in http://www.gao.spb.ru/english/astrometr/index1_eng.html
The publication you linked, right after saying the difference between 1996 and 2008 minima in TSI was not measurable (because they were so similar in W/m^2) emphasizes “When assessing long term trends, allow for an uncertainty of at least 0.2 W/m2 for the 1996 solar minimum!” (Elsewhere, uncertainties of “typically 300 ppm (0.4 W/m^2)” are referenced in it). http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/news/2011ScienceMeeting/docs/presentations/1g_Schmutz_SORCE_13.9.11.pdf
Even before getting into the topic of different instruments being referenced, that is not disproving Dr. Abdussamatov’s data: His data has cycles 22 and 23 nearly identical in averages/minimum W/m^2, and so does their data within its stated margin of error.
Where matters get far more interesting, where Dr. Abdussamatov has major predictions in contrast, is for this current cycle 24 and beyond.
Like http://cosmicrays.oulu.fi/webform/query.cgi?startday=01&startmonth=01&startyear=1995&starttime=00%3A00&endday=30&endmonth=08&endyear=2012&endtime=00%3A00&resolution=Automatic+choice&picture=on suggests, the magnitude of vastly more major difference between the last solar cycle 23 and this cycle 24 is striking.

Henry Clark
August 13, 2012 6:43 pm

edit:
The above comment is meant to be in reply to:
Leif Svalgaard says:
August 13, 2012 at 4:33 pm
His prediction is based on [see his Figures 1 and 2] an assumed decrease of TSI during the last minimum.” […]

PJF
August 13, 2012 6:52 pm

Leif Svalgaard wrote:
“And it wouldn’t matter anyway. All the bodies are in free fall in their combined gravitational field [omitting tiny general relativity effects].”
Being in free fall in their combined gravitational field does not preclude objects affecting other objects in ways other than orbital motion.
The Moon, via interaction with the liquid parts of the Earth’s mass, takes energy from the spin of the earth and adds it to its orbital speed: the Moon moves further away and the days on Earth get longer. The interiors of the Jovian moons are heated and melted by the complex gravitational tugging within that system. The liquid interior of Jupiter is moved and heated by those moons, and we do not know enough to say how significant is the effect.
So the statement that the Sun is in free fall has no bearing on the possibility of it being internally affected in some way by the actions of the planets. The (solar system) centre of mass being inside and outside the variable liquid body of the Sun by 0.13 solar radius and 1.98 solar radius over a short period of years, is interesting enough to investigate any correlations of planetary positions and solar activity.
Solar activity is clearly dominated by the Sun’s internal processes but that does not preclude outside effect being significant.

Ninderthana
August 13, 2012 8:12 pm

Leif,
Look very closely at your following words since you are going to be eating them very soon…..
“…the solar-planetary ‘theory’ is nonsense and has no predictive power..”
I am going to enjoy watching you choking on humble pie..

August 13, 2012 8:19 pm

Henry Clark says:
August 13, 2012 at 6:41 pm
that is not disproving Dr. Abdussamatov’s data: His data has cycles 22 and 23 nearly identical in averages/minimum W/m^2, and so does their data within its stated margin of error.
His Figure 1 shows that the minimum value of TSI was significantly lower for the 23/24 minimum than for the previous minima. This difference is the basis for his extrapolation. Observations show no difference, hence his extrapolation is wrong.
PJF says:
August 13, 2012 at 6:52 pm
Being in free fall in their combined gravitational field does not preclude objects affecting other objects in ways other than orbital motion.
I carefully said ‘except for tidal forces’. The examples you mention are all due to tides. The magnitude of tides can be calculated, and the largest tidal bulge is that raised by Jupiter [the next one is by by Venus] and is less than one millimeter high.
Solar activity is clearly dominated by the Sun’s internal processes but that does not preclude outside effect being significant.
Outside effects are there, no doubt, but are of such low magnitude that they have no detectable effect. There are also the effect of Sirius-shine on the Sun. When Jupiter is between the Sun and the star Sirius, Sirius-shine is reduced. This is an indisputable fact, but when you put numbers on it, you will find such a vanishing variation that there is no detectable effect. As your comment shows, that does not deter people from believing weird stuff.

August 13, 2012 8:33 pm

Ninderthana says:
August 13, 2012 at 8:12 pm
Look very closely at your following words since you are going to be eating them very soon…..
You have been saying that for quite a while now…
I am going to enjoy watching you choking on humble pie..
It takes a certain kind of nastiness to enjoy other people’s misfortune…

Mike J
August 13, 2012 8:42 pm

AJB wrote”
“Hard to tell with the south pole tipped away from us at the moment but do you really think it’ll take another year for it to switch? Looks to be happening fairly quickly.”
Oh darn. I hope it the southern hemisphere tips back towards us here in the northern hemisphere soon, so we’re both tipped in the same direction.

August 13, 2012 8:45 pm

Henry@HenryClark
I am just puzzled that no one is plotting maxima, as it is giving so much less noise. With a sample of 47 weather stations I have now ramped up my rsquare on the binominal for the change in maxima in degrees C per annum to 0,998. Amazing.
I think I may have made a slight error in one of my previous comments.Maxima are now droppping by -0.06 degrees C per annum, but it looks like earth energy output is now dropping by as much, if not more…. (maxima have been dropping since 1995)

Jeff L
August 13, 2012 9:24 pm

Kudos to Leif for spending so much time answering questions & educating fellow blog followers !!
Well done & thanks!

Henry Clark
August 13, 2012 9:47 pm

Leif Svalgaard says:
August 13, 2012 at 8:19 pm
His Figure 1 shows that the minimum value of TSI was significantly lower for the 23/24 minimum than for the previous minima. This difference is the basis for his extrapolation. Observations show no difference, hence his extrapolation is wrong.
Actually the data referenced in his paper implies the 23/24 minimum was around 0.26 W/m^2 less than the previous minimum. If you want, you can call that “significantly lower,” but you are trying to disprove the Russian data with a publication on French satellite data outright implying its own uncertainty is of roughly comparable magnitude to that entire figure. If anything, even the *corrected* PREMOS data looks like a slight decline in minima between 1996 and 2008, as seen if I quickly draw (nonexact) red and brown lines on it here ( http://img185.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=17964_premos_122_174lo.JPG ), although such is not particularly meaningful to interpret in itself when the data source has up to tenths of W/m^2 error as the authors note.
More importantly, as Dr. Abdussamatov remarks, “the uniqueness of the elapsed cycle 23 is confirmed by the fact that this cycle became the longest (~12.5 years) among all ascertained and studied 11-year solar cycles for more than 150 years of reliable observations starting from the cycle 10.
But even that is far less major of an observation than what is being seen for solar cycle 24’s relative decline compared to solar cycle 23.
The real test of his extrapolation is in cycle 24 and beyond.
If you argue about cycle 23 versus 22, you are trying to quibble over hundredths of a W/m^2. Cycle 23 versus 24 is what really matters.

August 13, 2012 9:54 pm

Ninderthana says:
August 13, 2012 at 8:12 pm
Look very closely at your following words since you are going to be eating them very soon…..
I think you have my motivation backwards here. I am in the business of predicting solar activity. Anything that can help with that, I would welcome. If planetary influence could be in fact observed and established, we could separate those from the internally generated causes and open a new window on the physics of the sun and stars. Unfortunately, no such elucidation has been forthcoming in the 150 years the hypothesis has been around. The subject has been hijacked by eager dilettantes pushing nonsense bordering on astrology and no progress has been made [except in their own minds – where anything goes]. Papers are from time to time published in second-rate journals [sometimes after repeated rejections by reputable journals – perhaps that is what you have stumbled upon], but there is none of what characterizes true science: quantitative analysis, sound physics, and building on a common, ever expanding body of knowledge.

Hoser
August 13, 2012 10:15 pm

Leif Svalgaard says:
August 13, 2012 at 4:10 am

Perhaps not, if there is a double peak like cycle 23.

chickenlittle
August 14, 2012 12:12 am

Great job Professor Archibald, although you truly are [url=http://uknowispeaksense.wordpress.com/tag/david-archibald/]hiding your light under a bushel.[/url]

August 14, 2012 12:43 am

When comparing SC24 with cycles before 1945 it is necessary to discount the Waldmeier factor and the increased speck ratio we experience today to compare apples with apples. David and Vuk have both made that mistake when using the SIDC values for SC24. When the comparison is done correctly SC24 is very very close to SC5….so far.
http://www.landscheidt.info/images/sc5_sc24.png
I see Leif is still peddling the same rhetoric, I remember statements he made in the past like, SC24 will not be part of a grand minimum and that SC25 was going to be a large cycle. His side of science can only guess. Based on sound data the current cycle and SC25 will be weak with a recovery during SC26. This makes this period weaker than the Dalton and much weaker than the Maunder, so perhaps don’t expect too much cooling.
Interesting that David is going for a 17 year length for SC24, I thought the Ed Fix model was predicting a very short cycle length?

August 14, 2012 12:44 am

When comparing SC24 with cycles before 1945 it is necessary to discount the Waldmeier factor and the increased speck ratio we experience today to compare apples with apples. David and Vuk have both made that mistake when using the SIDC values for SC24. When the comparison is done correctly SC24 is very very close to SC5….so far.
http://tinyurl.com/2dg9u22/images/sc5_sc24.png
I see Leif is still peddling the same rhetoric, I remember statements he made in the past like, SC24 will not be part of a grand minimum and that SC25 was going to be a large cycle. His side of science can only guess. Based on sound data the current cycle and SC25 will be weak with a recovery during SC26. This makes this period weaker than the Dalton and much weaker than the Maunder, so perhaps don’t expect too much cooling.
Interesting that David is going for a 17 year length for SC24, I thought the Ed Fix model was predicting a very short cycle length?

August 14, 2012 12:52 am

Dr. S.
You might be interested in a comment from your Stanford colleague
http://judithcurry.com/2012/08/12/philosophical-reflections-on-climate-model-projections/#comment-228922

Mervyn
August 14, 2012 12:57 am

Australia has not had a period of cooler than normal temperatures over such an extended period of time as is the case this year. In 2011, Northern Australia experienced cooler than normal temperatures, not seen for many decades. This year it is even cooler, and has been for a longer period than experienced before. No bull… just ask the people of Darwin in Australia’s Northern Territory. In Australia, there definitely has been cooling despite rising Co2 emissions.

David Banks
August 14, 2012 3:11 am

Girls girls you are all pretty. As a highschool dropout with an interest in solar physics and its effects on past and future climate I say we live in interesting times where a ball of plasma billions of years old will show us that maybe nobody here really knows all her secrets. We have been studying the sun crudely for only a few hundred years. We also have crude temperature records roughly over the same time. Now we have the instruments to do some detailed observations and I can only hope we get an honest evaluation. Not data manipulation like we get from poor themometer sites

AJB
August 14, 2012 4:04 am

Mike J says, August 13, 2012 at 8:42 pm
South pole will be max 7.25° inclined towards earth again on March 7th. Plenty of time to darn old socks.

Allan MacRae
August 14, 2012 4:07 am

Regarding timing, I think we are better in most fields at predicting what rather than when. Timing is really difficult to predict, and often involves a high degree of subjectivity in the analysis – years after a change in global climate, informed people will have different opinions on exactly when it started to occur.
Therefore, I have no strong opinion on the timing of the commencement of global cooling – it may start soon, or may have already commenced.
Now, concerning what will happen, here is my best guess – and I submit that all our opinions are guesses at this point – we do not understand climate science well enough to know what is cause and what is effect – for example, does CO2 primarily drive temperature, or does temperature primarily drive CO2?
My prediction regarding global cooling is at
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/05/20/premonitions-of-the-fall-in-temperature/#comment-990638
I say there is zero probability of major global warming in the next few decades, since Earth is at the plateau of a natural warming cycle, and global cooling, moderate or severe, is the next probable step.
In the decade from 2021 to 2030, I say average global temperatures will be:
1. Much warmer than the past decade (similar to IPCC projections)? 0% probability of occurrence
2. About the same as the past decade? 20%
3. Moderately cooler than the past decade? 40%
4. Much cooler than the past decade (similar to ~~1800 temperatures, during the Dalton Minimum) ? 25%
5. Much much cooler than the past decade (similar ~~1700 temperatures, during to the Maunder Minimum) ? 15%
In summary, I say it is going to get cooler, with a significant probability that it will be cold enough to negatively affect the grain harvest.

tallbloke
August 14, 2012 4:33 am

Leif Svalgaard says:
August 13, 2012 at 4:00 pm
tallbloke says:
August 13, 2012 at 3:35 pm
“What did Wolff and Patrone say about Gough’s debunking of their paper”
They said they’d not had such a good laugh in a while and that there was no need to respond until Gough got his ‘criticism’ past peer review.
So, they [and you] chicken out.

Why should Wolff and Patrone feel compelled to answer to the meanderings of Gough, who admits in the first sentence of his ramblings that he didn’t read their paper? Get a grip.
Gough completely misunderstood the physical mechanism proposed because he didn’t actually read the paper, he just made stuff up about what he thought they must be proposing and criticised the strawman of his own creation.
You’re guilty of the same thing.

tallbloke
August 14, 2012 4:49 am

Leif Svalgaard says:
August 13, 2012 at 9:54 pm
If planetary influence could be in fact observed and established, we could separate those from the internally generated causes and open a new window on the physics of the sun and stars.

If you were able to quantify the magnitude of and predict the timing of the internal causes, which you are not.
Unfortunately, no such elucidation has been forthcoming in the 150 years the hypothesis has been around.
This is a lie.
The subject has been hijacked by eager dilettantes pushing nonsense bordering on astrology and no progress has been made [except in their own minds – where anything goes].
And this is just ad hominem crap.
Papers are from time to time published in second-rate journals [sometimes after repeated rejections by reputable journals – perhaps that is what you have stumbled upon], but there is none of what characterizes true science: quantitative analysis, sound physics, and building on a common, ever expanding body of knowledge.
Gatekeepers like you are preventing the expansion of knowledge, not facilitating it.

barry
August 14, 2012 4:54 am

EM Smith says
“We started cooling in 1998 (all down hill from there..”
Hmm, according to GISS, UAH and BEST we haven’t been cooling since 1998, we’ve been warming. But not so according to HadCRU3 and RSS (although updated HadCRU4 says yes to warming since 1998).
Ocean Heat Content (<750 meters or <2000 meters. take your pick) has warmed since 1998.
So it's not *all* downhill. Which data stream is the right one, EM?

tallbloke
August 14, 2012 5:31 am

Leif Svalgaard says:
August 13, 2012 at 9:54 pm
Papers are from time to time published in second-rate journals

[sometimes after repeated rejections by reputable journals]
For your information Leif the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics is rated in the top ten worldwide for the IDRT measure of research impact.
http://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-atmospheric-and-solar-terrestrial-physics/
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may03/bollen/05bollen.html
The ten highest IDRT scoring journals consist of a range of journals relating to a variety of subjects. We find, for example, the Journal of Arid Environments, Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, Remote Sensing of Environment and Planetary and Space Science
Funnily enough the “reputable Journal you review for isn’t in the list.

August 14, 2012 5:35 am

Henry Clark says:
August 13, 2012 at 9:47 pm
Actually the data referenced in his paper implies the 23/24 minimum was around 0.26 W/m^2 less than the previous minimum. If you want, you can call that “significantly lower,” but you are trying to disprove the Russian data…
That is a quarter of the solar cycle variation so is significant. But there are no Russian data involved. He used the PMOD [of Froehlich] composite for his extrapolation. PMOD has now been shown to be wrongly compensated for instrument degradation [as I also showed long ago: http://www.leif.org/research/PMOD%20TSI-SOHO%20keyhole%20effect-degradation%20over%20time.pdf
So no long-term decline has been observed, hence the basis for the extrapolation has gone away.
Geoff Sharp says:
August 14, 2012 at 12:43 am
When the comparison is done correctly SC24 is very very close to SC5….so far.
Except that we have very little actual data for SC5. Here are the various attempts to reconstruct SC5: http://www.leif.org/research/Wolf-SSN-for-SC5.png so to claim that something is ‘very very close’ is meaningless.
tallbloke says:
August 13, 2012 at 3:35 pm
“What did Wolff and Patrone say about Gough’s debunking of their paper”
They said they’d not had such a good laugh in a while and that there was no need to respond until Gough got his ‘criticism’ past peer review.

So, they [and you] chicken out. Perhaps you could copy us the email where W&P said that…
[still waiting for your response]

Gail Combs
August 14, 2012 7:10 am

E.M.Smith says:
August 13, 2012 at 4:53 pm
What Henry Clark said…
I see the Tallbloke vs Leif “does so does not” is on again…
We started cooling in 1998 (all down hill from there – but with some wobble) and took a bit of a pause on the current cycle “peak” that isn’t much. As we round over the top of it ( 2013 ) we start down again….
So, IMHO, Habibullo has it right and the oceans smear the process out over that flow pattern by about 1998 to 2055… But we’re past the hump and headed (slowly) down.
To the extent it has a sine wave shape, crossing the peak takes a while but once ‘mid change’ things pick up…
________________________________
There is also the lesson I would hope Gerard Roe brought home when looking at the effects of solar insolation in relation to the the Milankovitch cycles.

…The idea is that these cycles change the amount of sunshine near the Arctic circle which was claimed by the Serbian scholar [Milankovitch] to be globally important…. These cycles roughly have the right periodicity. However, it was still noticed that it didn’t quite work… The graphs above are just unimpressive. A lag of 8,000 years has to be added by hand to make it at least remotely plausible. There’s no real agreement…
However, Gerard Roe realized a trivial mistake…
The problem is that people confuse functions and their derivatives; they say that something is “warm” even though they mean that it’s “getting warmer” or vice versa.
In this case, the basic correct observation is the following: If you suddenly get more sunshine near the Arctic circle, you don’t immediately change the ice volume. Instead, you increase the rate with which the ice volume is decreasing (ice is melting). Isn’t this comment trivial?

I think that is what we are seeing here. Not a change in temperature but a change in the rate (derivative) that temperature is increasing or decreasing. Therefore instead of looking at the increase in temperature we should be looking at the slope of the line/rate/first derivative.
We now have fifteen years that say there has been a change in the first derivative. Graph

D. Patterson
August 14, 2012 7:15 am

Leif, FWIW or not, several elderly farmers I’ve been talking to in Southern Illinois this past week have surprised me with their unusual unanimity in opinion about the coming Winter weather. They’re all more than 72 years of age. I talked to each one individually, and they offered their opinion without any prior solicitatoins from me for those opinions. They each said that they believed the cold weather is already showing signs in Nature for the coming Winter, and the Winter they believe is going to be an extraordinarily cold one. When i asked if there were any particular reasons why they were so convinced the Winter was going to be so cold, they responded by saying no. They all said it was just the feeling they had from the way the hot months of June and July and the cooling month of August felt so much like it did when they were young and it got bitter cold the following Winter. These are the same guys who normally cannot agree about much of anything, and especially about the weather in the coming season.

August 14, 2012 7:36 am

tallbloke says:
August 14, 2012 at 5:31 am
Funnily enough the “reputable Journal you review for isn’t in the list.
I have reviewed for some of those [and for some not in the list, like Nature and Science] and even published in some, including JASTP, so I don’t know what your problem is. BTW, IMO the quality of JASTP has, sadly, been declining lately.

Gail Combs
August 14, 2012 7:42 am

chickenlittle says: @ August 14, 2012 at 12:12 am
________________________
Use HTML tags see the bottom of Ric Werme’s Guide to Watts Up With That
(Or you can steal them from Joanne Nova’s site and even preview the comment before cut and past to here. )

August 14, 2012 7:47 am

tallbloke says:
August 14, 2012 at 5:31 am
The ten highest IDRT scoring journals consist of a range of journals relating to a variety of subjects.
The IDRT is just a measure invented by Bollen et al. to quantify their results of surveying the journal articles downloaded at one laboratory [Los Alamos] reflecting that laboratory’s interests and is not a measure of the general interest. As usual, you know not whereof you speak.

August 14, 2012 8:01 am

Henry@Gail
Gail, I am not saying you are wrong or anything. I just want to know why you would say that you trust UAH. How do they do their calibration?

tallbloke
August 14, 2012 8:09 am

Leif Svalgaard says:
August 14, 2012 at 5:35 am
[still waiting for your response]
Still waiting for you to deal with the substantive issue. Which isn’t asking for copies of other people’s email. Which you won’t get.

August 14, 2012 8:49 am

tallbloke says:
August 14, 2012 at 8:09 am
Which isn’t asking for copies of other people’s email. Which you won’t get.
I suspect that I won’t get it, because there isn’t any. Now, I know Charles so perhaps I just ask him. BTW, there have been six citations of W&P, five by Scafetta and one by Callebaut et al. who states “As an improvement to earlier research on this topic we reconsider the internal convective velocities and we examine several other effects, in particular those due to magnetic buoyancy and to the Coriolis force. The main conclusion is that in its essence: planetary influences are too small to be more than a small modulation of the solar cycle.”

Spector
August 14, 2012 8:52 am

David Archibald says: (August 13, 2012 at 5:09 pm}
[If the Svensmark theory is correct]
Svensmark claims that solar activity controls the low clouds, which is falsified here …
It would appear that Svensmark is using a smoothed curve that removes the ‘noise’ of annual fluctuations that are shown in your reference. I would think falsification would require comparisons of similarly filtered cosmic radiation flux at ground level. (*not solar activity*) I would be somewhat surprised if the Royal Astronomical Society would accept for publication, a paper by someone known to have released obviously false data.
The real issue here, I would guess, is the degree by which cosmic ray generated condensation nuclei are required for condensation to occur: 100%, 90%, 50%, 10% . . . Svensmark seems to have shown that cosmic ray flux can be correlated with climate changes associated with the transit of the solar system through the spiral arms of the galaxy where cosmic radiation levels are relatively high and ground temperatures tend to be low–perhaps due to accelerated convective activity.
http://www.ras.org.uk/news-and-press/219-news-2012/2117-did-exploding-stars-help-life-on-earth-to-thrive
http://thegwpf.org/the-observatory/3016-new-evidence-that-cosmic-rays-seed-clouds.html
Dr. Tim Ball
A Different Perspective
Svensmark’s Cosmic Theory Confirmed; Explains More Than Solar Role in Climate Change

http://drtimball.com/2011/svensmark%E2%80%99s-cosmic-theory-confirmed-explains-more-than-solar-role-in-climate-change/

Gary
August 14, 2012 9:03 am

D. Patterson, I trust old farmer’s bones more than I do any other source. I ain’t no farmer, but I grew up outdoors, working outdoors, gardening, growing, pruning, trimming, etc. The advent of August was a weird one, almost like it was late September instead. Could it be a shift in the seasons? Like the seasons are out of whack by a month? I know that sounds foolish, but I am a layman. I merely say that as contrast. I hate to sweat, but it’s better than shivering. I hope that ol’ sun keeps burning, baby!

August 14, 2012 9:14 am

Spector says:
August 14, 2012 at 8:52 am
“Svensmark claims that solar activity controls the low clouds, which is falsified here …”
It would appear that Svensmark is using a smoothed curve that removes the ‘noise’ of annual fluctuations that are shown in your reference.

It is simpler than that: solar activity has been decreasing the past several decades and so has the low cloud cover, while Svensmark would predict the opposite. No amount of smoothing, torturing, or massaging can change that.

Venter
August 14, 2012 9:24 am

Notice to moderators : On every thread relating to the Sun or Solar System on WUWT you might as well put up a notice
COMMENTS NOT PERMITTED – LEIF SVALGAARD KNOWS EVERYTHING
That would be more adept. And I though that my wife was the world champion in having the last word on any subject!! 🙂

REPLY:
Dr. Svalgaard is a competent debater, and welcome here. Engage him at your own risk – Anthony

Venter
August 14, 2012 9:30 am

Hi Anthony,
That’s why I put up the smiley in order to make clear that it was said in humour. Hope Dr.Svalgaard and you don’t mind it.

August 14, 2012 9:30 am

Venter says:
August 14, 2012 at 9:24 am
COMMENTS NOT PERMITTED – LEIF SVALGAARD KNOWS EVERYTHING
“In the land of the blind, the man with one eye is king”

Venter
August 14, 2012 9:37 am

Good one Leif, you had the final word here also, hats off 🙂

D. Patterson
August 14, 2012 9:40 am

[snip – facts not in evidence]

Ulric Lyons
August 14, 2012 9:50 am

Leif Svalgaard says:
August 14, 2012 at 9:14 am
“It is simpler than that: solar activity has been decreasing the past several decades..”
That depends on which metric: http://omniweb.gsfc.nasa.gov/tmp/images/ret_30917.gif
I’m not though supporting Svensmark.

August 14, 2012 10:02 am

Ulric Lyons says:
August 14, 2012 at 9:50 am
“It is simpler than that: solar activity has been decreasing the past several decades..”
That depends on which metric: http://omniweb.gsfc.nasa.gov/tmp/images/ret_30917.gif
I’m not though supporting Svensmark.

It really doesn’t. Svensmark claims cosmic rays are involved, and they follow closely solar wind B [inverted].

Spector
August 14, 2012 10:27 am

RE: Leif Svalgaard: (August 14, 2012 at 9:14 am)
Spector says:
August 14, 2012 at 8:52 am
“Svensmark claims that solar activity controls the low clouds, which is falsified here …”
It would appear that Svensmark is using a smoothed curve that removes the ‘noise’ of annual fluctuations that are shown in your reference.
It is simpler than that: solar activity has been decreasing the past several decades and so has the low cloud cover, while Svensmark would predict the opposite. No amount of smoothing, torturing, or massaging can change that.

I will have to accept this, provided that, ground level cosmic radiation flux, the ‘hypothetical’ Svensmark cloud-formation mechanism, has not also been decreasing over this period.
I was under the impression that the temperature rise over the last century might be explained, at least in part, as the result of a gradual decline in cosmic radiation from ‘The Chilling Stars’ reaching the surface of the Earth.
Again; I have seen, from my limited vantage point, no comprehensive attempt to explain the condensation process. When two water molecules collide in the atmosphere, what is the probability, if any, that they will fuse and during collisions or in fusing, can they generate unusual photons due to their strong polar electric fields, such photons that would not likely to be absorbed by other water molecules in free flight.

tallbloke
August 14, 2012 11:39 am

Leif Svalgaard says:
August 14, 2012 at 7:47 am
tallbloke says:
August 14, 2012 at 5:31 am
The ten highest IDRT scoring journals consist of a range of journals relating to a variety of subjects.
The IDRT is just a measure invented by Bollen et al. to quantify their results of surveying the journal articles downloaded at one laboratory [Los Alamos] reflecting that laboratory’s interests and is not a measure of the general interest. As usual, you know not whereof you speak.

As usual your ignorance about the solar-planetary theory shines through. Los Alamos is where the theory gained its big leap forward in the modern era with the work of Paul D Jose.
Leif Svalgaard says:
August 14, 2012 at 7:36 am
tallbloke says:
August 14, 2012 at 5:31 am
Funnily enough the “reputable Journal you review for isn’t in the list.
I have reviewed for some of those [and for some not in the list, like Nature and Science] and even published in some, including JASTP, so I don’t know what your problem is. BTW, IMO the quality of JASTP has, sadly, been declining lately.

Fascinating Leif, so you are also a gatekeeper for the journals Science and Nature, which enjoy such a high reputation for their unbiased approach to the climate debate amongst the sceptic community. Fancy that.
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2010/07/17/sun-rediscovered-by-nature/

Amos Batto
August 14, 2012 11:50 am

What solar cycle is David Archibald talking about? The solar cycle that climatologists generally talk about in terms of climate impacts is a 11 year solar cycle. We are currently in the start of a new cycle, so we can expect solar radiation to go up for the next 5 years, meaning slightly higher temperatures for the next couple years. See Figure 9 at http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2011/
I’m sorry, but I the NASA scientists do peer-reviewed research whose data and software algorithms are publically available. Archibald will have a hard time convincing me when he is saying the exact opposite of James Hansen and the other top climatologists.

Jim G
August 14, 2012 12:24 pm

Leif Svalgaard says:
August 13, 2012 at 3:12 pm
Jim G says:
August 13, 2012 at 2:49 pm
“stuff that only interacts gravitationally with other matter and energy and has been conveniently hypothesized to exist in order to explain why our other theories of mass and gravity, though ASSUMED to be correct and complete, are not proving out well based upon actual observations.
The theories about mass and gravity are not affected by the actual observations of dark matter and dark energy [are in fact used to detect those things]”
There has yet to be any “actual observations of dark matter and dark energy” only suppositions based upon present accepted theories of mass and gravity that cause believers, such as yourself, to think they have been “detected”. And it may well be so, but it might also NOT be so. True scientists need to open their minds to other possibilities or they will never be discovered if they do exist..

matt v.
August 14, 2012 12:37 pm

D. Patterson
You were commenting about what the local farmers in Southern Illinois , US ,were saying about the coming winter and their feeling that it would be an “extraordinarily “cold winter. I partly agree with them in that it will be a cold winter again but not necessarily extra cold [not like the winters of the late 1970’s which were extraordinarily cold ] . My feeling is that it will be more like the winters before the 2012 winter and more like the 2008-2010 winters around average winter temperature of about 25-27 degrees F

August 14, 2012 12:49 pm

When will it start cooling??
Ah, It must just be my imagination then, I could have sworn that hundreds lost their lives earlier this year in Europe due to extreme cold and wintry conditions, and it brought chaos governments mobilized their armies and it effected hundreds of thousands right across Europe and Eurasia including freezing over canals and waterways for the first time in many years.
http://www.france24.com/en/20120205-death-toll-europe-deadly-chill-300-ukraine-london-heathrow-weather-cold-winter-snow
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/weather/9061221/Britain-on-snow-alert-as-Europe-freezes-over.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2097292/Big-freeze-Europe-shows-signs-letting-Venices-famous-waterways-ice-over.html
Maybe I was just dreaming that tens of thousands of people had to queue in the freezing cold for water in Northern Ireland and the largest lake in the UK and Ireland (lough Neagh) froze over in 2010, did the big freeze even happen?
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/12/29/northern.ireland.water/index.html
http://www.nightskyhunter.com/Extreme%20Lough%20Neagh%20Freeze%20-%20Page%201.html
And I must have imagined headlines like this from the US during February 2010; “Washington, D.C., is clobbered with snow again”
“The snowiest winter since records were first kept in the 1880s paralyzes the region, shutting down the federal government, airports and schools.”
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/feb/10/nation/la-na-snow-washington11-2010feb11
2012 Johannesburg.
“The snowfall was the first in Johannesburg in five years and the heaviest since 1981.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/southafrica/9461564/Johannesburg-snow-fulfils-couples-white-wedding-dream.html
2009 Historic snow event in South America.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/07/23/historic-snow-event-in-south-america/
So, when will this cooling start for real?

tallbloke
August 14, 2012 1:04 pm

Leif Svalgaard says:
August 14, 2012 at 9:14 am
Spector says:
August 14, 2012 at 8:52 am
“Svensmark claims that solar activity controls the low clouds, which is falsified here …”
It would appear that Svensmark is using a smoothed curve that removes the ‘noise’ of annual fluctuations that are shown in your reference.
It is simpler than that: solar activity has been decreasing the past several decades and so has the low cloud cover, while Svensmark would predict the opposite. No amount of smoothing, torturing, or massaging can change that.

Solar activity hasn’t been decreasing the past several decades. The peak amplitudes have fallen slightly, though by very little according to your adjustments to Waldmeier’s sunspot counts, but the cycles were short, the up and downramps steep, and the minima brief. The average sunspot count over the second half of the C20th was significantly higher than over the first half.
No amount of your data flattening exercise will change that. Especially since the solar science community rejected your proposed revamping of the data.
So Svensmark is still in the running, considering how little we know about clouds and the effect of cosmic rays on them at this stage. Good results coming from Jasper Kirby at CERN though, and the big Forbush decreases in march this year lend credence to the theory. Sunny weather followed a week after the big solar flares. No amount of naysaying will change that either.

Ulric Lyons
August 14, 2012 1:14 pm

Leif Svalgaard says:
August 14, 2012 at 10:02 am
I was merely commenting on your blanket statement that solar activity has been decreasing the past several decades. This is not true for plasma speed: http://omniweb.gsfc.nasa.gov/tmp/images/ret_11735.gif

August 14, 2012 1:15 pm

tallbloke says:
August 14, 2012 at 11:39 am
As usual your ignorance about the solar-planetary theory shines through. Los Alamos is where the theory gained its big leap forward in the modern era with the work of Paul D Jose.
Paul Jose was at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico when he published his 1965 paper…
Who was ignorant now? http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1965AJ…..70..193J
Fascinating Leif, so you are also a gatekeeper for the journals Science and Nature
I’m a reviewer for all major journals in these fields. So now you equate ‘peer reviewed’ with ‘gatekept’. Perhaps you should use that terminology on your blog: make a global change of ‘peer reviewed’ to ‘gatekept’. You know, with computers such sweeping textual changes are easy to do.
Jim G says:
August 14, 2012 at 12:24 pm
There has yet to be any “actual observations of dark matter and dark energy”
That you don’t know of any, does not mean that there aren’t any. Dark matter is detected in several ways, for example by gravitational lensing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_lens
Dark Energy is detected by observing the speed up of the expansion of space with increasing distance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy In a sense the words ‘dark energy’ is just the label we put on the observation that the expansion is accelerating. Just like ‘solar energy’ is the label we put on the observation that we get hot when we are out in the sun.

Jim G
August 14, 2012 1:18 pm

Just for Leif,
Dark matter and dark energy were invented, or discovered, depending upon your point of view, to explain, respectively, why the orbital speeds of visible matter in other galaxies exceeded expectations given the amount of visible matter observed and why the expansion of the universe is accelerating when it would be expected to be slowing down due to gravitational effects. Einstein’s original equations for general relativity indicated an expanding universe which could not be detected by the technology available in his day. He then introduced a cosmological constant to bring his theory in agreement with observations available at that time which he later called his greatest mistake. Turns out, however, that there may well be a different correction factor need to explain an acceleration of the expansion, that being dark energy. Dark matter, on the other hand, seems to complicate this entire situation and cause many open minded serious scientists to question if there may be some finer points missing in the overall general theory of relativity.
Complicating all of this are questions as to the proper interpretation of the observed red shifts which give rise to the estimated of velocities and distances of far away objects as both the theories of dark matter and dark energy have their basis in these interpretations. Also, structures have been detected at distances, i.e. earlier in time, than theory says there should be such structures. This along with the inability to marry quantum physics with relativity has caused very notable scientists to question and attempt to explain what may be missing in relativity or quantum physics that might obviate the need for dark matter and/or dark energy. Being considered are theories of faster than light speed for systems of higher energy such as in the early universe and theories which “unzip” time from space/time that might obviate the need for dark matter and dark energy and avoid the infinities produced when trying to combine the theories of the very small with those of the very large.
Just as relativity replaced Newtonian physics it may be that there is another energy level at which one of these new theories may be more accurate than relativity. But it will take open minds, just like Einstein, who was at one point considered a heretic in his time.

August 14, 2012 1:23 pm

tallbloke says:
August 14, 2012 at 1:04 pm
Solar activity hasn’t been decreasing the past several decades. The peak amplitudes have fallen slightly, though by very little according to your adjustments to Waldmeier’s sunspot counts, but the cycles were short, the up and downramps steep, and the minima brief. The average sunspot count over the second half of the C20th was significantly higher than over the first half.
The Waldmeier adjustment goes back to 1945 so it not relevant. The average sunspot count 1945-1995 was as high as some cycle in the 19th and 18th centuries. Since 1995 solar activity is lower.
Especially since the solar science community rejected your proposed revamping of the data.
I don’t think so. You can follow the evolution of the acceptance by the solar community here: http://ssnworkshop.wikia.com/wiki/Home see especially the summary by Hudson http://www.leif.org/research/SSN/Hudson.pdf
So Svensmark is still in the running
So Svensmark is roundly falsified as should be clear to everybody, except hardcore believers.

August 14, 2012 1:26 pm

Jim G says:
August 14, 2012 at 1:18 pm
cause many open minded serious scientists to question if there may be some finer points missing in the overall general theory of relativity
This has nothing to do with open-mindedness. All scientists dream about [and many try] proving Einstein wrong, but none have succeeded.

August 14, 2012 1:32 pm

Jose: “http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1965AJ…..70..193J”

August 14, 2012 1:35 pm

I give up on WordPress, here is my copy: http://www.leif.org/EOS/Jose-1965.pdf

Spector
August 14, 2012 1:44 pm

Just for reference; here is a link to a plot indicating cosmic radiation since 1964.
Cosmic Ray Station
of the University of Oulu / Sodankyla Geophysical Observatory (Finland)
http://cosmicrays.oulu.fi/webform/query.cgi?startday=01&startmonth=06&startyear=1964&starttime=00%3A00&endday=30&endmonth=03&endyear=2012&endtime=00%3A00&resolution=Automatic+choice&picture=on
Home: http://cosmicrays.oulu.fi/
This is the force that Dr. Svensmark believes to be driving the climate. There would be no need to examine solar activity–just this data. The plot represents cooling power which appears to be cyclicly decreasing until about 1995 and then cooling begins to increase from that point.

August 14, 2012 1:56 pm

Geoff Sharp says:
August 14, 2012 at 12:44 am
The cycles that Ed Fix’s model is showing up for Solar Cycle 24 are impossibly short. There is nothing wrong with his model – we are at the point where the system resets and then starts building momentum again. Re the length of Solar Cycle 24, just look at Altrock’s diagramme. He says it is 40% slower, I believe him, and then project it out. Solar minimum in 2026. You are right, of course, about the spot count thing.

Bob Kutz
August 14, 2012 2:02 pm

Lief, et al;
It seems to me that the reason it hasn’t been cooling of late is that we are at the peak of the cycle.
Set the equilibrium where you will, if we are in a ‘solar cycle cooling phase’, we are in the slowest part of that cooling phase.
That we are no longer warming at the peak of the cycle indicates that there is something happening. We were in the habit of warming both during the peaks and the troughs. I think if you assume that most solar energy is first absorbed by the oceans before being released to the atmosphere, this isn’t such a hard thing to understand; that the earth could warm, even during the inactive part of the solar cycle. When you realize that the oceans have many many times the heat capacity of the atmosphere, that isn’t such a difficult thing to believe. It may not be correct, but it would sure explain some things. I don’t know that we understand the climate system well enough to even understand and predict even that simple effect.
We are now at the peak of the solar cycle, weak though it is, and we aren’t warming. From what I see we are about to head into the trough of the current cycle. If cooling is going to happen as a result of changes to the solar cycle, it will happen during the trough before it happens at the peak. If it continues while we approach the peak of the next cycle . . . well I would take that as a very bad sign. If we had some way to know what future solar cycles have in store, that would be productive science.
As it is; I am too old to be very concerned about what happens after a couple more solar cycles.

August 14, 2012 2:03 pm

Amos Batto says (on August 14, 2012 at 11:50 am): “…the NASA scientists do peer-reviewed research whose data and software algorithms are publically available. Archibald will have a hard time convincing me when he is saying the exact opposite of James Hansen and the other top climatologists.
Amos, I’m very glad to hear that you know where NASA’s data and software algorithms can all be found. Will you please help me find them?
In particular, I’ve been trying, without success, to learn how and why, over the last ~12 years, NASA GISS and/or NCDC has added approximately 0.7 C of increased 1930s-to-1990s warming in revisions to their (old) USHCN temperature records for the 48 contiguous United States. I’ve also been trying, without success, to locate the unadjusted temperature data.
I am interested in the data depicted in the graph labeled “(a)” in this 1999 NASA article:
http://webcitation.org/63wGUTWt6
It is very strikingly different from current NASA GISS graphs of the U.S. 48-state surface temperature record. Compared to the 1999 version, recent versions show about 0.7 C of additional warming from the 1930s to the 1990s, comprised of a combination of increases in post-1965 temperatures and decreases in pre-1965 temperatures (especially in the 1920s and 1930s).
I’m aware of a paper discussing 0.29 C of adjustments, but no explanation for the rest.
Eyeballing this graph…
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/ushcn/ts.ushcn_anom25_diffs_pg.gif
…it appears to show the following 1930s vs 1990s adjustment effects:
TOBS (area adj & TOB adj): +0.34 F
MMTS (sensor change adj): + 0.04 F
SHAP (station history adj): +0.20 F
FILNET (missing data est): +0.02 F
FINAL (urban heat island adj): -0.06 F
———————-
sum: +0.53 F = 0.29 C
0.7 C is a very large increase to come from late adjustments to old data! It is about equal to the entire 20th century’s global warming!
Nick Schor told me that that Reto Ruedy at NASA GISS told him the difference is not due to adjustments made by NASA GISS, but rather due to adjustments made by NOAA NCDC “to accomodate siting and measuring biases,” before NASA received the data.
Based on the old version of the data, a page on nasa.gov said (circa 2000), “it is clear that 1998 did not match the record warmth of 1934.” But now NASA’s data shows 1934 as only 3rd-warmest year, and cooler than 1998. (This is all referring to U.S. 48-State temperatures, not global temperatures.) So what was “clear” to NASA in 2000 apparently is thought to be untrue, now.
(BTW, you’re not the first person I’ve asked; I stumped Prof. Scott Mandia of the Climate Science Rapid Response Team.)
Can you please help me to:
1. find the data which was graphed in that 1999 article, and any other extant pre-2007 versions of http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.D.txt, especially versions older than this one, which was archived by the late John Daly; and
2. find the the actual station lists and temperature and adjustment and weighting data used, for each of the stages of adjustment; and
3. understand the adjustments that were made, and why they should be trusted.
Thanks in advance!
BTW, my email address can be found on my web site:
http://sealevel.info/

August 14, 2012 2:04 pm

Spector says:
August 14, 2012 at 1:44 pm
This is the force that Dr. Svensmark believes to be driving the climate. There would be no need to examine solar activity–just this data.
This is a typical case of cherry picking. It has proven difficult to pin down what the long-term cosmic ray record is. Different stations show different trends. See e.g. the third plot of http://www.leif.org/research/Neutron-Monitors-Real-Time.htm or http://www.leif.org/research/thule-cosmic-rays.png which do not show the increase Oulu has.
The plot represents cooling power which appears to be cyclicly decreasing until about 1995 and then cooling begins to increase from that point.
Yet the climate has warmed since 1995 and [more damning] cosmic rays may have gone up, but the low-level clouds [which were supposed to follow the cosmic rays] have gone down. This is the clear falsification of Svensmark’s theory. You can always ‘rescue’ the theory but postulating that perhaps it was not the low clouds after all, or that the data is bad or manipulated, or …

August 14, 2012 2:04 pm

Sparks says:
August 14, 2012 at 12:49 pm
As the warmers say, those are just localised events. Dr Spencer’s UAH graph is the standard.

D. Patterson
August 14, 2012 2:09 pm

D. Patterson says:
August 14, 2012 at 9:40 am
[snip – facts not in evidence]

The facts were not supposed to be in evidence, because it was only a jocular and cautionary jibe in principle and not in example. I’m currently and irritatingly due for the real surgery myself. It seems to be quite common in my age group in recent months. I’m told we most all get to this point where it’s needed. The One-Eyed King has to pay more than the other blind inhabitants who don’t need it in the Land of the Blind. 🙂

August 14, 2012 2:10 pm

David Archibald says:
August 14, 2012 at 1:56 pm
The cycles that Ed Fix’s model is showing up for Solar Cycle 24 are impossibly short. There is nothing wrong with his model – we are at the point where the system resets and then starts building momentum again.
So a failure of a theory is now called a ‘reset’.
Re the length of Solar Cycle 24, just look at Altrock’s diagramme. He says it is 40% slower, I believe him, and then project it out.
He said that a year ago, now he says maximum in the Northern hemisphere is already passed. You still believe him on that?
You are right, of course, about the spot count thing.
No, Geoff is dead wrong, the last decade or so we have been losing the small spots and undercounting, e.g. http://www.leif.org/research/SSN/Lefevre.pdf

Jim G
August 14, 2012 3:10 pm

Leif Svalgaard says:
August 14, 2012 at 1:26 pm
Jim G says:
August 14, 2012 at 1:18 pm
“cause many open minded serious scientists to question if there may be some finer points missing in the overall general theory of relativity
This has nothing to do with open-mindedness. All scientists dream about [and many try] proving Einstein wrong, but none have succeeded.”
I am sure your attitude is similar to those who were skeptical of anything beyond Newtonian physics in Einstein’s time. Stuck in the box irrespective of evidence which would indicate there was more to be learned. It has everything to do with an open or closed mind.

Henry Clark
August 14, 2012 4:02 pm

Leif Svalgaard says:
August 13, 2012 at 8:19 pm
“Observations show no difference, hence his extrapolation is wrong.”
Leif Svalgaard says:
August 14, 2012 at 5:35 am
“So no long-term decline has been observed, hence the basis for the extrapolation has gone away.”
versus
Leif Svalgaard says:
August 14, 2012 at 9:14 am
solar activity has been decreasing the past several decades
To use a more reliable, consistent, and specific source of data instead, where observed variation greatly exceeds any measurement error (as opposed to distraction by a case where that is not so): http://cosmicrays.oulu.fi
Such illustrates how solar activity increased over cycles 20 to 21 and 22 (up to the early 1990s and contributing to warming on top of the ocean cycle). Then solar activity decreased a bit from cycle 22 to 23, and decreased more going from cycle 23 into the current cycle 24 (during which time temperatures reached a plateau to border on cooling, since the late 1990s through now, although the 60 year ocean cycle is as important as the moderate external forcing variations so far):
solar cycle 20, 1964/10 to 1976/6: 6181 average neutron count
solar cycle 21, 1976/6 to 1986/9: more solar activity, greater magnetic deflection of cosmic rays: 3.1% reduction in average GCR count (5991) compared to cycle 20
solar cycle 22, 1986/9 to 1996/5: the solar oven continuing at relative max setting so to speak, continued high deflection of cosmic rays: 3.1% reduction in average GCR count (5992) compared to cycle 20
solar cycle 23, 1996/5 to 2008/12: a significant relative decrease in solar activity from cycle 22, with less deflection of cosmic rays: within 0.5% of the average GCR count of cycle 20 (6214) instead of 3.1% less
And then the first 3 years and 8 months so far of solar cycle 24 have had significantly less solar activity than the first 3 years and 8 months of solar cycle 23, as illustrated by having less magnetic deflection with 2.5% more average GCR flux (as 6565 instead of 6407).
The preceding is the basic picture of solar activity: rising from the 1960s to be like an oven on max during the late 1970s through the early 1990s (with albedo decline as in reduced cloud cover http://tallbloke.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/albedo.png ), then solar activity trends reversing to start to decline from the late 1990s through now (with albedo trends reversing to start to increase as in http://tallbloke.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/albedo.png ), although a fuller climate picture would include adding in such as http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-amo/from:1964/to:2013/mean:50 (AMO ocean cycle index) among other data.
Dr. Abdussamatov has some weaknesses, like he uses a common temperature dataset (unfortunately fudged by the CAGW movement) in one of the figures (rather than http://img111.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=43034_ScreenHunter_296_Apr._08_09.29_122_441lo.jpg plus http://hidethedecline.eu/media/PERPLEX/fig75.jpg and other data discussed before that shows more solar-temperature correlation than the fudged data, superimposed upon the 60-year ocean cycle and shorter ocean oscillations, which would support his observations even more).
But overall the preceding compares well enough to the general pattern of Dr. Abdussamatov’s illustrations at http://www.gao.spb.ru/english/astrometr/sa_tsi_1600_en.jpg and http://www.gao.spb.ru/english/astrometr/sa_eng.jpg
as part of http://www.gao.spb.ru/english/astrometr/index1_eng.html
Off-topic, it is noteworthy how the very anti-CAGW page above is that of the Pulkovo Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences, supported by the Russian government instead of an E.U. or Anglosphere government, illustrating as usual how publications supporting CAGW tend to be localized in both space and time to where and when the primarily-Western modern enviropolitical activist movement is strong.

August 14, 2012 4:11 pm

Henry Clark says:
August 14, 2012 at 4:02 pm
“Observations show no difference, hence his extrapolation is wrong.”
versus
“solar activity has been decreasing the past several decades”

Shows how one can twist things to support any point of view when guided by a firm belief.
Dr. A’s whole thesis is based on his Figure 1 and 2. On the change in TSI with time. His curve shows a downward trend. Do you see that?
Once you have answered this question we can go on.

August 14, 2012 4:17 pm

Leif Svalgaard says:
August 14, 2012 at 4:11 pm
Dr. A’s whole thesis is based on his Figure 1 and 2. On the change in TSI with time. His curve shows a downward trend. Do you see that?
To help you out here is the Figure 1: http://www.leif.org/research/Abdussa1.png
Once you have answered this question we can go on.

Gail Combs
August 14, 2012 4:23 pm

HenryP says:
August 14, 2012 at 8:01 am
Henry@Gail
Gail, I am not saying you are wrong or anything. I just want to know why you would say that you trust UAH….
___________________________
I trust them more than I trust the others. Here is some information (At least we do not have to sue for it)
How the UAH Global Temperatures Are Produced
Our Response to Recent Criticism of the UAH Satellite Temperatures
WUWT: How the UAH Global Temperatures Are Produced by Dr. Roy Spencer, PhD.
Review of Previous Climate Calibration Workshop

Scientific Robustness Of The University Of Alabama At Huntsville MSU Data
As a result of the persistent, but incorrect (often derogatory) blog posts and media reports on the robustness of the University of Alabama MSU temperature data, I want to summarize the history of this data analysis below. John Christy and Roy Spencer lead this climate research program…. Dr. Roger Pielke Sr.

Peter
August 14, 2012 4:24 pm

What an amusing array of comments.
I really like the opening paragraph – “It hasn’t cooled yet and we’re three and a half years into the current cycle.”
Also I see that old favourite distortion of using 1998 as the baseline for claiming a cooling trend has made another appearance. Classic denier fantasy land. Go look at the global temperature charts – the best you could say is the rate of warming has slowed. That would be due to all those forcings that are supposed to be producing much cooler conditions……. but aren’t.
Oh, and cherry picking a few newsworthy cold weather events from the southern hemisphere, where it’s winter by the way, doesn’t mean anything.
REPLY: I should have snipped this, but decided otherwise. Mr. Hearndon, I’ll expect you to make the same complaint to the BBC when they talk about the next heat wave or record high temperature. – Anthony

August 14, 2012 4:31 pm

Jim G says:
August 14, 2012 at 3:10 pm
Stuck in the box irrespective of evidence which would indicate there was more to be learned. It has everything to do with an open or closed mind.
As I said, every physicist want to prove Einstein wrong and is totally open on this point. There is no box other than the hard constraints of observations. The problem is that when extending a theory to explain puzzling things one is constrained to still have the new version explain everything the old one could. That is the hard part. And nobody has succeeded in doing so, but everybody wish in his heart that he could. What physicists do not buy is the argument that there are some unknown unknowns that we can shove stuff onto. In the old days, it was called ‘magic’. We don’t believe in magic and we do not believe in the notion that all it requires is an open mind. I don’r know any scientist who would close his mind to a chance of proving Einstein wrong. There is ALWAYS more to be learned. The very notion of dark matter and dark energy are indeed things we have recently learned. You would exclude that hard won knowledge? I would say: how wonderful things we are learning that we never thought of before.

Gail Combs
August 14, 2012 4:55 pm

Amos Batto says:
August 14, 2012 at 11:50 am
What solar cycle is David Archibald talking about? The solar cycle that climatologists generally talk about in terms of climate impacts is a 11 year solar cycle. We are currently in the start of a new cycle, so we can expect solar radiation to go up for the next 5 years, meaning slightly higher temperatures for the next couple years. See Figure 9 at http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2011/
I’m sorry, but I the NASA scientists do peer-reviewed research whose data and software algorithms are publically available. Archibald will have a hard time convincing me when he is saying the exact opposite of James Hansen and the other top climatologists.
____________________________
HUH???
You really should do a bit of a search on the internet before posting.
You state: “We are currently in the start of a new cycle, so we can expect solar radiation to go up for the next 5 years…” While this is what NASA says:

NASA: Solar Cycle Prediction (Updated 2012/08/02)
The current prediction for Sunspot Cycle 24 gives a smoothed sunspot number maximum of about 60 in the Spring of 2013…

You then say: “…Archibald will have a hard time convincing me when he is saying the exact opposite of James Hansen and the other top climatologists.
ERRR, the NASA scientists do not all agree with Hansen. Actually you do not even have the correct guy it is Dr. Hathaway who is the Solar Physicist.
NASA Finds Sun-Climate Connection in Old Nile Records A study by Richard Feynman’s sister and others.
A. J. Strata, NASA Engineer Error Analysis of surface temperature data

NASA Data Confirms Solar Hibernation and Climate Change to Cold Era
The Space and Science Research Center (SSRC) announces today that the most recent data from NASA describing the unusual behavior of the Sun validates a nearly four year long quest by SSRC Director John L. Casey to convince the US government, the media, and the public that we are heading into a new cold climate era with 20 to 30 years of record setting cold weather.
According to Director Casey,
“I’m quite pleased that NASA has finally agreed with my predictions which were passed on to them in early 2007. There is no remaining doubt that the hibernation of the Sun, what solar physicists call a ‘grand minimum’ has begun and with it, the next climate change to a prolonged cold era.
When I first called Dr. Hathaway and told him the NASA and NOAA estimates for the Sun’s activity were “way off” in both sunspot count and in which solar cycle the hibernation would begin (cycle 24 vs. cycle 25), he was polite but dismissive. Since that time both NASA and NOAA have been revising their sunspot estimates for solar cycle 24 lower every year and with each year their numbers have been getting closer
to mine and the few other scientists around the world who had similar forecasts. The January announcement by NASA is now virtually identical to mine made almost four years ago.”…

To put it bluntly they all have theories and some knowledge but none have a really solid grip on the “truth” about the sun or the climate. We are all still learning and that is why legislation about the climate is completely idiotic at this time.

August 14, 2012 5:35 pm

Gail Combs says:
August 14, 2012 at 4:55 pm
The Space and Science Research Center (SSRC) announces today that the most recent data from NASA describing the unusual behavior of the Sun validates a nearly four year long quest by SSRC Director John L. Casey to convince the US government
John Casey is a fraud, so no need to consider this any further.

Henry Clark
August 14, 2012 5:39 pm

Leif Svalgaard:
You had to skip over practically my entire prior post to aim to repeat the same loop. No thanks.

August 14, 2012 6:14 pm

Henry Clark says:
August 14, 2012 at 5:39 pm
You had to skip over practically my entire prior post to aim to repeat the same loop. No thanks.<
Because your entire post was irrelevant for the issue at hand. And now that you see the writing on the wall you withdraw without learning anything so you can maintain your delusion. Your loss.

Gail Combs
August 14, 2012 6:26 pm

Henry Clark says: @ August 14, 2012 at 4:02 pm
…..Off-topic, it is noteworthy how the very anti-CAGW page above is that of the Pulkovo Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences, supported by the Russian government instead of an E.U. or Anglosphere government, illustrating as usual how publications supporting CAGW tend to be localized in both space and time to where and when the primarily-Western modern enviropolitical activist movement is strong.
____________________________________
I am not surprise the Russians are not swallowing the CAGW crap. When it comes to a little (or big) ice age the Russians are not going to fool around with the facts because getting caught flat footed means starvation and death.

AlaskaHound
August 14, 2012 6:41 pm

Solar cycle 23 may not have ended when we thought it did.
We may have peaked in this cycle last month, so wait and wait some more:)

William Astley
August 14, 2012 6:51 pm

There are cycles of gradual climate change and abrupt climate change in the paleoclimate record. There are solar changes before and during the climate changes. (The papers below note the correlation.)
There has been significant progress made in resolving the mechanisms by which the solar magnetic cycle changes affect the planet’s climate. There is a physical reason why when there is an abrupt slow down in the solar cycle from a period of short active cycles to long cycles or an interruption in the solar magnetic cycle, there is a 10 to 12 year delay in the onset of cooling.
I would suggest we continue looking for anomalous solar observations and the onset of cooling. The past data and current observation appear to support the assertion that there will be a significant cooling event, a Heinrich event which it appears is predicated by a solar magnetic cycle interruption, followed by significant cooling due to increased GCR, and then when the magnetic cycle restarts a series of events that cause a geomagnetic excursion, which causes long term abrupt cooling.
List of Bond events
Most Bond events do not have a clear climate signal; some correspond to periods of cooling, others are coincident with aridification in some regions.
• ≈1,400 BP (Bond event 1) — roughly correlates with the Migration Period pessimum(450–900 AD)
• ≈2,800 BP (Bond event 2) — roughly correlates with the Iron Age Cold Epoch (900–300 BC)[8]
• ≈4,200 BP (Bond event 3) — correlates with the 4.2 kiloyear event
• ≈5,900 BP (Bond event 4) — correlates with the 5.9 kiloyear event
• ≈8,100 BP (Bond event 5) — correlates with the 8.2 kiloyear event
• ≈9,400 BP (Bond event 6) — correlates with the Erdalen event of glacier activity in Norway,[9] as well as with a cold event in China.[10]
• ≈10,300 BP (Bond event 7) — unnamed event
• ≈11,100 BP (Bond event 8) — coincides with the transition from the Younger Dryas to the boreal
Reduced solar activity as a trigger for the start of the Younger Dryas?
http://www.falw.vu/~renh/pdf/Renssen-etal-QI-2000.pdf
http://scholar.google.com/url?sa=U&q=http://dept.kent.edu/geography/GEC/Reduced_solar_activity_as_a_trig.pdf
http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/transit.html
According to the marine records, the Eemian interglacial ended with a rapid cooling event about 110,000 years ago (e.g., Imbrie et al., 1984; Martinson et al., 1987), which also shows up in ice cores and pollen records from across Eurasia. From a relatively high resolution core in the North Atlantic. Adkins et al. (1997) suggested that the final cooling event took less than 400 years, and it might have been much more rapid.
Following the end of the Eemian, a large number of other sudden changes and short-term warm and cold alternations have been recognized; apparently many or all of these occurred on a global or at least a regional scale (Fig.3; Ice core record). The most extreme of these fluctuations are the warm interstadials and the cold Heinrich events. These are most prominent in the ice-core record of Greenland, deep-sea cores from the North Atlantic, and in the pollen records of Europe and North America, suggesting that they were most intense in the North Atlantic region (e.g., Bond et al., 1992; 1993).
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379198000882
“The role of solar forcing upon climate change”
“A number of those Holocene climate cooling phases… most likely of a global nature (eg Magney, 1993; van Geel et al, 1996; Alley et al 1997; Stager & Mayewski, 1997) … the cooling phases seem to be part of a millennial-scale climatic cycle operating independent of the glacial-interglacial cycles (which are) forced (perhaps paced) by orbit variations.”
“… we show here evidence that the variation in solar activity is a cause for the millennial scale climate change.”
Last 40 kyrs
Figure 2 in paper. (From data last 40 kyrs)… “conclude that solar forcing of climate, as indicated by high BE10 values, coincided with cold phases of Dansgaar-Oeschger events as shown in O16 records”
Recent Solar Event
“Maunder Minimum (1645-1715) “…coincides with one of the coldest phases of the Little Ice Age… (van Geel et al 1998b)
Periodicity
“Mayewski et al (1997) showed a 1450 yr periodicity in C14 … from tree rings and …from glaciochemicial series (NaCl & Dust) from the GISP2 ice core … believed to reflect changes in polar atmospheric circulation..”

Gail Combs
August 14, 2012 7:07 pm

Peter says: @ August 14, 2012 at 4:24 pm
…… Go look at the global temperature charts – the best you could say is the rate of warming has slowed. That would be due to all those forcings that are supposed to be producing much cooler conditions……. but aren’t.
==================================
Well Mr. Hearndon, thank you for confirming the change in the first derivative of the temperature. As I noted in my other comment the effects on the climate is not in the absolute numbers but in the first derivative or RATE of change in the temperature.

In Defense of Milankovitch
…The idea is that these cycles change the amount of sunshine near the Arctic circle which was claimed by the Serbian scholar [Milankovitch] to be globally important….
However, Gerard Roe realized a trivial mistake…
The problem is that people confuse functions and their derivatives; they say that something is “warm” even though they mean that it’s “getting warmer” or vice versa.
In this case, the basic correct observation is the following: If you suddenly get more sunshine near the Arctic circle, you don’t immediately change the ice volume. Instead, you increase the rate with which the ice volume is decreasing (ice is melting).

Just as you would not expect to immediately change the ice volume in response to the Milankovitch cycles (changes in Solar Insolation), you would not expect an immediate change in temperature either. Graph
70% of the earth is ocean and a large amount of the high energy wavelengths enter the ocean to be absorbed at various depths (think in three dimensions) To actually overcome the inertia of the system requires time and a heck of a change in energy. Think about what it takes to break a railroad train or better yet an ocean liner. The response is going to be in terms of years and may only be seen as changes in ENSO, PDO, and AMO decades later because the oceans act as storage for large amounts of energy over time. Therefore a step change in the amount of energy (TSI) though small could be “integrated’ over time to give a surprisingly large effect.

Werner Brozek
August 14, 2012 8:09 pm

Peter says:
August 14, 2012 at 4:24 pm
the best you could say is the rate of warming has slowed.

Warming has STOPPED for over 10 years on all sets below except UAH.
On all data sets, the different times for a slope that is flat for all practical purposes range from 10 years and 10 months to 15 years and 8 months. Following is the longest period of time (above 10 years) where each of the data sets is more or less flat. (*No slope is positive except UAH which is +0.0022 per year or +0.22/century up to July. So while it is not flat, the slope is not statistically significant either.)
1. UAH: since October 2001 or 10 years, 10 months (goes to July, but note * above)
2. GISS: since March 2001 or 11 years, 5 months (goes to July)
3. Combination of the above 4: since October 2000 or 11 years, 6 months (goes to March) (Hadcrut3 is SLOW!!)
4. HadCrut3: since January 1997 or 15 years, 3 months (goes to March)
One has to back to the 1940s to find the previous time that a Hadcrut3 record was not beaten in 10 years or less.
5. Sea surface temperatures: since January 1997 or 15 years, 6 months (goes to June)
6. RSS: since December 1996 or 15 years, 8 months (goes to July)
RSS is 188/204 or 92.2% of the way to Santer’s 17 years.
7. Hadcrut4: since December 2000 or 11 years, 8 months (goes to July using GISS. See below.)
See the graph below to show it all for #1 to #6.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1997/trend/plot/gistemp/from:2001.16/trend/plot/rss/from:1996.9/trend/plot/wti/from:2000.75/trend/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1997/trend/plot/uah/from:2001.75/trend
For #7: Hadcrut4 only goes to December 2010 so what I did was get the slope of GISS from December 2000 to the end of December 2010. Then I got the slope of GISS from December 2000 to the present. The DIFFERENCE in slope was that the slope was 0.0049 lower for the total period. The positive slope for Hadcrut4 was 0.0041 from December 2000. So IF Hadcrut4 were totally up to date, and IF it then were to trend like GISS, I conclude it would show no slope for at least 11 years and 8 months going back to December 2000. (By the way, doing the same thing with Hadcrut3 gives the same end result, but GISS comes out much sooner each month.) See:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2000/to/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2000.9/trend/plot/gistemp/from:2000/plot/gistemp/from:2000.9/to:2011/trend/plot/gistemp/from:2000.9/trend

August 14, 2012 8:15 pm

William Astley says:
August 14, 2012 at 6:51 pm
an interruption in the solar magnetic cycle …
solar magnetic cycle interruption

Seems to be a favorite theme. So define what such a ‘interruption’ would be. How would we know one if it happened?

Henry Clark
August 14, 2012 8:57 pm

Leif Svalgaard says:
August 14, 2012 at 6:14 pm
“Because your entire post was irrelevant for the issue at hand.”
Inconvenient for you trying to get people to believe Dr. Abdussamatov was wrong in implying a decline in solar activity after cycle 22? Yes. Irrelevant? No.
I notice you repeatedly skip over:
1) the change in GCR count between cycles 22 and 23
2) the change in GCR count between cycles 23 and 24
3) the change in sunspot number between cycles 22 and 23
4) the change in sunspot number between cycles 23 and 24
5) the change in solar cycle length between cycles 22 and 23
All of those support the general picture of Dr. Abdussamatov. It is very telling that you end up resorting to the one and only measurement source (unlike all of the preceding) where Abdussamatov’s expected difference is smaller than the measurement error, smaller than the multiple tenths of a W/m^2 error stated by the authors in your publication.
Such as the 12.6 year duration of cycle 23 compared to 9.7 years for cycle 22 is not likely to be measurement error and not something which can be revised away later.
September 1986 to May 1996 does not equal May 1996 to December 2008.
Even if I believed cycles 22 and 23 were identical in TSI down to the last 0.01 W/m^2, that would just show decline in other aspects of solar activity (like the magnetic field affecting GCR flux and neutron count measurements) can start before TSI decline does: a mild curiosity not reversing the big picture.
I’m reminded of part of a post someone recently made on another topic in a different context, on August 13, 2012 7:46 pm in http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/08/13/july-hottest-ever-but-u-s-tornado-count-lowest-since-1951-poisoned-weather-meme-falsified-by-nature/ . In that analogy, one berry does not distract from the non-berries if one realizes to watch out for the tactic. (You apparently figure the tactic works on skim readers, which unfortunately is likely so).
********************
The following from http://cosmicrays.oulu.fi data gives the real picture of solar activity (inverted average GCR counts relative to cycle 20):
Rise in activity, from the 1960s through part of the 1990s, like an oven on max:
cycle 20: 1.000 for 1964-1976
->
cycle 21: 1.032 for 1976-1986
->
cycle 22: 1.032 for 1986-1996
Decline in activity (about fitting Dr. Abdussamatov’s paper, short of misleading nitpicking attempts):
->
cycle 23: 0.995 for 1996-2008
->
cycle 24 so far: 0.942 (where cycle 23’s figure would be 0.965 by this many months into it)
Later in this decade is the real test for whether Dr. Abdussamatov is right or not, as he is making major predictions for what will happen after cycle 24 peaks in the near future. But, after further illustration of what one of his top opponents is like in regard to bias, my opinion of how he compares has gone up.

August 14, 2012 9:31 pm

Henry Clark says:
August 14, 2012 at 8:57 pm
“Because your entire post was irrelevant for the issue at hand.”
A favorite trick is to heap link upon link, dataset upon dataset, claim upon claim, etc until the true issue is completely blurred. I tried to go in small steps so there would be only a single question in each step to agree upon. In that way one can make progress through the swamp of obscurantism. So, back to http://www.leif.org/research/Abdussa1.png Have you seen this Figure before? Describe what you see.
Later in this decade is the real test for whether Dr. Abdussamatov is right or not
In fact we do not need to wait, we shall see [at the end of the exercise] that he is already wrong. But if you do not want to follow along you will not obtain enlightenment.

Henry Clark
August 14, 2012 10:10 pm

Leif Svalgaard says:
August 14, 2012 at 9:31 pm
In that way one can make progress through the swamp of obscurantism.
I cross-check claims against such as the solar activity rise from 1.000 -> 1.032 -> 1.032 for the cycles from 1964 to 1996 A.D. seen in average relative inverted neutron counts, which was followed by decline to 0.995 and then, in this incomplete cycle, 0.942 so far.
Leif Svalgaard says:
August 14, 2012 at 9:31 pm
Describe what you see.
Particularly notably, a major decline in peak sunspot numbers between cycle 22 and cycle 23 (which correlates with other data on how relative solar activity, in the metric mentioned earlier, dropped from 1.032 in cycle 22 to 0.995 in cycle 23).

August 14, 2012 10:33 pm

Leif said:
“The very notion of dark matter and dark energy are indeed things we have recently learned.”
Well, we may have ‘learned’ that proposing them appears to solve a few puzzles if they are defined in certain specific terms but it is not yet clear to me that they actually exist. Something exists but whether those terms are appropriate remains to be seen.
In the meantime, proposing them is a bit of an appeal to magic is it not ?
The phonomena which they are currently used to ‘describe’ could still be the result of some different features of our universe.

August 14, 2012 11:17 pm

Leif Svalgaard says
Since 1995 solar activity is lower.
Henry says
don’t you think it is interesting for me to have been able to calculate this from the fall in maximum temperatures?
(I give myself an ovation)
http://www.letterdash.com/henryp/global-cooling-is-here
funny that you should also mention 1945.
Namely, my results suggest that from this time solar activity started increasing. Do you agree?
We are not imagining things when we say it is cooling. The official datasets must be wrong (CALIBRATION?) or they are being manipulated. I also feel that winter is longer here now. August used to be fine, but it feels like July. We had snow here in Pretoria (South Africa) for the first time that I have been here (36 years). Just be sure, it was snow I went outside to see and feel it happening.

August 14, 2012 11:49 pm

Henry@Werner, Gail
Thanks Werner, an impressive peace of work! It clearly tells me that UAH must be wrong, which I already suspected for some time. There could be several causes and I most certainly don’t suspect it is Dr. Spencer’s fault. I briefly looked at the calibration procedure (Thank you Gail!) and it seems to me that using the cosmic backround as a reference point of 2.7K could be a point of discussion. How do we know that point is not changing by a few tenth’s with solar activity going down in the surrounding space? (since 1995, as we noted in my previous post)

Spector
August 14, 2012 11:51 pm

This is an example of the plot Dr. Svensmark has presented as convincing evidence of a direct correlation between low cloud cover and cosmic ray flux. I have not found a site providing the source data for this plot. It seems to show a strong correlation between obviously filtered cloud-cover data and cosmic ray flux. Of course, one might argue that these plots share a common driver and nothing more.
As the Earth as a whole would act as a huge low-pass filter, perhaps sufficient to remove the eleven-year solar activity variation cycles, one might expect a ten or more year delayed response in the temperature record.
As the possibility of cloud seeding by cosmic rays has been experimentally confirmed, this graph indicates may be a close-coupling between climate and cosmic ray flux as modulated by galactic and solar effects and moderated by terrestrial inertia.
[“. . . The correlation between cosmic ray flux(orange) as measured in Neutron count monitors in low magnetic latitudes, and low altitude cloud cover (blue) using ISCCP satellite data set, following Marsh & Svensmark, 2003.”]
http://www.androidworld.com/Clouds_CosmicRays.jpg
Source(ScienceBits): http://www.sciencebits.com/CosmicRaysClimate
The only other mechanism that I can think of for an enhanced (non-photon) solar effect on climate would be by energy or particles carried directly in the solar wind.

tallbloke
August 15, 2012 12:23 am

Leif Svalgaard says:
August 14, 2012 at 7:36 am
I have published in some, including JASTP, so I don’t know what your problem is. BTW, IMO the quality of JASTP has, sadly, been declining lately.

Well of course Leif. JASTP was fine when it published your paper, but because it published Scafetta’s work its quality must be declining.
/sarc

tallbloke
August 15, 2012 3:19 am

Leif Svalgaard says:
August 14, 2012 at 8:49 am
tallbloke says:
August 14, 2012 at 8:09 am
Which isn’t asking for copies of other people’s email. Which you won’t get.
I suspect that I won’t get it, because there isn’t any. …there have been six citations of W&P, five by Scafetta and one by Callebaut et al. who states …The main conclusion is that in its essence: planetary influences are too small to be more than a small modulation of the solar cycle.”
Yes Leif. I have had email correspondence with Callebaut and de Jager too.
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2012/04/15/the-influence-of-planetary-attractions-on-the-solar-tachocline/#comment-23693
See also:
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2012/05/28/another-argument-against-planetary-influence-on-solar-activity-bites-the-dust/

Henry Clark
August 15, 2012 4:46 am

Spector says:
August 14, 2012 at 11:51 pm
http://www.androidworld.com/Clouds_CosmicRays.jpg
Source(ScienceBits): http://www.sciencebits.com/CosmicRaysClimate

Just to add to that:
To get some data in another way extending from 1964 to 2012, for twice as lengthy of a time period, I made a quick illustration of actually 9 km altitude humidity versus solar/GCR activity:
http://img218.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=27173_globalwarmingGCRsvshumidity_122_1193lo.jpg
I circled in purple the four peaks of atmospheric specific humidity and the corresponding four solar minimums which were peaks in GCR flux. Of course, it is somewhat messy, being real-world data with other influences and weather fluctuations on top, but one can see the general match-up even in the unfiltered raw data.
The top is from:
http://www.climate4you.com/images/NOAA%20ESRL%20AtmospericSpecificHumidity%20GlobalMonthlyTempSince1948%20With37monthRunningAverage.gif
The bottom is from:
http://cosmicrays.oulu.fi/webform/query.cgi?startday=01&startmonth=01&startyear=1964&starttime=00%3A00&endday=30&endmonth=08&endyear=2012&endtime=00%3A00&resolution=Automatic+choice&picture=on
CAGW movement supporters claim GCRs having any effect is proven impossible by post-2004 divergence between GCR trends and the “official” average cloud cover trend. But, by 2004 onwards, average global cloud cover trends reported by the ISCCP (headquartered at GISS) diverge from other metrics when cross-checked, in contrast to relationships before. Short of weird physics, the simplest explanation is that GISS started fudging their cloud cover dataset to counter theories against CAGW like the same GISS group definitely does with their temperature dataset (discussed in http://hidethedecline.eu/pages/posts/part1-the-perplexing-temperature-data-published-1974-84-and-recent-temperature-data-181.php et cetera).
By the way, just in case you haven’t already seen them before, you might enjoy http://www.space.dtu.dk/upload/institutter/space/forskning/05_afdelinger/sun-climate/full_text_publications/svensmark_2007cosmoclimatology.pdf and 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/ , and with, as usual on climate topics, a Russian publication on cosmic rays being good: http://rjes.wdcb.ru/v06/tje04163/tje04163.htm

Henry Clark
August 15, 2012 4:54 am

edit:
There is a typo in the text of my prior comment, reversing minimums and peaks. The http://img218.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=27173_globalwarmingGCRsvshumidity_122_1193lo.jpg graph is better than its text description, though.

August 15, 2012 5:31 am

tallbloke says:
August 15, 2012 at 12:23 am
Well of course Leif. JASTP was fine when it published your paper, but because it published Scafetta’s work its quality must be declining.
Indeed, that is part of its malaise. Very perceptive of you.
tallbloke says:
August 15, 2012 at 3:19 am
I have had email correspondence with Callebaut and de Jager too.
And you have no qualms about showing that correspondence, so now we are awaiting a similar openness about W&P’s.
Stephen Wilde says:
August 14, 2012 at 10:33 pm
In the meantime, proposing them is a bit of an appeal to magic is it not ?
Actually not, as they are consistent with the known laws of nature. New particles are discovered all the time.
The phonomena which they are currently used to ‘describe’ could still be the result of some different features of our universe.
There is those weasel words ‘could be’. The phenomena are observed [gravitational lensing, acceleration of expansion] and no new ‘features’ need be considered.
Henry Clark says:
August 14, 2012 at 10:10 pm
Particularly notably, a major decline in peak sunspot numbers between cycle 22 and cycle 23
The relevant feature is the decline of the minimum value of TSI shown by the blue line in concert with a similar decline of the sunspot number. In Figure 2 http://www.leif.org/research/Abdussa2.png he highlights the TSI ‘deficit’. Now, both my own work and that of the PMOD team have shown that there is no deficit. This is why I said “there is no decrease” [in the minimum values], that is: TSI minima do not follow the blue line down.
So, as the next step we need to agree that minimum TSI has not decreased. That there is no ‘deficit’.

August 15, 2012 6:18 am

“Actually not, as they are consistent with the known laws of nature. New particles are discovered all the time.”
So what new particles constitute dark matter and dark energy ?
The whole point of speculating as to their existence is because observations on the face of it are not always consistent with the known laws of nature. You could be using the terms simply as a catch all for ‘whatever is causing the apparent discrepancies’ but I’d call that magic until you actually determine whether those specific terms have any descriptive meaning. The cause could be quite different from anything that a reasonable person would describe as dark matter or dark energy.

tallbloke
August 15, 2012 6:44 am

Henry Clark says:
August 15, 2012 at 4:46 am
To get some data in another way extending from 1964 to 2012, for twice as lengthy of a time period, I made a quick illustration of actually 9 km altitude humidity versus solar/GCR activity:
http://img218.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=27173_globalwarmingGCRsvshumidity_122_1193lo.jpg

Henry, you may be interested in the graph of Specific humidity near the tropopause vs Sunspot count I made a couple of years ago.
http://tallbloke.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/shumidity-ssn96.png

August 15, 2012 6:50 am

Stephen Wilde says:
August 15, 2012 at 6:18 am
The whole point of speculating as to their existence is because observations on the face of it are not always consistent with the known laws of nature.
Dark matter is not a matter of speculation as to its existence. DM is observed by its gravitational effect. That is no different from deducing the existence of the planet Neptune from its effect on the orbit of Uranus. There are several candidates for what those particles are and one of the reasons for the LHC [of Higgs fame] is to search for those.
Dark energy is consistent with general relativity, in fact, is demanded by GR [in combination with the observation that the Universe is flat].
The cause could be quite different from anything that a reasonable person would describe as dark matter or dark energy.
But not from what a knowledgeable person would think.
You might progress from ‘reasonable’ to ‘knowledgeable’ by reading this very accessible piece http://www.leif.org/EOS/CosmicSoundWaves.pdf

August 15, 2012 7:09 am

tallbloke says:
August 15, 2012 at 6:44 am
you may be interested in the graph of Specific humidity near the tropopause vs Sunspot count I made a couple of years ago.
Except, the graph does not show the actual sunspot number count as should be obvious to everyone.

August 15, 2012 7:37 am

Stephen Wilde says:
August 15, 2012 at 6:18 am
The whole point of speculating as to their existence is because observations on the face of it are not always consistent with the known laws of nature.
The laws of nature are what demonstrates the existence of dark matter. Another good and accessible reference is http://chandra.harvard.edu/xray_astro/dark_matter/

tallbloke
August 15, 2012 7:45 am

Leif Svalgaard says:
August 15, 2012 at 5:31 am
tallbloke says:
August 15, 2012 at 3:19 am
I have had email correspondence with Callebaut and de Jager too.
And you have no qualms about showing that correspondence, so now we are awaiting a similar openness about W&P’s.

Here’s the part that concerns you and Gough. [My Parentheses]
===========================
Dear Roger Tattersall:
We decline to enter the private exchange you reported to us concerning planetary influence on the sun. In our opinion the observational evidence for some kind of planetary effect is nearly overwhelming.
However, models of the effect are always open to question or improvement. We agree that the “the sun is in freefall” and said so in our paper. But this does not repeal the conservation of angular momentum or the tidal force for example. In due time, the merit of our model will be decided.
[Section redacted]
Sincerely,
Paul Patrone and Charles Wolff
===========================
So there you have it Leif. The merit of W&P’s model will be decided by scientists in the literature. Not in a knockabout internet argument started by your private exchange with Gough who can’t even be bothered to read the paper. Dirk Callebaut and Kees de Jager have made a half hearted attempt which cast a slur on any and all tidal hypotheses and falsely included W&P in a list of hypotheses they think they have refuted. It’s pretty obvious to me they didn’t read or understand W&P’s paper either.
What are you and Gough afraid of, getting your asses handed back to you on a plate? If you believe you and Gough have found a flaw in W&P’s work, then submit a properly written piece to the relevant journal. Otherwise W&P stands and you’re talking hot air.

August 15, 2012 7:58 am

tallbloke says:
August 15, 2012 at 7:45 am
“We decline to enter the private exchange you reported to us concerning planetary influence on the sun.”
So there you have it Leif.

Which makes your reply to my question “What did Wolff and Patrone say about Gough’s debunking of their paper”: They said they’d not had such a good laugh in a while and that there was no need to respond until Gough got his ‘criticism’ past peer review.
a blatant lie [as I thought]. Completely destroying any ‘credibility’ you might have thought you had.
What are you and Gough afraid of, getting your asses handed back to you on a plate? If you believe you and Gough have found a flaw in W&P’s work, then submit a properly written piece to the relevant journal. Otherwise W&P stands and you’re talking hot air.
We might do that at some point, although I doubt that that would make any difference to your cult.

Werner Brozek
August 15, 2012 8:07 am

HenryP says:
August 14, 2012 at 11:49 pm
It clearly tells me that UAH must be wrong, which I already suspected for some time.

Some sort of an adjustment should be coming in the next month of two. It is possible UAH has been too high over the last three years. On February 2, Dr. Spencer wrote: “Progress continues on Version 6 of our global temperature dataset. You can anticipate a little cooler anomalies than recently reported, maybe by a few hundredths of a degree, due to a small warming drift we have identified in one of the satellites carrying the AMSU instruments.”
See
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1980/mean:36/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1980/mean:36/plot/rss/from:1980/mean:36/plot/uah/from:1980/mean:36/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1980/mean:36
UAH is the only one that shows the last 36 month mean as being warmer than any earlier time.

tallbloke
August 15, 2012 10:57 am

Leif Svalgaard says:
August 15, 2012 at 7:58 am
tallbloke says:
What are you and Gough afraid of, getting your asses handed back to you on a plate? If you believe you and Gough have found a flaw in W&P’s work, then submit a properly written piece to the relevant journal. Otherwise W&P stands and you’re talking hot air.
We might do that at some point, although I doubt that that would make any difference to your cult.

Still blowing smoke Leif?
Let us know when your guru Gough gets around to actually reading the W&P paper and writing something he thinks worthy of submission for peer review.

tallbloke
August 15, 2012 11:03 am

Werner Brozek says:
August 15, 2012 at 8:07 am
HenryP says:
August 14, 2012 at 11:49 pm
It clearly tells me that UAH must be wrong, which I already suspected for some time.
Some sort of an adjustment should be coming in the next month of two. It is possible UAH has been too high over the last three years. On February 2, Dr. Spencer wrote: “Progress continues on Version 6 of our global temperature dataset. You can anticipate a little cooler anomalies than recently reported, maybe by a few hundredths of a degree

I think UAH is fine. What we are seeing is what I have been predicting on my blog for the last two and a half years. When the Sun goes quiet, heat comes out of the ocean and keeps the lower troposphere warm. Land is only a quarter of earth’s surface, and air isn’t very good at warming it. The increase in cloud as measured by the Earthshine project and ISCCP after 1998 means less insolation to the soil and oceans. The heat is coming up from the ocean depths.

August 15, 2012 11:14 am

tallbloke says:
August 15, 2012 at 10:57 am
Still blowing smoke Leif?
Just exposing your errors and lies, e.g. that Jose was at Los Alamos and that W&P actaully said in their email. But let that slide, as Steven Schneider once said: “it is OK to lie if it furthers the cause”.
Let us know when your guru Gough gets around to actually reading the W&P paper
Perhaps you didn’t read his note to me where Gough comments on specific items of the text:
“that Wolff and Patrone on p231 appear to claim …”
“the first paragraph of p. 232 …”
“in the last six lines of p.232”
“dismissal at the bottom of p.231”
But, as he says, after a while it becomes clear that the rest of the ‘fairy tale’ in the paper is not worth delving into. And for that reason it may not be worth wasting energy on a rebuttal [which you would not understand or accept anyway]. Or any need. Bad papers are soon and deservedly blissfully forgotten.
As Gough notes: “I have no advice to offer the authors that I believe they might take. What they should do is go back to the original publications of Rayleigh and Chandrasekhar and try to understand them. If they succeed, and if they are honest, they would then withdraw the paper.”
Perhaps they did not succeed…

Jim G
August 15, 2012 11:14 am

Leif Svalgaard says:
August 14, 2012 at 4:31 pm
Jim G says:
August 14, 2012 at 3:10 pm
Stuck in the box irrespective of evidence which would indicate there was more to be learned. It has everything to do with an open or closed mind.
“As I said, every physicist want to prove Einstein wrong and is totally open on this point. There is no box other than the hard constraints of observations. The problem is that when extending a theory to explain puzzling things one is constrained to still have the new version explain everything the old one could. That is the hard part. And nobody has succeeded in doing so, but everybody wish in his heart that he could. What physicists do not buy is the argument that there are some unknown unknowns that we can shove stuff onto. In the old days, it was called ‘magic’. We don’t believe in magic and we do not believe in the notion that all it requires is an open mind. I don’r know any scientist who would close his mind to a chance of proving Einstein wrong. There is ALWAYS more to be learned. The very notion of dark matter and dark energy are indeed things we have recently learned. You would exclude that hard won knowledge? I would say: how wonderful things we are learning that we never thought of before.”
Not everyone is simply attempting to be the first to prove Einstein wrong. You are looking at the search for deeper knowledge as an egotist would and it is certain that some of that may be involved for some. Some are, however, simply trying to determine if there is MORE that might add to or modify what Einstein has discovered and thereby answer questions which relativity does not answer. Dark matter has not been “observed”, only inferred based upon what we do know about gravity, which may not be complete knowledge, What you are doing is taking the same position as those who would not listen to Einstein and clung to the Newtonian approximations of the day. An open mind says that relativity is the present day best approximation of what is going on but since it does not answer all of the questions, there may be more, and since dark matter has not been found or observed, but its postulation is using what we already do think we know to prove what we already think we do know, dark matter may not be the answer. Not a very encouraging course of logic. Also, relativity does not, I believe, call for an accellerating expansion, only an expanding universe (and here I may be open to correction, see “General Relativity and the Accelerated Expansion of the Universe”, Patrick Das Gupta) so dark energy is also in question. It may,however, according to some, be related to the potential quantum nature of space itself.
Your position on this issue is a perfect example of the old saying that ‘It is not what people don’t know that gets them in so much trouble but all of the things they do know that just ain’t so.’ In a single word, dogmatism. This said, I probably agree with you more on the issue of relativity, in general, than you might suppose, with the exception of dark matter and dark energy due to the “incestuous” sequential logical used to “prove” their existence.

August 15, 2012 11:45 am

I first read about solar cycles in John Gribbin’s book “The Strangest Star.” I thought that the science of solar cycles had been discredited and am fascinated to see it resurfacing. Gribbin has excellent instincts and is seldom wrong.
On the other hand…. climate change skeptics, if it starts cooling, don’t rejoice too soon. The warmists will only take the cooling as evidence that carbon emission restrictions were effective.
Off topic: snip acceptable. I love the tolerant moderation policy on WUWT. Opposing opinions are welcome. In fact every time there’s a new blog I look to see what James Abbott and barry have said. They never stoop to personal comments and maintain a high standard of debate. Gail Combs is another favorite.

August 15, 2012 12:06 pm

Tallbloke says
Werner Brozek says: August 15, 2012 at 8:07 am HenryP says: August 14, 2012 at 11:49 pm It clearly tells me that UAH must be wrong, which I already suspected for some time. Some sort of an adjustment should be coming in the next month of two. It is possible UAH has been too high over the last three years. On February 2, Dr. Spencer wrote: “Progress continues on Version 6 of our global temperature dataset. You can anticipate a little cooler anomalies than recently reported, maybe by a few hundredths of a degree …
I think UAH is fine. What we are seeing is what I have been predicting on my blog for the last two and a half years. When the Sun goes quiet, heat comes out of the ocean and keeps the lower troposphere warm. Land is only a quarter of earth’s surface, and air isn’t very good at warming it. The increase in cloud as measured by the Earthshine project and ISCCP after 1998 means less insolation to the soil and oceans. The heat is coming up from the ocean depths
Henry says
HI tallbloke! Hi Werner! No doubt you are right about where the heat is coming from, when since 1995 the energy input to earth (ground) has been falling. It seems there is no one so far that has challenged the validity of my tables. From my table for means it can be calculated that “global” temps have dropped by about -0.2 degrees C or K since 2000. With current technology I would accept an absolute maximum error of 0.2 degrees K . Of course, because of various technical reasons, I believe my own data set is the best. That means most data sets must report between -0.4 to 0.0 from 2000. UAH is out. Not by a few hundredth. It is a little more, I am afraid.

August 15, 2012 12:49 pm

Jim G says:
August 15, 2012 at 11:14 am
Dark matter has not been “observed”, only inferred based upon what we do know about gravity, which may not be complete knowledge
One of the best demonstrations of Dark Matter is the determination of the Baryon/Cold Dark Matter ratio from the observed signature of sound waves during the early universe, see e.g. http://www.leif.org/EOS/CosmicSoundWaves.pdf This is simple freshman physics and has nothing to do with general relativity or gravity on large scales. There are now so many observations of DM at the issue is compelling, see e.g. http://chandra.harvard.edu/xray_astro/dark_matter/
Also, relativity does not, I believe, call for an accellerating expansion, only an expanding universe
Observations show that the Universe is ‘flat’ which with the observed amounts of baryons and dark matter requires about 75% dark energy, which automatically means an accelerating universe.
Your position on this issue is a perfect example of the old saying that ‘It is not what people don’t know that gets them in so much trouble but all of the things they do know that just ain’t so.’
You get more in trouble by not knowing whereof you speak.
You make the unwarranted assumption that cosmology is dominated by dogmatism. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Workers in the field are their own devil’s advocates and leave no stone unturned trying to poke holes in modern precision cosmology by examining known and possible sources of errors and uncertainties. A good example is http://arxiv.org/pdf/1201.2434v1.pdf .
Dark Matter and Dark Energy are in a sense the least upsetting or revolutionary things. The implications of DM and DE being due to something else are MUCH more shattering. I prefer the simplest and most conservative explanations consistent with what our observations force us to go along with. You may want to assume much more radical departures from known physics than I could stomach, that is your choice, but in that you leave me behind.

Werner Brozek
August 15, 2012 12:51 pm

Thank you tallbloke and HenryP. Dr. Spencer has already said there needs to be an adjustment downward. The only question is how much. Now I know this is not very scientific and could easily be wrong. But IF we make the assumption that RSS has been correct over the last 12 years, and if we then compare the relative positions of the 36 month mean for 2002 and 2012 for each set, my conclusion is that UAH was too high by 0.10 C over the last three years. Time will tell if this is in the ball park.

tallbloke
August 15, 2012 1:26 pm

Leif Svalgaard says:
August 15, 2012 at 11:14 am
Bad papers are soon and deservedly blissfully forgotten.

You have to get a proof that it is bad published, or you are just continuing to blow smoke. Wolff and Patrone’s paper stands until rebutted in the literature. You can blissfully ignore it remain in ignorance if you wish, the development of the theory will continue without your input.

August 15, 2012 1:30 pm

“Dark Matter and Dark Energy are in a sense the least upsetting or revolutionary things. The implications of DM and DE being due to something else are MUCH more shattering”
That is a good point but does not justify saying with certitude that DM and DE exist.
DM and DE are currently just the least disruptive interpretation that could be put on the observations. And it isn’t that DM or DE is due to something else but rather that the observations that led to the concepts of DM and DE might be due to something else.
It could well be something else unless one can demonstrate the presnce of DM and DE empirically and those who wish to consider other interpretations should not be discouraged from doing so.
Fixing on DM and DE as the most likely explanation without any supporting observation or measurement of the actual physical properties of DM and DE is just the same type of leap of faith that led to it being assumed that our CO2 emissions can control the climate.

tallbloke
August 15, 2012 1:37 pm

HenryP says:
August 15, 2012 at 12:06 pm
UAH is out. Not by a few hundredth. It is a little more, I am afraid.
Werner Brozek says:
August 15, 2012 at 12:51 pm
.my conclusion is that UAH was too high by 0.10 C over the last three years. Time will tell if this is in the ball park.

Well, we’ll see. What I’m saying is that lower troposphere warming relative to land surface as ocean surface cools is consistent with the hypothesis I’ve been testing since late 2008. The Recent el Nino’s have been depleting ocean heat content and heating lower troposphere. The Sun hasn’t been ‘recharging’ (as Bob Tisdale puts it) the Pacific Warm Pool so much. so we see the Hadley SST falling, and the land surface series falling behind the troposphere. It’s a temporary situation, as the run of big el Nino’s peters out, the lower troposphere will start to chill. My curent guess is we’ll see a marked downturn in LT by the end of next year whatever minor adjustments Roy and John need to make for orbital factors.
It’ll be interesting to see how it develops.
Cheers
TB .

August 15, 2012 1:56 pm

tallbloke says:
August 15, 2012 at 1:26 pm
“Bad papers are soon and deservedly blissfully forgotten.”
You have to get a proof that it is bad published … the development of the theory will continue without your input

It will not be forgotten by me, but by the scientific community in general. There has been no further development of the ‘theory’ so far.
Stephen Wilde says:
August 15, 2012 at 1:30 pm
That is a good point but does not justify saying with certitude that DM and DE exist.
There is no ‘certitude’ in science [except in your theory 🙂 ].
DM and DE are currently just the least disruptive interpretation that could be put on the observations. And it isn’t that DM or DE is due to something else but rather that the observations that led to the concepts of DM and DE might be due to something else.
You have clearly not studied any of the links I gave you. Try again http://www.leif.org/EOS/CosmicSoundWaves.pdf
What you are saying is like “the Moon seems to be held in orbit by gravity, but it might be something else”
It could well be something else unless one can demonstrate the presnce of DM and DE empirically
See the above link
and those who wish to consider other interpretations should not be discouraged from doing so.
They most certainly are not. Many scientists are trying to poke holes in this. None have succeeded so far. As for the general public [like you], they should be educated if they are willing and [perhaps more to the point] able.
Fixing on DM and DE as the most likely explanation
You did not study the links. DM and DE are *forced* upon us by observations, unless we want to entertain even worse alternatives.

August 15, 2012 1:59 pm

tallbloke says:
August 15, 2012 at 1:26 pm
“Bad papers are soon and deservedly blissfully forgotten.”
You have to get a proof that it is bad published

No need, a bad paper stinks to high heaven on its own and any scientist worth his salt can spot it.

August 15, 2012 2:00 pm

Thx you all. I wouls agree/say that UAH Is out by at least 0.1 since 2000. I am interested to hear the reason? Best wishes. H

Jim G
August 15, 2012 2:01 pm

Leif Svalgaard says:
August 15, 2012 at 12:49 pm
“You make the unwarranted assumption that cosmology is dominated by dogmatism.”
You make the unwarraned assumption that I was speaking of cosmology in general, the dogmatism comment was the stone thrown and the one which howls is the one which was struck. there are, indeed, many in the field who are open minded and seeking more truth.
“Observations show that the Universe is ‘flat’ which with the observed amounts of baryons and dark matter requires about 75% dark energy, which automatically means an accelerating universe.”
More incestuous, circular logic.
“Dark Matter and Dark Energy are in a sense the least upsetting or revolutionary things. The implications of DM and DE being due to something else are MUCH more shattering.”
It is not that DM and DE might be due to something else, but that the observations which you feel confirm their existence might be due to something else. And why would such a discovery be “shattering” to you particularly if it progessed us toward integration of quantum physics with relativity?

August 15, 2012 2:50 pm

Jim G says:
August 15, 2012 at 2:01 pm
You make the unwarranted assumption that I was speaking of cosmology in general
Cosmology without DM and DE simply does not exist. You too could benefit from studying the very accessible http://www.leif.org/EOS/CosmicSoundWaves.pdf which you clearly didn’t do.
And why would such a discovery be “shattering” to you particularly if it progessed us toward integration of quantum physics with relativity?
First, there is no ‘discovery’, second because DM has nothing to do with general relativity. As I said:
“You may want to assume much more radical departures from known physics than I could stomach, that is your choice, but in that you leave me behind.”
Your notion of ‘dogmatism’ is ill-placed. The dogmatic one is the one who refuses to accept the marvel of modern cosmology. Refuses to accept how far we have come and refuses to learn about the greatest story ever told.

Peter
August 15, 2012 3:00 pm

[snip]