Dr. Leif Svalgaard on the New Scientist solar max story

Jan P Perlwitz says:
In my statement,
‘If the fact that finding a time period (15 years, 10 years, 2 weeks, 2 days, whatever) for which the increase in the temperature anomaly wasn’t statistically significant was sufficient to conclude that there was no physical process of global warming ongoing, then this would lead to absurd additional conclusions with necessity.’
the key word is “sufficient”.
No. All of the words in that statement are key. And you are running from all of them.
That statement is false. It is long past the time when an honest man would have admitted that.
The assertion, e.g., made by “D. Boehm”, is that it was sufficient to find such a time period.
D Böehm made no such assertion in the post to which you were putatively responding . That is a lie.
Rather, D Böehm was laughing at the fact that you were estimating a potential ‘delay’ in warming of 10 years due to the current weak solar cycle, when we are already sitting at 15 years of no warming. No matter what he actually said. You had a talking point that you wanted to use, and you pretended that D Böehm said something he did not, in order to give yourself cover to use it. That is what you political actors do. Among the numerous problems with that course of action is that your inappropriately directed talking point is false.
When you say, “there exists SOME length of time for which a lack of statistically significant warming would be sufficient to conclude that said theory is false.”, then this is not the same argument as put forward by “D. Boehm”,
I was not responding to D Böehm. Nor was I responding to the lie that you put in D Böehm’s mouth. I was responding to your asinine, scientifically illiterate statement.
In your statement, an additional proposition has been included, which must be fulfilled as necessary condition. The additional, necessary condition is that the time period of no statistical significance was long enough. Not just that one could find a time period without statistical significance.
No. My statement contains no additional proposition. Your asinine, scientifically illiterate talking point explicitly denied that there is any length of no warming period that would be sufficient to falsify ‘global warming’. Read what you wrote. Pay attention to all of your words, for they are all key. Among those key words: “whatever”.
You have been caught in multiple deceits. On this particular matter, you began by putting words in D Böehm’s mouth. You ‘answered’ that fabrication with an hilariously false statement. Rather than come clean, you double down on the strawman you created for D Böehm, reasserting that he said something he did not. Rather than admit that the laughingly unscientific talking point was false, you instead attempt to twist and dissemble your way around it’s meaning. You don’t get to be indignant anymore, when people question your ethics.

Bart says:
September 30, 2012 at 9:32 am
It’s like talking to my grandpa after we had to move him into the Home.
Most decent people would treat their grandpa with some respect, but that, apparently, does not include you.

From Bart on September 30, 2012 at 9:32 am:

It’s like talking to my grandpa after we had to move him into the Home. Forget it, Leif. Have some oatmeal.

As someone who cared for his dad and changed his adult diapers and wiped his butt before he ended up in a Home after breaking his hip, I think Leif is doing much better than you think. His teaching style may be off-putting due to the repetitious call to “Read the material, try to learn”, and young people tend to dismiss older instructors who no longer use the level of “dynamic engagement” found with younger ones, but I can assure you Leif does have a very coherent presentation style.
This is not to be taken as a blanket endorsement of everything he espouses. But solar dynamics is his area of expertise, not mine, and he honestly presents what he knows as the evidence and the theories, so I try to just sit back and see what I can learn from him. What are you doing?

Jan P Perlwitz says:
I’m not going to dignify your ad hominem with which you have come up in response to factual statements by me, by replying to it.
I have made no ad hominem. You misuse that term. Stop whining, and stop running from the truth.
You write:
“Clearly false. If there is such a thing as a theory of climate, then that theory can only be tested on the whole.”
Says who? You? The Commission for Normatives of Theory Testing?
Says deductive logic and the scientific method. They seek to avoid the sort of ad hoc fallacies that you create from your incomplete list of ‘evidence’.
Says Henri Poincaré, if you find value in ad vericundium arguments, as your decidely unscientific ‘says who’ question indicates. Scientists don’t ask “Says who”. They ask, “Say what?”
Like global temperature increase,
Flat for as long a period as the IPCC claims it rose due to CO2. Do tell us about the 50% CO2 duty cycle present in the ‘theory of climate’.
increase in ocean heat content,
LOL. We have only been measuring the heat content of the upper half of the ocean with anything even approaching sufficient spatial and temporal resolution for less than 10 years. Still bupkiss on the 50% of the ocean below 2000m. And even with what we have, Trenberth is still missing heat. It is a travesty, I tell you.
melting of the ice in the Arctic and in the Antarctic etc.
Arctic: Current research on ice cores in Greenland indicates that the arctic is melting consistent with a natural pattern established centuries before IPCC claims that humans had an effect on atmospheric CO2.
Antarctic: AR4 makes the following claim about ‘global warming’:
“Sea ice is projected to shrink in both the Arctic and Antarctic under all SRES scenarios.”
But Antarctic sea Ice just hit a new record high the other day. Whoopsie.
sea level is rising
Has been for milennia.
the Arctic sea ice decline is accelerating, even more than previously predicted by the climate models,
Uh, that is an example of the models being wrong. What else are they wrong about?
Climate models are recursive – the outputs from timestep 1 are the inputs for timestep 2. This permits the simulation of feedback mechanisms. We are told that Arctic sea ice extent is a powerful positive feedback mechanism, one of the things that is supposed to turn a theoretical 1C climate sensitivity into the 2C – 6C (LOL) 21st century temp increase predicted by the models presented in AR4. If the models are underpredicting Arctic sea ice loss, but not also underpredicting global average surface temp increase (arguably, they are significantly *overpredicting* that parameter), then there is a serious problem with those models.
But then, you knew that. But rather than present that knowledge that you undoubtedly have as a modeler, you instead pretend that the models being wrong with a cold bias about a single parameter is meaningful. Dishonest.
as system responses to an increasing greenhouse gas concentration?
Bald assertion. Based on pure conjecture and entirely unquantified.
All of the above is why any alleged theory of climate – which if it exists at all is to be found as the logic and parameterizations of those models – must be tested on the whole to determine its validity. Your ad hoc justification method is itself fallacious, above and beyond the fact that its operative components are themselves often exaggerated, misleading, or false.

JanP
Like the other five times before that over the last 40 years?
REPLY: Yes, and like the many similar times over the last several hundred years.
JanP;
Then again, the positive trend over the whole time period is statistically significant.
REPLY: Over the course of the modern instrumental record, the trend has remained pretty much constant, implying no change that can be directly attributed to CO2, and certainly nothing that can be considered “dominant”.
JanP;
: ARGO BUOYS SHOW DECLINE
Not a fact:
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/index.html
REPLY: Sir, you know very well that the Argo buoys have only been in operation for a few years, yet you show us a graph that begins decades before the Argo buoys were deployed.
JanP;
What “past” specifically? “The past” is long. Over geological times of Earth, climate changed significantly.
REPLY: I am glad that you recognize that Earth’s climate has changed significantly due to natural variation.
JanP;
Only the Antarctic sea ice in late winter with an increase less than 1% per decade. Compared to the Arctic sea ice decline of about 10% per decade
REPLY: Your specific statement was that Antarctic ice is melting. This statement was wrong, and you’ve now admitted it while at the same time trying to distract attention from the fact that you got it wrong by trying to compare it to the arctic.
JanP,
You have also not responded to my point that according to the IPCC, which you claim to endorse, our level of scientific understanding of 9 of the 14 factors contributing to uncertainty regarding earth’s energy budget are rated as low or very low. You have not responded to the point made by richardscourtney and myself that without widely diverging values for aerosol forcing, the models in the IPCC ensemble would also diverge, showing that wildly different aerosol values are being used to force the models to converge by negating other errors within the models. You have also not answered my question about Keith Briffa using a handful of trees in Siberia to represent the temperature of the globe.

From Leif Svalgaard on September 30, 2012 at 9:25 am:

If we go that route, recent work has shown that there has been no long-term trend in the SSN the last 300 years, I believe some people are claiming that there is an upward trend in temperatures. On a shorter time scale, the solar indicators and temperatures vary in opposite directions as we have discussed.

Leif, in June you said:

(…) Note: we think that modern sunspot numbers are about 20% “too high” compared to the historical record [before 1945]. The graph has not been corrected for this [it should]. We have just had the 2nd SSN workshop in Brussels. You can see more about the workshops here http://ssnworkshop.wikia.com/wiki/Home

Does the work showing that lack of long-term trend incorporate that correction?

JJ;
You are not an honest man.
>>>>>>>>>>>>
Actually, I think he is.
He has been immersed in a world where his opinions are simply echoed and reinforced by those around him. He’s frustrated and angry that we cannot so easily see the truth of his points like all his colleagues can. As I said earlier, at least he has stopped playing cat and mouse and has instead begun discussing the science. Let us encourage him to continue in that manner.

davidmhoffer says:
Actually, I think he is.
The evidence inidcates otherwise.
There are honest arguments that can be made for the ‘global warming’ conjecture. And there are ways to argue honestly against some of the the points that sceptics raise. A highly placed NASA scientist should be capable of making those arguments. He has also made some demonstrably false statements, and made some appallingly non-scientific arguments. A highly placed NASA scientist should have the professionalism to fess up when those things are pointed out.
That is not what we are seeing here. Instead, we are seeing exactly the same sort of behavior as is practiced by non-scientist, ignorant politcal hacks like Cook from SKS. In fact, in his last post we now see the NASA scientist parroting Cook’s talking points, instead of engaging in a meaningful discussion of the current surface temperature trend and the implications on the ‘global warming’ conjecture. Shameful.
Your analysis of his likley social and professional circles does not demonstrate that he is an honest man, though it may go some distance in explaining why he evidently is not.

Bart says:
September 30, 2012 at 3:05 pm
The behavior is that of stochastically modulated oscillation, just as in the model I have suggested. Your article agrees with me and disagrees with you
The they go on to say:
“It therefore seems extremely unlikely that the dynamics of the solar interior can be described by a forced linear system without throwing away much (if not all) of the important physics. In this case it must be argued not only that this discarded physics is irrelevant to the dynamo process but also that the parameterisation of the unresolved physics should not include a stochastic component, as this would have an extremely large effect on such a relinearised system”
The main point of the article is that prediction beyond one cycle is impossible so there is no possibility to extrapolate the two harmonic modes you claim to find into anything useful.
Your response is typical of the lack of physical insight in your approach.

Bart says:
September 30, 2012 at 3:05 pm
The behavior is that of stochastically modulated oscillation, just as in the model I have suggested.
You may hope that none of your prospective customers are reading this blog. Backed by your self-proclaimed ‘professional’ qualifications you quote selectively and misleadingly. Here is the full text:
“What we have demonstrated [no mere value statement or opinion] here is that no meaningful predictions can be made from illustrative mean-field models, no matter how they are constructed. If the mean-field model is constructed to be a driven linear oscillator then the small stochastic effects that lead to the modulation will have an extremely large effect on the basic cycle [which are not observed] and make even short-term prediction extremely difficult. The second scenario, where the modulation arises as a result of nonlinear processes rather than stochastic fluctuations, is clearly a better one for prediction — though here too, prediction is fraught with difficulties. Owing to the inherent nonlinearity of the dynamo system, long-term predictions are impossible (even if the form of the model is completely correctly determined). Furthermore, even short-term prediction from mean-field models is meaningless because of fundamental uncertainties in the form and amplitude of the transport coefficients and nonlinear response. Any deterministic nonlinear model that produces chaotically modulated activity cycles will be faced with the same difficulties.”