An article in the New Scientist says:
But Dr. Leif Svalgaard, one of the worlds leading solar physicists and WUWT’s resident solar expert has this to say:
Solar max is a slippery concept. One can be more precise and *define* solar max for a given hemisphere as the time when the polar fields reverse in the hemisphere. The reversals usually differ by one or two years, so solar max will similarly differ. The North is undergoing reversal right now, so has reached maximum. The South is lagging, but already the polar field is rapidly decreasing, so reversal may be only a year away. Such asymmetry is very common.
Here is a link to the evolution of the polar fields as measured at WSO:
http://www.leif.org/research/WSO-Polar-Fields-since-2003.png
And here’s data all the way back to 1966, note there has not been a crossing of the polar fields yet in 2012, a typical event at solar max:
http://www.leif.org/research/Solar-Polar-Fields-1966-now.png
Here is a link to a talk on this: http://www.leif.org/research/ click
on paper 1540.
Dr. Svalgaard adds:
Solar max happens at different times for each hemisphere. In the North we are *at* max right now. For the South there is another year to go, but ‘max’ for a small cycle like 24 is a drawn out affair and will last several years. To say that max falls on a given date, e.g. Jan 3rd, 2013, at UT 04:15 is meaningless.
I found this article on the solar activity vs. temperature link very informative. Chew on this Jan!
Magic sunspot number is 40! Greater than that the earth system warms, less than that it cools!
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2010/07/21/nailing-the-solar-activity-global-temperature-divergence-lie/
John Whitman wrote in
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/09/28/dr-leif-svalgaard-on-the-new-scientist-solar-max-story/#comment-1093189
No, that is not a premise of mine.
Jan P Perlwitz;
The “argument” is not scientifically valid. It’s nonsense. There is a difference between statistical detectability of a physical process and presence of a physical process. Lack of statistical significance, e.g., of a trend, only allows the conclusion that the process can’t be sufficiently distinguished from noise on the given time period.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Well glad to see you admitting that natural variability is so large that it makes the contribution of CO2 pretty much insignificant by comparison.
Jan P Perlwitz says:
=================================================================
“The Sun has nothing to do with global climate until we can figure out a way to tax it.”
Eyes Wide Open says:
September 28, 2012 at 12:36 pm
Wow. Nicely done. So, in the end it all boils down to, the Sun drives temperatures and temperatures drive CO2. What an unmitigated fiasco.
Jan P Perlwitz;
The IPCC doesn’t do any of these things, you claim here, because the IPCC itself doesn’t do climate research or climate modeling. The IPCC report is a review report, which compiles and synthesizes the existing research as it has been published in the peer reviewed scientific literature. The IPCC can only report what’s out there.
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So, if the IPCC “synthesizes” a report based on other reports, and the other reports turn out to be wrong, then it means only one thing: That the IPCC “synthesis” report was wrong.
Nice try Jan P Perlwitz, but this tactic simply discredits you further. You’ve presented no argument that is 100% accurate and quite beside the point. Either defend the models, or don’t. But saying that the IPCC doesn’t actually do the modelling, they just report the results, is like a mafia don claiming he doesn’t do the killing….
These are the models and results of models as reported by the IPCC, and referring to them as “their” models is perfectly valid for the purposes of this discussion. If memory serves, 18 of the 22 models used in the IPCC AR4 ensemble had no variable for TSI at all, and the forcing assumed by them for aerosols was all over the map. The best the models could do versus actual observations was (again, going from memory) about 3 degrees and the ensemble got to within 1 degree. That leaves you relying on models that have clear errors that cancel each other out to a certain extent, but combining them in that fashion results in massive error bars, making the value of the output pretty much meaingless. Further, the real world only has ONE actual value for aerosols. If all the models used the same value, only one of them would even be close, and that one only by about 3 degrees.
From this you want us to believe that the models are capable of discerning a temperature rise of 1/100 degree per year and attribute some portion of it to CO2 in an environment which you yourself just admitted has natural variability that dwarfs the CO2 signal we’re trying to measure?
Bart,
I think this chart shows the ΔT/ΔCO2 cause and effect more clearly.
Also, GISS “adjusts” the temperature record:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/gw-us-1999-2011-hansen.gif
And Hansen is wrong again. He’s never right, is he?
Jan P Perlwitz:
At September 28, 2012 at 11:03 am you ask Tom Murphy
Oh! I want to answer that one! I will take any opportunity to tell anybody the answer to that one.
So, here is the answer again.
None of the climate models – not one of them – could match the change in mean global temperature over the past century if it did not utilise a unique value of assumed cooling from aerosols. So, inputting actual values of the cooling effect (such as the determination by Penner et al.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/07/25/1018526108.full.pdf?with-ds=yes)
would make every climate model provide a mismatch of the global warming it hindcasts and the observed global warming for the twentieth century.
This mismatch would occur because all the global climate models and energy balance models are known to provide indications which are based on
1.
the assumed degree of forcings resulting from human activity that produce warming
and
2.
the assumed degree of anthropogenic aerosol cooling input to each model as a ‘fiddle factor’ to obtain agreement between past average global temperature and the model’s indications of average global temperature.
More than a decade ago I published a peer-reviewed paper that showed the UK’s Hadley Centre general circulation model (GCM) could not model climate and only obtained agreement between past average global temperature and the model’s indications of average global temperature by forcing the agreement with an input of assumed anthropogenic aerosol cooling.
The input of assumed anthropogenic aerosol cooling is needed because the model ‘ran hot’; i.e. it showed an amount and a rate of global warming which was greater than was observed over the twentieth century. This failure of the model was compensated by the input of assumed anthropogenic aerosol cooling.
And my paper demonstrated that the assumption of aerosol effects being responsible for the model’s failure was incorrect.
(ref. Courtney RS An assessment of validation experiments conducted on computer models of global climate using the general circulation model of the UK’s Hadley Centre Energy & Environment, Volume 10, Number 5, pp. 491-502, September 1999).
More recently, in 2007, Kiehle published a paper that assessed 9 GCMs and two energy balance models.
(ref. Kiehl JT,Twentieth century climate model response and climate sensitivity. GRL vol.. 34, L22710, doi:10.1029/2007GL031383, 2007).
Kiehl found the same as my paper except that each model he assessed used a different aerosol ‘fix’ from every other model. This is because they all ‘run hot’ but they each ‘run hot’ to a different degree.
He says in his paper:
And, importantly, Kiehl’s paper says:
And the “magnitude of applied anthropogenic total forcing” is fixed in each model by the input value of aerosol forcing.
Thanks to Bill Illis, Kiehl’s Figure 2 can be seen at
http://img36.imageshack.us/img36/8167/kiehl2007figure2.png ]
Please note that the Figure is for 9 GCMs and 2 energy balance models, and its title is:
”Figure 2. Total anthropogenic forcing (Wm2) versus aerosol forcing (Wm2) from nine fully coupled climate models and two energy balance models used to simulate the 20th century.”
It shows that
(a) each model uses a different value for “Total anthropogenic forcing” that is in the range 0.80 W/m^-2 to 2.02 W/m^-2
but
(b) each model is forced to agree with the rate of past warming by using a different value for “Aerosol forcing” that is in the range -1.42 W/m^-2 to -0.60 W/m^-2.
In other words the models use values of “Total anthropogenic forcing” that differ by a factor of more than 2.5 and they are ‘adjusted’ by using values of assumed “Aerosol forcing” that differ by a factor of 2.4.
So, each climate model emulates a different climate system. Hence, at most only one of them emulates the climate system of the real Earth because there is only one Earth. And the fact that they each ‘run hot’ unless fiddled by use of a completely arbitrary ‘aerosol cooling’ strongly suggests that none of them emulates the climate system of the real Earth.
Richard
I think this chart shows the ΔT/ΔCO2 cause and effect more clearly.
Also, GISS “adjusts” the temperature record:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/gw-us-1999-2011-hansen.gif
##############################
That is very misleading on your part. The temperature estimated in 1999 used
1. A different dataset
2. Different averaging code.
Of course when you use more data and employ better methods you will find that the past
cools a bit. Kinda has to.
Using all the data in its rawest form publicly available and using methods that are BLUE it’s quite easy to show that GISS is more accurate now than it used to be. Sorry, its just a fact of math.
I had to google ‘Jan P. Perlwitz’ and came with :
NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
Affiliation: Columbia University
Very impressive, but I also came across his colleague
Dr. Jean Dickey of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena:
She said:
One possibility is the movements of Earth’s core (where Earth’s magnetic field originates) might disturb Earth’s magnetic shielding of charged-particle (i.e., cosmic ray) fluxes that have been hypothesized to affect the formation of clouds. This could affect how much of the sun’s energy is reflected back to space and how much is absorbed by our planet. Other possibilities are that some other core process could be having a more indirect effect on climate, or that an external (e.g. solar) process affects the core and climate simultaneously.
(more on the subject here: http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/TMC.htm )
I would be interested to hear Dr. Jan P. Perlwitz’s opinion.
Dr. Perlwitz thank you for your time.
(apologies in advance to Anthony)
MarkW says:
September 28, 2012 at 10:09 am
Sparks says:
September 28, 2012 at 6:52 am
While a drop in the solar wind might be enough to drop the size of an orbit by a few miles, there’s no way it can change a nearly circular orbit to a highly elliptical one.
First it is necessary to identify what the Earth is actually orbiting. The Earth does not orbit the Sun and the Sun is not the center of the Solar System. The Sun and the Earth orbit the barycenter of the Solar System. However, the barycenter is moving due to the change in the relative position of the planets (see Rhodes Fairbridge and Landscheidt); the Earth is in an orbit around the previous position(s) of the barycenter and that orbit must alter to the new barycenter position.so the Earth’s orbit is continually altering following a modified epitrochoid pattern. Sometimes the movement pattern of the barycenter is smooth on other occasions it is rapid and changes to retrograde. These rapid changes are difficult for the Sun and the planets including Earth to follow.
What would be expected? Circulation patterns in the Sun could be disrupted as the barycenter moves through the Sun prograde or retrograde and sometimes out to more than a solar diameter away. The solar activity – including spots, CME. solar wind, magnetism may all be affected. Planetary orbits are disturbed causing changes from nearly circular (when the barycenter is relatively stable) to highly elliptical when the barycenter has moved. Chasing a moving barycenter will require velocity change, the inertia of this blob of liquid rock with a thin crust overlaid with layers of liquid and gas that we call Earth means that a velocity change may disturb or cause cracks in its thin crust – we call these earthquakes and volcanism – there will also be measurable angular momentum and length of day changes.
So back to your point. True the solar wind dropping or increasing is unlikely to change the orbit – but it may be a symptom of the orbital changes of the Sun and the planets as they orbit a moving barycenter. It may also explain why volcanism and earthquakes seem to be linked to the behavior of the Sun. This has been noted in papers from NASA and is used by Piers Corbyn of WeatherAction to forecast increased earthquake and volcanic activity.
You may not like the ideas but the hypothesis is internally consistent and fits observations.
richardscourtney;
Oh! I want to answer that one! I will take any opportunity to tell anybody the answer to that one.
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I’d encourage anyone who thinks that the models have any validity at all (this means you JPP) to read richardscourtney’s comment above in detail. This is one of the most glaring problems with the models that I can think of. I’ve seen Richard post versions of this before, and the response from the cagw community that touts models as “proof” is the sound of crickets.
richardscourtney says:
September 28, 2012 at 1:35 pm
Oh! I want to answer that one! I will take any opportunity to tell anybody the answer to that one.
Tim Walker responds to Richard. Wow. What a great answer. I doubt if the person asking the question you answered, will look at your answer with an opening mind and willing to see the truth. Thank you for your work. Keep doing what you can.
Can we all agree to call it New Clientist in future?
Steven Mosher says:
“That is very misleading on your part.”
Steven, you are confused about who is doing the misleading.
“Dr. Leif Svalgaard, one of the worlds leading solar physicists and WUWT’s resident solar expert ” it says at the top.
And he probably is.
Except when he says that the variations in the sun’s output is not great enough to cause the variations in the climate, then nobody believes him. Odd isn’t it ?
Jan P Perlwitz says:
September 28, 2012 at 12:45 pm
No, that is not a premise of mine.
= = = = = =
Jan P Perlwitz,
Then your original statement (as follows) is self contradictory in principle:
Your statement erroneously assumes that cycles with higher sunspot counts should, per se, increase earth-atmosphere system energy (via TSI) and thus increases in global temperature relative to cycles with lower sunspot counts. That presumption does not contain the evolving knowledge that cycles with lower sunspot counts can have a spectral shift in the sun’s energy (SSI) reaching earth that may actually have a net warming effect greater than cycles with higher sunspot counts.
John
davidmhoffer wrote
(Snip. Stop referring to people who have not commented here, or future posts will go to the spam folder. ~mod)
Well glad to see you admitting that natural variability is so large that it makes the contribution of CO2 pretty much insignificant by comparison.
I don’t say anything like this about the effect of CO2 on climate in the statement that you quote here. Either you maliciously misrepresent what I say, or you have some serious problems with understanding what you read. The quote is a generally valid statement about the difference between the statistical detectability of a physical process in a data set and the presence of the process.
Jan P Perlwitz says:
September 28, 2012 at 7:02 am
Even if the 11-year solar cycle vanishes altogether and the sun activity stays at the minimum of the solar cycle, I predict global warming due to greenhouse gases will continue over the next decades, since greenhouse gases have become the dominant climate driver in the second half of the 20th century. The warming will just be delayed by a few years (by about 10 years based on mere energy balance considerations).
Thanks for posting this Jan, its much easier later when the complete opposite occurs for you (GISS) to be discredicted further than already is the case. All i see is “greenhouse gases are the dominant driver”, the CSIRO is ” virtually certain” the oceans are warming due to the CO2. But there is no proof, none whatsoever. There is no science in this, its just an assumption that these changes cannot be natural, so CO2 must be causing it.
Its getting tiresome, reading so much garbage about CO2, when there is a large disconnect between CO2 and temperatures. And your theory of a delay doesnt cut it, CO2 has increased since 1998 more than any other time, exactly the time the warming halted.
It seems obvious to anyone that solar has an influence, because if you go outside at 2am you get to see the influence in real time.
Steven Mosher;
Of course when you use more data and employ better methods you will find that the past
cools a bit. Kinda has to.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Why? Why does it “has to”?
Ian W says:
“Planetary orbits are disturbed causing changes from nearly circular (when the barycenter is relatively stable) to highly elliptical when the barycenter has moved.”
That is very interesting. It explains a lot, for example why the length of a year varies, and why the equinoxes are unpredictable, and also why astronomers are completely unable, because their equations do not contain this effect, to predict the occurrences of eclipses to the nearest minute. And it explains the strange lurching I sometimes feel when I come out of a pub on Saturday evening – I now realise it is due to sudden changes in the Earth’s velocity as it tries to keep up with the barycenter. Thank you for this insight.
Dr. Leif Svalgaard’s comments on an article in the New Scientist? I have often wondered who read that rag!
jimmi_the_dalek says:
September 28, 2012 at 2:59 pm
Jimmi – may I suggest you read a few very simple lectures on the search for extrasolar planets. Try this one for a start http://www2.astro.psu.edu/users/caryl/a10/lec21_2d.html
Perhaps read it before you have that ginger beer and lose your faculties.
And you can look at http://astro.unl.edu/naap/esp/detection.html showing the effect on the Sun.
“””””…..Bart says:
September 28, 2012 at 12:05 pm
Steve M. from TN says:
September 28, 2012 at 11:25 am
“Probably just us humans had to have a way to reference the top hemisphere and the bottom hemisphere of the Sun, so we kept the same naming convention as we use here.”
Indeed. A positive rotation about a given axis is, by convention, counter-clockwise. And, most of the planets revolve counter-clockwise about the North pole axis of the Sun………””””””
Where did you come up with that rule ? I believe by convention, Positive in the rotation vector sense is governed by the right hand rule. so you point your thumb in the positive angular rotation or velocity, or angular momentum direction and your fingers wrap around the vector direction in a clockwise direction, or the direction of a right handed screw.
Yes some trigonometry text books choose Counter clockwise as the positive direction. On the other hand, one of the very first things stated in the most definitive geometrical optics text book ever published (circa 1926) states that the direction of positive angles is clockwise. Of course it doesn’t matter which you choose, so long as you use it consistently. So if one points one’s thumb in the direction of earth’s axis, , pointing from south towards north, what direction does the earth rotate; well blow me down, I do believe it is from west to east, just as prescribed by the right hand vector rule.
Any fly fisherman knows that when you cast a fly line, you have to make the cast in such a way, that the linear momentum, and angular momentum, are both of the same sign, either both positive (forward cast) or negative (backward cast), and if you launch it with crossed up momentum signs, you get a tailing loop mess; every time..
jimmi_the_dalek says:
September 28, 2012 at 2:36 pm
“Odd isn’t it ?”
What a very intriguing comment. To me this implies that you, jimmi, understand something that seems to elude everyone else – that being how “the variations in the sun’s output” cause variations in Earth’s climate. A half dozen or more ideas have been floated like helium-filled balloons at a birthday party and all seem to have been burst like having been touched with the burning candles on the cake. Please take the opportunity to state which one of the ideas you think works and explain the mechanism. You could save us all a lot of further reading and better direct all future research on the subject.