Teaming up with Jo Nova to answer The Team down under: “Professor Sherwood is inverting the scientific method”
Guest post by Alec Rawls
My leak of the draft IPCC report emphasized the chapter 7 admission of strong evidence for solar forcing beyond the very slight variance in solar irradiance, even if we don’t know the mechanism:
The forcing from changes in total solar irradiance alone does not seem to account for these observations, implying the existence of an amplifying mechanism such as the hypothesized GCR-cloud link.
One of the fifteen lead authors of chapter 7 responded that the evidence for one of the proposed mechanisms of solar amplification, GCR-cloud, indicates a weak effect, and proceeded as if this obviated the IPCC’s admission that some such mechanism must be having a substantial effect:
[Professor Steven Sherwood] says the idea that the chapter he authored confirms a greater role for solar and other cosmic rays in global warming is “ridiculous”.
“I’m sure you could go and read those paragraphs yourself and the summary of it and see that we conclude exactly the opposite – that this cosmic ray effect that the paragraph is discussing appears to be negligible,” he told PM.
Sherwood uses theory—his dissatisfaction with one theory of how solar amplification might work—to ignore the (admitted) evidence for some mechanism of solar amplification. Putting theory over evidence is not science. It is the exact definitional opposite of science (see Feynman snippet above).
Since Sherwood is Australian, it seemed a visit Down Under was due, so Jo Nova and I teamed up to issue a reply on her website.
Jo knows Sherwood
Here is Jo Nova’s take on Sherwood’s shenanigans:
The IPCC are now adding citations of critics (so they can’t be accused of ignoring them completely), but they bury the importance of those studies under glorious graphic art, ponderous bureacrat-speak, and contradictory conclusions.
When skeptics point out that the IPCC admit (in a hidden draft) that the solar magnetic effect could change the climate on Earth, the so-called Professors of Science hit back — but not with evidence from the atmosphere, but with evidence from other paragraphs in a committee report. It’s argument from authority, it’s a logical fallacy that no Professor of Science should ever make. Just because other parts of a biased committee report continue to deny the evidence does not neutralize the real evidence.
Alec Rawls pulls him up. Sherwood calls us deniers, but the IPCC still denies solar-magnetic effects that have been known for 200 years. This anti-science response is no surprise from Sherwood, who once changed the colour of “zero” to red to make it match the color the models were supposed to find. (Since when was red the color of no-warming? Sure you can do it, but it is deceptive.) That effort still remains one of the most egregious peer reviewed distortions of science I have ever seen. — Jo
Earlier this week Nova posted about Sherwood’s glowing support for recent claims that the IPCC’s predictions of global warming have been accurate. Obviously Sherwood needs to take a closer look at the Second Order Draft which, in particular the following graph (SOD figure 1.4 on page 1-39, with a hat tip to Anthony):
Absolutely NOT falsified says Sherwood, but guess what he thinks IS falsified?
Steve Sherwood, Co-Director, Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales said the paper showed “that if you take natural year-to-year variability into account in any reasonable way, the predictions are as close as one could reasonably expect.”
“Those who have been claiming ad nauseum that the climate models have been proved wrong, should read this paper, even though for most of us it is not very surprising,” said Dr Sherwood, who was not involved in the Nature Climate Change paper.
“Though there is no contrarian analogue to the IPCC, individual contrarians have made predictions over a similar time frame that the warming would stop or reverse. The data since then have probably falsified many of those predictions (which the deniers continue to make today).”
Predictions that warming would stop have been falsified? By what? By the fact that, according to HadCRUT4, there has been no statistically significant warming for 16 years? Falsification in Steve Sherwood’s dictionary: “whatever preserves Steve Sherwood’s presumptions.” Just what we’d expect from a definitional anti-scientist.
My own response to Sherwood gets into the back-story on the Second Order Draft. Readers might be interested to know that the SOD admission of substantial evidence for solar amplification seems to be in response to my submitted comments on the FOD. I had charged them with, you guessed it, inverting the scientific method. That’s why Sherwood, in pretending that the new admission never happened, is also inverting the scientific method. He’s reverting to the FOD position. Well, some of his co-authors are apparently not willing to go there any more, and hopefully they will speak out.
My guest post at Jo Nova’s:
Professor Steven Sherwood inverts the scientific method: he is an exact definitional anti-scientist
My submitted comments on the First Order Draft of AR5 accused the IPCC of committing what in statistics is called “omitted variable fraud.” As I titled my post on the subject: “Vast evidence for solar climate driver rates one oblique sentence in AR5.”
How vast is the evidence? Dozens of studies have found between a .4 and .7 degree of correlation between solar activity and various climate indices going back many thousands of years, meaning that solar activity “explains” in the statistical sense something like half of all past temperature change (citations at the link above).
Solar activity was at “grand maximum” levels from 1920 to 2000 (Usoskin 2007). Might this explain a substantial part of the unexceptional warming of the 20th century? Note also that, with the sun having since dropped into a state of profound quiescence, the solar-warming theory can also explain the lack of 21st century warming while the CO2-warming theory cannot.
Now take a look the radiative forcing table from any one of the IPCC reports, where the explanatory variables that get included in the IPCC computer models are laid out. You will see that the only solar forcing effect listed is “solar irradiance.” In AR5 this table is on page 8-39:
Why is the solar irradiance effect so tiny? Note that Total Solar Irradiance, or TSI, is also known as “the solar constant.” When solar activity ramps up and down from throwing wild solar flares to sleeping like a baby, TSI hardly varies a whit. That’s where the name comes from. While solar activity varies tremendously, solar irradiance remains almost constant.
This slight change in the solar radiation that shines on our planet is known to be too small an energy variation to explain any substantial change in temperature. In particular, it can’t begin to account for anything near to half of all past temperature change. It can’t begin to account for the large solar effect on climate that is evidenced in the geologic record.
Implication: some other solar effect besides TSI must also be at work. One of the solar variables that does vary when solar activity ramps up and down, like solar wind pressure, must be having some effect on climate, and this is certainly plausible. We in-effect live inside of the sun’s extended corona. When the solar wind is going full blast the earth’s immediate external environment is rather different than when the solar wind is down, and even if we don’t know the mechanism, we have powerful evidence that some solar effect other than the slight variation in TSI is driving global temperature.
This is what the IPCC admits in the Second Order Draft of AR5, which now includes the sentence in bold below (page 7-43, lines 1-4, emphasis added):
Many empirical relationships have been reported between GCR or cosmogenic isotope archives and some aspects of the climate system (e.g., Bond et al., 2001; Dengel et al., 2009; Ram and Stolz, 1999). The forcing from changes in total solar irradiance alone does not seem to account for these observations, implying the existence of an amplifying mechanism such as the hypothesized GCR-cloud link. We focus here on observed relationships between GCR and aerosol and cloud properties.
Sherwood’s response is to consider only one possible mechanism of solar amplification. He looks at the evidence for Henrik Svensmark’s proposed GCR-cloud mechanism and judges that the forcing effect from this particular mechanism would be small, then concludes that a greater role for the sun in global warming is “ridiculous.”
Hey Sherwood, read the added sentence again. It says that the evidence implies the existence of “an amplifying mechanism.” Presenting an argument against a particular possible mechanism does not in any way counter the report’s new admission that some such mechanism must be at work. (Guess he didn’t author that sentence eh? Since he doesn’t even know what it says.)
Sherwood is trying to use theory—his dissatisfaction with a particular theory of how solar amplification might work—to dismiss the evidence that some mechanism of solar amplification must be at work. The bad professor is inverting the scientific method, which requires that evidence always trump theory. If evidence gives way to theory it is not science. It is anti-science. It is the exact opposite of science.
The new sentence was added specifically to avoid the criticism that the authors were inverting the scientific method
My submitted comments on the First Order Draft ripped the authors up and down for inverting the scientific method. They were all doing what Sherwood is doing now. Here is the same passage from the FOD. It lacks the added sentence, but otherwise is almost identical (FOD page 7-50, lines 50-53):
“Many empirical relationships or correlations have been reported between GCR or cosmogenic isotope archives and some aspects of the climate system, such as SSTs in the Pacific Ocean (Meehl et al., 2009), some reconstruction of past climate (Kirkby, 2007) or tree rings (Dengel et al., 2009). We focus here on observed relationships between GCR and aerosol- and cloud-properties.”
The first sentence here, citing unspecified “empirical relationships” between cosmogenic isotopes (a proxy for solar activity) and “some aspects of the climate system” is the only reference in the entire report to the massive evidence for a solar driver of climate. Not a word about the magnitude of the correlations found, nothing about how these correlations are much too strong to possibly be explained by the slight variance in solar irradiance alone, and almost nothing (“many”) about the sheer volume of studies that have found these correlations. And that’s it: one oblique sentence, then the report jumps immediately to looking at the evidence for one proposed mechanism by which solar amplification might be occurring.
The evidence for that particular mechanism is judged (very prematurely) to indicate a weak effect, and this becomes the implicit rationale for the failure of the IPCC’s computer models to include any solar variable but TSI. Readers of the FOD have no idea about the mountain of evidence for some solar driver of climate that is stronger than TSI because the report never mentions it. A couple of the citations that were included mention it (in particular, Kirkby 2007, which is a survey paper), but the report itself never mentions it, and the report then goes on to ignore this evidence entirely. The enhanced solar forcing effect for which there is so much evidence is completely left out of all subsequent analyses.
In other words, the inversion of the scientific method is total. In the FOD, the authors used their dissatisfaction with the GCR-cloud theory as an excuse for completely excluding the vast evidence that some mechanism of enhanced solar forcing is at work. Theory was allowed to completely obliterate and remove a whole mountain of evidence. “Pure definitional anti-science,” I charged.
At least one of the co-authors seems to have decided that this was a bridge too far and added the sentence acknowledging the evidence that some mechanism of solar amplification must be at work. The added sentence declares in-effect, “no, we are not inverting the scientific method.” They are no longer using their dissatisfaction with a particular theory of how enhanced solar forcing might work as a ruse to pretend that the evidence for some such mechanism does not exist.
So good for them. In the sea of IPCC dishonesty there is a glimmer of honesty, but it doesn’t go very far. TSI is still the only solar effect that is included in the “consensus” computer models and the IPCC still uses this garbage-in claim to arrive at their garbage-out conclusion that observed warming must be almost entirely due to the human release of CO2.
One of the reason I decided to release the SOD was because I knew that once the Steven Sherwoods at the IPCC realized how the added sentence undercut the whole report they would yank it back out, and my submitted comments insured that they would indeed realize how the added sentence undercut the whole report. Now sure enough, as soon as I make the added sentence public Steven Sherwood publicly reverts to the FOD position, trying to pretend that his argument against one proposed mechanism of solar amplification means that we can safely ignore the overwhelming evidence that some such mechanism is at work.
We’ll find out in a year or so whether his co-authors are willing to go along with this definitional anti-science. Evidently there is at least some division. With Sherwood speaking up for the FOD position, any co-authors who prefer the new position should feel free to speak up as well. Come on real scientists, throw this blowhard under the bus!
In any case, it is good to have all of them stuck between a rock and a hard place. They can invert the scientific method and be exact definitional anti-scientists like Steven Sherwood, or they can admit that no one can have any confidence in the results of computer models where the only solar forcing is TSI, not after they have admitted strong evidence for some mechanism of solar forcing beyond TSI. That admission is a game changer, however much Sherwood wants to deny it.
He piles on with more of the same at the ridiculous “DeSmog Blog” (as if CO2 is “smog”), and is quoted front and center by the even more ridiculous Andrew Sullivan. Sherwood has become the go-to guy for the anti-science left.
The two dozen references documenting strong correlations between solar activity and various climate indicies
Jo wanted to include references so I sent along the list of citations that I had included in my FOD comment. Worth seeing again I think:
Bond et al. 2001, “Persistent Solar Influence on North Atlantic Climate During the Holocene,” Science.
Excerpt from Bond: “Over the last 12,000 years virtually every centennial time scale increase in drift ice documented in our North Atlantic records was tied to a distinct interval of variable and, overall, reduced solar output.”
Neff et al. 2001, “Strong coherence between solar variability and the monsoon in Oman between 9 and 6 kyr ago,” Nature.
Finding from Neff: Correlation coefficients of .55 and .60.
Usoskin et. al. 2005, “Solar Activity Over the Last 1150 years: does it Correlate with Climate?” Proc. 13th Cool Stars Workshop.
Excerpt from Usoskin: “The long term trends in solar data and in northern hemisphere temperatures have a correlation coefficient of about 0.7 — .8 at a 94% — 98% confidence level.”
Shaviv and Veizer, 2003, “Celestial driver of Phanerozoic climate?” GSA Today.
Excerpt from Shaviv: “We find that at least 66% of the variance in the paleotemperature trend could be attributed to CRF [Cosmic Ray Flux] variations likely due to solar system passages through the spiral arms of the galaxy.” [Not strictly due to solar activity, but implicating the GCR, or CRF, that solar activity modulates.]
Plenty of anti-CO2 alarmists know about this stuff. Mike Lockwood and Claus Fröhlich, for instance, in their 2007 paper: “Recent oppositely directed trends in solar climate forcings and the global mean surface air temperature” (Proc. R. Soc. A), began by documenting how “[a] number of studies have indicated that solar variations had an effect on preindustrial climate throughout the Holocene.” In support, they cited 17 papers, the Bond and Neff articles from above, plus:
Davis & Shafer 1992; Jirikowic et al. 1993; Davis 1994; vanGeel et al. 1998; Yu&Ito 1999; Hu et al. 2003; Sarnthein et al. 2003; Christla et al. 2004; Prasad et al. 2004; Wei & Wang 2004; Maasch et al. 2005; Mayewski et al. 2005; Wang et al. 2005a; Bard & Frank 2006; and Polissar et al. 2006.
The correlations in most of these papers are not directly to temperature. They are to temperature proxies, some of which have a complex relationship with temperature, like Neff 2001, which found a correlation between solar activity and rainfall. Even so, the correlations tend to be strong, as if the whole gyre is somehow moving in broad synchrony with solar activity.
Some studies do examine correlations between solar activity proxies and direct temperature proxies, like the ratio of Oxygen18 to Oxygen16 in geologic samples. One such study (highlighted in Kirkby 2007) is Mangini et. al. 2005, “Reconstruction of temperature in the Central Alps during the past 2000 yr from a δ18O stalagmite record.”
Excerpt from Mangini: “… a high correlation between δ18O in SPA 12 and D14C (r =0.61). The maxima of δ18O coincide with solar minima (Dalton, Maunder, Sporer, Wolf, as well as with minima at around AD 700, 500 and 300). This correlation indicates that the variability of δ18O is driven by solar changes, in agreement with previous results on Holocene stalagmites from Oman, and from Central Germany.”
And that’s just old stuff. Here are four random recent papers.
Ogurtsov et al, 2010, “Variations in tree ring stable isotope records from northern Finland and their possible connection to solar activity,” JASTP.
Excerpt from Ogurtsov: “Statistical analysis of the carbon and oxygen stable isotope records reveals variations in the periods around 100, 11 and 3 years. A century scale connection between the 13C/12C record and solar activity is most evident.”
Di Rita, 2011, “A possible solar pacemaker for Holocene fluctuations of a salt-marsh in southern Italy,” Quaternary International.
Excerpt from Di Rita: “The chronological correspondence between the ages of saltmarsh vegetation reductions and the minimum concentration values of 10Be in the GISP2 ice core supports the hypothesis that important fluctuations in the extent of the salt-marsh in the coastal Tavoliere plain are related to variations of solar activity.”
Raspopov et al, 2011, “Variations in climate parameters at time intervals from hundreds to tens of millions of years in the past and its relation to solar activity,” JASTP.
Excerpt from Raspopov: “Our analysis of 200-year climatic oscillations in modern times and also data of other researchers referred to above suggest that these climatic oscillations can be attributed to solar forcing. The results obtained in our study for climatic variations millions of years ago indicate, in our opinion, that the 200- year solar cycle exerted a strong influence on climate parameters at those time intervals as well.”
Tan et al, 2011, “Climate patterns in north central China during the last 1800 yr and their possible driving force,” Clim. Past.
Excerpt from Tan: “Solar activity may be the dominant force that drove the same-phase variations of the temperature and precipitation in north central China.”
Saltmarshes, precipitation, “oscillations.” It’s all so science-fair. How about something just plain scary?
Solheim et al. 2011, “The long sunspot cycle 23 predicts a significant temperature decrease in cycle 24,” submitted astro-ph.
Excerpt from Solheim: “We find that for the Norwegian local stations investigated that 30-90% of the temperature increase in this period may be attributed to the Sun. For the average of 60 European stations we find ≈ 60% and globally (HadCRUT3) ≈ 50%. The same relations predict a temperature decrease of ≈ 0.9°C globally and 1.1−1.7°C for the Norwegian stations investigated from solar cycle 23 to 24.”
Those two dozen there are just the start. Scafetta hasn’t even been mentioned. (Sorry Nicola.) But there is a lot in those 24.
lsvalgaard says:
December 16, 2012 at 2:28 pm
“In the decade, we have figured out how to derive solar wind properties from the geomagnetic record. The bottom line is that the solar wind in the 20th century has not been significantly different from that in the 19th and 18th centuries. Neither has solar UV. In particular solar activity [and solar wind] at present is very much like it was a century ago. So the Sun has not varied enough to cause a significant climate influence, regardless of all the papers mentioned.”
There is an ambiguity in what you say. One wants to ask if you are claiming that each of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries varied in the same way, in effect showing a repeating pattern, or if you are claiming that all three centuries were equally boring with none of them showing a significant change within the century. Only the second will support your conclusion.
However, if it is true that you have seen no significant variation over the last three centuries, does that not give you reason to question your science?
My impression of the behavior of the climate system is that it is very close to the point of tipping into ice age, and that therefore the climate system cools easily (frighteningly easily) and is slow to warm. If we were actually right at the tipping point then the climate would react immediately and irreversibly to any cooling influence. Close to the tipping point it merely reacts very quickly to cooling influences and recovers only slowly and grudgingly once those cooling influences are removed.
Having different timescales for cooling and warming events explains how on the one hand the climate can react on a short time scale to the various solar minima and yet on the other hand seems to warm only slowly once those solar minimum periods end.
Leif – I do find your argument that the late 20th century may not have been a grand solar maximum convincing. So does this then remove the possibility of any solar cause for 20th century warming? Not necessarily. If the timescale for warming is long enough then 20th century warming can be viewed as merely a continuation of the recovery from the LIA superimposed on the usual noise inherent in any chaotic system.
If this picture is right however then we should beware as the response to the new emerging solar minimum is likely to be rapid and severe.
Very well said, Alec Rawls. Keep their feet to the fire. The IPCC has always been a top down organization that accepts without question the textbook version of the general principles relevant to climate science and that casts a blind eye to empirical research. Yes, they have inverted the scientific method time and again. If they have empirical studies that are not explained by mainstream principles then they just ignore them.
There is not a person in the IPCC who has the temperament of a scientist. That is why Svensmark and Kirkby drive them mad. The real science of Svensmark and Kirkby will take decades to produce well confirmed hypotheses but the folks from the IPCC demand actionable results immediately.
Alec Rawls says:
December 16, 2012 at 6:27 pm
eighty years of high solar activity could easily account for the modicum unexceptional warming of the 20th century.
there has not been 80 years of high solar activity. There has been 40 years. And there were such periods in the 18th and 19th centuries too. The thermal inertia of the oceans introduces a lag of, what, 10 years or so. People who plot solar activity and climate don’t show any or only a short lag. Just think of the Cosmic Ray enthusiasts, or Soon, or most of the papers you cited, e.g. Solheim et al. 2011, “The long sunspot cycle 23 predicts a significant temperature decrease in cycle 24”. It would be wonderful if the Sun was responsible: would solve our funding problems immediately.
The ‘climate’ scientists at UNSW think that they are the center of the climate change universe which is at odds with the Manncentric view of the climate change universe.
Makes me feel dirty to be Australian with these clowns running around.
lsvalgaard;
The thermal inertia of the oceans introduces a lag of, what, 10 years or so. People who plot solar activity and climate don’t show any or only a short lag.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Huh? Quick back of the envelope…. 1 w/m2 would need 22 years to raise the top 700 meters of ocean by one degree. And that’s assuming 100% efficiency which tends not to happen in the real world. I’d think lag times in the range of a century or more would make more sense? Am I missing something here?
rgb.
“Bear in mind that I’m not a “warmist”, not a “denier”, but that I do want to see things stated clearly. One of the three things above seems as though it must be true — a lot of people working in good faith who are somehow in error, a lot of people working in bad faith who are deliberately in error, or a secondary cause such that the first is true but it does not matter because there is some other ignored proximate cause for the variations in climate observed in correlation with e.g. radiometric proxies.’
These are not the only cases. Take the Solheim paper as an example ( the paper predicting a large drop in temps over the balance of cycle 24. Here you see a common error that get repeated over and over again in solar papers. There are an infinite number of climate variables and combinations thereof. They select ( who knows how) looking at temperatures in Norway, and Europe. They start to play with solar cycle length data. They canvas various ways others have looked for correlations and failed to find them. various ways of smoothing the data, not smoothing, all of these are bites at the statistical apple. Through a variety a decisions ( all untested ) then happen upon a relationship between one particular manipulation of a solar parameter (cycle length) and another selection of climate parameter. That is neither good faith or bad faith. That is hunting for a relationship until you find one. I cant even begin to calculate the “bites” at the statistical apple. Torture data long enough as they say.
Without any theory driving the selection of solar parameters or discipline in selecting the climate parameters I amd shocked that there are only dozens of papers purporting to find “correlations”
You can look at lake levels ( pick any lake) river levels, ocean cycles, global temps, regional temps, detrended temp, Ohc, tree rings, you name it. On the solar side you can look at sun spots, UV, cycle length, planet orbits, solar wind, smooth these, detrend them, accumulate them perform hundreds of operations on both sides of the correlation and guess what. you WILL find correlations, you MUST find correlations and not because something is there to find. You must find them because there is no limit to the operations you can perform on the solar data and no limit to the subclasses of climate parameters you can select. Again, I am shocked given human ingenuity that there are MORE papers.
There are some simple tests in my mind that I apply to all these papers.
1. Do they try to explain more than one climate variable. the climate is not defined by temperature. To compete with other explanations they need to show some measure of skill with
two or more global metrics.
2. Did they use all the data in model construction or hold out a good portion for verification.
3. Do they have a physical mechanism
4. Did they properly account for all their failed “bites” at the apple.
I havent found a paper that passes this simple set of test. But I can, if given time, find a correlation between the number of land falling hurricanes and some solar metric. easy peasy.
Or the MXD of certain trees in some region of the world and some other solar metric.
Monkeys and typewriters.
What the solar proponents need to do to be taken seriously is propose testable hypothesis.
“we think THIS parameter matters for the following physical reason” propose tests
in advance and then do the test. Lets take GCR. There you actually have a proposed mechanism. More GCR is more clouds. When I asked Solar proponents to suggest at test for the effect after Forbush events ( I found no effect on clouds ) I got silence. Nobody wants to propose and live by a test of their ideas.
History will not treat the anti-sun cause of warming and cooling very kindly. It seems most obtuse that our star would be ruled out of the climate-change picture so confidently. Ultimately, we will burn up and all the carbon on earth will be oxidized with the sun’s final show. I trust we won’t be measuring the rise in CO2 that will be most dramatic as the cause.Gee it would be irony indeed if our resident solar expert were to be the last to find the sun much more interesting than currently thought. We have to be careful to hold off on the natural tendency for us old guys to become dinosaurs.
davidmhoffer says:
December 16, 2012 at 7:50 pm
lag times in the range of a century or more would make more sense? Am I missing something here?
You are missing that the papers cited by Alec don’t operate with lags that long. Rather 0-10 years.
Gary Pearse says:
December 16, 2012 at 7:57 pm
Gee it would be irony indeed if our resident solar expert were to be the last to find the sun much more interesting than currently thought.
The real irony is that I am the first to find the sun much more interesting than currently thought. Almost all my work goes in the direction of showing that ‘traditional’ solar variations are wrong and that the Sun is up to something very interesting, e.g. http://www.leif.org/research/Another-Maunder-Minimum.pdf
http://www.leif.org/research/Disappearance-of-Visible-Spots.pdf
http://www.leif.org/research/Solar-Petaluma–How%20Well%20Do%20We%20Know%20the%20SSN.pdf (slide 19)
But it is very hard to change people’s preconceived notions [including yours].
lsvalgaard says:
December 16, 2012 at 7:58 pm
davidmhoffer says:
December 16, 2012 at 7:50 pm
lag times in the range of a century or more would make more sense? Am I missing something here?
You are missing that the papers cited by Alec don’t operate with lags that long. Rather 0-10 years.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Fair enough, but I wasn’t asking the question in terms of the papers Alec cited. I was asking more in the context of a lag time with a time constant of say 20 to 100 years. Full lag would then be 100 to 500 years. (I have no justification for those numbers, just pulling them out of…. my hat…but they seem a lot more reasonable to me than 0-10 years).
Would a lag on those sorts of time scales provide a better correlation to solar data (other than TSI)?
What about the new understanding of how the Van Allen belts work? Could this be another natural climate driver?
“Throughout the brief early life of the two-year mission, energetic events and ejections of plasma from the sun caused dramatic changes in the radiation belts that, for the first time, were observed by twin spacecraft within the belts. “The sun has been a driver of these systems more than we had any right to expect,” says Daniel Baker, ..”
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/rbsp/news/belt-dynamics.html
davidmhoffer says:
December 16, 2012 at 8:15 pm
Fair enough, but I wasn’t asking the question in terms of the papers Alec cited. I was asking more in the context of a lag time with a time constant of say 20 to 100 years. Full lag would then be 100 to 500 years. (I have no justification for those numbers, just pulling them out of…. my hat…but they seem a lot more reasonable to me than 0-10 years).
Almost nobody finds correlations with that sort of lag.
Would a lag on those sorts of time scales provide a better correlation to solar data (other than TSI)?
We really don’t have any on that long time scales. The cosmic ray data people are claiming good correlations without such lags. Let me ask Alec: for your 12 papers, what are the lags considered? I’m looking for 12 numbers.
Now, of course, with variable lags, and different lags for warming a cooling [with the lags determined from the correlations] anything can be made to fit anything, e.g. cannot be falsified.
lsvalgaard says:
December 16, 2012 at 8:24 pm
Let me ask Alec: for your 12 papers, what are the lags considered? I’m looking for 12 numbers.
Sorry, the 24 papers, so I’m looking for 24 numbers.
Werner Brozek says:
“Could El Ninos and La Ninas be influenced by the changes of the solar wind speed?”
Be careful Werner….
Don’t link solar activity with ENSO or you’ll have Bob Tisdale to deal with. 🙂
Susan Fraser says:
December 16, 2012 at 8:21 pm
What about the new understanding of how the Van Allen belts work? Could this be another natural climate driver?
No, we just have a better understanding of how the belts are formed and maintained. This does not help on what effect [if any] they have. The Dst index which describes the currents in the belts goes back more than a century, and that has not changed.
Mosher, if only you applied those fine principles to climate scientists, not just solar scientists…
A minor issue i see in this whole mess is the excitation of molecules and the frequency at which they vibrate. The Sun is essentially a huge ball of gas tipping back and forth from a solid state to a gas state. The reaction of fusion causes the gas and the solid to vibrate at differing wave lengths.
in a cooling phase the UV spectrum would be very low as the fission reaction would be teetering very near the solid mass and thus vibrating more slowly. In an excited state the sun would be closer to a full gaseous state and UV would be at much higher spectrum levels as the vibrations would be faster.
These two states and the resulting magnetic strength change coupled with the solar wind can have massive impact on the earth as a whole. UV radiation is absorbed in the first three meters of the sea and on land. Any change in the wave length, while not changing the total TSI, would have an effect on the mass it passes through or lands on. So its the waves length and the receiving matter that can create the change in absorption.
Anyone who understands how fiber optics work and how certain impurities affect differing wave lengths can put the 1+1 and get 2. The suns output may not change in total but how it is output is vibrating and how it affects the receiving mass can.. impurities in the air and water will also have an effect. But CO2 allows full passage with little attenuation so its not even a concern.
lsvagaard;
We really don’t have any on that long time scales. The cosmic ray data people are claiming good correlations without such lags.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Well I’m not going to dig up thermo texts that I haven’t touched in 3 decades, but time constants of less than 20 years just don’t pass the WAG test for me. But then start thinking it through, and itz worse than that. If there were various changes in energy flux at various frequencies, they don’t all get absorbed at one depth, nor across the water column in a uniform manner. Each frequency would be smeared across some portion of the water column, and a different portion for each frequency. Plus, the time constant would vary with the temperature of the water at the point of absorption. Then you have water currents and other processes smearing the whole thing around even more.
So…. I gotta say, calculating a time constant for that would be almost impossible to describe mathematically and it would take every super computer on the planet a few decades to crunch through the numbers. Then, assuming you got a time constant larger than the solar cycle, how would you even begin to correlate the two? You’d need millions of years of data and who knows how much compute power. I don’t think this one can be solved!
On the other hand, I can’t see where changes in energy flux at high frequencies in particular would NOT affect temps on some time scale. More upper end SW and less lower end has got to make a difference in terms of amount of energy absorbed into the system, and as importantly, at what depth. Darned if I can think of a way to possibly quantify and correlate it though.
Bill H says:
December 16, 2012 at 9:10 pm
The Sun is essentially a huge ball of gas tipping back and forth from a solid state to a gas state. The reaction of fusion causes the gas and the solid to vibrate at differing wave lengths.
No, the Sun is an almost perfect gas throughout and at all times.
implying the existence of an amplifying mechanism such as the hypothesized GCR-cloud link
The amplifier may be biological, forest fires for example. Biological cycles are known to synchronize with solar cycles.
https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/443/2/sinclair.1993.am.nat.sunspo.pdf
davidmhoffer says:
December 16, 2012 at 9:17 pm
Well I’m not going to dig up thermo texts that I haven’t touched in 3 decades, but time constants of less than 20 years just don’t pass the WAG test for me.
Tell that to all the people who claim oh so significant solar-climate correlations with little or no lag, e.g. this one [which we discussed at length a while ago here at WUWT]: http://www.leif.org/research/Temp-Track-Sun-Not.png
Personally I don’t care, because I don’t think the Sun is a major driver, but Alec and his ilk need a lesson, so go get’em.
Leif says:
Ten years or a bit less is a common estimate for the response time of the well-mixed upper ocean layer (100 or 200 meters), but that isn’t the end of the story. As the top layer warms up it transfers heat to the next deeper ocean layers. If a high level of forcing persists these next deeper layers will continue to warm on the time scale of multiple decades to multiple centuries. This warming will reduce the temperature differential between the upper and deeper layers, causing there to be less and less heat loss over time from the upper to the deeper layers, causing the upper layer to continue to warm on the time scale of multiple decades to multiple centuries.
Alec Rawls says:
December 16, 2012 at 9:34 pm
Ten years or a bit less is a common estimate for the response time of the well-mixed upper ocean layer (100 or 200 meters), but that isn’t the end of the story.
I was looking for 24 numbers… but, OK, those are hard to come by. Suffice it to say that the papers you cited operate with a short lag [10 yr or less] and totally ignore the centuries involved until the ‘end of story’ is told. So, I don’t think I should be faulted doing the same.
lsvalgaard says:
December 16, 2012 at 2:28 pm
So the Sun has not varied enough to cause a significant climate influence, regardless of all the papers mentioned.
+++++++++
BS. Pure anti-science. It has not varied in the parameters you have mentioned. It has varied quite a bit in the parameters you have not mentioned and perhaps even more in the parameters you have not measured and are not even aware of.
The crux of the matter is that you and and every scientists on earth know very little about the sun. However, you believe you know almost everything there is to know about the sun.
What percentage of everything there is to know about the sun do you estimate you know today? Do you estimate you know 50% of everything there is to know? I estimate that while you may indeed know more than me, you and I know pretty close to 0.0000000% of what there is to be discovered in total.