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.
Leif says:
As I noted before, Leif has a lot of good company, including a lot of good scientists like Solanki, who are also overlooking the basics of ocean equilibration, so I don’t blame anybody for being misled.
Solanki made just the argument Leif was thinking of here. Because the strong solar correlation he found was strongest with about a 7 year lag, he said he had no evidence that longer term elevations in solar activity would cause longer term warming, but that is not correct. If high solar activity causes warming in the short term that IS evidence that it will also cause warming in the long term, just as the solar warming of the day is evidence that lengthening solar insolation will also warm the season.
The difference is that in the case of the seasons we can directly observe this warming in response to increased forcing on a repeated basis so we don’t NEED to infer the longer term effect from the shorter term effect. With variations in solar activity the pattern is erratic and it is obscured by two other signals that are relatively powerful on the decadal time scale: volcanic activity and the effect of ocean oscillations. That makes it hard to read the temperature forcing effects of longer term changes in solar activity in the paleo record, but the strong short term correlation does provides evidence that such longer term temperature forcings would also be going on.
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Gail Combs says:
December 17, 2012 at 8:29 am
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Appreciate the info & effort, Gail. Lots to look at….
Leaked IPCC report reaffirms dangerous climate change
‘A draft of a major report on climate change, due to be published next year, has been leaked online. Climate-sceptic bloggers have seized on it, claiming that it admits that much of global warming has been caused by the sun’s variability, not by greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, THE REPORT SAYS NOTHING OF THE KIND.
The report was leaked by Alec Rawls, who signed up to be an expert reviewer of the next report – something anyone can do. Rawls posted the latest draft of the report’s first section on his website. It was swiftly picked up by bloggers critical of mainstream climate science, such as ANTHONY WATTSs of Watts Up With That and JAMES DELINGPOLE [hahahahahahahah…], who writes for the UK’s Daily Telegraph newspaper.
Climate scientists are lining up to debunk this claim, and to explain that the bloggers have simply got it wrong. “They’re misunderstanding, either DELIBERATELY or otherwise, what that sentence is meant to say,” says solar expert Joanna Haigh of Imperial College London.
Haigh says that if Rawls had read a bit further, he would have realised that the report goes on to largely DISMISS the evidence that cosmic rays have a significant effect. “They conclude there’s very little evidence that it has any effect,” she says.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23005-leaked-ipcc-report-reaffirms-dangerous-climate-change.html
milodonharlani says:
December 17, 2012 at 7:38 am
Whom do you consider sun nuts? Svensmark? Kirkby?
The sun nuts are people who proclaim the dominance of the Sun in controlling the climate based on a priory assumptions and without considering [or ignoring] the evidence or advocate the Sun simply as an antidote to CO2, or people who say “we don’t know anything about the sun, so how can we deny that the Sun is doing it”. The ‘cosmic ray effect’ has been shown not to be significant as chapter 8 correctly points out: “However there is high confidence (medium evidence and high agreement) that the GCR-ionization mechanism is too weak to influence global concentrations of cloud condensation nuclei or their change over the last century or during a SC in a climatically-significant way (Erlykin and Wolfendale, 2011; Harrison and Ambaum, 2010; Snow-Kropla et al., 2011).”
Is it your opinion that solar magnetic flux does not affect cosmic rays reaching earth, that these particles don’t affect cloud condensation nuclei, or that these phenomena occur, but have no appreciable or negligible effect on terrestrial climate (or that of other solar system bodies)?
The latter
Please also kindly state your opinion on possible climatic effects of the recent finding that while TSI remains nearly constant, UV can fluctuate significantly & opposite to visible & IR spectra.
The fluctuations in UV [stemming from the same source as variations of TSI – the sun’s magnetic field] would tend to follow the same pattern as TSI. We have a good proxy record of solar UV going all the way back to 1722 [when the effect was discovered by George Graham]. UV creates and maintains the ionosphere. Dynamo action creates a current up there causing a magnetic field variation that we can measure on the ground. Such measurements show us that there has been no long-term changes [since 1722] in the overall level [i.e. apart from the repeating solar cycle].
Carter quotes another self-serving alarmist on cosmic rays, saying that “there’s very little evidence that it has any effect”. However, there is NO empirical evidence showing that CO2 has ANY effect on temperature. None.
Now, AGW may exist, but if so the effect is so minuscule that it can be completely disregarded for all practical purposes. CO2 is a minor third-order forcing that is swamped by much larger first-order and second-order forcings.
As far as global temperatures are concerned, the effect of CO2 was completely saturated at much lower concentrations, and any further increase has no effect — as the planet is currently demonstrating. So while there may be ‘little’ evidence that cosmic rays have an effect, there is NO evidence that more CO2 has any effect. CO2=AGW is simply an evidence-free conjecture.
Alec Rawls says:
December 17, 2012 at 8:54 am
That makes it hard to read the temperature forcing effects of longer term changes in solar activity in the paleo record, but the strong short term correlation does provides evidence that such longer term temperature forcings would also be going on.
How many of your 24 papers deal with the paleo record? Here are the Global Temperatures [well, a couple of reconstructions] the past 2000 years compared to solar activity [derived from cosmic ray record]: http://www.leif.org/research/Global-Temperatures-2000-yrs.png
I don’t see anything supporting your claims.
Actually, I see in that graph a cumulative effect where higher cosmic rays do seem to correlate with rising temperatures and declining cosmic rays eventually seem to correlate with trends downward in temperature. I have also seen charts over hundreds of thousands of years which show very clear correlations.
http://motls.blogspot.mx/2004/09/sunspots-correlations-with-temperature.html?m=1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Paleo-cosmic_flux.svg
While nobody seems to have the correlation frankly this correlation is in the right direction, ie the cosmic ray changes precede the temperature change and it is consistent over many time periods in a way that seems impossible to be a coincidence. There is no obvious connection like with co2 where we know that co2 causes the oceans to outgas and ingest more co2 when temps go up or down respectively. The fact that co2 always lags the change in temperature and this known factor means we really don’t know what effect co2 has on temperature because the whole thing could simply be a sympathetic reaction to climate change. Whereas with cosmic rays its unclear how this correlation of the sun and the earth could work backwards, ie the earth effect cosmic rays. It seems this relationship clearly is one-way and independent so it’s correlation is surprising whereas the co2 correlation is a known property of the ocean.
This is all very simple and I am amazed that we have to go through such contortions and decades of contentious arguing, because of this blatant attempt to obfuscate the obvious:
Did the climate change periodically over the last 4,000 (and more) years? Yes
Did the CO2 change to any significant degree over all but the last 100 of those 4,000 years? No
Therefore, something else must be operating that produces significant climate change!
A small child could understand this.
Up til now, (and still ‘officially’) the IPCC has pretended that there is nothing other than CO2 (and other lessor man-made gasses) producing significant climate change. Therefore, the IPCC is wrong with the science. The National Academies are wrong with the science. The AMS (American Meteorology Society) is wrong with the science. Until they acknowledge the obvious truth that there is at least one other major player in climate change, they are all obviously wrong! If you accept the two statements above, there is no other possible conclusion. If you deny either statement, you are denying the overwhelming evidence, and your position is not one of science. There is no requirement to know what that something else is in order to know that it exists (which is an often used strawman argument). Pretending that it does not exist because we don’t know exactly what it is (still the official IPCC stance), is delusional.
End of story.
Patience with mental illness will often resort to ‘projection’ in order to survive in their own version of reality. Projection is the practice of accusing someone else of an issue that you have, perhaps in an attempt to divert the deserved criticism. I am not saying that warmists suffer from mental illness, but they have used a form of ‘projection’ when labeling CAGW skeptics as climate change deniers. Of course, most skeptics have never denied climate change, only the magnitude of the proposed human impact on the ever-changing climate. But warmists MUST deny all significant climate change before the 20th Century in order to hold their current beliefs. That is a huge denial of climate change; several orders of magnitude greater than the denial of which skeptics are falsely accused.
@ur momisugly Total Mass Retain
“More irony. If it’s “the sun stupid” someone has to explain why the 40% rise in CO2 over the past 150 years hasn’t done what the laws of physics says it must do: retain heat. Infantile soundbites from the deniers doesn’t change that basic problem. Neither does cherry picking dates to show the warming has “stopped”: you still have to explain why it hasn’t warmed.”
Actually, we don’t have to explain why it hasn’t warmed. That’s totally the domain of your lot, you have to explain why it hasn’t warmed in the context of continued of C02 rises.
So, come on, why hasn’t it, is it simple physics or isn’t it?
What mechansim do you postulate for it not warming?
What could possibly have almost exactly counter balance the warming that we should have experienced?
We’re waiting…………….
Where the extra water vapour, where’s the “definitely” positive feedbacks, where’s the heat?
beesaman at 2:59 pm linked to this Judith Curry discussion on a draft NAS publication The effects of solar variability on Earth’s climate: A workshop report. This is prepublication and can still be downloaded for free. A quick scan reveals this is very readable.
Gail was kind enough to link to the ocean absorption information for incoming solar here and here. The key takeaway for me is that the visible spectrum is the most heavily absorbed by the ocean. UV & IR tail off very quickly. This article describes the incoming solar spectrum. About 49% of incoming solar is in the IR spectrum. Maybe Anthony could put these relatively static graphs at the bottom of the solar page.
AR5 assigns a radiative forcing impact to CO2 of 1.5 W/M**2 and about 0.04 W/M**2 to Solar irradiance. The solar attribution is positive and on the same order as aircraft contrails. Figure C2 in the NAS report (33 year TSI record) appears to show a min to max range of as much as 5 W/M**2 (including outliers).
As indicated above, not all watts are created equal. The IR watts resulting from greenhouse gases do not penetrate the ocean. Incoming solar watts are more likely to penetrate the ocean to depth and contribute, for example, to ENSO.
From my perspective, the following elements are in place for an increased role for solar influences on our energy budget dynamics.
– AR5 assigns essentially zero impact of solar variability to radiative forcing.
-Solar is much more effective in ocean heating than greenhouse gas IR.
-The impact of small changes in TSI and spectrum on cloud cover is apparently unknown. For example, if a reduction in TSI is accompanied by an increase in cloud cover, than the TSI impact would be amplified.
-We only have accurate TSI measurements for the satellite era whereas the AR5 solar impact attribution goes back to 1750.
Carter:
Your post on this thread is another copy-and-paste from some warmunist blog of the same meaningless talking points which were refuted when posted on another thread of WUWT.
Please explain why you have posted those refuted points again on this thread.
Richard
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Leif. I don’t think you are covering all the bases here.
If a solar event or cycle can influence the high latitude jetstreams, so that they move in an equatorial direction, you can generate a mini-Ice Age without any change in TSI.
This is what we have experienced in the last three years in northern Europe, with jetstreams running through the Med (instead of through the English Chanel) and resulting very cold winters. If you can imagine this or more happening for a whole decade, the worldwide temperatures as measured above 45 degrees of latitude may well cool substantially. Tropical areas may be doing something completely different, but I am not sure that 18th century science and meteorology was too interested in tropical regions.
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Silver Ralph says:
December 17, 2012 at 9:52 am
If a solar event or cycle can influence the high latitude jetstreams
There is no good evidence of that…
Leif.
Just as a matter of interest – how does the neutrino flux change, with the change in Sunspots?
RobertInAz says:
December 17, 2012 at 9:40 am
From my perspective, the following elements are in place for an increased role for solar influences on our energy budget dynamics.
– AR5 assigns essentially zero impact of solar variability to radiative forcing.
Zero impact of solar variability is in place for an increased role for solar influences???
Silver Ralph says:
December 17, 2012 at 9:57 am
Just as a matter of interest – how does the neutrino flux change, with the change in Sunspots?
It does not. Neutrinos are created in the core of the Sun [and escape the Sun in a couple of seconds] while sunspots are the product of processes occurring nearer the surface.
Haigh did exactly what Sherwood did. She is basicly lying to the world about what the added sentence says, claiming that it is about GCR-cloud effects, which she thinks can be dismissed, when the sentence clearly admits evidence for SOME mechanism of enhanced solar forcing, even if we don’t know what that mechanism is. Claiming that the evidence for any particular mechanism suggest that that particular mechanism would be weak does nothing to counter the admission of strong evidence for SOME such mechanism that is operating more powerfully.
As this post points out, this sentence seems to have been added in direct response to my FOD criticism of this misdirection that Sherwood and Haigh are using: it inverts the scientific method. They can’t use their dissatisfaction with with the GCR-cloud theory as an excuse for ignoring the evidence that some such mechanism is at work. That is putting theory over evidence, which is the definition of anti-science.
Amazing to me that after reading this post someone can cite as a rebuttal Haigh doing the exact same thing the post expose as anti-scientific.
lsvalgaard;
Zero impact of solar variability is in place for an increased role for solar influences???
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
My reading of Ch11 is that they are forecasting (predicting, projecting, whatever the word of the day is) a maximum of -0.1 degrees C for a Maunder type minimum. So they are on the one hand admitting that there is an effect (which is a reversal from AR4) but on the other claiming it is small.
They have several “get out of jail free” cards built into Ch11, this, I think is one of them. By allowing that the effect exists at all, they can now say they under estimated it if they don’t get the warming they expect. They use the same excuse with aerosols.
http://www.leif.org/research/Another-Maunder-Minimum.pdf
page 18,
http://www.cmiae.org/Resources/glaciers-lichens.php
Sunspot numbers and retreating glaciers, there were 4 very active cycles prior to 1887, a large melt to 1898, three smaller cycles to about 1910 and a smaller melt and on we go. If it wasn`t the sun wot caused it what was it.
lsvalgaard says: December 17, 2012 at 10:03 am Zero impact of solar variability is in place for an increased role for solar influences???
What I mean here is the role AR5 assigns for solar forcing since 1750 is so tiny even a small change in our understanding of the physics has a potentially large impact on the relative importance of solar vis-a-vis, for example CO2. This must be an exciting time for solar physicists as the planet’s temperature remains stable while the solar cycle is quiet in spite of continued increases in GHG concentrations. You guys must have been very popular at AGU.
I’ve commented quite infrequently on this blog – more of a lurker but I wanted to say this for a long time and since solar stuff is on the table.
First of all the more subtle message in Alec’s release of the draft and contention that it was a game changer may have missed a lot of people. Here in the SOD is now achapter concerned with solar effects on climate and in which people have performed experiments to see if their theories were correct. Then the authors seem to say “well it’s insignificant” and then cling to the CO2 theory that has even less empirical evidence to back it up. That’s sounds more like belief than balance.
Now I am a physicist by training (doctorate in Material science) and I have worked with plasma engines for space for nearly ten years. I am an experimental scientist first and foremost. I’m also from Northern Ireland, Belfast in fact so I don’t like to mess around with fluff. I like to get to the point.
So for all those CO2 theory lovers here is the central question: where has the effect of shining 4 and 15 micron light onto a surface at 15 degrees in the presence of a representative convecting atmostphere ever been performed?
This test would show what happens with the famous back radiation idea. Never mind all the MODTRAN and that guff. Where has the experiment being done? The closest I have come to finding one is for agriculture where FIR (Far Infra Red) is used to heat strawberries. Turns out blowing hot air over them was better.
This experiment or characterisation is fundamental to the idea of forcing. Another assumption is that a surface will somehow absorb the reflected IR (at the same frequency that it is emitting) and somehow change its internal energy so that it can “balance” the increase of absorbed radiation. Reflected radiation is not the same as inhibited radiation (as in if an IR filter was used to prevent emission). Though in theory emission eventually balances absorption the real life situation needs to be tested.
What I suggest will happen is that “back-radiated light” is simply weakly scattered and reflected back, like a very weak laser effect. After a few ping pongs with Co2 the net effect is loss to scattering and the energy is dumped into the first few metres of atmosphere. Maybe the wind blows a but stronger.
I believe this may happen as most surfaces are not black bodies meaning they do not have to emit radiation following the ideal black body curve. Stars don’t do this. In fact the Kurutz model from the 80s used atomic emission lines in stars to better bound the photosphere temperature because black body physics wouldn’t cut it. Even look at the Sun. The spectrum does not follow a black body exactly. But also strictly speaking it is the intergrated area under a frequency curve that determines the total energy released so there is no need to “raise” the temperature of a body. The spectrum may change to accommodate if it is energetically favourable to do so. The least energy thing to do i.e. the laziest, is to scatter the energy as loss, local heating whatever rather than raise the surface temperature internally (first metres of the surface). Also as convection does a much better job at energy transference this loss could be absorbed into atmosphere dynamics.
But like I said do the fundamental IR experiment first and see what happens.
And so onto the Sun
There seems to be a bit of confusion as to what the Sun can and can’t do. In terms of dumping energy onto the Earth the Sun’s energy doesn’t need to vary by that much at all (less than 1%) to have an effect provided the Earth is already distributing its energy in a non-random way.
Let me explain. In plasmas, most notably discharge plasmas for space engines, there is an effect where a small change on primary power (less than 1%) causes the plasma current oscillations to shift from random noise to coherent acoustic oscillations (which are dictated by geometry and other coupling factors). Literally it looks like the plasma just switches. In particular with Kaufman engines (which have an internal electrical circuit – plasma cathode to anode ring) at low ac frequencies the anode current reads the same as the power supply. At kHz it can be up to 10 times as much in peak to peak oscillations.
Another related effect is that this transition to acoustic oscillations from random is influenced by the input spectrum itself. Especially the high frequency aspects. Small changes to the higher frequency register can result in the acoustic oscillations occuring at higher or lower input powers. In general, Acoustic oscillations are favoured by the plasma as it is becomes energetically efficient to oscillate rather than randomly vibrate when power is increased.
Lastly, the transition frequenty resembles a Cantor Dust. In that bunches of oscillations appear that when zoomed up show periodicities similar to the global bunch. When power is increased these bunches come together such that the oscillation pattern becomes more like a sine wave and has better consistency; conversely if the power is dropped groups of oscillation packets are further spaced out until it become white noise again.
Now this is just an analogy but if this is what the climate does it implies that if the Earth’s climate is in the acoustic oscillation phase, then a quieter Sun may cause the ENSO to be less symmetric. Or it could mean one severe event followed by 5 or more calm ones. It also could mean transition regions between rising warmth and then falling cold against a backdrop of slowly increasing temperature (due to the exit from the LIA). This could occur rather than a steadier rise as ENSO dumps more energy in shorter time compared to more even periodicity in which the ENSO oscillations are more regular.
Or it could mean something else, I don’t know. Bob Tisdale is the man for that.
If this mechanism is what is happening, then there should be a correlation between ENSO periodicity, strength and total energy and the amount of energy from the Sun. As the Sun increases ENSO becomes more regular; as it wanes ENSO becomes irregular but the total energy only slightly decreases, seeing at the total energy from the Sun has decreased slightly. The signature will be the bunching and eventual disappearance of the ENSO into random noise. Similar to the input power to a plasma.
This is conjecture but to reiterate the lack of a 4 and 15 micron back radiation experiment isn’t. That’s a gaping hole in the role that CO2 plays in the climate.
Jim Clarke says:
December 17, 2012 at 9:12 am
“Patience with mental illness will often resort to ‘projection’ in order to survive in their own version of reality. Projection is the practice of accusing someone else of an issue that you have, perhaps in an attempt to divert the deserved criticism. I am not saying that warmists suffer from mental illness, but they have used a form of ‘projection’ when labeling CAGW skeptics as climate change deniers. Of course, most skeptics have never denied climate change, only the magnitude of the proposed human impact on the ever-changing climate. But warmists MUST deny all significant climate change before the 20th Century in order to hold their current beliefs. That is a huge denial of climate change; several orders of magnitude greater than the denial of which skeptics are falsely accused.”
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Jim:
What you described is called Skeptical Science Syndrome. This is a fairly new form of mental illness, but one that needs to be addressed soon. Even tho its spread seems to be contained, and has a downward bias to the trend, it is still an extremely serious illness and if allowed to flair, could result in man’s destruction.
Alec Rawls says:
December 17, 2012 at 10:21 am
Haigh did exactly what Sherwood did. She is basicly lying to the world about what the added sentence says, claiming that it is about GCR-cloud effects, which she thinks can be dismissed, when the sentence clearly admits evidence for SOME mechanism of enhanced solar forcing, even if we don’t know what that mechanism is
The Assessment says:
7.4.5.1 Correlations Between Cosmic Rays and Properties of Aerosols and Clouds
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.
It is clear that they are talking specifically about observations of cosmic rays and clouds and nothing else. They point out that TSI does not account for these observations and that therefore other mechanisms must be invoked if these observations hold up, thereby linking their discussion to the reality of the correlation, but in no way accepting the reality. You are WAY overinterpreting the statement. Haigh and Sherwood simply point out what the issue at hand is [also specified by the title of the section “Correlations Between Cosmic Rays and Properties of Aerosols and Clouds”]. Implying anything else is wishful thinking.
Alec Rawls :
Amazing to me that after reading this post someone can cite as a rebuttal Haigh doing the exact same thing the post expose as anti-scientific.
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Don’t be amazed. This is standard tactics with such scientists. They see themselves not as scientists but as participants in the “Guerilla War Against Climate Change”, in the words of Joelle Gerghis, PhD and paleo-climate researcher of the Universiry of Melbourne. This is the mentality that predominates with many of the would-be scientists of the AGW crowd. They are not so concerned with science as they are with propaganda. Ideological truth, yes, but the weight of rigorous science is against them, so they have learned how to finesse scientific truth.They are used to getting by with such tactics, and they league together when an opportunity to obfuscate appears, embracing each other and chanting the same mantra. They seek safety in numbers and they would never dare engage in a public discussion of the issues with skeptics because they would be exposed.
The “some” we are looking for is under our feet in the form of 2 million cubic miles of fissionable material under high temperature, high pressure and variable particle bombardments. The “total” part of TSI is near constant, but the frequency of output and volume of cosmic rays vary directly with solar activity. One defect in the GCR-cloud hypothesis is the origin of the 3 micron feedstock of SOx in the atmosphere necessary for the 50 micron nucleation process. The two by-products of Earth’s variable fission rate are heat and elemental atoms. These elemental atoms quickly form elemental compounds, including the needed SOx feedstock, the 97% of natural occuring CO2 and a host of other gases. The inert gas, Radon, has a half-life of 3.8 days, cannot form any compounds and is only produced by nuclear decay. Radon release rates spike just prior to Earthquakes. This links solar and Galactic cosmic rays to climate and tectonics allowing finally the discussion of a Unified Earth Science Theory.
Or — and I’m just throwing this out there — this is complete and utter crap. Seriously, would you learn just the teensiest bit of nuclear physics — I’m talking stuff at the level of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_physics and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_binding_energy, not even at the level of a real physics textbook — before you throw pseudo-scientific manure into the cosmos?
Visit the second of these two sites. Look at the “Nuclear binding energy per nucleon” curve that is its only figure. Note well that fission does not make any oxygen or carbon. Nuclear decay — not fission — does produce a tiny bit of helium 4 (from alpha decay in the Actinide series).
Read the first of these two sites, and observe that the heavy elements were all produced in supernovae, and that (for that matter) it takes a second generation star, usually, to cook up carbon and oxygen in the first place. You might want to get a decent book on Astronomy and learn about nucleosynthesis, the production of metals in stars (where metals does not mean what you think it means) and so on.
Second, once you’ve mastered enough nuclear physics to learn that you should never, ever, talk about it again on any sort of public list, you might look at the measurements of temperature gradient in the Earth’s crust. Those measurements suffice to pretty much determine the rate at which the Earth is generating heat internally from the plain old boring heat equation, certainly within a factor of two or three. The rate of heat production — mostly from nuclear decay processes including fission, you do get that much right — is orders of magnitude too small to be relevant to the Earth’s temperature.
In the meantime, you do make me really, really tired. You’re a poster child for our failed educational system. But at any time you can quit — just go back to school, buy some real physics textbooks, sit down, and instead of just making stuff up that sounds nifty and plausible do some math backed by actual measurements. Then be mousy quiet, as perhaps then you’ll finally come to realize how very much you need to learn to be able to participate in a discussion like this as an adult.
In the meantime, your handle “Faux Science Slayer” is a complicated oxymoronic joke, however good it makes you feel about yourself.
rgb
davidmhoffer says:
December 17, 2012 at 10:25 am
My reading of Ch11 is that they are forecasting (predicting, projecting, whatever the word of the day is) a maximum of -0.1 degrees C for a Maunder type minimum. So they are on the one hand admitting that there is an effect (which is a reversal from AR4) but on the other claiming it is small.
It is obvious that there is solar activity related effect of a tenth of a degree, but that does not make the Sun the dominant driver of climate. In fact, Jupiter is.