It's the Sun stupid – The minor significance of CO2

Leif Svalgaard says
Well, the Gleissberg ‘cycle’ is claimed to be in sunspot numbers, but it clearly not there (SIC) http://sidc.be/html/wolfaml.html
What you (i.e. Henry) are looking at (i.e. I am looking at MAXIMA) is irrelevant as far as the existence of a Gleissberg cycle in sunspot numbers.
HENRY SAYS
it seems to me this 88 year solar/weather cycle was already calculated from COSMOGENIC ISOTOPES as related in this study:
Persistence of the Gleissberg 88-year solar cycle over the last ˜12,000 years: Evidence from cosmogenic isotopes
Peristykh, Alexei N.; Damon, Paul E.
Journal of Geophysical Research (Space Physics), Volume 108, Issue A1, pp. SSH 1-1, CiteID 1003, DOI 10.1029/2002JA009390
Among other longer-than-22-year periods in Fourier spectra of various solar-terrestrial records, the 88-year cycle is unique, because it can be directly linked to the cyclic activity of sunspot formation. Variations of amplitude as well as of period of the Schwabe 11-year cycle of sunspot activity have actually been known for a long time and a ca. 80-year cycle was detected in those variations. Manifestations of such secular periodic processes were reported in a broad variety of solar, solar-terrestrial, and terrestrial climatic phenomena. Confirmation of the existence of the Gleissberg cycle in long solar-terrestrial records as well as the question of its stability is of great significance for solar dynamo theories. For that perspective, we examined the longest detailed cosmogenic isotope record—INTCAL98 calibration record of atmospheric 14C abundance. The most detailed precisely dated part of the record extends back to ˜11,854 years B.P. During this whole period, the Gleissberg cycle in 14C concentration has a period of 87.8 years and an average amplitude of ˜1‰ (in Δ14C units). Spectral analysis indicates in frequency domain by sidebands of the combination tones at periods of ≈91.5 ± 0.1 and ≈84.6 ± 0.1 years that the amplitude of the Gleissberg cycle appears to be modulated by other long-term quasiperiodic process of timescale ˜2000 years. This is confirmed directly in time domain by bandpass filtering and time-frequency analysis of the record. Also, there is additional evidence in the frequency domain for the modulation of the Gleissberg cycle by other millennial scale processes. Attempts have been made to explain 20th century global warming exclusively by the component of irradiance variation associated with the Gleissberg cycle. These attempts fail, ……
end quote
again, I say:
It appears at least one attempt did not fail, albeit that maybe I am a lone voice ?,
I have been able to confirm this, by looking purely at maximum temps:
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2012/10/02/best-sine-wave-fit-for-the-drop-in-global-maximum-temperatures/
Looking at the data from Anchorage (graph below) every place on earth is on its own sine wave (A-C curve). probably depending a lot on the exact composition of substances on the top of the atmosphere.
Furthermore, I have showed a few times that I can correlate the flooding of the Nile exactly with the 40-50 years period of warming (= minimum flooding at the end) that is followed by the 40-50 years of cooling (=maximum flooding at the end) that are apparent within this 88 year solar/weather cycle.
Never mind Leif, I am sure Dr. Norman Page and some others here agree with me that we can expect further cooling until about 2038 – give or take a few years either way- ?

PS
@Steven Mosher
I think there is also absorbency of water in some of the IR regions, so if there is, this IR would also be converted to heat in the water in addition to the amount of shortwave coming through where water has absorbency.

Leif says
So ‘your’ data has nothing to do with the Sun, as you acknowledge.
&
No, most of the UV and all of even shorter wavelengths are absorbed very high in the atmosphere and don’t make it to the surface and the oceans.
Henry says
for your info: “my” data are here:
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2013/02/21/henrys-pool-tables-on-global-warmingcooling/
I would think that my evaluation of maxima has a lot to do with what UV and IR is coming through the atmosphere, ends up in the water, mostly, then provides heat from (H2O) condensation to the atmosphere, and then filters to our measuring instruments in the stations where we measure temperature.
Co-coincidentally (although personally I believe it was design), the ozone & others concentration on TOA is much lower in the SH (where most of the water on earth is)
You and ANYONE on this blog are most welcome to try and plot the speed of warming/cooling for maxima from my data quoted above in anything else but the 88 year A-C curve that eventually ended up with:
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2012/10/02/best-sine-wave-fit-for-the-drop-in-global-maximum-temperatures/

Steven Mosher says:
February 20, 2013 at 9:23 pm

If we could hold all other forcing constant and change the watts of the sun by 1 watt and hold it steady for over a century, we could then measure the sensitivity by looking at Delta C. We cant do controlled experiments on the climate. CLimate science is observational.

Steve, We can’t control it for a century, but we do get exactly what we need every day. The Sun goes down every night, and the ratio of night to day changes, every day. But because someone wanted to hide this, we’ve been stuck with annualized data that destroys this relationship.
Here’s that relationship. This graph is tonight’s average night time cooling subtracted from today’s average day time warming times 100 for North of 23 Lat. This is the sensitivity to the daily change in the difference in incoming Watt’s vs outgoing Watts as the length of day changes as the season progress. Daily Sensitivity in ΔT. I calculated the diff for each stations day rise and following night fall in temp, then averaged diff from all the stations in a specified area. This graph is based on some 80 Million station samples. You see the annualized versions of this here. The take away from the annualized version is that even though T Rise and T Fall are different everyday, over the year their average is almost identical to each other. While the magnitude of each does vary slightly from the 40-50’s to 2010 they have stayed almost the same, there’s been no change to this from Co2, Also Diff has no trend over those decades.

When you increase C02 you increase the forcing. This is radiative physics. The physics used by spencer and christy. the physics used by IR detector folks. The physics created for the defense of our country. This is measured. This physics works. We build stuff based on this physics. When you double c02 from 280 ppm to 560 ppm you produce extra watts.
3.7 watts to be exact. Predicted. Measured. verified. this is engineering. That is why skeptics who work in this field ( related to radiative physics ) don’t question 3.7 watts.

While it might change forcing by 3.7 watts, as you can see from above it’s not effecting night time temperature drop, and if up measure the temp of the over head sky in IR while there’s low humidity, in my driveway my sky on a 1.5C day with clear skies, it measures something less than -40C, this -40C is after adding what about 1-2 watts so far?
You can also see this in the station data if you select for high pressure, low wind speeds, low humidity, and large and fairly equal T Rise and T Fall, there are a few hundred days under these conditions where the daily temp swing is +/- 40F, over twice the daily average.
So, when you select for low humidity, even if there’s is a 3.7 watt increase, it’s effect on surface temps is insignificant.
If though you alter surface records homogenizing them, and solve just for annual temperature, all of this information is lost.

Steven Mosher says:
February 20, 2013 at 9:23 pm
““… examine the change in temperature and solar forcing between glaciation (ice age) and interglacial (no ice age) periods”
You are of course referring to surface insolation not TSI. What I do not see in your post is the cause and effect of insolation changes due to the climate system reacting to any increase in watts. If an increase of watts causes more clouds to form then insolation will decrease and the temperature will also decrease. As everyone knows when standing in direct sunlight your skin has a certain temperature. By moving into shade that temperature drops due to decreased insolation on your skin. So while an increase in watts will add energy to the system, the system can react to decrease the effect of that energy, and after all, isn’t that what we seek as an end result: the actual climate that results from all the interactions of the forcings? I am not convinced how any computer model can be programmed to take all these complex interactions and variations into account ACCURATELY enough to predict anything close to reality.

lsvalgaard says:
February 20, 2013 at 12:54 pm

RockyRoad says:
February 20, 2013 at 12:34 pm
before you’re willing to concede that CO2 is not even close to being the controlling factor, Leif?
I would think that the word ‘concede’ implies that you assume that I think CO2 is the controlling factor, so who is assuming here?
And you are wrong about assuming that I think CO2 is not a factor AT ALL. Of course it has some effect, just like the Sun has, but neither are significant on the time scales of interest [from years to centuries]. The word ‘story’ means the assumptions of the effect or lack thereof of CO2. You may have noticed that the is such a debate going on. That is the ‘story’.

No, Leif–I call your incessant bluff; I simply asked a question and got a useless answer. You see, the synonyms for “concede” include: “grant, give in, admit, allow, give up, compromise, and forfeit” (the antonym is “maintain”) but doesn’t include “assume” at all–you made that up.
So you are obviously the one who has difficulty with English, but that’s common for someone who is intollerant of others because they think they know it all. I can see why you have difficulty conveying your message with the nasty approach you generally use–a good “bedside manner” isn’t one of your forte’s.

I would also suggest a look at The oceans as a calorimeter with a link to his peer-reviewed paper.
Dr. Niv Shaviv, a physics professor carrying out research in the fields of astrophysics, says in his article:

…One of the raging debates in the climate community relates to the question of whether there is any mechanism amplifying solar activity. That is, are the solar synchronized climatic variations that we see (e.g., take a look at fig. 1 here) due to changes of just the solar irradiance, or, are they due to some effect which amplifies the solar-climate link. In particular, is there an amplification of some non-thermal component of the sun? (e.g., UV, solar magnetic field, solar wind or others which have much larger variations than the 0.1% variations of the solar irradiance). This question has interesting repercussions to the question of global warming, which is why the debate is so fierce….
…is there a direct record which measures the heat flux going into the climate system? The answer is that over the 11-year solar cycle, a large fraction of the flux entering the climate system goes into the oceans. However, because of the high heat capacity of the oceans, this heat content doesn’t change the ocean temperature by much. And as a consequence, the oceans can be used as a “calorimeter” to measure the solar radiative forcing….
Nevertheless, the beautiful thing is that within the errors in the data sets (and estimate for the systematics), all three sets give consistently the same answer, that a large heat flux periodically enters and leaves the oceans with the solar cycle, and this heat flux is about 6 to 8 times larger than can be expected from changes in the solar irradiance only. This implies that an amplification mechanism necessarily exists. Interestingly, the size is consistent with what would be expected from the observed low altitude cloud cover variations.

In his other article Carbon Dioxide or Solar Forcing? Dr. Shaviv

…An alternative explanation for global warming, or at least part of it
These correlations exist on time scales ranging from the 11-year solar cycle to many millennia (for the two most beautiful correlations, see Neff et al, and Bond et al. in the refs below)….
The activity of the sun manifests its self in many ways. One of them is through a variable solar wind. This flux of energetic particles and entangled magnetic field flows outwards from the sun, and impedes on a flux of more energetic particles, the cosmic rays, which come from outside the solar system. Namely, a more active sun with a stronger solar wind will attenuate the flux of cosmic rays reaching Earth. The key point in this picture is that the cosmic rays are the main physical mechanism controlling the amount of ionization in the troposphere (the bottom 10 kms or so). Thus, a more active sun will reduce the flux of cosmic rays, and with it, the amount of tropospheric ionization. As it turns out, this amount of ionization affects the formation of condensation nuclei required for the formation of clouds in clean marine environment. A more active sun will therefore inhibit the formation of cloud condensation nuclei, and the resulting low altitude marine clouds will have larger drops, which are less white and live shorter, thereby warming Earth.
Today, there is ample evidence to support this picture (a succinct introduction can be found here). For example, it was found that independent galactic induced variations in the cosmic ray flux, which have nothing to do with solar activity do too affect climate as one should expect from such a link. There are many more examples. [Added Note (4 Oct. 2006): These recently published experimental results strongly point towards the validity of this link, as expected]
graph
Fig. 5: Solar activity over the past several centuries can be reconstructed using different proxies. These reconstructions demonstrate that 20th century activity is unparalleled over the past 600 years (previously high solar activity took place around 1000 years ago, and 8000 yrs ago). Specifically, we see sunspots and 10Be. The latter is formed in the atmosphere by ~1GeV cosmic rays, which are modulated by the solar wind (stronger solar wind → less galactic cosmic rays → less 10Be production). Note that both proxies do not capture the decrease in the high energy cosmic rays that took place since the 1970’s, but which the ion chamber data does (see fig. 6)…..

One of the criticisms of warmists is that solar activity does not march in lock step with temperature all the time. (They over look the same problem with CO2)
Gerald Roe pointed out one of the problems and the solution in the paper In defense of Milankovitch (see article)
The University at Buffalo scientists addressed another correlation problem.

Study of Dust in Ice Cores Shows Volcanic Eruptions Interfere with the Effect of Sunspots on Global Climate
….The research, published in a paper in the May 15 issue of Geophysical Research Letters, provides striking evidence that sunspots — blemishes on the sun’s surface indicating strong solar activity — do influence global climate change, but that explosive volcanic eruptions on Earth can completely reverse those influences.
It is the first time that volcanic eruptions have been identified as the atmospheric event responsible for the sudden and baffling reversals that scientists have seen in correlations between sunspots and climate…..
According to the UB researchers, their work reveals two different mechanisms by which climate is affected by cosmic rays, charged particles that stream toward Earth and which are strongly influenced by solar activity.
….Plain old dust, Ram added, holds the key in these experiments because it reflects how dry conditions were in a particular year….
Drawing on climate data derived from ice cores obtained through the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2, (GISP2), the scientists used laser-light scattering techniques to determine the level of dust in the atmosphere for roughly the past 300 years, which is how far back sunspot data have been recorded.
The scientists started out with the assumption that a low level of cosmic rays on Earth resulting from high sunspot activity would lead to less cloud cover and less rain, with resulting high dust levels.
“This was true for the first three or four solar cycles we studied, from about 1930 to 1962, but then the correlation reversed itself, demonstrating that the mechanism couldn’t be what we thought,” said Ram.
It turned out that during those 32 years of positive sun/dust correlation, there was relatively little explosive volcanic activity worldwide. The researchers found that the same conditions existed between 1860 and 1882. Each of these relatively “quiet” periods came to an end with increased volcanic activity.
For example, in 1883, the Indonesian volcano Krakatau erupted in one of the deadliest volcanic disasters, killing 36,000 people. At exactly the same time, the data started to exhibit low dust concentration whenever there was high sunspot activity, a correlation that violated the scientists’ original assumptions.
“By carefully studying the timing of other volcanic eruptions, we found that they coincided with all of the correlation reversals between sunspots and climate,” said Ram….