By David Stockwell writing in Quadrant Online
As CO2 climate models falter and even the IPCC backs off its estimates, it just may be that a radical shift in thinking is looming. Wouldn’t it be funny if it was the sun all along?
Remember Thomas Kuhn and his paradigm shift? According to his Structure of Scientific Revolutions, theories change only when anomalous observations stress the ”dominant paradigm” to the point that it becomes untenable. Until then, failure of a result to conform to the prevailing paradigm is not seen as refuting the dominant theory, but explained away as a mistake of the researchers, errors in the data, within the range of uncertainty, and so on. Only at the point of crisis does science become open to a new paradigm. So, does Kuhn inform the current climate debate, help identify important information or an alternative paradigm?
Climate models can be seen as encapsulating the dominant theory, even though they are composed of many different theories regarding land, the ocean and atmosphere. Despite their differences they are also similar in many ways, sharing terminology such as the ‘radiative kernel’. Lets agree, for the purpose of argument, that the dominant AGW paradigm is of global temperature’s high sensitivity to CO2 doubling, resulting in an increase of around 3°C, which appears to be about the central estimate of the climate models.
Does the 15-year ‘pause’ in global temperatures stress this theory? Certainly to some, the stress has already reached a ‘crisis’; while to others the divergence can be explained away by natural variation, uncertainty, and errors in the data.
Do failed models and their predictions of increasing extreme events, like hurricanes, droughts and floods, stress the climate models? Possibly not. From a physical perspective, these phenomena lie at the boundaries of the theory. Hurricanes, droughts and floods are ‘higher order’ statistics — extremes not climate averages. Surface temperature is only a part of the greater global climate system. Because anomalous behavior at the margins can be discarded without sacrificing the main theory, their power to confirm or reject the dominant paradigm is somewhat limited.
Ocean heat content, however, is in a unique position. The world’s oceans store over 90% of the heat in the climate system. Arguably, therefore, increases in ocean heat determine overall global warming. Ocean heat represents the physical bulk of the global heat store, and so should carry the most weight in our assessment of the status of AGW. Observations of ocean heat uptake represent the crucial experiment — observations capable of decisively dismantling a theory despite its widespread acceptance in the scientific community. The ARGO project to monitor ocean heat with thousands of drifting buoys is the crucial experiment of the AGW stable.
A number of climate bloggers have remarked on the very low rate of ocean heat uptake (here, and here, and here), much lower than predicted by the models (here, here, and here). The last link is about Nic Lewis, a coauthor on Otto et al. 2013, who feels that recent findings of low climate sensitivity, many based on ocean heat content, have led a number of prominent IPCC authors to abandon the higher estimates of climate sensitivity. That may not be a ‘catastrophe’ for the dominant AGW paradigm, but it is certainly a lurch by insiders towards the lower ends of risk and urgency.
The IPCC panel preparing the AR5 report may not have been devastated when they changed the likely range of climate sensitivity, which had stood at 4.5–2°C since 1990. The lower extimate has now been dropped from 2°C to 1.5°C. What has not been appreciated is that increasing the range of uncertainty is impossible in a period of Kuhnian ‘normal science’, where new information always decreases uncertainty.
The ‘blow-out’ in the range of likely climate sensitivity can only mean one thing: We are no longer in a period of ‘normal’ science, but entering a period of ‘paradigm shift’.
Until the scientific revolution, explaining away anomalous results will be the normal behavior of the status quo. For example, Nic details a series of erroneous statements and misrepresentation by the UK Met Office of peer-reviewed studies observing relatively modest aerosol forcing and climate sensitivity (here and here).
What new theory could possibly replace the dominant paradigm? Clearly there is a great deal yet to know about natural climate variation and the influence of the Sun on global temperature and climate. While many studies have found a strong correlation between the sun and climate, other studies have discounted a strong solar influence. I personally think that miss-specified models have contributed dismissal of solar influence, and have developed an alternative ‘accumulative’ theory of solar influence (here, here and here).
UC Berkely professor Richard Muller has said, “Anyone claiming another cause would have to show that it correlates with the temperature record at least as well as CO2.” As shown in the figure above, a simple regression model of accumulated total solar insolation (CumTSI) with global temperature gives a higher correlation than greenhouse gas and total solar insolation. In large part this is because accumulation shifts the phase of solar effects by 90 degrees bringing it into phase with global temperature, even though the pattern is obscured by the timing of major volcanic eruptions last century. In the accumulation theory, global temperature rises while solar activity is above the long-term solar constant. It is an immature theory, admittedly, but it works over annual- to million-year time scales and explains some very specific features such as ‘chaotic’ dynamics, 20th century warming and the current ‘pause’.
Climate skeptics don’t want to say we told you so but, well, we told you so. Even though we do not yet have an accepted theory of solar influence, there are 25 unique models in the AR5-sponsored CIMP5 archive, most with a climate sensitivity untenable on observations from the last decade.
Take out Occam’s razor and cull them – deep and hard.
Dr David Stockwell, Adjunct Researcher, Central Queensland University
It is rare, and very good, to hear sense on CAGW from our Aussie Academia.
Similar to your model, sunspot time integral and ocean oscillations explain 90-96% of global temperature observations
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2013/08/natural-climate-change-has-been-hiding.html
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2010/01/climate-modeling-ocean-oscillations.html
Thank you for an interesting article.
When I began my personal investigation into to viability of GHG related AGW the CO2 theory quickly dissolved but early on the sun rose as a likely suspect. (No puns intended, of course.)
I never could understand why the proponents of the AGW could give serious consideration to a theory that predicted an increase of 3 deg C in a century when on a daily basis the temperature in the vast majority of locations on the earths surface vary that much in a few hours and do so every day. This intra day change being induced by the sun or lack therof.
I LOVE the title!
I’d like to see how the IPCC would use that considering their “95% certainty” 😉
David S,
Does your article, with emphasis on ocean temperatures, then suggest that if ARGO buoys were to show significant warming below (say) 700m then you would be happy to avow AGW as real and dangerous? Personally, I’m not buying that.
Rich.
The temperature history in the chart in this post, from the CRU of Climategate, has been rewritten by those activists to be more towards a hockey stick rather than the actual double peak appearance of 20th century temperature history in original readings. Without that, there is not so much need for heavy accumulation adjustments, as implied in the solar-climate matches in http://img176.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=81829_expanded_overview_122_424lo.jpg
While the deeper oceans have thermal inertia and would have lag, the surface temperature record is easier to reconstruct from relatively reliable sources. Too predominately deep ocean temperature change is reported in joules to be deliberately misleading, amounting to mere hundredths of a degree or less, not sufficiently independently verifiable from sources other than the same kind of activist-dominated institutions which have repeatedly and not honestly rewritten surface temperature history by whole tenths of a degree (as illustrated in the prior link).
To clarify in my prior comment, I’m referring to CRU-depicted temperature history over the whole 20th century, not just the 1950-onward shown in that one chart.
oh my god whts going on ……………
It is my impression that those scientists who are interested in the philosophy of science tend to prefer the ideas of Karl Popper to those of Thomas Kuhn. Popper was the high priest of falsification. However, as has often been pointed out, climatologists have been reluctant to say what could disprove their theory that man-made CO2 is the main driver of climate change. Consequently Kuhn’s idea of a paradigm shift seem more relevant to climatology.
As Max Planck, the father of quantum theory, put it:
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
Perhaps the paradigm shift will get underway as soon as some of the leading lights of the CAGW theory reach retiring age.
it is the sun that controls earths weather not CO2 the sun magnetic poles are about to reverse . http://www.space.com/22271-sun-magnetic-field-flip.html
David Stockwell:
Whatever Kuhn thought, it is not necessary to have an alternative theory to falsify an existing theory. The AGW-hypothesis has been falsified by several observations: it is wrong.
But the falsification of AGW as the dominant effect in climate variation does not imply that any other effect (e.g. solar variation) dominates climate variability.
Climate does vary and its variations probably result from several influences such as response to solar variation, and/or as an outcome of internal variation of the oceanic thermohaline circulation, and/or as a harmonic effect of climate oscillation, and/or as … etc..
The most important scientific statement is always WE DON’T KNOW.
Richard
Good Morning, David. Permission to repost your article? With links back to Quadrant ans WUWT, of course.
‘UC Berkely professor Richard Muller has said, “Anyone claiming another cause would have to show that it correlates with the temperature record at least as well as CO2.” ‘
The hindcasting works- the projections don’t. The hindcasting – the right result for the wrong reasons.
I don’t know about ‘stress’ or ‘crisis’ but I know someone who is certainly worried. Journalists should ask why he is worried.
Karl Popper wrote as a philosopher, while Kuhn wrote as a historian of science. Kuhn wanted to be considered a philosopher but the philosophers would not have it.
The philosophical question that Popper addressed was, if we cannot know the “truth”, can we at least discover what is “false”?
Kuhn did not deal with the question of truth. He showed that scientists function like other social groups in following the crowd. Only at unusual times does someone speak in a way that the crowd listens. [In similar fashion only a few investors recognize a market bubble and move to cash before the market crashes.]
Kuhn was describing how scientists behave. Others including Kuhn himself have elevated this descriptive approach.
So the new norm for scientific endeavour [and for awarding grant money] is discern the direction of the crowd and to follow. Of course you end up with a scientific “bubble” which may or may not be about to burst. Depends a lot on whether or not the cold winters persist for very long and whether the arctic ice recovers.
Seems bizarre to me that changes in climate of less than 60 years is even considered evidence of secular change. Sixty year ocean cycles have been well known for a very long time, so the idea that climate is the average weather over 30 years should have been abandoned long ago.
Focusing on any period shorter than 60 years seem to me no better than augury, in other words no better than looking at the entrails of chickens.
So, it’s the sun (again)
Shouldn’t we be moving on from the graph matching stage, to rewriting coupled climate models that show just how the sun does it, to demonstrate this ‘alternative paradigm’?
Or is this ‘accumulation theory’ too ‘immature’ as yet to move into the major league?
Surely, history shows that when the ‘the point of crisis’ is reached there’s a credible ‘alternative paradigm’ waiting in the wings take it’s place, not a vacuum. In this case the vacuum consists of vague ideas revolving around “it’s the sun”. If it’s so obvious it’s the sun wot did it, why are the proofs and mechanisms so elusive? And if they are so elusive, why are we so sure they’re there waiting to be discovered?
Richard Courtney, I agree. Just because we do not have the fully worked out alternative to a wrong theory, that does not mean that the theory we know to be wrong, remains right, until an alternative understanding is “settled science”…That would repeat the mistake of ever believing that the C02 basis for CAGW hypothesis was correct, in the first place.
The scientific thing to do is accept the data, correctly announce the falsification of the CO2 driven CAGW hypothesis and announce that we do not know exactly what are the many and varied contributary driving factors in climate change. Or rather, we do not of many different drivers, but we do not yet know exactly how they all interlink and inter-react at any given moment to be able to predict future climate change with any degree of confidence.
Actually there is an accepted theory of solar influence centred round the work of solar physicist H Abdussamatov working at Polkovo Astronomical Observatory in St Petersburg. his analysis points to a declining bicentennial component of the total solar irradiance which will gather pace over the next few decades. This in turn points to an approaching ice age..www.ccsenet.org Applied Physics research Vol 4 No February 2012
Brilliant! I was just thinking the same thing about CO2!
The trouble is that the sun has become the cAGW crowd’s get-out-of-jail free card. They now have an alibi for the ‘pause’ which will last for a good 20-30 more years while they finish their work of taking most of the West (but not, of course, China, India, Brazil etc) back to the stone age. It’s role has become one more fudge factor to add to their models – and they will shortly be telling us that this is all predicted once said fudge factor has been incorporated.
Truly, there is no stopping the evil that is Ed Davey/Lord Deben/Tim Yeo/etc/etc.
In reply to:
“The IPCC panel preparing the AR5 report may not have been devastated when they changed the likely range of climate sensitivity, which had stood at 4.5–2°C since 1990. The lower estimate has now been dropped from 2°C to 1.5°C. What has not been appreciated is that increasing the range of uncertainty is impossible in a period of Kuhnian ‘normal science’, where new information always decreases uncertainty.”
The climate wars have blocked the process of normal science. To publish research that questions EAGW is to risk ones career, advancement, access to journals, and so on. Editors have been fired for daring to publish material that challenges EAGW. It is astonishing and disheartening that the scientific community allowed climategate type of practices to occur. There are multiple fundamental observations and analysis any one of which could have created a crisis to dispute EAGW. The standard theory should have based on these observations and analysis changed from EAGW to lukewarm AGW. The rapid decline in the solar magnetic cycle may be the game changer. Based on what has happened in the past the earth will cool due to the decline in the solar magnetic cycle.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/10/28/bbc-real-risk-of-a-maunder-minimum-little-ice-age/
“According to Professor Lockwood the late 20th century was a period when the sun was unusually active and a so called ‘grand maximum’ occurred around 1985. Since then the sun has been getting quieter. By looking back at certain isotopes in ice cores, he has been able to determine how active the sun has been over thousands of years. Following analysis of the data, Professor Lockwood believes solar activity is now falling more rapidly than at any time in the last 10,000 years. He found 24 different occasions in the last 10,000 years when the sun was in exactly the same state as it is now – and the present decline is faster than any of those 24.”
Dr Stockwell
In my humble opinion this is the best, non-technical article I have read on the subject.
VI: Its a good question, which is why I have been archiving results on how to simulate the model, fingerprints of ghg vs solar forcing, and most importantly the physical basis for the correlation. But you have to read the papers first, and there is no point in asking the questions unless you have read the papers. The starting point of simulating a climate system is a semi-diagonal difference matrix – nothing less.The “proofs and mechanisms” are elusive because the assumptions are wrong.
WA: I have something of a bone to pick with Professor Lockwood. His papers have been very influential in discounting solar influence. IMHO this is because he used too short a decay period. In the model, a certain part of the climate system has a very long time decay – around 100,000 years (assume deep ocean). Other parts are less, depending on altitude. The time decay, and hence the apparent climate sensitivity depends on the part of the climate system where the perturbation takes place, not so much on what is perturbed.
Roy: Popper’s falsification (in the popular understanding) is normative, i.e how one should practice science. Kuhn was descriptive – how one does practice science. You can win the battle but that’s not the war.
TJ: I was not aware that Abdussamatov was accepted. I will look into that.
@Village Idiot
It is often assumed that causing the downfall of a corrupt and venal government will only be followed by ‘something better’. The idea that nothing could be worse is inviting and cuddly.
Never assume anything. The inevitable collapse of CAGW might provoke a sweeping anti-scientist revolution in attitudes that will take decades to overcome. The whole apparatus of modern science is base on a moral foundation that religions lie to us and scientists always tell the truth. An eternal claim of religion is that without a religious foundation scientific freedom inevitably leads to materialistic despotism and mass extermination.
CAGW claims a moral imperative: protection of the long term viability of life and comfort and the common weal. Those making this claim are as adamant in it as they are hostile to the spiritual authority of priesthoods. It truly is as false a religion as the panaceatic creations of televangelists.
Make no assumptions that what follows the fall of an empire is peace and happiness. Between one paradigm and the next is a period of moral and intellectual anarchy that will much later be described as ‘creative’.
No chance , the IPCC etc relies on AGW for [their] very reason to exist, Whole careers and university departments have been built on it while its a wagon hitched on to by 101 political ’causes’ None of that could stand the change to ‘it was the Sun wont do it ‘
The reality is if man cannot be blamed , to many people stand to lose a great deal for this change , regardless of the facts , to come about quietly.
Crispin in Waterloo says:
The whole apparatus of modern science is base on a moral foundation that religions lie to us and scientists always tell the truth.
Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton and Michael Faraday would not agree with you, nor would they think that all religions are the same.
An eternal claim of religion is that without a religious foundation scientific freedom inevitably leads to materialistic despotism and mass extermination.
Can you cite evidence of this “eternal” claim, or do you think the last 5 minutes seemed like eternity?
knr says:at 3:34 am
“The reality is if man cannot be blamed , too many people stand to lose a great deal for this change , regardless of the facts , to come about quietly.
This is the naked truth!
Roy,
And religion, presumably, doesn’t lead to despotism and mass extermination?
Maybe, just maybe, you should exercise your synapses a bit, say, 5 minutes every day?
„UC Berkely professor Richard Muller has said, “Anyone claiming another cause would have to show that it correlates with the temperature record at least as well as CO2.”
As shown in the figure above, a simple regression model of accumulated total solar insolation (CumTSI) with global temperature gives a higher correlation than greenhouse gas and total solar insolation.”
As shown in the figure:
http://www.volker-doormann.org/images/hadcrut4_vs_sun14.gif
a simple regression model accumulating 14 solar tide functions (GHI 14) with global temperature gives a higher correlation than total solar insolation (CumTSI) with global temperature.
Mr. Watts,
Posted the url of one of your charts at http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/10/ask-ars-about-the-new-ipcc-report/?comments=1&start=120
Scott Johnson the site writer and others took great exception to your website.
SO I followed up with the url for your website. WOW they really don’t like you much.
I tried to explain that my experience in marine science doing field work does not support the IPCC modeling.
GEEEZZZZZ
Thanks For All You Do
Mike Brown
Richard Muller :“Anyone claiming another cause would have to show that it correlates with the temperature record at least as well as CO2.”
But the warming DOES NOT correlate with CO2!
A paradigm shift will come about once this basic question is going to be asked:
how did the deep oceans (below ~1000m) get their present high temperatures?
Average deep ocean temperature ~275K, already 20K above the infamous 255K Effective temperature for Earth. More relevant 275K is almost 80K above the average surface temperature of our Moon.
Since solar doesn’t reach much deeper than ~200m, downward conduction fighting upward convection reaches another couple 100 meters at most and warm water doesn’t sink into much colder water, warming from above isn’t going to work.
(the idea of the atmosphere warming the deep oceans is too silly to consider)
Given that our Earth consists mostly of molten rock, with a core of molten metal, the place to look seems obvious to me. And no, I’m not talking about the ~100 mW/m^2 flux through the oceanic crust.
Just in case the question gets asked, I DO have an answer.
When I first came across the name Bruno Latour it was in connection with the book Higher Superstition which assumed the dispute over how science is taught had something to do with a dispute over the actual nature of the world. (I explain the relevance of Constructivism globally in math and science in Chapter 3 of a book that was just published).
Since then though I have read Latour’s 2004 book published by Harvard, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Nature, which makes it quite clear that the desired shift is against the very objectiveness of science. It fails to yield to political power and in a world that seeks to reshape social institutions, that objectiveness about the nature of reality is the real issue.
For decades the planners have been using economic models and pretending that’s how economies work. It brought many of the credentialed power, money, and careers. When skeptics dispute the objective reality underlying climate models like the IPCC or Limits to Growth in the early 70s, we are missing their true purpose–to serve as the justification for further centralization of social and economic decision-making under political power.
It’s not just Latour or Donella Meadows who have been graphic about this over the decades. So have Daniel Bell and Anthony Giddens. If we treat the dispute as legitimately about science, we look in the wrong places for a desired remedy.
In searching for analogies to climate variations I sometimes quote cycles of the human body. There are fundamental ones related to pulse, respiration, sleep, defecation, perspiration, etc at one level and a bunch of biochemical cycles like Krebs, Calvin Cori … it’s a long list but it is not needed to be complete to make the analogy clear.
Surely climate has cycles like this. They have a rhythm that can be independent of, or cross-correlated to each other, some weakly, some strongly. Different processes can affect the frequency and amplitude of a given cycle – or sometimes a common input, such as exertion or a febrile condition, can alter the variables of a number of cycles, but not in a way that is easy to predict or to analyse from first principles. It’s hard to even denote independent and dependent variables because without any one, life stops. In this sense they are all dependent.
A problem with grand climate models arises because the natural processes are not amenable to conventional statistical analysis, even the most complicated. (To me there’s a feel that old-fashioned analogue computers with purposeful noise added might be better than digital ones).
In hindsight, the present architecture of climate models had to be tried for completeness. Now, having failed, they should be abandoned. They should be abandoned because they cannot cope with complexity (illustrated by the analogy with the human body). Nobody that I know is modelling the human body that way, do correct me if I’m wrong. It would be an ambitious project.
Perhaps, using the analogy, the climate model problem arose from an urge to isolate global temperature and to study what affected it. This is somewhat akin to seizing on body temperature and trying to hitch known cycles to it.
Chances are that temperature is not the ultimate variable process-wise. Just as we are fascinated with what keeps a body alive, we should be asking what has stopped the world from dying.
Crispin.
I agree with your point on the loss of credibility science has suffered.
That may, in the end, prove the biggest loss of this whole mess.
I worry the consequences of this debacle will be severe.
However, it is still ‘job 1’ to move the world out of this pre-enlightenment phase we have unfortunately entered. We will have deal with the consequences when the time comes.
Paul Homewood says:
November 1, 2013 at 4:38 am
Richard Muller :“Anyone claiming another cause would have to show that it correlates with the temperature record at least as well as CO2.”
But the warming DOES NOT correlate with CO2!
Where is it that ‘mainstream’ Climate Science has even done a correlation between the two? It looks like it has been assumed as a ‘tenet’.
From David Stockwell’s “On the Dynamics of Global Temperature”, abstract-
“Over the last century, annual global temperature rises or falls 0.063 C/W/m^2 per year when solar irradiance is greater or less than an equilibrium value of 1366 W/m^2 at top-of-atmosphere.”
The sensitivity of intra-annual surface temperature variations to seasonal solar insolation variations, given at any particular location by (summerT – winterT)/(summer TSI – winter TSI) (aka summer is warmer than winter) is around 0.04 – 0.12 C/W/m^2. This is in the same ballpark as David’s estimate.
Here is a quote from the last post on my blog at
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com
The whole post and accompanying cooling forecast was guest posted on WUWT on 10/29.
Seems very apropos to this discussion.
“2. A Simple Rational Approach to Climate Forecasting based on Common Sense and Quasi Repetitive- Quasi Cyclic Patterns.
How then can we predict the future of a constantly changing climate? A new forecasting paradigm is required .
It is important to note that it in order to make transparent and likely skillful forecasts it is not necessary to understand or quantify the interactions of the large number of interacting and quasi independent physical processes and variables which produce the state of the climate system as a whole as represented by the temperature metric.”
An excellent example of Einstein’s Razor: “Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler”
Similarly, Murry Salby showed that CO2 fluxes are not exceptional because“gas diffuses in ice cores”, and nature dominates CO2 fluxes.
I was intorduced to the formal study of scholarly communication patterns using statistical modeling techniques (bibliometrics) as a graduate student in the early 90s at Drexel University, and it has always appeared to me that a bogus paradigm shift in the field of climate studies was engineered somehow in a relatively brief period. The publication of Mann’s hockey stick reconstructions first introduced the idea that abrupt climate chage was possible, yet by the time the Second Assessment Report was issued in 1995, after very little of the sort of process Kuhn’s model would lead us to expect, this was presented as the dominant paradigm. From a “Kuhnian perspective”, I’d say we’re seeing the system slowly righting itself.
I think the big thing being missed is that it doesn’t matter how many holes you shoot in the science of AGW. The people pushing this are not pushing this philosophy because they truly want to save the world from global warming. They want to control the economies of the world and this is a convenient excuse for why everyone should give them control of the world. There might be a paradigm shift, but it will be from one reason for control to another.
“In the accumulation theory, global temperature rises while solar activity is above the long-term solar constant.”
So is it also true that global temperatures fall while solar activity is below the long-term solar constant?
What is the lag time? When do temperatures start to fall?
I would like a prediction.
” As shown in the figure above, a simple regression model of accumulated total solar insolation (CumTSI) with global temperature gives a higher correlation”
______________________________
Aw come on, this has been disproven here on WUWT multiple times already. These cycles can be seen in data even before 1950, but if you look at them before that you’ll notice that they’re not that nicely in phase anymore. And besides, there is no known physical principle that would be able to integrate TSI over many decades, No, not even sea water.
James Cross
For a prediction see my comment at 5:56 AM above Here is a summary
” I have combined the PDO, ,Millennial cycle and neutron trends to estimate the timing and extent of the coming cooling in both the Northern Hemisphere and Globally.
Here are the conclusions of those posts.
1/22/13 (NH)
1) The millennial peak is sharp – perhaps 18 years +/-. We have now had 16 years since 1997 with no net warming – and so might expect a sharp drop in a year or two – 2014/16 -with a net cooling by 2035 of about 0.35.Within that time frame however there could well be some exceptional years with NH temperatures +/- 0.25 degrees colder than that.
2) The cooling gradient might be fairly steep down to the Oort minimum equivalent which would occur about 2100. (about 1100 on Fig 5) ( Fig 3 here) with a total cooling in 2100 from the present estimated at about 1.2 +/-
3) From 2100 on through the Wolf and Sporer minima equivalents with intervening highs to the Maunder Minimum equivalent which could occur from about 2600 – 2700 a further net cooling of about 0.7 degrees could occur for a total drop of 1.9 +/- degrees
4)The time frame for the significant cooling in 2014 – 16 is strengthened by recent developments already seen in solar activity. With a time lag of about 12 years between the solar driver proxy and climate we should see the effects of the sharp drop in the Ap Index which took place in 2004/5 in 2016-17.
4/02/13 ( Global)
1 Significant temperature drop at about 2016-17
2 Possible unusual cold snap 2021-22
3 Built in cooling trend until at least 2024
4 Temperature Hadsst3 moving average anomaly 2035 – 0.15
5 Temperature Hadsst3 moving average anomaly 2100 – 0.5
6 General Conclusion – by 2100 all the 20th century temperature rise will have been reversed,
7 By 2650 earth could possibly be back to the depths of the little ice age.
8 The effect of increasing CO2 emissions will be minor but beneficial – they may slightly ameliorate the forecast cooling and help maintain crop yields .
9 Warning !! There are some signs in the Livingston and Penn Solar data that a sudden drop to the Maunder Minimum Little Ice Age temperatures could be imminent – with a much more rapid and economically disruptive cooling than that forecast above which may turn out to be a best case scenario.”
Anthony this is SAL, I thought you said it would only be 48 hrs before I could post. It is going on two weeks.
I thought this web-site was al about finding out the truth and featuring different points of views.
As far as Leif goes, you don’t agree with him yourself yet when I challenge him it seems to get you bent out of shape. Why is that? I sit because Leif is the representative solar scientist for Watts Up With That?
In any matter their are many web-sites to voice opinions on this subject and if you don’t want mine it is your loss and the web-site loss.
E
Salvatore, you can post anytime. Not sure what you are on about. The time out is long past.
To portray AGW as a scientific paradigm is to give it legitimacy beyond its desert. It is a pseudo science. When science triumphs over a pseudo science, this is not a paradigm shift in the Kulnian sense. Climate science has been corrupted by politics — how that happened is what requires explaining. How that corruption can be corrected, that is what needs doing.
FROM WIKI: In honor of his legacy, the “Thomas Kuhn Paradigm Shift Award” is awarded by the American Chemical Society to speakers who present original views that are at odds with mainstream scientific understanding. The winner is selected based in the novelty of the viewpoint and its potential impact if it were to be widely accepted.
I cannot wait till someone is awarded this for throwing out the IPCC and their unscientific fantasy on the source of global climate variations.
I think science will drop, not shift the CO2 generated AGW theory much as the phlogiston theory of fire and the biological theory of spontaneous generation were dropped once science moved on and a wealth of new discoveries made them unnecessary. I don’t think anyone ever proved the non-existence of phlogiston although that became obvious once chemistry became established. I doubt anyone will ever prove CO2 doesn’t or can’t control climate on earth but it will become unnecessary once the real drivers of climate are discovered (which I think they mostly already are it’s just that nobody has put them together into a periodic table of climate yet). That won’t matter one whit to the politicians and radical environmentalists who need the CO2 theory of AGW to justify their control over populations and to further the green revolution. It will die or be dropped in science but will live on until we again have frost fairs on the Thames and years without summers in the US.
” What has not been appreciated is that increasing the range of uncertainty is impossible in a period of Kuhnian ‘normal science’, where new information always decreases uncertainty.
The ‘blow-out’ in the range of likely climate sensitivity can only mean one thing: We are no longer in a period of ‘normal’ science, but entering a period of ‘paradigm shift’.
Wrong.
The increase in range in uncertainty had nothing to do with the science. The prior range ( 2-4.5) was the result of a ‘expert’ assesment. Not data. not theory. not anything normal at all.
Second, the article systematically misunderstands the difference between revolutionary science and normal science. A shift toward lower sensitivities does not upend radiative theory.
Even if one found unknown effects for the sun that would not upset radiative theory. Those changes are all on the edges.
What would be a revolution? data that showed RTE is wrong.
I went to talks by Myles Allen and others last week about IPCC and climate models. Some speakers denied the ‘pause’, others admitted it but blamed it on ‘natural variation + solar cycle’.
My overall impression was that the extent of the validation of the models was that ‘temperatures have gone up over 100 years and modelled temperatures have done likewise’.
Which I think leaves the door wide open for ‘other things have made the temperature go up and CO2 sensitivity is smaller than we think’. Hard to prove either way without more data. The next 30 years will settle it I suppose!
in addition, at the talks, the 2 questions which caused most difficulty for the presenters were
1 – if the solar cycle is partially to blame for the pause, can we see its effect in the rest of the temperature record?
2 – if so much heat has gone into the deep ocean, we should be able to track it using radioisotopes from the bomb tests?
Richard Muller :“Anyone claiming another cause would have to show that it correlates with the temperature record at least as well as CO2.”
Is he talking about the correlation over the last 150 years? ie that both go up?
– – – – – – – –
David Stockwell,
You have presented a stimulating essay. I think you have offered a needed perspective.
Popper and Kuhn and Occam aside, a radical shift in climate theory occurred in the late 20th with an ‘a priori’ postulated CAGW. The current observed return to a balanced climate perspective, which includes expected advances in research that wasn’t supportive of the radical CAGW theory, is not in itself a radical shift; it looks like ponderous and slowly acting scientific self correction; science grinding on to eliminate biases such as CAGW.
The self-correction change back to a balanced perspective is being accelerated by the irrational AR5 absurdness.
John
“My overall impression was that the extent of the validation of the models was that ‘temperatures have gone up over 100 years and modelled temperatures have done likewise’.”
That is an awfully low standard for validation of models that are used to support the call for global sacrifice. I think the ancient Greeks and Romans had more ‘validation’ that the gods controlled the climate than we have that the GCM’s model it.
“As Max Planck, the father of quantum theory, put it:
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
Perhaps the paradigm shift will get underway as soon as some of the leading lights of the CAGW theory reach retiring age.”
The sad thing about this is that they are teaching this theory in schools. My 7 year old grand daughter, in her science book, learned that carbon dioxide is pollution and that humans are causing the planed to heat up and change the climate and effect the ecosystems.
How do you fight that?
Was I going to confront the teacher or tell my grand daughter not to believe her science book?
I’m chess coach at several schools and at the junior high, have had discussions with the 2 science teachers on this topic. They have blind faith in this theory. The reason I “HAD” discussions, as in the past tense is that I provided all the evidence to show they were wrong and they just couldn’t stand to hear it because it showed something they were teaching was a crock.
I talk with them still about many things but they will absolutely not bring up this topic.
This goes all the way up thru our institutions of higher learning. Our youth are being indoctrinated into this religion by countless thousands of teachers/professors that brainwash it into them, after which, it’s stored in their brains as a fact………….which then causes them to process all new information differently.
This is just like the author of this excellent article states.
If one did a study on the average age of the skeptics and the average age of the believers(including children) that is based only on what they think they know, my guess is that the skeptics will die first.
When these school aged children are taught this, then given a test later on to see if they learned it, you have classrooms of students across many countries that will get credit for the right answers by showing they agree with the theory of CAGW.
In the end, climate science was always primarily about radical environmentalism, elitism, opportunism, and a vehicle for an emergent governing class. In short, it was always about politics. Unlike normal political promises which are seldom kept this case is different since the benefactors and the benefactees are tied together at the hip. So I strongly suspect, for even beyond what would normally be possible, this political promise WILL be kept:
“If you like your climate model, you can keep your climate model.”
Steven Mosher says:
November 1, 2013 at 7:51 am
” What has not been appreciated is that increasing the range of uncertainty is impossible in a period of Kuhnian ‘normal science’, where new information always decreases uncertainty.
The ‘blow-out’ in the range of likely climate sensitivity can only mean one thing: We are no longer in a period of ‘normal’ science, but entering a period of ‘paradigm shift’.
Wrong.
The increase in range in uncertainty had nothing to do with the science. The prior range ( 2-4.5) was the result of a ‘expert’ assesment. Not data. not theory. not anything normal at all.
I thought this (2-4.5) was determined from the model outputs (to give us a prior) rather than a pre-determined prior distribution plucked out of the air.
Second, the article systematically misunderstands the difference between revolutionary science and normal science. A shift toward lower sensitivities does not upend radiative theory.
I don’t think this is what is being suggested here.
Even if one found unknown effects for the sun that would not upset radiative theory. Those changes are all on the edges.
Is he not proposing, that assuming causality from casual relationships, then solar output would do a better jobs by those standards. It does look impressive though all the same.
Might the crust of the earth be responsible for integrating TSI? There seems to be some belief that borehole temperature measurements can tell us something about what the surface climate was like in the past. That doesn’t work if energy can’t accumulate in the crust.
Mike Maguire
Most of the stuff I’ve read about paradigm shifts would suggest that these generally occur as one generation replaces another.
As H. L. Menchen put it “The urge to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it”.
Describes the ultimate goal of AGW and it’s socialist followers many of which reside in academia and government who politicians continue to foolishly believe. They fail to realized that eventually you run out of other peoples money. In the meantime public confidence in these institutions continues to decline which eventually leads to a rupture in the bond bubble and free market induced interest rate increases causing fiscal deficts and taxes to ballon. Adam Smith’s invisible hand takes over as world captial begins to move to private entities and governments can’t sell their bonds. History repeats because the passions of mankind has never changed. It’s a cycle just like our beloved climate.
” “My overall impression was that the extent of the validation of the models was that ‘temperatures have gone up over 100 years and modelled temperatures have done likewise’.”
That is an awfully low standard for validation of models that are used to support the call for global sacrifice. I think the ancient Greeks and Romans had more ‘validation’ that the gods controlled the climate than we have that the GCM’s model it.”
Yes, I agree, but that is what we have got to work with as friends of mine in climatology would say.
Another interesting quote from a presenter was – “we can’t predict the random fluctuations of the climate, only the underlying trend”. But climate models are bottom up physics models, which means “we can’t model or don’t model or don’t know how to model the things that are causing these deterministic non-random fluctuations and we can’t say for sure that the temperature rise since 1850 isn’t one of them”.
When he mentioned random fluctuations I was tempted to ask a question, but why break a lifetime’s habit?
amazing stuff, this layman understood with ease the SUN is the “driver” as soon as the discussion began, and NEVER understood how any “scientist” would ever consider the silly notion that human co2 was “driving” the climate…….it was and remains simply SILLY on its face.
• issue isn’t bad physics — issue is weak aggregation criteria foundations in mainstream
• ~1940s peak not explained by sunspot integral — overlooks sensitive dependence of mass distribution & large scale circulation on northern hemisphere latitudinal insolation gradients (no need for violation of radiative theory blah blah blah = total BS distortion from folks that should be banned from discussion for deliberately ignoring mass distribution & large scale circulation for purely political reasons)
• total column ozone record shows detail and supports this interpretation (no elaboration until I have longterm secure support from the local university)
Good article. Accumulated solar energy is a more appropriate way of evaluating the contributions from varying solar activity. Most studies that dismiss the sun do so based on overly simplistic linear correlations, ie solar activity was higher in the 50s than in the 90s and therefore can not explain the warming. Such erroneous simplifications never accounted for solar heat accumulation in the ocean. Furthermore the CO2 advocates use a formula the averages solar input between the poles and the equator. However it is the heating of the tropical oceans that is most critical, so averaging will underestimate the sun’s contribution to accumulated heat. The tropics absorb more heat than temperatures would suggest because much of the tropical heat is exported. Several studies by Meehl show that small changes in solar input during sunspot cycles causes detectable alterations to how much heat is exported out from the tropics.
The Pacific Decadal Oscillation entered its heat absorbing mode in the 40s and much of the warming in the 80s and 90s can be attributed to the PDOs heat ventilating cycle with more frequent El Ninos that ventilated that stored heat. Was the sun or CO2 responsible for that stored heat? Jim Hansen predicted a super El Nino in 2006 assuming the oceans were storing heat derived from CO2. His prediction failed. I believe Trenberth is making the same mistake, and in 20 years the natural cycles will provide the final test of the CO2 paradigm. As solar activity continues to wane during the PDO’s current heat absorbing phase, predictions guided by natural cycles suggest temperatures will never exceed the 90s during the next ventilation phase. If so the CO2 paradigm will be stressed beyond repair.
In recent months Salvatore Del Prete has been perhaps the most strategic contributor at WUWT.
William Astley says:
November 1, 2013 at 2:49 am
“According to Professor Lockwood the late 20th century was a period when the sun was unusually active and a so called ‘grand maximum’ occurred around 1985.
Well, he is wrong about that as I have shown you many times. There has been no Grand Maximum.
lsvalgaard says:
November 1, 2013 at 9:16 am
“There has been no Grand Maximum”.
Leif has there ever been a Grand Minimum?
At most, Leif accepts a mini minimum and a mini maximum.
His preference would be to ‘prove’ absolute flatness !!!
Muller comments that any alternative theory must show a higher correlation to temps than CO2? There is NO correlation between temps and CO2, as four prior warm periods with low CO2 and the overall decline of temps since the 1930s despite a 40 percent increase in CO2 since then prove beyond a shadow of a doubt.
CO2 may increase AFTER temps do, because of the release of CO2 from soils and water, but this is no evidence that CO2 caused the increase in temps – in fact it proves the reverse.
Roy says:
November 1, 2013 at 1:31 am
It is my impression that those scientists who are interested in the philosophy of science tend to prefer the ideas of Karl Popper to those of Thomas Kuhn. Popper was the high priest of falsification. However, as has often been pointed out, climatologists have been reluctant to say what could disprove their theory that man-made CO2 is the main driver of climate change. Consequently Kuhn’s idea of a paradigm shift seem more relevant to climatology.
As Max Planck, the father of quantum theory, put it:
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
…
Planck’s dictum is entirely consistent with Kuhn’s argument. For an historical example that is now mostly in the past read up on the debate over plate tectonics. It was not even in text books in the 1960s and at the time I was taking geology in the early ’70s, most of the material we received was mimeographed or xeroxed. As late as the 1990s there were holdouts that insisted the crust was too rigid to behave as the theory suggested. Sending them an good photo of a fold in a rock stratum and asking for an alternate explanation typically was met with a redirected argument. The only way some of these holdouts would abandon the idea that the continents didn’t move was by dying. There are still holdouts and individuals arguing that there are alternate theories that are not being “properly” respected.
The strangest part of the debate was always the self evident fact that parts of the crust were always known to move. The real short fall was in imagination that simply could not encompass the scale involved, or would not carry out the visualization of what a “local” movement implied globally, if the earth’s crust was “too rigid” to fold and subduction could not happen.
jim Steele says:
November 1, 2013 at 9:07 am
Agreed, a good summary.
I’ve been making similar points for years.
Climate change is a result of the constant interplay between top down solar and bottom up oceanic influences on the global energy budget at top of atmosphere.
The primary driver is global albedo (cloudiness) variations from the top down solar effect on atmospheric chemistry involving ozone quantities above the tropopause and the delayed system response due to the thermal inertia of the oceans.
However Leif strives to flatten the solar variability, whatever solar variability remains is enough to provide the necessary forcing element.
Leif would be well advised to apply his undoubted skills in another direction.
Our emissions account for virtually nought compared to natural forcing elements.
I don’t expect anyone to accept my contentions uncritically but I am putting them on record for future reference.
I agree that the primary force behind man-made global warming is a political force, not a science force. the political people are in the powerful places in higher education, in the govt, in funding sources such as dept of energy funding Mann’s dissertation, in the environmental advocacy groups, groups, and in the international governance world – the NGOs.
Manmade climate impact is just another avenue of criticizing and weakening our Judeo-Christian, capitalistic/commerce-based society. In contrast, there is a clear history of Marxist-guided thought in many fields of society, from family values to education to the environment.
While these aims are often noble, or have a noble façade, the end-game is Marx’s end-game: overturn capitalism and evolve to communism.
It is fine to be concerned about pollution affecting our environment, or our health. It is fine to ponder whether we are over-crowding our planet. It is fine to ponder whether carbon fuel emissions are making serious changes to the dynamics of our atmosphere that could result in disaster. It is fine to ponder whether nuclear energy will lead to great illness and great zoned-off Chernobyl areas of our planet. It is great to ponder whether the presence of nuclear weapons can only lead to their use, in a nuclear war nightmare, and possible “morning after” wasteland effect.
For political reasons, these are merely tools for Marxists to get a hold on politics. Great portions of our society, especially young adults, sympathized with the “occupy” movement, with its nebulous political aims, but which were obviously quite against business as usual – the prevailing “cultural hegemony.”
On various topics, I and many of us agree with the Marxists on various specifics: I think banks should not be “too big to fail,” and should be more accountable. I agree that the lobbying forces in the U.S. congress are too powerful. Etc.
But I do not favor their comprehensive one-size-fits-all revolutionary answer to all of this.
As a starting place for those who are not familiar with the complex agenda of the Marxists, here is a link to the “original port huron statement” – you can look this up on Wikipedia and elsewhere, and see how Marxism influences have developed in the United States since the turn of the century 100 years ago (maybe start with Emma Goldman), progress to the 1060s Port Huron statement and SDS, then investigate forward – some of the SDS people are still around. This statement is comprehensive. The Marxists have activism in many areas of our society, with many of these captured in the port huron statement…
http://www.sds-1960s.org/PortHuronStatement-draft.htm
SDS planned the Kent State demonstrations even though they were not Kent State students, went there, had some demonstations including, I recall, bombing one unoccupied building – a storage shed or something – got regular students involved, and thus made it seem to be a spontaneous student demonstration with an unprovoked govt shooting of students.
The govt should have never pulled a trigger. But there was violence – the bombing – from the SDS before the Man pulled the trigger. This is the type of thing the SDS wanted – not a college kid getting killed, but demonstrations and to pain the govt as oppressive jack-booted thugs. Lesson learned, as the ‘occupy’ movement, far more vast, was largely free of incidents outside of tear gas, which I don’t think of as very extreme (having been in a tear gas situation once myself).
I agree: this man-made global warming stuff is politics, not science. I invite you all to start reading th ehistory that is very much available, but simply is not in our textbooks.
jim Steele says:
November 1, 2013 at 9:07 am
Well said. However I fear that CACA, like Marxism, will remain a dangerous zombie long after shown false. The dead dogma will be kept walking by those in power who benefit from it.
Earth is a water world, & its usually homeostatic climatic fluctuations IMO owe largely to the properties & feedback effects of H2O in its various states, regulated by solar radiation & magnetism, plus factors such as orbital mechanics, plate tectonics & the planet’s internal heat sources.
In Icehouse climatic periods, the greenhouse gas water vapor comes out of the air & liquid water out of the oceans to be deposited as ice on the continents & sea surface. In Hothouses, water returns to the seas & increases concentration in the air, although as gas & not necessarily the droplets that form clouds, which depend upon CCN availability. Both gas in the air & liquid in the oceans move heat around & up & down the planet.
CO2 is a minor player above low levels, although important in the first 200 ppm as a GHG & plant food, since life also features in the climate system of earth. Higher concentrations are good for life, up to a point, but add very little to global GHE. Methane is a transient player.
Why are alternative models not summarized together in one post? Norman Page had a new one released, another one for the next 500 years, of F. Steinhilber & Beer, came out this year…..There is a Russian model, the Akasofu model and a lot more out there…..
Its a pity, that Anthony is “mumbling-oriented” instead of being “model performance-oriented”…
All those, who mumble about AR4 and AR5 models get their post….many others, who present
ingenious new approaches, get turned down….Too bad….
“In recent months Salvatore Del Prete has been perhaps the most strategic contributor at WUWT.”
Agreed up to a point.
Salvatore has a applied a bludgeon whereas I’ve tried to supply a rapier.
Only history will judge.
milodonharlani says:
“…I fear that CACA, like Marxism, will remain a dangerous zombie long after shown false. The dead dogma will be kept walking by those in power who benefit from it.”
Exactly right. It will remain until those promoting it have passed on, because even if some lemmings do not financially benefit, there is always this:
I submit that there are multiple paradigm shifts occurring. The overlap between science and politics blurs the distinctions between them. They cannot be disentangled as simply as this article attempts to do. I offer a single example as evidence.
In the 1970’s, it was considered crucial by the US government to reduce fossil fuel consumption. This resulted in a 55 mph speed limit being imposed on the entire country. Today, it is considered crucial by the US government to reduce fossil fuel consumption, but no such solution is being proposed. The proposals being proposed today are completely different because they have completely different political drivers, and the science used to justify the politics is hence completely different despite having the same ostensible end goal (reducing fossil fuel consumption).
As for the science paradigm on its own, I don’t see where replacing a paradigm that fits only a segment of the historical data with another paradigm that only fits a segment of the data is of any value in changing any minds in the climate debate. Those who are looking for a “single driver” to explain temperature variation over the last few decades have lost the debate before they have begun. There are dozens of drivers, perhaps thousands. Untangling them all to the point where a specific driver can be shown to be responsible for a specific amount of change is unlikely to happen, in my humble opinion, in my lifetime. In the meantime, CO2 continues to rise and temps continue to remain flat or even decline, suggesting that the CO2 driver itself is far less of a factor than previously thought.
But if warming resumes, regardless of the reason, politics dictates that it will be CO2 that gets the blame, and taxation and regulation will be the answer. Since the real goal is not to actually reduce fossil fuel consumption, I shall continue to purchase private transportation that can easily exceed 55 mph.
Paul Vaughan.
Hi Paul.
I noticed this from your link:
“The decadal circulation signal is coherent with the rate of change of total column ozone. A widespread misconception is that total column ozone tracks the solar cycle. It does not. The solar cycle drives changes in total column ozone, so the solar cycle is a quarter-cycle ahead of decadal total column ozone.”
I noticed that the ozone response above 45km and towards the poles is opposite to the ozone response below 45km and towards the equator with the former being dominant hence a cooling stratosphere and growing ozone holes when the sun is active and a warming stratosphere and shrinking ozone holes when the sun is inactive.
Does that fit with your data or not ?
Stephen.
If the proponents of Catastrophic CO2 induced global warming admit that their theory is wrong, they would also admit that the skeptics have been and are right — the skeptics that have been demonized and name-called and cursed and ridiculed. That second thing may be the hardest.
I think that the number that ultimately admit their error will be dwarfed by the number that claim that “given the information available at the time” they were right.
What has not been appreciated is that increasing the range of uncertainty is impossible in a period of Kuhnian ‘normal science’, where new information always decreases uncertainty.
Come again? Follow the data. When the data changes, you change your statistics. It doesn’t matter if sqrt(N) is increasing if the Sum(Variance) is faster.
David Stockwell wrote,
“Observations of ocean heat uptake represent the crucial experiment — observations capable of decisively dismantling a theory despite its widespread acceptance in the scientific community.”
Judith Curry wrote,
“A paper published Science finds reconstructed Pacific Ocean heat content has been significantly higher throughout the vast majority of the past ~10,000 years in comparison to the latter 20th century.”
http://judithcurry.com/2013/11/01/pacific-ocean-heat-content-for-the-past-10000-years/#more-13583
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/75831381/Rosenthal%20ocean%20temps%20Supplementary%20Materials.pdf
As Mosher points out, the earlier uncertainty ranges are not bound by data as much as expert opinion and anchoring. So the real issue is how a range of uncertainty changes as you move from Post-Normal science driven by urgency and lack of data to a Normal science driven by data and hypothesis testing.
I have been posting these TSI charts a lot lately. So many Sun, solar and TSI articles. Maybe scientist should get out side and look at the sun a little more often.
TSI reconstructed chart.
http://lasp.colorado.edu/lisird/tsi/historical_tsi.html
Latest TSI data I have.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/pmod
“Count not his broken pledges as a crime: He MEANT them, HOW he meant them — at the time.”
[Said of PM Lloyd George]
Sorry guys. but Leif is right. Solar insolation changes are too small to drive “climate change”. The same is doubly true for CO2 changes.
“Climate change” is simply energy flux distribution changes in the system, with the total energy in the system remaining constant.
For example, simply lowering the Stevenson screens from 6′ to 3′ would raise the average temperature, that is the same affect as increasing CO2 levels. Changes in lapse rates are one of the causes of ‘climate change’.
Call me a pedant but the title of this should be ‘C’ change. C is for century. A C change is so major a change it occurs once a century approximately. It has nothing to do with the sea.
For reference, Muller’s argument about CO2/volcano/warming correlation is based on this figure: http://static.berkeleyearth.org/pdf/annual-with-forcing.pdf
The use of the cumulative sum of TSI is slightly mind-boggling. I’d love to hear the physical justification for that. Also, the period from 1950-present is not a great one to use for judging correlation fits, as the trend in low-frequency changes is pretty linear over that time. Using a longer period gives you more structure to work with, and there are TSI reconstructions that go further back. Unfortunately, the fit to normal TSI doesn’t work well that far back, and presumably the fit to cumsum(TSI) wouldn’t either: http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics/Solar_vs_temp_500.jpg
Zeke,
SkS is cherry-picking, as usual. This chart covers a much longer time frame. Can you spot the LIA?
Ulick Stafford (@ustafford) says:
November 1, 2013 at 11:18 am
Call me a pedant but the title of this should be ‘C’ change. C is for century. A C change is so major a change it occurs once a century approximately. It has nothing to do with the sea.
>>>>>>>>
Actually a “sea” change does have something to do with the sea.
http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/312800.html
Zeke, What would the Berkeley chart look like with the ENSO cycles included too? The meme lately seems to be shifting from volcanoes to ENSO.
Also the fit seems horrible in the 17-1800’s.
Genghis said:
“Climate change” is simply energy flux distribution changes in the system, with the total energy in the system remaining constant.”
Correct unless something changes global albedo which alters the proportion of ToA insolation able to reach the surface and enter the oceans.
“Solar insolation changes are too small to drive “climate change”.
Correct as regards TSI in isolation but Incorrect as regards wavelength and particle changes because such solar changes alter global albedo out of all proportion to TSI changes due to solar effects on ozone amounts in stratosphere and mesosphere.
“The same is doubly true for CO2 changes.”
Correct. The effect of CO2 is miniscule compared to solar and oceanic effects.
“Climate change” is simply energy flux distribution changes in the system, with the total energy in the system remaining constant.”
Correct because even when solar variations change the amount of energy entering the oceans the air circulation changes to apply a negative system response.
“for example, simply lowering the Stevenson screens from 6′ to 3′ would raise the average temperature, that is the same affect as increasing CO2 levels. Changes in lapse rates are one of the causes of ‘climate change’.”
Correct. Now just expand that principle to expansion and contraction of the entire atmosphere
when GHG quantities change.
Fuller description here:
http://www.newclimatemodel.com/the-gas-constant-as-the-global-thermostat/
People are getting there, step by step.
dbstealey,
The sun could certainly have had a role in earlier periods of climate change. The fact that there is no trend in TSI (its slightly going down if anything) since 1960 during a period where we saw pretty rapid warming strongly suggests that it is not a major factor in modern warming. You can always do something silly like the author of this post did and use the cumulative sum of TSI to force it to go up, but if there were any physical basis for that (e.g. if the climate impact of solar irradiance over time were cumulative) the Earth would have burned to a crisp long ago.
A ‘sea change’…..er, maybe not just yet.
President Obama issued an executive order Friday directing a government-wide effort to boost preparation in states and local communities for the impact of global warming.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/nov/1/obama-orders-government-prep-global-warming/
I’m so disgusted with this socialist psuedoscience sewage spewage, I cannot find acceptable words to continue that would not be justifiably .
MtK
Mosher(A) — “The prior range ( 2-4.5) was the result of a ‘expert’ assesment. Not data. not theory. not anything normal at all.”
Mosher(B) — “Even if one found unknown effects for the sun that would not upset radiative theory. Those changes are all on the edges.”
lsvalgaard — “Well, he is wrong about that as I have shown you many times. There has been no Grand Maximum.”
Some considerations: The first is that expert assessment is not necessarily a theory, but it is a part of every new theory. Specifically, we have social expectations that it is the experts producing the new theories based on their assessments of things. We needn’t, of course. One can construct a single hypothesis or a whole tapestry on the justification of “Because, why not?” But we should expect that experts are going to be better at making new theories, or paradigms, that are not at odds with existing data. Non-experts not having the awareness of the same breadth of things by definition. (No reason that amateur experts are not every bit as well informed as people employed as experts.) But there are all manner of odd ideas about what counts as a theory.
If the pre-extant theory is math, and the new ‘expert opinion’ is not a necessary consequence of that math, or is not math itself, then it is a new hypothesis. Which is what we call an expert assessment that is not experimentally grounded as yet.
If the pre-extant theory is math, and the necessary math consequences are used to give rise to metaphysical statements (eg. “Time dilation is real.”) then it is a new metaphysic. It’s introduction is post-hoc and modifies or breaks extant metaphysics. That causes paradigm shift. For if the new metaphysic is held as correct, then all the old metaphysics need to be brought into agreement. eg. The hypothesis wasn’t falsified, the metaphysics — interpretive framework — for the math has been. Which is a bit loose, since modern metaphysics rely on the ‘real’ of things we cannot access directly.
If a hypothesis is not a necessary consequence of the existing math, it is unrooted. It simply cannot justify itself. Nor need it. There’s no requirement that we bolt metaphysical explanans onto everything instead of going commando with Hypothesis non Fingo. The hypothesis itself is an expert assessment. And any introduced metaphysics, also unrooted, are also expert assessment.
But a metaphysic is simple a narrative collection of existential statements and relations between things stated to have existence. Or denied it. And such metaphysics may be little more than one line statements that are indifferent from a mission statement. eg. “Survival of the fittest.” From these, one can derive boundary tests and conditions that permit falsification of the metaphysic as if it were numerical in nature. But it is not required that everything derived is necessary. They are largely quite loose and fuzzy things and require us to make leaps of intuition and question begging to make use of them. In which case, they inspire, but are not necessarily required, of any new hypothesis or theory.
And then there’s the ‘gaps.’ Instrumental gaps or changes that frustrate things. cf Leif’s statements about the Grand Maximum. The sunspot counts were used as inputs to correlative models. The instrumentality (equipment and process) of counting sunspots changed. But the past models were not first-principle theories, they were consequences and correlates of the specific instrumentality. Change that, and you need new models. Or, as Leif has suggested in a powerpoint on the subject, emplace a corrective factor on old data to serve as a ‘sanity test.’ The hazard being that you now have to correct both your corrections and your model. This can cause a paradigm shift as there is no possibility to provably correct measurements not made. cf. Sun-spots may now be reclassified not based on size but the better ability to detect a halo or group.
Lastly are the ‘math gaps.’ Quantum theory can theorize and model towards bulk matter. But as it gets closer, stateful, discrete, and chaotic affairs begin to dominate. But neither calculus nor statistics ‘do’ stateful and discrete things. None of what is being dealt with is a large enough ensemble to produce ‘smoothness’ necessary for the math to do its job. At the upper boundary of bulk matter, there are enough molecules and links that we can return to calculus/statistical treatments of them. And we can theorize and model down from normal chemistry towards Quantum details. But again, as soon as the features become stateful, discrete, and chaotic, it all begins to break down again.
Such gaps are both metaphysical and mathematical. We assume that the metaphysics of Quantum notions will continue up and through the things we cannot get after and onto bulk matter. But there is a necessary division, or independence between the two. Likewise, we assume that the math we have at the quantum level can bridge that gap as well. But it too is independent of things. From this, a paradigm shift can occur on either side of such a boundary without touching anything on the other side.
So for Mosher(A): No, expert assessments are hypothesis. As are amateur assessments. And it need not be even testable in principle to be considered a scientific one. Scientists being prone to festoon things with all manner of math and metaphysic that we cannot possibly get after. But that Scientists like, anyways.
For Mosher(B), this is absolutely correct. But it’s meaningless as there is a gap between radiative theory and climate theory. Or even any theory regarding gas/fluid dynamics. Such that it is incorrect to state that it is ‘at the edge’ as such consideration are on the ‘other side of a metaphysical and mathematical chasm.’ Just as with quantum theory and bulk matter chemistry.
The problem here, in Climate Science, is that they’re playing on both sides of the gap. They want classic thermo, and they want quantum effects (require it, really), and they want fluid dynamics (require it, really) but don’t want to trouble with the fluid dynamics. Not surprising, as fluid dynamics are ridiculously loose and fuzzy, and require stateful modelling to say anything fine-grained.
But just the same, we do expect that bounds will tighten on uncertainty if the science is a ‘normal’ phase. That is, better math leads to better math. Which is the entire idea beyond ‘Science converging on realtiy.’ as separate from ‘Science is self-correcting.’ But the uncertainties are not instrumental or experimental in nature. They are not the result of bean-counting reality. They are statements of theory about the a priori theoretical variance and error given the instrumental concerns, or theoretical ones. And this is far different in that the theory itself isn’t converging on a theory. The theory is diverging from itself in terms of just raw metaphysics or prediction. This is not an issue of competing theories as there are none credited in professional Science. (Social thing.) And it is not an issue of the instruments themselves. Not that there aren’t problems of the sort Leif highlighted about the Grand Maximum; there are, and they are far worse.
The strict issue with the widening gaps is that the theorists are confessing that their purely theoretical side is converging on an inability to predict anything. And that is not a healthy paradigm. And it is a common, maddeningly common, occurence amongst cults and pop-statistics. Where the system is understood first by its most minimal features, rather than it’s major ones. Which is rather like a theory of humans that starts, foremost, with the structural features of their body hair.
Firgures, wrote all that and apparently Science has just sorted out how Science works…. From some physicists. Good summary at the link:
http://scienceblog.com/67583/physicists-unify-the-structure-of-scientific-theories/
Stephen Wilde says:
“Correct. Now just expand that principle to expansion and contraction of the entire atmosphere when GHG quantities change. (and) Correct unless something changes global albedo which alters the proportion of ToA insolation able to reach the surface and enter the oceans.”
Greenhouse gases (aside from H20, clouds) do not alter the proportion of ToA insolation reaching the surface.
The ocean (via energy and water vapor) creates the environmental lapse rate of 6.5˚C/km. If more energy enters the system, the ocean responds by increasing the water vapor, the lapse rate drops down to 4˚C/km, the atmosphere expands (low pressure) and the surface temperature falls (Willis’s thermostat). H20 is a negative feedback.
Conversely if there is less heating of the ocean surface, there is less water vapor created, the lapse rate increases up to 9.8˚C/km, the atmosphere shrinks (high pressure) and the surface temperature increases.
This is meteorology 101, CO2 and solar insolation changes, don’t play much of a role. Changes in the energy flux in the ocean dominate the ‘climate’.
Another sea change is if they accept the concept of unit roots and Beenstock paper. Then global warming stops as long as CO2 is kept constant. This is easier to achieve, than the 80% cuts which will never happen.
A lot of people are having trouble understanding a theoretical justification (aka physical basis) for using “cumulative” TSI in these types of analyses, and seem to think it’s kind of a handwaving fudge factor. But it does come into play any time you have a “capacitance”.
The voltage across an electrical capacitor is proportional to the “cumulative” current into it — technically speaking, to the time integral of the current in. If you have an oscillatory (sinusoidal) current input to the capacitor, the voltage across the capacitor will have a phase lag of 1/4 cycle (90 degrees) relative to the current at all frequencies. That is, it will be in phase with the time integral of the input current.
Similarly, the temperature (relative to a baseline) of a thermal capacitance is proportional to the cumulative thermal power in. In a “pure” thermal capacitance (no change in losses as a function of temperature), if you have an oscillatory power input, the temperature of the capacitive body will have a phase lag of 1/4 cycle relative to the power input at all frequencies, and therefore be in phase with the time integral of the power input.
In the real world, we do not have “pure” capacitances, either electrical or thermal. There are “losses” due to electrical or thermal resistances. In these cases, the system output (voltage or temperature in these examples) will still lag the input (current or thermal power), but the amount of lag relative to the oscillatory input will vary (between 0 and 1/4 cycle) depending on the relative values of the resistance and capacitance, and the frequency of the input.
In the earth’s climate, of course, there is a lot going on besides simple resistances and capacitances driven by sinusoidally varying inputs, but to my mind there is nothing absurd about the concept of a temperature response lagging an oscillatory power input by close to 1/4 of a cycle.
Until you come with a falsifiability ticket, you don’t even get admitted to the room with honest Popperians!
Curt;
Thermodynamically speaking, in a circuit ‘losses’ are heat (entropy) to the surroundings. What are the surroundings of the climate system? And isn’t heat the flux being measured?
Ghengis.
Clouds are what I had in mind to force albedo changes.
Solar energy reaching the surface and penetrating the oceans varies with cloudiness and cloudiness changes are forced by solar variability.
richardscourtney says:
November 1, 2013 at 1:42 am
Excellent comment, as usual. Once upon a time, Kuhn was new, challenging, and entertaining. Today he is only entertaining.
Global cooling?
There is increasing interest in solar driven climate. With the lowest solar cycle in more than a century, there is increasing talk on global cooling.
Lawrence Solomon: A Global Cooling Consensus?
Date: 01/11/13 Financial Post
Economist Paul Samuelson once quipped: “Economists have correctly predicted nine of the last five recessions.”
I think a similar thing can be said about paradigm shifts except with a much bigger discrepancy, especially when the people doing the prediction are those who happen to believe the current paradigm is wrong. I would say something to the effect of “Proponents of ideas that go against the dominant paradigm have correctly predicted 5000 out of the last 5 paradigm shifts.”
Joel Shore says:
“Proponents of ideas that go against the dominant paradigm…”
I was just banned from an alarmist blog for posting a half-dozen links that disprove the catastrophic AGW paradigm. I won’t mention the blog, because I don’t want to give them oxygen.
They are proponents of the dominant [but declining] paradigm that insists that “carbon” is a problem. Despite my being extra polite, I was called quite a few really despicable names, the least of them being “denialist” and “fake skeptic”.
None of those insulting my comments argued based on any scientific evidence whatever. Name-calling was all they did. They all ganged up, competing with each other for the most vile pejoratives. Despite my appeals to their moderator to keep the discussion confined to science, nothing was done. I was eventually banned without any explanation.
When a blog cannot bear to have someone post links to peer reviewed papers that say what they do not want their readers to see, they are getting desperate. I would hope that Joel Shore and others understand that when a blog refuses to allow another point of view, they are pushing an agenda. They are not a science blog as claimed, they are merely a propaganda blog.
This site allows and promotes all points of view. That is one reason for the high traffic that WUWT generates. If alarmist blogs believed in freedom of speech, they would soon go out of business, because they do not have the necessary facts to support their catastrophic AGW position. Censorship, therefore, is their only choice. The problem is that they end up being an echo chamber of head-nodding lemmings, agreeing with each other, and taking turns insulting anyone with a different view.
Now I can add another blog to SkS, RC, Closed Mind, hotwhopper, and a few others that I don’t recall at the moment. That is OK, because a comment at WUWT reaches many more readers that all those others combined.
The Alarmists still have no shortage of alarming studies. This one comes from the Washington Post. Basically, the study says that the Pacific Ocean is storing more heat than it has for the last 10,000 years:
http://tinyurl.com/m9ewk2y
It references heavily from Trenbeth (no surprise) and Mann (of course). Essentially, the study took a nod from Trenbeth’s assertion in 2009 that the globe is cooling because all of the “heat” remains trapped in the Pacific Oceans. This stored heat only showed up in the last 2 years. The Pacific Ocean is literally boiling over. Any more, when I read this stuff, I feel like Samuel L. Jackson’s character in Snakes on the Plane. Substitute Alarmists for snakes:
I apologize for the profanity in the clip
Temperature changes are not what really needs the alternative explanation. Tell the truth about what the temperatures have been, and suddenly there is little to explain.
What really needs a paradigm shift is Dr. Keeling’s CO2 graph. He carefully ruled out explanations like instrumental drift over time. Surely some of the rise is due to burning of carbonaceous fuels. But I think most of it is due to chemical agriculture of the 20th/21st century scalding the earthworms and reducing the organic matter in the soils. We have UNsequestered carbon that used to be in the ground. This has reduced the soil’s ability to hold moisture, which has resulted in increased needs for irrigation, the loss of underground aquifers and temperature extremes both hot and cold. Water has a temperature modifying effect.
The primary greenhouse gas in our atmosphere is H2O and it provides ample negative feedbacks to the addition of any additional greenhouse gases so as to mitigate their effect on climate. This is one reason why the climate has been stable enough for life to evolve. It is the sun that is the primary energy driver but it is the a nonlinear thermal capacitor, the oceans, that cause much of the variability. It appears to be basic ocean current changes caused by North and South America joining up that has caused the latest ice age cycling. We also do not know how variable the sun can really be because we have not observed it for very long. Short term variable stars are quite common in the cosmos and we have not been viewing long enough to be tracking long term variability. Our sun could be a very long term variable star and we would never know it.
Lady Life Grows says:
November 1, 2013 at 5:31 pm
Study of net effect on carbon sequestration of earthworms:
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/131015/ncomms3576/full/ncomms3576.html
Agricultural practices probably have a net positive effect on earthworm populations:
http://soils.usda.gov/sqi/management/files/sq_atn_11.pdf
Irrigation in formerly sandy or desert soil should increase their populations.
Green Sand says:
November 1, 2013 at 9:24 am
“There has been no Grand Maximum”.
Leif has there ever been a Grand Minimum?
Good question. I would tend to say NO. What stand out in the record are the Grand Minima. It is as if the Sun has an upper limit to how much solar activity it can produce. I think there is both an upper limit and a lower limit, but that is just my speculation.
Stephen Wilde says:
November 1, 2013 at 9:30 am
His preference would be to ‘prove’ absolute flatness !!!
What a silly [if not outright stupid] thing to say. It doesn’t do you justice. You are [I think…] better than that. See e.g. slide 10 of http://www.leif.org/research/Heliospheric%20Magnetic%20Field%201835-2010.pdf if you want to see my preference [namely what the data show]
@dbstealey, Nov 1, 4:20pm
I have no idea which blog you are referring to, but I would like the viewers here to see (if they already don’t know), the comments which are allowed on the Watching the Deniers site.
First and foremost, I apologise for the language displayed here and as a fellow Ozzy I am disgusted in such behaviour (language). Also to MODS, if you wish to delete link, I don’t blame you!
http://i255.photobucket.com/albums/hh154/crocko05/WtDcomment10_zps91e9b031.jpg
It should also be pointed out that WtD has a new site policy in place:
“NEW GUIDELINE: false claims such as “climate change is not real”, “climate change is a hoax” or “there has been no warming for 15 years” cannot be made.”
The above comment and more can be viewed @ WtD – Open Thread, dated Oct 30th. I will not provide a link.
[Reply: Link OK. We do not censor here. We only snip comments that violate site Policy. — mod.]
Of course the increase in energy of a body is the sum of all energy in minus the sum of all energy out. For sum read integral. This is so basic it is not up for discussion.
“What new theory could possibly replace the dominant paradigm?”
I’m going to stick with the old theory. It’s the weather Gods who are mucking us around. A few decent sacrifices should sort it all out.
I wonder if you are assuming that Kuhn’s theory of science is correct? My HO on the matter: if it is a theory of human nature (i.e. humans can’t psychologically make these adjustments without a major disaster) then it may have some truth in it. But if it is a theory of scientific knowledge, it is pure baloney. It assumes that scientific progress can never be made because different theories are incommensurable. It is worse than postmodernism. So if you are saying that we are nearing a psychological turning point, maybe. If you are saying this is an indicator of our stage of real scientific progress, I cannot agree.
Curt says:
November 1, 2013 at 1:13 pm
if you have an oscillatory power input, the temperature of the capacitive body will have a phase lag of 1/4 cycle
==============
thus, in summer, even though solar energy is decreasing as the days get shorter (first day of summer is longest day) temperatures continue to climb. something often “overlooked” when trying to correlate solar energy with temperature. It is such a simple concept one wonders if it is overlooked on purpose by scientists that should know better, in an attempt to mislead.
ferd berple says:
November 2, 2013 at 3:24 pm
It is such a simple concept one wonders if it is overlooked on purpose by scientists that should know better, in an attempt to mislead.>
Except that it is not generally true, see e.g. slide 7 of http://www-das.uwyo.edu/~zwang/atsc2000/Ch3.pdf
The lag is not 1/4 year = 3 months, but only about 1 month.
lsvalgaard: “Except that it is not generally true”. The region of accumulation (amplification) seems to begin at time scales around 2-3 years and extend almost linearly up to 100,000 years. This is shown by plotting the spectral energy of multiple temperature time series. Either side of those time-scales the response of the climate system seems flat. The Bode plot is central to describing the dynamics (amplification and phase) of the system and one can’t really discuss the theory without it. The expected phase shift of temperature wrt. TSI at the various time scales is shown on the second panel of the Bode representation, and so the theory predicts the phase at all scales including the annual scale. I think it reaches a maximum phase shift and then curves up again at the shorter time scales (to the right end of the x axis) a bit like this (hard to find a good example): http://powerelectronics.com/site-files/powerelectronics.com/files/archive/powerelectronics.com/power_systems/circuit_analysis/extracting-bode-plots-fig5.jpg.
So yes the phase shift is not exactly pi/2 at every time-scale but is predicted exactly by the theory never-the-less. Its a systems based, electrical engineering description.
The idea that increasing co2 causes the earths atmosphere to warm is we have been told as certain as the law of gravity in this case we should be able to observe c02 apples falling.A prediction drawn from the idea that c02 warms the atmosphere is that the amount of water vapour contained in the atmosphere will gradually increase as c02 accumulates in the atmosphere, the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere also goes up and down seasonally in the northern and southern hemisphere particularly but because of increasing c02 we should still see a rise in water vapour on average every year.The amount of water vapour that that the atmosphere can hold is determined by its average temperature but the sea surface temperatures determine to some extent how much water vapour is evaporated into the atmosphere if the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere goes above a certain level then cloudiness builds up which will reflect more sunlight back into space, if global sea surface temperature go up or the global troposphere temperature falls we will see an increase in cloudiness. I think that while increasing co2 could in theory produce a constantly warming atmosphere it is not as certain as the law of gravity and the warming we have seen recently in the winter anomalies in the northern hemisphere could be caused by increased cloudiness rather than c02 warming as the summer anomalies have not risen in the same way.
laterite says:
November 2, 2013 at 4:40 pm
So yes the phase shift is not exactly pi/2 at every time-scale but is predicted exactly by the theory never-the-less. Its a systems based, electrical engineering description.
That does look this way to me. Color me unimpressed. Show a plot of actual measured temperature variation and show that that is predicted ‘exactly’ by a theory.
That does NOT look this way to me. Color me unimpressed.
OK. That gives me some ideas for a follow-up post where I list all the predictions of the theory. It should also show the phase at the ends of the time-scales and not just in the middle where the accumulation is strongest. Good suggestion for a test.