Readers may recall when Dr. Gavin Schmidt appeared on a television program with Dr. Roy Spencer, but by Gavin’s cowardly choice, not at the same time.
After listing the known causes for climate change aka global warming, Gavin Schmidt said:
“We’ve looked at the sun; it’s not the sun. We’ve looked at volcanoes; it’s not volcanoes. We’ve looked at the orbit; it’s not the orbit.”
Interestingly, Gavin lists solar forcing as primary cause of colder temperatures during the Maunder Minimum and “little ice age” in this 2001 paper co-authored with Mike Mann:
Science 7 December 2001: Vol. 294 no. 5549 pp. 2149-2152 DOI: 10.1126/science.1064363
Solar Forcing of Regional Climate Change During the Maunder Minimum
Drew T. Shindell1, Gavin A. Schmidt1, Michael E. Mann2, David Rind1, Anne Waple3
+ Author Affiliations
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NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Center for Climate Systems Research, Columbia University, New York, NY 10025, USA.
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Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22902, USA
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Department of Geosciences, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003, USA
Abstract
We examine the climate response to solar irradiance changes between the late 17th-century Maunder Minimum and the late 18th century. Global average temperature changes are small (about 0.3° to 0.4°C) in both a climate model and empirical reconstructions. However, regional temperature changes are quite large. In the model, these occur primarily through a forced shift toward the low index state of the Arctic Oscillation/North Atlantic Oscillation as solar irradiance decreases. This leads to colder temperatures over the Northern Hemisphere continents, especially in winter (1° to 2°C), in agreement with historical records and proxy data for surface temperatures.
The full paper is here at PSU: http://www.meteo.psu.edu/holocene/public_html/shared/articles/Shindelletal01.pdf
The conclusion reads (bold mine):
The GISS model results and empirical reconstructions both suggest that solar-forced regional climate changes during the Maunder Minimum appeared predominantly as a shift toward the low AO/NAO index. Although global average temperature changes were small, modeled regional cooling over the continents during winter was up to five times greater. Changes in ocean circulation were not considered in this model. However, given the sensitivity of the North Atlantic to AO/NAO forcing (37), oceanic changes may well have been triggered as a response to the atmospheric changes (38). Such oceanic
changes would themselves further modify the pattern of SST in the North Atlantic (39) and, to a lesser extent, the downstream air temperature anomalies in Europe.
These results provide evidence that relatively small solar forcing may play a significant role in century-scale NH winter climate change. This suggests that colder winter temperatures over the NH continents during portions of the 15th through the 17th centuries (sometimes called the Little Ice Age) and warmer temperatures during the 12th through 14th centuries (the putative Medieval Warm Period) may have been influenced by long-term solar variations.
==============================================================
In the paper: A History of Solar Activity over Millennia (PDF) it is demonstrated:
The modern level of solar activity (after the 1940s) is very high, corresponding to a grand maximum. Grand maxima are also rare and irregularly occurring events, though the exact rate of their occurrence is still a subject of debates. These observational features of the long-term behavior of solar activity have important implications, especially for the development of theoretical solar-dynamo models and for solar-terrestrial studies.
More here: Paper demonstrates solar activity was at a grand maximum in the late 20th century
Another paper recently published predicts the sun is headed for a Dalton-like solar minimum around 2050
The author notes solar activity has been at a higher level in the 20th century saying”
“the Sun has emerged from a Grand Maximum, which includes solar cycle 19, the most active solar cycle in the last 400 years. Earth was cooler in Grand Minima. The trend line indicates we have entered a period of low solar activity.”
Note the red horizontal line on the graph below shows 50-year mean solar activity was at the highest levels of the past 300 years during the latter half of the 20th century.
From the WUWT Solar reference page, Dr Leif Svalgaard has this plot comparing the current cycle 24 with recent solar cycles. The prediction is that solar max via sunspot count will peak in late 2013/early 2014 (now):
Predictions are that cycle 25 will be even lower: First Estimate of Solar Cycle 25 Amplitude – may be the smallest in over 300 years
Based on the slowing of the Sun’s “Great Conveyor Belt”, NASA solar scientist David Hathaway predicted that
“The slowdown we see now means that Solar Cycle 25, peaking around the year 2022, could be one of the weakest in centuries.” He is very likely to have got the year wrong in that Solar Cycle 25 is unlikely to start until 2025.
In this paper: http://www.probeinternational.org/Livingston-penn-2010.pdf,
Livingston and Penn provided the first hard estimate of Solar Cycle 25 amplitude based on a physical model. That estimate is 7, which would make it the smallest solar cycle for over 300 years.
Yet according to Gavin in his recent television interview,
“We’ve looked at the sun; it’s not the sun.”
Right, apparently the sun can only force climate one-way.
So in the upcoming two decades, as solar activity wanes, if it becomes globally cooler, will Gavin and Mike blame the sun, or will the disavow their previous work, pointing to studies like this one?
- Claim: Solar activity not a key cause of climate change, study shows (wattsupwiththat.com)
The old Shidell et al. paper from 2001 was based on the erroneous Hoyt-Schatten reconstruction of TSI, so cannot be used anymore. The notion that solar activity in the 20th century was at an all-time high is also incorrect. When the data used to infer relationships are in doubt, anything goes, and no valid conclusions can be reached. My own reasoning is here: http://www.leif.org/research/Long-term-Variation-Solar-Activity.pdf
Dr Gavin Schmidt is merely reflecting the elastic properties of climate “science”. Nothing is inconsistent with climate astrology. Just make things up as you go along!
Oh mann..hoisted on their own petard?
Gavin Schmidt & Mann inadvertently discovered one of many solar amplification mechanisms that have been described in the literature: solar forcing of the North Atlantic Oscillation [NAO], which in turn has large scale effects on global climate.
Many other peer-reviewed papers corroborate solar forcing of the NAO [as well as other ocean/atmospheric oscillations such as PDO/ENSO]
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/search?q=solar+nao
But, they ignore their own inconvenient work and conveniently only talk in public about the 0.1% change of total solar irradiance during solar cycles as being insufficient to force climate, which ignores the fundamentally different effects of wavelength shifts during solar cycles on climate, as well as solar amplification mechanisms.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2013/12/how-climate-models-dismiss-role-of-sun_21.html
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/search?q=solar+amplification+mechanisms
From the abstract:
“However, regional temperature changes are quite large. In the model, these occur primarily through a forced shift toward the low index state of the Arctic Oscillation/North Atlantic Oscillation as solar irradiance decreases.”
More like when the solar wind is slower.
The more studies that appear on all sides it becomes even more apparent no one understands climate, not to mention none of them can predict weather five days out, yet the public actually listens to these fortune tellers? There are so many forces at play at the same time that constantly shift and change just as constantly, studies can at best describe a single moment in time for a specific place that has no bearing a few miles away. The fact remains we do not yet understand climate factors at play.
I also found Ridley very credible in the video. He pointed out other positive aspects of fossil fuel use that simply do not fit into the one-dimensional, over-specialized, over-hyped paradigm of modern “climate science” T.M.
Lots of things can kill people, including not enough food. More people die from hunger today than could ever be killed from a scientifically credible increase in temperatures.
Schmidt lost any professional respect that may have been due with that utterly feeble, truly pathetic display of ego. If he had the ‘science’ to support his claims he would not have needed to play such an embarrassing game, which would certainly have been deeply insulting to a fellow professional like Dr Spencer.
Painful to watch, but nonetheless a great lesson in the consequences of misguided hubris.
PS. Respect to Dr Spencer for being prepared to over-indulge the spoilt rat.
Gaven Schmidt looked like a cockroach scurrying on and off the set with his head down And his transparent self serving lie of an excuse for not debating Roy: I want to get [MY] word out.
yeah sure Gavin… I agree. It is pretty hard to get your unreasonable opinion out when there is a voice of reason there to say that you are unreasonably
What a gutless faker. The Herald of a socialist… conceal your socialism as science and then lie about the facts and refuse to debate it.
You fooled nobody you dullard.
Hurricane Sandy’s destruction was due to Global Warming he said. What a bull%$^&er.
I think hurricanes are destructive in their own right and Sandy was a direct hit on a populated area.
So in the upcoming two decades, as solar activity wanes, if it becomes globally cooler, will Gavin and Mike blame the sun, or will the disavow their previous work,…
My view (not accepted by many, if any) is: In order for a solar cycle to produce global cooling, its magnetic polarity has to be opposite in phase to small but measurable decadal changes in the Earth’s magnetic field. Amplitude also maters, stronger the cycle is it’s effect is more pronounced the warming or cooling. Good example of this is SC19 which was strongest on the record, but it was followed by significant cooling.
Here is what calculations show:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/GSC1.htm
I do not do predictions, but do extrapolations of my equations.So what the extrapolation shows?
Using another of my equations (see second part of this post) indicates low amplitude of two next cycles, amplitude of the geo-change isn’t known but phase is, this translates into a more moderate cooling/warming than if the SSN numbers were large.
In 10 days time, it is exactly 10 years since publication of my solar formula approximation. So you may ask, how did ‘solar formula’ do ?
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/SSN.htm
Call it coincidence, numerology or whatever you wish, but may I remind you that at the time the top NASA scientists (Hathaway and Dikpati) were predicting SC24 as the highest ever.
Wait until the E=GREENS find out that Photovoltaic cells are made using ARSENIC – and like the last decade miracle the compact fluorescent bulb was found to contain MERCURY a dangerous hazardous waste material that goes in our water and fish.
Yes, they are going to save us by making energy cost five times more and then poison us so there will be less human population and the world will then be sustainable. Oh yes, did the HARD E=GREENS like Sierra Club, Greenpeace and others that fund a think tank put their CHIEF SCIENTIST on TV a while back and he said the E=GREEN movement wants to reduce the human population by 2/3 – Only 1/3 can be allowed to live and reproduction will be a government granted permit – like EPA now issues.
Leif…If there was no long term variability of solar activity as your work seems to show, then what natural causes can there be for the periodic and fairly regular shifts in climate – such as the MWP and LIA? Shindell also directed attention to the UV element of solar variability. The ap index also is a measure of the solar wind and this clearly does vary from trough to peak in the solar cycle – as does UV….so logic would say that if there is a prolonged ‘trough’ as in the Maunder Minimum and shorter Dalton Minimum, then these factors would likely be affected.
And a note to ‘Confused Photon’……please stop directing your ire at ‘astrology’…..it has nothing to say about climate, nor climate about astrology. Take some direction from Sir Isaac Newton, and go study it as deeply as he did….in the days before scientists focused solely on matter and became paranoid of any other dimension of reality.
I examined that 2001 paper a while ago:
http://www.newclimatemodel.com/how-gavin-schmidt-and-michael-mann-almost-got-it-right-in-2001-by-stephen-wilde-guest-post-at-climate-realists/
IPCC =International POLICEFORCE on Climate Change and do not forget it!
Seems to me there needs to be much more work done in climate science before AGW or lack of is understood with a high level of certainty.
The media and politicians have picked up on a story that they want to be true. It reminds me of all the times we hear about an apparent cure for cancer, diabetes , obesity, AIDS on the news that was found by some researcher, but the cure never seems to make it to reality.
At one time I believed in AGW but when the models missed their predicted warming, I knew the from high school science that the models had to be rejected because they did not agree with the real world data. A model is simply an hypothesis. We certainly cannot accept an hypothesis that doesn’t match the data.
vukcevic says:
December 28, 2013 at 1:29 pm
Call it coincidence, numerology or whatever you wish, but may I remind you that at the time the top NASA scientists (Hathaway and Dikpati) were predicting SC24 as the highest ever.
They were as wrong for cycle 24 as you are for cycles 20 and 10. So, both their and your ideas fail in predictive [or even descriptive] ability. This is the predictable fate of ‘predictions’ based on faulty science [them] and no science [you]. Hathaway at least has the honesty to admit he was wrong. You still have to get to that point.
Peter Taylor says:
December 28, 2013 at 1:37 pm
Leif…If there was no long term variability of solar activity as your work seems to show, then what natural causes can there be for the periodic and fairly regular shifts in climate – such as the MWP and LIA?
All complicated non-linear systems can have internal, natural variability, and the climate is no exception.
I debated a NASA Ph.D for two years over AGW and fossil fuels – he was a committed GRANT SCIENTIST – Next I introduced logic – how could you assume the sun emits the exact same amount of energy each minute and over the millions of years, where is any evidence to support that hypothesis. He had none but called names and went to peer reviewed consensus scientific papers all support AGW.
I then ask because I studied a long time ago for this new Scientific method to arrive at proofs – when did this become acceptable evidence of a proof. He again called my names and ran away. They are mostly like Gavin – no real data sets and all based on computer models and they will never release the raw data use to create the based data set – therefore in my old world no one can reproduce the test or the result.
This then provides all involved with a “F” and they should return their degrees as they are fake just like their science. To bad Politics has entered the world of absolute science using MONEY as the reward for failure.
If you want to really set them off just mention NUCLEAR power and the approval of it now by the retired President of the Sierra Club – he said he was sorry to have caused the financial ruin of the only source of energy that can replace Fossil Fuels and not emit CO2.
Gavin engaged in wriggle matching without serious attention to mechanism. As he currently also does. In both cases Gavin fails to consider other more probable mechanisms with the energy necessary to bring about, sustain and deepen weather pattern variations shifts. If he now agrees to consider other non-solar causes of historical shifts, he must consider other such causes for the modern one he is so focused on.
albertalad says:
December 28, 2013 at 1:17 pm
The more studies that appear on all sides it becomes even more apparent no one understands climate, not to mention none of them can predict weather five days out, yet the public actually listens to these fortune tellers? There are so many forces at play at the same time that constantly shift and change just as constantly, studies can at best describe a single moment in time for a specific place that has no bearing a few miles away. The fact remains we do not yet understand climate factors at play.
@ Garethman, you are correct to a large extent albertalad in that climate science is extremely complex with much yet to be defined on how it varies and what factors impact to change from cold to warm etc. But there is one thing we do know, from observation, not models and not hypothesis, and that is that the world is warming. Past trends and behaviour are not a 100% fail-safe guide to future unknowns, but they are a good indicator and the only one based on evidence which is objective. There may be a slowing of that rise, but the overall trend is still up (change temperature for unemployment figures debated by politicians and it becomes clearer) If the temperature has not gone down,and I think we all agree they have not, and no other factors have been confirmed which would start that process, it’s a pretty good guess that they will continue to rise. If they fall for a few years we need to re-evaluate much of these conclusions, but at present the trend remains pretty obvious.
Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.
Mark Twain
Global versus regional.
Next.
There is no modern maximum in TSI.
Next.
REPLY: Oh yea of narrow possibilities. Not one mention of TSI. There are other mechanisms – Anthony
“We’ve looked at the sun; it’s not the sun. We’ve looked at volcanoes; it’s not volcanoes. We’ve looked at the orbit; it’s not the orbit.”
——————————————————
We have met the climate – and it is us.
for the sardonically disabled: /sarc
I’ll accept Svalgaard’s caution about reading too much into solar-energy fluctuations, and especially about comparing modern observational records to proxy reconstructions of the past.
However (as objections always begin), I think the caution may be too selective. The Sun’s energy flux is variable on many timescales and across various parts of the EM spectrum, so simple measures of TSI or sunspot frequency are generally too coarse as metrics. The Sun’s particle wind and EM fields also interact with Earth’s electrical and magnetic fields, and these in turn interact with the electromagnetic fields created by atmospheric circulation of charged particles, lightning-induced EM currents, and the irregular flux of EM discharge from the bombardment of galactic cosmic rays on all of the above. None of this is factored into GCM climate simulations.
The IPCC paradigm that CO2 alone is the BIG KNOB that controls temperature (and thus, they presume, “climate”) is easily falsified by the last 15-17 years of history: CO2 rising conspicuously while global temps go nowhere. To quote Feynman, “If the facts don’t match the model, the model is wrong”.
As several recent posts have argued, the ocean-atmosphere system functions as a great heat engine that moves tropical heat upward and poleward, generally maintaining long-term stable climatic regimes. Changes to those regimes are driven by changes in the thermal gradients between tropics and poles, which seem to be most clearly associated with changes in solar output and/or the effects of solar variations on cloud cover.
Anyone who argues for “tipping points” in climate history is [sorry to say] completely ignorant of Earth history. Just in the last million years, Earth has cycled repeatedly from glacial to interglacial conditions [10C in the polar regions, 3-4C in tropical regions] without ever “running away”. Clearly, Earth has thermostats as demonstrated by the fact that glacial minimum temps and interglacial maximum temps all tend to be about the same.
If CO2 were so darned powerful, then why would glacial temps begin to rise when CO2 was minimal? If CO2 were so darned powerful, then why would interglacial temps begin to fall when CO2 was at it’s maximum level?
Common sense seems to be lacking in the climatology realm.
Peter Taylor says:
December 28, 2013 at 1:37 pm
The ap index also is a measure of the solar wind
The ap index and the solar wind have shown no trend the past 170 years:
http://www.leif.org/research/Ap-1844-now.png and
Figure 6 of http://www.leif.org/research/Error-Scale-Values-HLS.pdf [the solar wind magnetic field is shown by the pink curve in the middle of the plot].
But I think there may have been an upward trend of global temperatures the past two centuries
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/28/loehle-vindication/
Figure 15: 10-year averaged sunspot numbers looks to me to be a “solar hockey stick” 🙂
While Leif has said that TSI (may | does) not have a significant effect on climatic temperatures, the co-relation of prior cool periods with sunspots suggests there may be a relation through a mechanism not yet (well) understood. Hopefully through this coming period that mechanism will be discovered.
GeologyJim says:
December 28, 2013 at 1:55 pm
The Sun’s particle wind and EM fields also interact with Earth’s electrical and magnetic fields, and these in turn interact with the electromagnetic fields created by atmospheric circulation of charged particles, lightning-induced EM currents, and the irregular flux of EM discharge from the bombardment of galactic cosmic rays on all of the above
As per my previous comment there has been no long-term trend in those parameters either…
Maybe Mother Nature is simply a great gypsy who wanders wherever she chooses for no particular reason at all. And all the while, shaman-scientists study chicken bones and meditate over goat scat in their efforts to divine where The Great Gypsy may go next. Finally, our high priests reveal to us what we must sacrifice in order to placate The Great Gypsy (lumps of coal and barrels of oil are popular at the moment).
Hockey Schtick says:
December 28, 2013 at 1:12 pm
Gavin Schmidt & Mann inadvertently discovered one of many solar amplification mechanisms that have been described in the literature: solar forcing of the North Atlantic Oscillation [NAO], which in turn has large scale effects on global climate.
Many other peer-reviewed papers corroborate solar forcing of the NAO [as well as other ocean/atmospheric oscillations such as PDO/ENSO]
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/search?q=solar+nao
But, they ignore their own inconvenient work and conveniently only talk in public about the 0.1% change of total solar irradiance during solar cycles as being insufficient to force climate, which ignores the fundamentally different effects of wavelength shifts during solar cycles on climate, as well as solar amplification mechanisms.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2013/12/how-climate-models-dismiss-role-of-sun_21.html
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/search?q=solar+amplification+mechanisms
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I believe you are correct in stating that Solar minima affect weather due to variation in the Sun’s emitted wavelength output … however.
An increase or decrease in UV that affects the Strat (destroys O3 and therefore warms) is not a NET increase in solar energy absorbed by the climate system. At least not a sig one as it does not penetrate into the Troposphere.
To say that it influences weather – I mean that it rearranges the weather patterns but the heat processed by the it remains the same (bar the ~0.1% variation) in the Solar absorbed V IR emitted equation.
Our best demonstration of this is the correlation with Cold European winters and low solar (vis LIA). This via an induced –AO, due warming /disruption of the Strat vortex and down-welling of E’lies to the Surface.
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cycle
“Even though it only accounts for a minuscule fraction of total solar radiation, the impact of solar UV, EUV and X-ray radiation on the Earth’s upper atmosphere is profound. Solar UV flux is a major driver of stratospheric chemistry, and increases in ionizing radiation significantly affect ionosphere-influenced temperature and electrical conductivity.”
And
“The sunspot cycle variation of 0.1% has small but detectable effects on the Earth’s climate.[30] Work by Camp and Tung suggests that changes in solar irradiance correlates with a variation of ±0.1 K (±0.18°F) in measured average global temperature between the peak and minimum of the 11-year solar cycle”
From: http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch2s2-7-1-3.html
“Approximately 1% of the Sun’s radiant energy is in the UV portion of the spectrum at wavelengths below about 300 nm, which the Earth’s atmosphere absorbs. Although of considerably smaller absolute energy than the total irradiance, solar UV radiation is fractionally more variable by at least an order of magnitude. It contributes significantly to changes in total solar irradiance (15% of the total irradiance cycle; Lean et al., 1997) and creates and modifies the ozone layer, but is not considered as a direct RF because it does not reach the troposphere. Since the TAR, new studies have confirmed and advanced the plausibility of indirect effects involving the modification of the stratosphere by solar UV irradiance variations (and possibly by solar-induced variations in the overlying mesosphere and lower thermosphere), with subsequent dynamical and radiative coupling to the troposphere (Section 9.2). Whether solar wind fluctuations (Boberg and Lundstedt, 2002) or solar-induced heliospheric modulation of galactic cosmic rays (Marsh and Svensmark, 2000b) also contribute indirect forcings remains ambiguous.”
What they could do is change the way sunspots are counted and then find some rational to change the historical record of sunspot counts (which by the way I believe is the oldest continuous scientific measurement man has made) just as they have done to the temperature records. After all their beliefs have nothing to do with science and everything to do with money and faith.
RAH says:
December 28, 2013 at 2:11 pm
What they could do is change the way sunspots are counted and then find some rationale to change the historical record of sunspot counts
Except that is not what “they” do. BTW, I do that [on sound grounds] http://www.leif.org/research/CEAB-Cliver-et-al-2013.pdf
According to wiki, fluorescent bulbs were invented in 1856.
It is tempting to belittle the greens for discovering in 2012 that fluorescent bulbs contain mercury.
Leif Svalgaard says “there has been no long-term trend in those parameters either …”
Are you denying the peak in sunspot/EM activity during cycles 21-22-23-24, as shown in your diagram?
solar-polar-fields-1966-now.png [see wattsupwiththat.com solar info page]
I fail to understand your reluctance to acknowledge the influence of the Sun, but I await your explanation
lsvalgaard says:
December 28, 2013 at 1:47 pm
Peter Taylor says:
December 28, 2013 at 1:37 pm
Leif…If there was no long term variability of solar activity as your work seems to show, then what natural causes can there be for the periodic and fairly regular shifts in climate – such as the MWP and LIA?
All complicated non-linear systems can have internal, natural variability, and the climate is no exception.
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Well, that is a pretty weak answer. Changing global surface temperature a degree or two requires changing ocean temperatures to at least a few hundred meters depth. A lot of energy has to be sourced/sinked and variations of surface insolation are about the only way to do it. Natural variability won’t happen if the energy isn’t available.
geologyjim says:
December 28, 2013 at 2:26 pm
Are you denying the peak in sunspot/EM activity during cycles 21-22-23-24, as shown in your diagram?
Just pointing out that solar activity was just as high in the 1830-1870s and in the 1780-790s…
I like what Matt Ridley (second half of the video) said – “Fossil fuels is responsible for the end of slavery. Because energy is cheap, it is cheaper to build machines than hire lots of people. You either have cheap labour or cheap energy, and frankly it is better for people to have cheap energy”.
If you look at where slavery is most prevalent in the world, its in places like Africa, or undeveloped parts of central Asia, where fuel is expensive, infrastructure nonexistent, and the only way to escape endless drudgery is to force someone else to do the work.
The CO2-global warming connection is based on an unobserved (and extremely poorly measured) change in water vapor. Water vapor changes dramatically due to naturally occurring weather pattern variations. What that means is that any change or trend in water vapor due to increased anthropogenic CO2 additions to the atmosphere would be buried in the natural noisy signal. It would even be buried in natural-sourced trends in water vapor. When a separate trend is buried in another trend which is buried in noise, I hardly consider that premise worth a farthing. The solar variation connection is based on an unobserved set of theories (I will call them various solar amplification theories) of which no plausible mechanism has been found and no correlations have been found.
So the anthropogenic CO2 theory has just as much, if not more, validity as the solar theory. If I were a solar enthusiast, I would have to admit the on-paper equality (or the slight advantage of the water vapor theory) and be sobered by it. Yet, solar enthusiasts continue to blather on about their driver, completely unwilling to face or admit serious weaknesses in their proposals. It boggles the mind.
Meanwhile, one of the greatest IR filters combined with one of the greatest heat storing entities in the known Universe keeps chugging along, churning up and belching warmer or colder waters onto our shores and either heating us up or freezing our asses off with decades-long impunity. This mechanism is known. It has the energy necessary to cause such trends. There is no need for magical or otherwise amplification. The nose on the face of the globe could not be any bigger. Ignore it at your own embarrassment.
bones says:
December 28, 2013 at 2:28 pm
Natural variability won’t happen if the energy isn’t available.
Well, it didn’t come from the Sun, because solar activity has not changed enough.
lsvalgaard says:
December 28, 2013 at 1:55 pm
The ap index and the solar wind have shown no trend the past 170 years:
Correct, but is the Ap index as measured the true representation of the interplanetary magnetic field for the solar magnetic field alone, i.e. magnetic field carried by the solar wind among the planets of the Solar System, or those planets have something to do with it as well
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/Tromso.htm
Its spectral composition suggests that science is not settled on that one either.
It’s inevitable that complexity will gradually return to climate science. Propaganda can only work for so long.
“We’ve looked at the sun; it’s not the sun. We’ve looked at volcanoes; it’s not volcanoes. We’ve looked at the orbit; it’s not the orbit.”
Well something is causing a 60 year cycle I the data (and it is not CO2!)
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:220/mean:174/mean:144/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:720/plot/esrl-co2/scale:0.01/offset:-3.3
Gareth Phillips says: @ December 28, 2013 at 1:52 pm
albertalad says: @ December 28, 2013 at 1:17 pm
….But there is one thing we do know, from observation, not models and not hypothesis, and that is that the world is warming. Past trends and behaviour are not a 100% fail-safe guide to future unknowns, but they are a good indicator and the only one based on evidence which is objective. There may be a slowing of that rise, but the overall trend is still up….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
That depends. If you look at the total Holocene interglacial the actual trend is cooling from the Holocene optimum with some up and down squiggles. We are at present in an up squiggle thank goodness.
The best graph I have come across yet is HERE.
There are plenty of studies that back up that graph too. Such as:
A more recent paper looking at glaciers in Norway.
The authors of BOTH papers simply state that most glaciers likely didn’t exist 6,000 years ago, but the highest period of the glacial activity has been in the past 600 years. This is hardly surprising with ~9% less solar energy.
lsvalgaard says:
December 28, 2013 at 2:31 pm
bones says:
December 28, 2013 at 2:28 pm
Natural variability won’t happen if the energy isn’t available.
Well, it didn’t come from the Sun, because solar activity has not changed enough.
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But it could well have come from relatively small changes in cloud cover. Perhaps those are chaotic variations, but there is some evidence of correlation with solar activity.
bones says:
December 28, 2013 at 2:44 pm
But it could well have come from relatively small changes in cloud cover
Clouds are part of the climate system too, don’t you think?
there is some evidence of correlation with solar activity.
Like these? :
http://www.leif.org/EOS/swsc120049-GCR-Clouds.pdf
http://www.leif.org/EOS/Cloud%20Cover%20and%20Cosmic%20Rays.pdf
Gavin could not, and would not be caught in the same room as the reasoned, respected, and intelligent scientist, Dr Roy Spencer,
Instead, Gavin, scurried away like the cockroach that he is.
Greg Cavanagh says:
December 28, 2013 at 2:19 pm
According to wiki, fluorescent bulbs were invented in 1856.
It is tempting to belittle the greens for discovering in 2012 that fluorescent bulbs contain mercury.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
One must remember that it was the eco freaks who forced us to place them in our homes using a lie. they may not have invented them but they dam sure forced us into poisoning ourselves by government fiat!
lsvalgaard says:
December 28, 2013 at 2:51 pm
bones says:
December 28, 2013 at 2:44 pm
But it could well have come from relatively small changes in cloud cover
Clouds are part of the climate system too, don’t you think?
there is some evidence of correlation with solar activity.
Like these? :
http://www.leif.org/EOS/swsc120049-GCR-Clouds.pdf
http://www.leif.org/EOS/Cloud%20Cover%20and%20Cosmic%20Rays.pdf
————————————————————
I was thinking of something that more directly related surface insolation variations to the solar cycle. In a previous post, I provided a reference to direct solar insolation measurements from Antarctica. I will try to find it and post it again. The effect was large; several percent change.
It is fascinating that the climatocracy is able at once to sit in the seat of high social prestige while at the same time being unable to debate their point and win. Gavin learned after losing to Michael Crichton to never actually debate the issues he makes his living promoting.
Yet the billion$ roll in, and “progressive” leaders line up to find ways to sneak their ideas into law and avoid the voters. It used to be that if you could not win the debate you would lose the argument. But in the age of CO2,anything is possible.
ELKE Presentation Pier Corbyn:
bones says:
December 28, 2013 at 3:02 pm
I provided a reference to direct solar insolation measurements from Antarctica
Antarctica has strongest solar magnetic correlation anywhere found on the Earth
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/TMC.htm
@ R. de Haan
Piers Corbyn, Gavin Schmidt and I are products of the same university (GS university college, P.C and I imperial)
If Leif was a tv detective, he would be the kind of tv detective that solves cases on the basis of a ‘hunch’. He just kinda ‘knows’ deep down he’s on the right trail – even if the pesky clues don’t seem to line up!
charles nelson says:
December 28, 2013 at 3:32 pm
If Leif was a tv detective, he would be the kind of tv detective that solves cases on the basis of a ‘hunch’. He just kinda ‘knows’ deep down he’s on the right trail – even if the pesky clues don’t seem to line up!
Nonsense.
Gavin was for solar before he was against it? But from my lurking at Real Climate, reading the CRU emails and from his public behaviour, has Gavin ever been for ethical behaviour and honesty?
The Sheniderism of Science?
I truly think that it is honesty that is missing in the climatology realm more than there being a lack of common sense. I am not being cynical or snide with this comment; I can not explain the alarmist’s position that anthropogenic CO2 drives the climate and will burn us to a crisp other than to believe they are dishonest. Stupidity is just not enough. (although “Dr.” Mann’s stupidity is legendary I’ll admit)
How many times have the main climate data sets been “adjusted”? What percentage of the time does the “adjustment” make cAGW look better rather than the other way around? (100% I’d say)
This whole enterprise is fraud and has been since Hansen testified in congress during the summer with the A/C turned off.
Yet according to Gavin in his recent television interview,
“We’ve looked at the sun; it’s not the sun.”
Doesn’t he mean, “We’ve ignored the sun, its not the sun”
Not looked at clouds also or is that ignored clouds too? Another inconvenient truth.
“We’ve looked at volcanoes; it’s not volcanoes.”
Well partly true because the reduction of major volcanoes to zero after 1992 has contributed to less cooling since. It’s not volcanoes having any influence on the non-warming period recently.
Leif You say
“The old Shindell et al. paper from 2001 was based on the erroneous Hoyt-Schatten reconstruction of TSI, so cannot be used anymore. The notion that solar activity in the 20th century was at an all-time high is also incorrect. When the data used to infer relationships are in doubt, anything goes, and no valid conclusions can be reached.”
This statement not self consistent. If the data are in doubt as you say it is then this implies that you don’t know whether Hoyt is right or not or whether or not solar activity is at an all time high or not.
The idea that you don’t know what solar activity has been over the last 400 years is also the conclusion of the in press paper you linked – you say
“There is no consensus or agreement about the level and variation of several measures of solar
activity over the past 400 years, severely hampering the interpretation of the previous ten millennia
of cosmic ray proxy record”.
and the abstract says .
“Is there a varying background which dominates all other variations and forms the first-order
forcing and influence on our environment? We do not know.”
How can you say you don’t know what the solar variability is and then say other interpretations are wrong. – Doubtful – OK -wrong -I don’t think so.
It is also of interest to note that Mann was also a co-author of the Shindell paper.
I have used that paper as a quasi empirical guide to some of the various cooling forecasts at http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com.
These forecasts suggest that the neutron count (and 10Be record }is a useful proxy for the solar activity effect on climate but are agnostic as to the mechanism involved I say:
” NOTE !! the connection between solar “activity” and climate is poorly understood and highly controversial. Solar ” activity” encompasses changes in solar magnetic field strength, IMF, CRF, TSI ,EUV, solar wind density and velocity, CMEs, proton events etc. The idea of using the neutron count as a useful proxy for changing solar activity and temperature forecasting is agnostic as to the physical mechanisms involved.”
Loved the video – after all, how can the science be debated when the science is settled, right? LOL!
All that means is that those who spout man-made global warming, know that they will lose in a debate and that is why not one of them will debate the issue. How sad, but oh, how so revealing, eh?
Anthony,
Thank you for posting the video, I hadn’t realized that the situation was that ridiculous.
This needs to be talked about but he wont talk about it ( that says alot) science is an open forum that should hear other ideas but they wont entertain an open forum they fear being proved wrong thats the issue here.
Wasn’t Gavin for a specified period of no global surface warming after which he would reconsider CAGW? I can’t find it but I vaguely recall it was a question in one of Real Climate’s comments sections.
Dr Norman Page says:
December 28, 2013 at 3:48 pm
“The old Shindell et al. paper from 2001 was based on the erroneous Hoyt-Schatten reconstruction of TSI, so cannot be used anymore. …”
This statement not self consistent. If the data are in doubt as you say it is then this implies that you don’t know whether Hoyt is right or not or whether or not solar activity is at an all time high or not.
I would never write anything that is inconsistent. I may be wrong, but never inconsistent.
Anyway, Hoyt-Schatten is not in doubt, it is simply wrong. There is some debate about whether there is a slowly changing ‘background’, but indications are that there is not, so the ‘doubt’ is a minor one. We are working to dispel whatever doubt there might be so that the climate community can have a vetted dataset to work with. I have given my reasons for why there shou;dn’t be doubt, but, human nature being what it is, as long as there is the slightest chance for doubt, people will jump on that if it fits their agenda.
I see the paper above by Drew T. Shindell1, Gavin A. Schmidt1, Michael E. Mann. This makes me reflect on something earlier by the very same people. Here is my comment and references:
Think about this little observation by Michael Mann on the Medieval Warm Period that he says he can’t explain? Can someone else explain the following observation by Michael Mann about FIGS AND OLIVES IN GERMANY????
A moderation question.
In the years that I have commented here (sporadically I suppose) I have have never had a comment “snipped” for any reason and most of them under the new policy just get posted right away. But every once in a while I get one held for moderation.
I think I dimly remember that the new policy has it that if you mention certain things or certain people then the comment automatically gets held. Can someone point me to the post where this was outlined please? I am almost positive that our fine host’s name is one of the things that will get a comment held: and I think a certain Dr. at Penn State. (or is that State Penn? … I always get that mixed up) Anyway, I have now forgotten what I read about the new moderation system and need a refresher on it.
TIA.
Then it came to an end. German babies, toddlers, teenagers and adults all know what bloody freezing weather and snow is since 2009. Less sunlight coming through last winter too. How gloomy can it get? That is climate change. It is changing and it is real!
The science isn’t settled. May never be.
Those who say it is…. Dare I say, are antiscience, or haven’t bothered to look.
Leif:
I don’t think that this sentence makes any sense:
[i]By virtue of a lack of strong evidence detected from the numerous satellite- and ground-based studies, it is clear that if a solar cloud link exists the effects are likely to be low amplitude and could not have contributed appreciably to recent anthropogenic climate changes. [/i]
Those things might contribute to warming (or not) — but to the anthropogenic portion?
Gavin says-
“We’ve looked at the sun; it’s not the sun. We’ve looked at volcanoes; it’s not volcanoes. We’ve looked at the orbit; it’s not the orbit.”
Interesting claims, in light of what the climate experts have been saying of late-
Hansen blames aerosols from nonexistent volcanic eruptions to explain the pause in temperature rise over the recent 15 years.
“Another prominent source of natural variability in the Earth’s energy imbalance is changes in the sun itself, seen most clearly as the sunspot cycle.”
Kevin Trenberth, May 22, 2013
‘Nonetheless, he agrees that earlier warming may have been deceiving.
“I think it’s true that some rather sloppy discussion of the rapid warming from the 20th century has given people unrealistic expectations about the future course of warming.”
Ray Pierrehumbert, May, 2013
…“It’s certainly the case that we got some of the forcings wrong,” [Ben Santer] says of the factors that specify the influence of any particular component of the atmosphere. “It’s likely we underestimated the true volcanic aerosol forcing, and may have underestimated the cooling effect of stratospheric ozone depletion.”
May 2013
The dead certain settled science is unsettling.
Ulric Lyons says:
December 28, 2013 at 1:13 pm
More like when the solar wind is slower.
—————————————————
That rings a bell within me. Just recently in the last week, I was musing about the winter temp changes this fall/winter. The cold moved in quickly from early October and then held a steady very cold night time for close to 2 months. Then there was a slight warming that started almost 3 weeks ago. The Sun was in a slump prior to and all through the cooling, and since this last upturn in ssn count and high flux my local night time temp rose 20F to a range between 26F to 30F. It just started dropping in the last two nights back into the teens. What a coincidence that this so exactly matches the ebb and flow of the solar output.
The supplied video doesn’t work for me.
So
Putting all comments by Mann and Schmidt together, they previously said the historical indicators support a LIA in the Northern Hemisphere, and a MWP also in the Northern Hemisphere, but these are NOT global, only local. Later (the hockey stick and others) they claim tree rings and some other data (almost all from NH) show no LIA or MWP, only a recent sudden rise from human activity. It appears the same Northern Hemisphere data is used both ways. Also, with little data in the Southern Hemisphere before about 150 years ago, how do they know what the global average was? It surely is not from ice core data.
Leif:
I read this with some interest as well…
There is no consensus or agreement about the level and variation of several measures of solar
activity over the past 400 years, severely hampering the interpretation of the previous ten illennia of cosmic ray proxy record.
I am curious as to whether you use the information embedded in rock. We routinely use the information in mineral exploration — and in core orientation etc.
Are you using that type of information as well as a proxy for the magnetic field etc.?
Trivia: 3.21× 10^-23
The decimal fraction of the sun’s mass in the form of energy sufficient to heat all oceans by 1 C (I think I calculated that right 😉 a mere wisp of a breath)
For all of you who think we are heading for global cooling due to the sun:
2013 Australia’s hottest year on record
2013 is the year Australia marked its hottest day, month, season, 12-month period and, by December 31, hottest calendar year.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/2013-australias-hottest-year-on-record-20131220-2zqpf.html#ixzz2oozXXcue
Now, what’s missing here? Deep sea ocean heat release? If it can get down without detections then it can get out without detection? No? Did the oceans eat the heat during the Medieval Warm Period? Roman Warm? Holocene Climate Optimum? Minoan? Dana plugged himself into his own hole.
WillR says:
December 28, 2013 at 4:53 pm
Are you using that type of information as well as a proxy for the magnetic field etc.?
on a timescale of years and decades the rock data is not useful. We use deposits in icecaps.
goldminor says:
December 28, 2013 at 4:47 pm
“…What a coincidence that this so exactly matches the ebb and flow of the solar output.”
___________________________
Right, a coincidence.
vukcevic says:
December 28, 2013 at 2:32 pm
but is the Ap index as measured the true representation of the interplanetary magnetic field for the solar magnetic field alone, i.e. magnetic field carried by the solar wind among the planets of the Solar System, or those planets have something to do with it as well
The Ap index is a proxy for the product of the magnetic field and the square of the solar wind speed. The IDV-index is a pure [and very good] proxy of the magnetic field alone which we then can infer back to the 1830s. The planets have nothing to do with this, except, of course, the Earth itself which we use as the measuring device. But the Earth and other planets do not disturb the heliosphere or the Sun to any noticeable degree..
Ahhh, another [snip] from down under.
And if we think we are heading for global cooling for reasons other than the sun?
2013 Australia’s hottest year on record.
Sure, once they changed the system they used. Now they measure temperature in the middle of the country by satellite, where there are no thermometers and where no-one lives. That’s where the nice new colours are needed.
One of the big issues sceptics have is this need on the warmists behalf to continue to change the system or metric used in order to keep pumping out the alarm.
No-one has the slightest idea how warm the centre of Australia was 100 years ago. So we can’t refute their new system. Which is why they like it.
Wait until the E=GREENS find out that Photovoltaic cells are made using ARSENIC
Just wait until people learn that salt – a necessary component of life is made with a gas used to poison millions of soldiers – CHLORINE.
==================
The real deal is this —> is the poison freely available as the mercury in a CFL is? Or is it chemically attached as the chlorine in salt is? The ARSENIC is chemically bonded. The bond is not as strong as a NaCl bond. But there is a SiAs bond.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenic
BTW you think As is bad? You will need to give up GaAs LEDs and lasers.
Jimbo wrote:
“Wasn’t Gavin for a specified period of no global surface warming after which he would reconsider CAGW? I can’t find it but I vaguely recall it was a question in one of Real Climate’s comments sections.”
Ah, Gavin’s goalposts. Gavin Schmidt of NASA has a website called RealClimate. Back in 2007 there was a post on signs of climate change.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/12/a-barrier-to-understanding/
In the discussion thread Daniel Klein asks at #57:
“OK, simply to clarify what I’ve heard from you.
(1) If 1998 is not exceeded in all global temperature indices by 2013, you’ll be worried about state of understanding
(2) In general, any year’s global temperature that is “on trend” should be exceeded within 5 years (when size of trend exceeds “weather noise”)
(3) Any ten-year period or more with no increasing trend in global average temperature is reason for worry about state of understandings
I am curious as to whether there are other simple variables that can be looked at unambiguously in terms of their behaviour over coming years that might allow for such explicit quantitative tests of understanding?”
[Response: 1) yes, 2) probably, I’d need to do some checking, 3) No. There is no iron rule of climate that says that any ten year period must have a positive trend. The expectation of any particular time period depends on the forcings that are going on. If there is a big volcanic event, then the expectation is that there will be a cooling, if GHGs are increasing, then we expect a warming etc. The point of any comparison is to compare the modelled expectation with reality – right now, the modelled expectation is for trends in the range of 0.2 to 0.3 deg/decade and so that’s the target. In any other period it depends on what the forcings are. – gavin]
stevek says:
December 28, 2013 at 1:44 pm
It reminds me of all the times we hear about an apparent cure for cancer,
Funny. We may have a cure for cancer:
http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/pdq/cam/cannabis/healthprofessional/page4
http://patients4medicalmarijuana.wordpress.com/2012/10/23/biochemist-who-cured-his-stage-4-prostate-cancer-with-cannabis-oil-explains-how-it-works/
And you never hear that on the news either. My conclusion? The news is biased.
Svalsgaard says [December 28, 2013 at 2:29 pm]
“Just pointing out that solar activity was just as high in the 1830-1870s and in the 1780-790s…”
I’m just a 50-year geologist, not a solar scientist. But I fail to see how relative highs in sunspot activity during the Little Ice Age (you DO agree that it happened, I presume?) compare with the absolute high levels of sunspot activity during the 1960s-1990s. Many commenters have pointed out that the critical metric in sunspot numbers may not be ABSOLUTE numbers but rather RATES OF CHANGE in sunspot activity.
No offense, Dr Svalgaard, but I think you’re hiding behind the old paradigm of the “Solar constant” and resisting acknowledgement of the many facets of solar-energy variation through time.
Surely the correlation of solar inactivity (Maunder Minimum) and the deepest depths of the Little Ice Age warrant some thoughtful consideration, eh?
GeologyJim says:
December 28, 2013 at 5:52 pm
But I fail to see how relative highs in sunspot activity during the Little Ice Age (you DO agree that it happened, I presume?) compare with the absolute high levels of sunspot activity during the 1960s-1990s. Many commenters have pointed out that the critical metric in sunspot numbers may not be ABSOLUTE numbers but rather RATES OF CHANGE in sunspot activity.
Solar activity is measured by the NUMBER of sunspots, and that number has reached about the same level in each of the centuries 18, 19, and 20.
Surely the correlation of solar inactivity (Maunder Minimum) and the deepest depths of the Little Ice Age warrant some thoughtful consideration, eh?
And it is getting all it deserves, but no more. E.g. http://www.leif.org/research/Does%20The%20Sun%20Vary%20Enough.pdf
It’s not difficult to produce a good match between solar activity and modern warming
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:30/normalise/plot/sidc-ssn/offset:-40/integral/normalise
Leif Svalgaard says: “…that number has reached about the same level in each of the centuries 18, 19, and 20”
Sorry Leif, but “about the same level” does not answer my question about the RATE OF CHANGE.
Nor does it answer my question about the correspondence of the Maunder Minimum and the deepest times of the Little Ice Age.
The Medieval Warm Period also corresponds to high solar activity (or its inverse, low galactic cosmic rays as evidenced by Be10) suggesting that solar activity has a long-term influence on global climate.
Of course, you know there are other correlations that support this connection.
So as one scientist to another, I’m just having a hard time understanding your reluctance to acknowledge the effect of that gigantic fusion reactor in the sky that daily bombards the Earth with ga-ziggawatts of energy, plus or minus a few ziggawatts. [pay attention to the ziggawatt differences]
And cryptic responses don’t sit well with me or other commenters.
Happy New Year, but it’s going to be colder than 2013. Wanna bet?
Watts
Im sure Appell can explain.
geologyjim on December 28, 2013 at 6:20 pm
If you integrate sunspot count, you get a good match between solar activity and 20th century temperature.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:30/normalise/plot/sidc-ssn/offset:-40/integral/normalise
. Svaalgard Then how and why did the Schiddell paper get published in Science? As usual the Climate drivel reply crowd. This guy has been wrong on all counts apart from his occasional HT contributions. A bit like Mosher, Conollet, Tamino, Schmidt etc….
Lov that “Coober Pedy” accent! Ha ha.
Hope Gav’s renewal of his H-1B goes OK. And good tidings Old Boy to your Obama Care Application: Uh Oh … not and American … Uh Oh …. not born in USA …. OK .. supports Obama with cash … Lovely that Obama has such generous cash supporters as Gav.
Waltz that Matilda Gav for all its worth.
😉
Where the hell is my “hat tip” for providing this reference to you?
REPLY: Well the quandary was that you’ve gone from using your real name to the fake name “justsomeguy”, and that made me think twice about giving you a credit since that’s a blog policy violation to change handles.
If you want credit, pick one, and I’ll gladly add it.
Thanks – Anthony
Joe says:
December 28, 2013 at 5:04 pm
For all of you who think we are heading for global cooling due to the sun:
2013 Australia’s hottest year on record
One year Russia is hot, later the United States has a very hot year and this year Australia is very hot. Of course this is not global warming. According to RSS, this year is only 9th so far. The article you quote says: “Certainly there is no global surface data set which shows 1998 was the warmest on record.”
All of the following have 1998 as the hottest year, however I assume that none strictly qualify according to his definition of “global surface data set”: UAH, RSS, HadCRUT3, Hadsst2, and Hadsst3. I can see the arguments for 4 of these, and presumably HadCRUT3 is out because it has been replaced by HadCRUT4. However Gavin below seems to have a broader view.
DB says:
December 28, 2013 at 5:34 pm
Ah, Gavin’s goalposts.
If 1998 is not exceeded in all global temperature indices by 2013, you’ll be worried about state of understanding
[Response: 1) yes,
My conclusion is that Gavin is now worried about his state of understanding the climate.
Mosher=Appell
But Gavin’s disheveling of his positions may be too unsettling of the settled science for even these two to harangue out an excuse for Schmidt.
After all it is the Appell who has been the loudest any pronouncing “Nothing but CO2 emissions can explain the 20th century warming.”
geologyjim says:
December 28, 2013 at 6:20 pm
does not answer my question about the RATE OF CHANGE.
Becasue the Rate of Change is not important. The amount of energy output is.
Nor does it answer my question about the correspondence of the Maunder Minimum and the deepest times of the Little Ice Age.
About the coincidence? Check out slide 32 of http://www.leif.org/research/SSN/Svalgaard14.pdf
The Medieval Warm Period also corresponds to high solar activity (or its inverse, low galactic cosmic rays as evidenced by Be10) suggesting that solar activity has a long-term influence on global climate.
There is good evidence that the 10Be record to a large degree is driven by climate, so you have a bit of a circular argument there.
And cryptic responses don’t sit well with me or other commenters.
Sometimes it is necessary to actually read a link to grasp its significance. Try to do that.
Happy New Year, but it’s going to be colder than 2013. Wanna bet?
Solar activity now is on par with what it was about 110 years ago, is the climate also?
Elizabeth says:
December 28, 2013 at 6:38 pm
Svalgaard Then how and why did the Schiddell paper get published in Science?
Partly because at that time [2001] it was not well known that the Hoyt-Schatten reconstruction was faulty. And even today when we know, people still cling to it if it fits their agenda. To wit some of the comments on this thread…
Gavin’s comments are not “complete”.
As it has been demonstrated many times in my papers the GISS model does not reproduce any of the oscillations observed in the temperature record since 1850, including the temperature standstill observed since 2000.
See here:
Scafetta, N. 2013. Discussion on climate oscillations: CMIP5 general circulation models versus a semi-empirical harmonic model based on astronomical cycles. Earth-Science Reviews 126, 321-357.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012825213001402
Scafetta N., 2012. Testing an astronomically based decadal-scale empirical harmonic climate model versus the IPCC (2007) general circulation climate models. Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics 80, 124-137.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364682611003385
Scafetta N., 2010. Empirical evidence for a celestial origin of the climate oscillations and its implications. Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics 72, 951-970.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364682610001495
Thus, when Gavin says “We’ve looked at the sun; it’s not the sun. We’ve looked at volcanoes; it’s not volcanoes. We’ve looked at the orbit; it’s not the orbit.”
He did not complete the list.
He should have added that he has also looked at the anthropocentric forcings and everything else he knows and still his GISS model does not get the data.
Thus, the truth is that Gavin does not have any clue about what is happening to the climate. The only scientific conclusion that he could reach is that the GISS model is wrong, and therefore, his own understanding of climate change is wrong as well. But he did not acknowledged it explicitly, just implicitly for those who can understand.
All evidences, as shown in my papers, point toward a synchronization of the climate system to a set of specific astronomical/solar/lunar harmonics as everything else synchronizes in the solar system. A new paper explaining this synchronization has been just accepted today.
At the moment the only model that has been successful in hind-casting and forecasting climate change has been my semi-empirical model based on astronomical cycles plus some anthropogenic and volcano forcing.
My last November model-temperature comparison update see here:
http://people.duke.edu/~ns2002/#astronomical_model_1
lsvalgaard says:
there is some evidence of correlation with solar activity.
Like these? :
http://www.leif.org/EOS/swsc120049-GCR-Clouds.pdf
http://www.leif.org/EOS/Cloud%20Cover%20and%20Cosmic%20Rays.pdf
————————————————————
bones says:
I was thinking of something that more directly related surface insolation variations to the solar cycle. In a previous post, I provided a reference to direct solar insolation measurements from Antarctica. I will try to find it and post it again. The effect was large; several percent change.
————————————————–
Here is a link to the abstract of the paper.
http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/11/1177/2011/acp-11-1177-2011.html
bones says:
December 28, 2013 at 7:43 pm
I was thinking of something that more directly related surface insolation variations
Your link says “The best-estimate declines appear too large to originate in the sun” and more likely to be terrestrial in origin, especially since the estimated solar cycle effect 2.4 ± 1.9% has such large uncertainty as not to be significant.
Joe says at 5:04 with comments by others regarding
Australia = hottest
This issue is covered frequently by Jo Nova and you can read those posts by going to her site and going to “Archives” under the white on blue box “Find Things” under some small photos near the top right. Search using ‘ hottest ‘ or other tags. Here’s one:
joannenova.com.au/2013/09/australias-record-hottest-12-month-period-junk-science-say-the-satellites/
A truly telling video once again…… (Thank you Dr Spencer)
A spoiled rich kid (government funded Gavin) not wanting to face the reality of the science on record with anyone…..
How absolutely child like…… cowardly for that matter.
When do you like minded people finally come together in a policy impacting way?
Not just individual efforts (Thank you again Roy and Matt)….
I am just not seeing the progress as it should be with all that is happening..
Scientifically, it doesn’t make sense…..
Has our science community really (insert your specifics here)》》》》》》
Dire straits “money for nothing” video redacted.
Presumably the Maunder Minimum was caused by people not driving their SUV’s to work. Does anyone know if he has withdrawn his paper he wrote with the help Michael Mann?
Yea, ignore that continuous fusion explosion 1000 bigger than the Earth turning a million tons of matter into energy every second for the last five billion years and can kill you just from the UV…. Can’t have any effect..
“Joe says:
December 28, 2013 at 5:04 pm”
You link to an article written by Peter Hannam, well known for his biased reporting on all things climate. You link to an article published by the SMH, well known for reporting popular alarmism on all things climate (That being anything either side of an average is alarming).
From the article;
“Global interest in Australia’s weather flared early. In January, when models predicted heat that was literally off the charts, the Bureau of Meteorology added colours to maps – a deep purple and pink – to indicate maximum temperatures of 50-54 degrees.
But for David Jones, head of climate analysis at the bureau, 2013’s stand-out event was a month largely overlooked by a media diverted by football finals and federal elections: “From a climate point of view, what happened in September was probably the most remarkable.” September’s mean temperature soared to be 2.75 degrees above the 1961-90 average, eclipsing the previous record monthly deviation set in April 2005 by 0.09 degrees.”
This was all after the BoM changed the way they calculate a national average using satellites for areas that were never measured before as well as introducing new colours (Which, if you recall had to be withdrawn). The BoM sill uses ground based thermometers, almost all based in cities and at airports. How many airports existied 100 years ago and in areas now being measured? And why do the BoM continue to compare an absolute temperature against an average calculated from data between 1961 – 1990? Given the BoM previously used ~112 ground based thermometers to calculate a national average (Thats 1 device for every ~68,500 square kilometers), the actual data suggests this summer is nothing out of the ordinary, for Australia during summer.
You will find only garbage published about climate at the SMH and by Peter Hannam.
Oh Gavin! What a baby! What a B-A-B-Y. Refusing to sit in the chair while the other guy speaks. What a baby.
charles nelson says:
December 28, 2013 at 3:32 pm
If Leif was a tv detective, he would be the kind of tv detective that solves cases on the basis of a ‘hunch’. He just kinda ‘knows’ deep down he’s on the right trail – even if the pesky clues don’t seem to line up!
————————————————————————————————————-
Come on give him a break. He is in my opinion the embodiment of a 21st Century Lord Kelvin and knows he is right . Wait a sec !……………………..
FrankK says:
December 28, 2013 at 10:13 pm
He is in my opinion the embodiment of a 21st Century Lord Kelvin and knows he is right
Perhaps I’ll get ‘degrees of certainty’ named after me, like Kelvin has his temperatures…
“We’ve looked at the sun; it’s not the sun.”
What planet did they find themselves on, intrepid explorers?
P.S.
I’ve noticed that the more attention people pay to the outside appearance of their head, the less there is, usually, inside the same appendage.
lsvalgaard says:
>> geologyjim says:”does not answer my question about the RATE OF CHANGE.”
Becasue the Rate of Change is not important. The amount of energy output is.
Indeed , so “activity” probably needs to be integrated in some fashion to get energy.
Simply integrating some measure of activity over all time would not be reasonable since as the Earth warms or cools in response to a changing input there will be tendency to return once the perturbation ends.
If climate has linear relaxation response to such perturbations the Laplace response will be convolution with a decaying exponential. That is basically a weighted integration. As an illustration SSN is integrated with 20 year time constant response and compared to low-pass filtered SST.
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=752
Anthony-
I have no real choice on the handle I use when I post a second time, the problem is WordPress requires me to pick a name when I log in the first time and I never remember (or generally do not remember) that my WordPress handle. Thus, it is not really my choice to post under different names but a fluke in a crappy software installation.
No need for the hat tip
REPLY: OK, but thanks just the same – Anthony
One significant point in the previous plot is the divergence since 1998. Could this finally be a sign of AGW or perhaps the increased radiative input from a more transparent stratosphere letting more solar into lower climate levels?
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=750
Both major eruptions in the record resulted in a definitive drop in TLS implying less blockage of incoming solar.
Leif-
You certainly have strong opinions and I respect that, that said not all of them to end in correct observations. Namely, this cycle is not turning out like Cycle 14 which you insisted was the model, instead it looks weaker and likely shorter with fewer “spikes”. You insist the sunspot for the second half of this century is wrong but argue little when it comes to how specks are counted in the modern satellite age. You seem like many faculty to me, namely you insist you are correct and block any paper or thought that might disagree and that seems a bit unacademic.
As for the solar theory, it is still espoused by Mann and I will send Anthony some papers to show that.
“We’ve looked at the sun; it’s not the sun. We’ve looked at volcanoes; it’s not volcanoes. We’ve looked at the orbit; it’s not the orbit.”
In addition: “We have looked at the feasible money, ….”
Global versus regional.
Next.
There is no modern maximum in TSI.
Next.
REPLY: Oh yea of narrow possibilities. Not one mention of TSI. There are other mechanisms – Anthony
Indeed there are.
According to what is known to date, the strength of the solar wind magnetic field as measured by Ap index, in long term averages in the range of 4-25 nT (nanoTesla).
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/SolarCycle/Ap.gif
It is also known that the Earth’s magnetic field in the polar regions shows similar or identical long trends as the sun’s variability (with temperature in the Arctic and Sunspot/TSI in the Antarctic) http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/PolarGMF.htm
but at intensity of 2 orders of magnitude ( 100 times ) greater than the Ap index, or more than 2 microTesla since Maunder minimum.
Those who wish to maintain ‘settle science’ status quo, impeding any progress that could be made in the ‘sun – earth –climate’ chain, dismiss above as irrelevant.
Dismiss any inconvenient finding as irrelevant, is that what science is about?
I would think not.
I do not think this is worth a post, but this is how Mann is now dealing with this clear issue of his prior position to current one: he builds a model which says that based on his climate proxies the Little Ice Age was much different than today, but we all know it isn’t.
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00382-012-1297-0
Something else your readers might be interested in, real time info on where the latest ice breaker is trying to save the climate crazies in Antarctica: http://www.sailwx.info/shiptrack/search.phtml and http://www.sailwx.info/shiptrack/shiplocations.phtml?lat=-65.6&lon=144.1&radius=200
Tim Obrien says:
December 28, 2013 at 9:00 pm
Yea, ignore that continuous fusion explosion 1000 bigger than the Earth turning a million tons of matter into energy every second for the last five billion years and can kill you just from the UV…. Can’t have any effect..
Tim:
It’s not ignored – far from it.
It’s observed in great detail.
The point is not the absolute energy it sends us – but variations in that energy.
We know the Earth’s orbit around it has a great effect in the NH (due preponderance of land-mass and the affect that insolation has on the accretion/melt of snow there).
We are in a point where the SH is receiving more insolation than the N – so that’s not it.
We have observed sunspots long enough to know what variation they cause in output (~0.1%) and perhaps the LIA was ~0.2%. This is not enough to cause current warming and anyway the sun has been relatively quiet in recent years and slowly calming down for longer.
I talk here of radiative power. There are affects that impinge the Stratosphere and cause warming there that can down-well to the Troposphere, but there is no net gained energy – just a nudging to alter weather patterns for a time.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/Solar-cycle-data.png
Leif,
As I recall in a previous conversation you at least acknowledge that we don’t understand all the links ebtween our nuclear fireball neighbour and us, and thus there may well be links between solar climate and earth climate that we dont know yet. IE things we don’t know that we don’t know.
I for example wonder if increased UV heating of the stratosphere could lead to a temperature inversion like effect, leading to changes in convective cooling.
The man has the title of Professor but acts like a spoiled child.
Quite pathetic actually.
Seems kind of unreasonable to hold someone to account today for a theory or opinion expressed 12 or 13 years ago. Sorry, I hate to defend the same man who refuses to engage with Sceptics, but it’s how I feel.
And thanks Leif for your input here. Illuminating.
From Tallbloke’s Talkshop: http://www.pattern-recogn-phys.net/special_issue2.html#
Special Edition of Pattern recognition: http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2013/12/13/special-edition-of-pattern-recognition-in-physics/#
Does Anyone Real know what TSI it is? http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2013/12/15/does-anybody-real-know-what-tsi-it-is/#comments
lsvalgaard says:
December 28, 2013 at 1:55 pm
The ap index and the solar wind have shown no trend the past 170 years:
Are you sure the global temperature has actually increased over that time? Other than a few bumps due to the 60 year ocean cycles I still have some doubts. With siting changes, UHI, AHI, vertical mixing and biased adjustments impacting the temperature record, the real warming could be almost non-existent.
Richard M says:
December 29, 2013 at 7:05 am
“The ap index and the solar wind have shown no trend the past 170 years”
Are you sure the global temperature has actually increased over that time?
There are many people out there who believe so; they even claim that the Sun did it. Try to convince them that they are mistaken….
vukcevic says:
December 28, 2013 at 3:32 pm
@ R. de Haan
Piers Corbyn, Gavin Schmidt and I are products of the same university (GS university college, P.C and I imperial)
Interesting to hear about that.
Maybe someone should submit to an ethics inquiry.
Greg says: @ December 28, 2013 at 11:58 pm
lsvalgaard says:
>> geologyjim says:”does not answer my question about the RATE OF CHANGE.”
Because the Rate of Change is not important. The amount of energy output is….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
However Gerald Roe (Department of Earth and Space Sciences, University of Washington) showed the rate of change IS IMPORTANT in his paper: In defense of Milankovitch An explanation by Luboš Motl link
So at least in this case the rate of change in the solar insolation is important.
Dr. Richard Alley, looking at the history of global climate changes by reading the annual rings of ice from cores drilled in Greenland made headlines in the 1990s with the discovery that the last ice age came to an abrupt end over a period of only three years.
Seems that change in rate can cause sudden climate change or at least something does. It certainly is not my driving an SUV since the CO2 levels coming out of an ice age are low.
You can see why Gavin Schmidt didn’t want a “debate” format as most of what he said was contestable on the face of it. The extreme weather claims being an easy example. The inherent imbalance of a media member presenting the critical questions to a “scientist” was a essential to the assumed authority of his presentation.
An extensive focus on the political I.D. of warming activist science would clear the debate up more quickly. Warming science is corrupt by nature and the agenda it holds. Endless banter about current talking points will carry the debate and thereby the statist agenda on indefinitely.
vukcevic says:
December 29, 2013 at 12:29 am
It is also known that the Earth’s magnetic field in the polar regions shows similar or identical long trends as the sun’s variability
As the Sun does not have any long-term trend, you are claiming the Earth’s magnetic field doesn’t either.
but at intensity of 2 orders of magnitude ( 100 times ) greater than the Ap index, or more than 2 microTesla since Maunder minimum.
A meaningless comparison, as the Earth’s magnetic field itself is 3 orders of magnitude greater than the Ap index. Both the Field and its variation originate deep in the Earth’s core and neither have any influence on the climate.
Those who wish to maintain ‘settle science’ status quo, impeding any progress that could be made in the ‘sun – earth –climate’ chain, dismiss above as irrelevant.
Worse, it is nonsense to imply that they are connected.
Dismiss any inconvenient finding as irrelevant, is that what science is about? I would think not.
This is not a ‘finding’ and is not in the least ‘inconvenient’, thus fully qualifies as ‘irrelevant’.
Gail Combs says:
December 29, 2013 at 8:37 am
However Gerald Roe (Department of Earth and Space Sciences, University of Washington) showed the rate of change IS IMPORTANT in his paper
You are confusing rate of change of the driver with the rate of change of the response (” increase the rate with which the ice volume is decreasing “).
lsvalgaard says:
December 29, 2013 at 8:42 am
……….
Hi doc
Have you actually read what is said and shown in my link ?
It doesn’t sound like, I didn’t claim that the gmf directly changes temperature, I am more of the view that it is a proxy of a parallel process. The link contains two quotes from two very eminent scientists in their own field, solar and terrestrial respectively.
Readers of the blog would benefit to a greater extent if you did elaborate on the quotes, than concentrating on my somewhat less articulate reflections.
vukcevic says:
December 29, 2013 at 9:10 am
Have you actually read what is said and shown in my link ?
We have been down that road before, nothing new, just a poor correlation [with a proxy that likely is not even correct]. As usual, your stuff does not work when one goes out of the domain of the coincidental correlation. The Earth’s magnetic field changes very much over thousands of years and not the same way as the climate. The first quote is concerned with weak external magnetic fields while the second one is a faux-pas by Dickey. Find me a peer-reviewed paper of hers where she maintains that the changes have a common external source.
Edit: will the disavow their will they …
I’m waiting for a Climate Scientist/modeller to say, “Model X, which successfully predicted A, B, C, D, and E, is now predicting F.” If only there were a real Model X.
Svalgaard @ vukcevic
As usual, your stuff does not work when one goes out of the domain of the coincidental correlation. The Earth’s magnetic field changes very much over thousands of years and not the same way as the climate. The first quote is concerned with weak external magnetic fields while the second one is a faux-pas by Dickey
More moderate tone has been noted
a) Apparent coincidental correlation with the advances of science, on rare occasions was proven to be a causal one.
b) ‘Multi-millennial’ change of the Earth’s magnetic field (leading to reversals) has a decadal and centenary components (accurately measured since Gauss), coincidentally or causally correlated to the solar magnetic changes.
c) Anything you disagree with or unable to explain, is a faux-pas by someone or another.
Sometimes reserving judgment rather than an outright rejection may prove to be a wiser option (someone up the thread mentioned Lord Kelvin)
Lief S. says about vukcevic December 28, 2013 1:45pm
Hathaway at least has the honesty to admit he was wrong (about SC24).
Well Mr Svalgaard, are you going to get ‘honest’ and admit your comparison of SC24 to SC14 is not correct…that it’s much more like SC5…WELL ??
vukcevic says:
December 29, 2013 at 10:43 am
a) Apparent coincidental correlation with the advances of science, on rare occasions was proven to be a causal one.
Not when it breaks down outside of the domain of determination
b) ‘Multi-millennial’ change of the Earth’s magnetic field (leading to reversals) has a decadal and centenary components (accurately measured since Gauss), coincidentally or causally correlated to the solar magnetic changes.
Same as a)
c) Anything you disagree with or unable to explain, is a faux-pas by someone or another.
No, junk is junk and stink is stink.
Sometimes reserving judgment rather than an outright rejection may prove to be a wiser option (someone up the thread mentioned Lord Kelvin)
No outright rejection, but careful evaluation and found wanting. Lord Kelvin was right on almost anything.
Dominic Manginell says:
December 29, 2013 at 10:45 am
comparison of SC24 to SC14 is not correct…that it’s much more like SC5…WELL ??\
http://www.leif.org/research/SC14-and-24.png enough said…
In addition cycle 5 is very poorly known so hard to compare with in a meaningful manner.
Thank you DB. Now, can someone ask Gavin if he is worried?
Also the Met Office said something like half the years after 2009 would be warmer than 1998? Yet we have a 97% consensus! Yipeeeeeee.
Ain’t it rich, the sun screws up our weather but doesn’t play a role in our climate.
http://www.weatheraction.com/displayarticle.asp?a=613&c=5#
Dr. S
Lord Kelvin was right on almost anything.
Lord Kelvin, 1892
It seems as if we may also be forced to conclude that the supposed
connexion between magnetic storms and sun-spots is unreal, and that the
seeming agreement between periods has been a mere coincidence.”
Lord Kelvin, president of Royal Society, 1895
X-rays will prove to be a hoax.
Also attributed:
– Radio has no future.
– Heavier than air flying machines are impossible.
vukcevic says:
December 29, 2013 at 11:35 am
“Lord Kelvin was right on almost anything.”
There is a good reason he is Lord Kelvin, the most celebrated physicist of his day.
“he did important work in the mathematical analysis of electricity and formulation of the first and second laws of thermodynamics, and did much to unify the emerging discipline of physics in its modern form. He worked closely with mathematics professor Hugh Blackburn in his work. He also had a career as an electric telegraph engineer and inventor, which propelled him into the public eye and ensured his wealth, fame and honur. For his work on the transatlantic telegraph project he was knighted by Queen Victoria, becoming Sir William Thomson. He had extensive maritime interests and was most noted for his work on the mariner’s compass, which had previously been limited in reliability.
Lord Kelvin is widely known for determining the correct value of absolute zero as approximately -273.15 Celsius. The existence of a lower limit to temperature was known prior to Lord Kelvin, as shown in “Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat”, published by Sadi Carnot in French in 1824, the year of Lord Kelvin’s birth. “Reflections” used -267 as an estimate of the absolute zero temperature. Absolute temperatures are stated in units of kelvin in his honour.”
Like many scientists, he did make some mistakes in predicting the future of technology.
Circa 1896, Lord Kelvin was initially sceptical of X-rays, and regarded their announcement as a hoax.[54] However, this was before he saw Röntgen’s evidence, after which he accepted the idea, and even had his own hand X-rayed in May 1896.[55]
Dominic Manginell says:
December 29, 2013 at 10:45 am
Lief S. says about vukcevic December 28, 2013 1:45pm
Hathaway at least has the honesty to admit he was wrong (about SC24).
Hi Dominic
I did not predict anything, it is extrapolation of the formula that gives results, don’t see need to apologise for any aberration; after all ‘the exceptions prove the rule’.
lsvalgaard says:
December 29, 2013 at 12:01 pm
(long summary of Lord Kelvin’s achievements)
Ergo: If lord Kelvin could be wrong about geomagnetic storms then Leif (I nearly wrote Lord) Svalgaard could be wrong about geomagnetic correlations too.
You referred to my correlation as
junk is junk and stink is stink
It is difficult to ascertain why scientist of your standing would be willing to say that a correlation based on reputable data is a ‘stink’. Not that it matters much to me, but if used in a moment of resentment, you might wish take the opportunity to withdraw the attribute.
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/4/045032?fromSearchPage=true
Kelvin was basically a creationist and also got the age of the earth hopelessly wrong. Here’s, a quote
“But overpoweringly strong proofs of intelligent and benevolent design lie all round us, and if ever perplexities, whether metaphysical or scientific, turn us away from them for a time, they come back upon us with irresistible force, showing to us through nature the influence of a free will, and teaching us that all living beings depend on one ever-acting Creator and Ruler”
lsvalgaard says:
again and again, on and on.
William:
What you believe concerning the solar magnetic cycle and what you have stated in this forum is almost completely incorrect. I can explain the mechanisms (what actually causes the solar dynamo), the observations and why you are incapable of considering a hypothesis that will completely invalidate your core beliefs which explains why you completely ignore recent solar observational data that supports the assertion that solar magnetic cycle changes caused the majority of more than 75% of the warming observed in the last 150 years and why your beliefs concerning the solar dynamo are completely incorrect. I am however convinced that you are incapable of changing your mind, so there is no point in discussing the science or what will happen next to the planet.
The planet is about to abrupt cool, due to the solar magnetic cycle change. I would assume the scientific community (scientists that are capable of admitting that they were incorrect) will respond to intense media and public pressure to provide an explanation for the abrupt cooling. I am waiting for the abrupt cooling as that will force a paradigm shift.
As note before planetary cloud cover closely correlated to GCR for the period 1983 to 1995, however suddenly in 1995 there was an abrupt reduction in planetary cloud cover. Post 1995, planetary cloud cover no longer correlated with GCR. Now a scientist would ask: What is the physical reason for the sudden change? (Hint the sun changed.)
http://www.megakastro.gr/weather_agro/Atmos_060302.pdf
The possible connection between ionization in the atmosphere by cosmic rays and low level clouds
4. The correlation between low clouds and ionization level in the atmosphere, 1983–2001 Fig. 2 shows the global annual averages of GCR induced ionization in the atmosphere and low cloud amounts for the period July 1983–June 2000 (ionization data is only updated to December 2000). A quick look at the data reveals the good agreement between those two quantities from 1983 to 1994, however, from 1995 to 2000 the correspondence breaks. The correlation coefficient (0.49) over the full period is significant only at the 85% level. There are several possible causes for the break of correlation after 1994, not least that a physical relationship between ionization and low cloud formation does not exist. However, it is worth mentioning that the new release of ISCCP data covers precisely the period 1995 onward, and increasing the mean level of the new data by only +1% would return the correlation coefficient to 0.89 (99.9% significance level). Some authors have suggested that the new (post-1994) ISCCP data may have a calibration error (Marsh and Svensmark, 2003), however, no such error has been reported by the ISCCP team so far.
lsvalgaard says:
“The ap index and the solar wind have shown no trend the past 170 years:
http://www.leif.org/research/Ap-1844-now.png ”
AO and NAO conditions are regularly negative when the Ap index is low. As for the trend, unadjusted temperatures are pretty flat too: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/24/unadjusted-data-of-long-period-stations-in-giss-show-a-virtually-flat-century-scale-trend/
vukcevic Dec.29,2013 at 12:09pm…sorry sir , I know you didn’t predict anything , I meant for an apology from Lief because he is comparing apples to oranges as everyone knows the methods used to count sunspots during SC5 and SC14 were different than methods used today. Get rid of the smoothing Lief ! Now then , put SC5 , SC14 , and SC24 MONTHLY counts up using pre-1945 methods . As all will see , SC14’s monthly count is VERY erratic with major peaks and valleys , but SC5 and SC24 have very limited swings each month…and LOW. I actually find your graphs very compelling Mr. Vukcevic…as I find Mr Svalgaard’s work extremely interesting and can tell both of you are very intelligent (much more than I) and believe passionately about your works…I hope you both keep searching for TRUTHS and look forward to each of yours and others search !
Imagine that. The magnificent star that sustains all life on our planet not a factor in the climate of our world. I think I may need some of what Gavin Schmidt is smoking.
Dominic Manginell says:
…………
Hi Dominic
thanks for the comment.
At the time in 2003, when I devised formula I was barely aware of the sunspot cycle (my daughter science project, btw. she recently ‘post-graduated’ from Oxford). I recognised signs of cross-modulation and since it is a magnetic oscillation, I took orbital values of two largest sources of magnetism in the solar system and the sunspot formula was defined.
Even I am surprised how close it is for the SC24, but anyway I didn’t think it is worthwhile modifying basic principle that I started from, in order to fit in 2 or 3 past anomalies.
That depends. If you look at the total Holocene interglacial the actual trend is cooling from the Holocene optimum with some up and down squiggles. We are at present in an up squiggle thank goodness.
The best graph I have come across yet is HERE.
Oooo, the best graph of the Arctic Holocene temperature variations EVER because it is the only one with one of the major peaks clearly labelled BEER. Screw copper, screw iron. Beer was the start of the cultivation of cereal crops (to make beer), the sterilizer of parasite and disease-laden water and hence the mother of civilization itself.
As always, a graph with no error bars, though. People in climate science have sadly never heard of error bars. I don’t understand it. Presumably they were science majors and/or have science Ph.D.’s, and somewhere in there they should have learned that scientists who present experimental data are supposed to accompany it with an error estimate. Consequently we do not know from this graph alone whether the “signal” being presented is large or small compared to the probable error, and we do not know if the probable error is likely to be systematic/skewed or random/normal or (most likely) a mix of the two.
Error bars are really useful. For one thing, if you include them you ensure that you don’t make egregious claims based on the points themselves that can come back and bite you in the ass when it turns out that what you thought was a signal turns out to really have been — just noise. Humans have an overwhelming tendency to find meaning in noise. We see sheep in the fluffy clouds, big dippers in the stars, stenographic projections in colorful noise, trends in chaotic but trendless data. There are good reasons for this. For most of our evolution, our ability to survive hinged on being able to resolve the shape of the leopard hidden in the dappled light and dark pattern made by sunlight filtered through leaves. It hinged out our ability to connect disease caused by “bad water” from particular watering holes surrounded by certain kinds of rocks (rocks that later proved useful when humans learned to e.g. smelt lead). The penalty for being wrong was small — there are plenty of safe watering holes, and avoiding a tree that really isn’t hiding a leopard has little effect when there are many other safer trees around.
That’s not so much the case when the watering hole in question is the one that waters civilization itself, and no, I don’t mean beer this time. I mean energy. If we abandon carbon based energy sources, there are not a lot of economically viable alternatives and the cost/penalty of a mistake is absolutely enormous. It is so great that human civilization might well deliberately choose to continue using carbon based fuels anyway (as in fact we are so choosing) because leaping in a panic away from carbon could easily kill billions of people not in a hundred years but in the next thirty or forty. Poverty is the great reaper, and energy is the fundamental wealth. Several million people die every year right now because of energy poverty and things like particulate inhalation as they use “biofuels” (animal dung, charcoal, wood) to cook or provide light and heat in poorly ventilated huts, a poverty that is exacerbated and maintained by the high prices established worldwide for the use of carbon based fuels and the diversion of our considerable socioeconomic energies into saving the planet from the most benign climate of the last 1000 years instead of tackling the problem of global poverty head on.
If I were a conspiracy theorist (I don’t need to be, of course — plenty of them on WUWT already:-) I would be tempted to infer the existence of a global conspiracy to maintain global poverty, to maintain the gap between the haves and the have nots. I’d be tempted to accuse the energy producers themselves as being the primary funders of this conspiracy, as they are the ones who most obviously benefit from the entire “carbon is evil” shtick. Raise the price of gasoline (to “discourage driving”) and who benefits the most? Oil companies. Pressure coal mining companies to produce less coal in an inelastic market and all you do is drive up the price — and margins — of the coal miners, making the same profit with fewer employees and prolonging the lifetime of their investment. These are not bad times for energy companies, these are boom times! Energy has gone from being a comparatively minor expense to being a significant chunk of the cost of every product or service being purchased, a significant chunk of every household budget. Every penny spent on it pays its sliver of profit to who, exactly? Not Michael Mann, that’s for sure.
Of course, never attribute to human malice that which can be adequately explained by mere human stupidity. Such as the sort of stupidity that can arise simply because one discipline making egregious claims for a future anthropogenic disaster based those claims on a post hoc ergo propter hoc argument that is invariably presented without any error bars (and often without the perspective obtained by looking at the full geological climate record, pretending that “climate” begins in 1850 or so and that the warming observed since that date is “unprecedented”. Sure it is — unprecedented since 1850, and even back to that date, most of the “observed” warming is lost in the noise of measurement error. Go back and look over thousands of years (and ignore error) and you find many instances where the current warming is in fact precedented and indeed rather normal and expected.
This doesn’t mean that post hoc ergo propter hoc is wrong, or that their assertion is incorrect. It simply emphasizes that the curves alone are seriously insufficient evidence that there is anything unusual about the current climate, or anything “unusually” catastrophic waiting humankind in the wings. Because the climate is always catastrophic. It is a poster child for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catastrophe_theory — filled with fold bifurcations and cusp catastrophes in absurdly high dimensional spaces. It is dynamically multistable, and clearly exhibits Hurst-Kolmogorov puncuated equilibrium at multiple timescales in various projections of its dynamical behavior. Absolutely anything could happen in the Earth’s climate system, with or without variation of CO_2.
In this sense, the advice of the climate catastrophists is sound. The Earth’s climate is an enormously complex, unpredictable system. We cannot explain its past. We cannot predict its future. We can imagine that some of the things we do as a civilization affect it — both in the past (goatherding contributed to the creation of the Sahara Desert, which in turn very likely had a profound effect on the Holocene) and in the present and sure, in the future. Because it is a chaotic system and has the visible potential for (mathematical) catastrophes, the shift from one locally stable dynamical equilibrium to another that might have very different properties, it is best not to kick it too hard simply because we are currently living in very nearly the best of times, climate wise and any change at all is likely to be less good. On the other had, it is not going to be stable no matter what we do, and there is a very real possibility that we have been approaching the catastrophic bifurcation fold associated with a drop into glacial conditions, which have dominated some 500 of the last 600 years.
Personally, I see little evidence in the historical record for a likely return to a still-warmer locally stable phase, e.g. pre-Pliestocene conditions, whatever the models say. I’m also not at all certain that such a return wouldn’t on the whole be beneficial if it should occur, certainly if the “natural” alternative would have been triggering the next 90,000 year stretch of glaciation. And obviously I do not place a lot of faith in the numerical models given that they cannot explain precisely the graph you present, with or without the beer. Over the unbelievably short period for which we have adequate but not spectacular data for comparison (most of which is used to initialize and tune the models themselves) they have shown remarkably little predictive skill. They do not agree with the actual (new) data and they do not agree with each other and their run-to-run noise within each model in general is far greater than the average warming each model predicts and in all cases deviates systematically from the observed lack of warming over the last 15+ years, at a time that CO_2-driven warming “should” have been cranking up to a full-tilt catastrophic boogie.
I do think it would be wiser, all things being equal, to burn less carbon for fuel to the extent that we can economically do so. There are better uses for oil and coal, if it comes to that. Radical measures are not, however, called for on the sole basis of the predictions of manifestly unsuccessful models, especially when in 20-30 years, sheer technological advance and economics are going to force a paradigm shift in our energy production mechanisms.
I think this may well be the real force driving CAGW. The late 19th and early 20th centuries were “driven” by the economics of fossil fuel recovery. Great fortunes were made — historic fortunes that created names we still recognize as defining “wealth”. Great power accrued to the wealthy individuals that controlled and continue to control the fossil fuel based delivery of energy.
However, this era is ending. It is ending whether or not the world does anything about “CAGW” or “CACC”. The only question is: just how much money the owners of these finite resources are going to make in the comparatively brief remaining period before they are either exhausted or so expensive to recover that they make cheaper alternatives economically viable. Could it be that they decided to create the CAGW issue out of whole cloth to maximize their sundown profits? It wouldn’t even take a conspiracy — just acting in self-interest would do it without coordination.
Note well, there are “catastrophes” in economic theory as well. One very predictable catastrophe is the crossover catastrophe where solar or thorium or (perhaps) thermonuclear fusion power can be produced, stored, and delivered as cheaply as carbon based fuels. In order, solar is happening (but in an uneven manner, as there are still technological challenges that are being overcome and as it will never work well outside of the tropics through temperate zone). The “gold rush” to solar is still decades away. Thorium is maybe happening, but again there are technical difficulties and any gold rush to thorium is decades away. Fusion is a crap shoot — not just technical difficulties but some serious physics to overcome there. Still, it could “pop” in a year, ten years, or a hundred years. Or even “never”, although I think that unlikely.
One thing is very likely indeed. We will not be burning mined carbon for fuel worldwide in 100 years. The main question is, when and where and how we will cross over from doing so now to alternative resources as they mature without causing the crash of civilization in the meantime due to panic and premature action.
rgb
“…We’ve looked at the orbit; it’s not the orbit.”
That part of the statement is plain wrong, changes in planetary orbits throughout the solar-system are one of the main causes of climate variability, over time orbital changes reverberate throughout the solar-system, Perturbation’s of outermost planet Neptune occur once approximately every 65-80 years. The last planetary Perturbation of Neptune began in 1984 and by 2000 it had changed the orbit of Uranus, this is important because the change in the orbits of Neptune and Uranus effect the orbit of Jupiter, which is known to be the major cause of Earths orbital changes.
There are also basic polarity changes that occur during these times between the planets, (some claim “coincidentally” with solar activity too!). If a climate expert looked at Earths orbital changes during such a short time-frame between the 1980’s and the 2000’s and concluded “it’s not the orbit.” it demonstrates that they have no grasp of time or concept of the scale of change that naturally takes place continuously.
It’s funny, although team climate moron dismisses orbital changes as not being significant enough to have any influence on earths climate yet, wasn’t there a paper/s published a few years back where Earths weather could change the length of a day? and as “weather is becoming more extreme” (lol) wouldn’t this change Earths orbit even more? Surly it must only be a matter of time before Earth goes flying off into deep space because human carbon dioxide is destabilizing earths orbit. /sarc
Robert Brown says:
December 30, 2013 at 8:30 am
That is an essay worth reading.
It is not only visual shapes, it works for sound too, ‘cocktail party effect’, I occasionally experience in busy London stores, lot of babble in many languages, including English, for my ears just a general background noise, suddenly I catch a word or a fraction of a sentence in my native language which is clearly filtered and an ‘brain alert’ is issued.
On the ‘error bars’, I often use data sets from existing data base, and more often than not these are not available.
Only the other day I was told by Dr. S. that a correlation I produced is a junk since there are no error bars. I checked his latest work submitted for publication, it doesn’t contain any or even mention, as far as I could find.
I can see usefulness of the error bars, but are they really that essential or is it just another statistical whizz?
Happy NY to all.
William Astley says:
December 29, 2013 at 3:58 pm
planetary cloud cover closely correlated to GCR for the period 1983 to 1995, however suddenly in 1995 there was an abrupt reduction in planetary cloud cover. Post 1995, planetary cloud cover no longer correlated with GCR. Now a scientist would ask: What is the physical reason for the sudden change? (Hint the sun changed.)
A much more likely reason is that the correlation was spurious to begin with.
William Astley says:
December 29, 2013 at 3:58 pm
planetary cloud cover closely correlated to GCR for the period 1983 to 1995, however suddenly in 1995 there was an abrupt reduction in planetary cloud cover. Post 1995, planetary cloud cover no longer correlated with GCR. Now a scientist would ask: What is the physical reason for the sudden change? (Hint the sun changed.)
A much more likely reason is that the correlation was spurious to begin with.
vukcevic says:
December 30, 2013 at 9:57 am
I checked his latest work http://www.leif.org/research/Long-term-Variation-Solar-Activity.pdf submitted for publication, it doesn’t contain any or even mention, as far as I could find.
Well, when it suits you, you go blind. Check out Figure 8. At the bottom there is a red curve [the text reads “The red line at the bottom of the graph shows the standard deviation of the values of IDV in each year”] showing the ‘spread’ of the yearly values giving an indication of the uncertainty. Calculating an ‘error bar’ assumes that you have a statistical model for the data. Without that [which in my case would just be an assumption] and error bar is not too meaningful, but the standard deviation is well-defined and is a useful indication of the uncertainty.
I can see usefulness of the error bars, but are they really that essential or is it just another statistical whizz
If one is claiming a correlation, the error bars or the standard deviation of the residuals are quite essential.
Dominic Manginell says:
December 29, 2013 at 6:29 pm
put SC5 , SC14 , and SC24 MONTHLY counts up using pre-1945 methods . As all will see , SC14′s monthly count is VERY erratic with major peaks and valleys , but SC5 and SC24 have very limited swings each month…and LOW.
There is another important difference between the way sunspots are reported. For SC14, the reported SSN is based on a single observation per day, while for SC24, the SSN is an average of the counts by about 60 different observers. The average is always less variable than the individual counts. That may contribute to the smaller spikes seen in SC24. As for SC5, the data is simply too ‘spotty’ [no pun] and there are too few observations to get a good measure. Missing data was interpolated to fill in the gaps. Any detailed comparison with SC5 is therefore meaningless.
vukcevic says:
December 30, 2013 at 3:16 am
I took orbital values of two largest sources of magnetism in the solar system and the sunspot formula was defined.
Lord Kelvin was correct within the limits of the science known in his day. We cannot fault him for not taking into account what was not known. His objection that the Sun’s magnetic field could not affect the Earth was correct as the science was known at the time [he did not know about the conducting solar wind dragging the solar magnetic field out to the Earth and beyond], and that very same objection is still valid today [within the limits of science as we know today] when it comes to the magnetic fields of the planets affecting the Sun. There is no Jupiter-wind dragging Jupiter’s magnetic field out into space reaching back to the Sun against the supersonic solar wind. So “two largest sources of magnetism” have nothing to do with the solar cycle. And by the way, those sources are actually tiny compared to the heliosphere. So, your premise is fundamentally wrong, apart from the formula own failings.
I’m a fan of Stossel’s, but when it comes to AGW he seems to be kind of clueless, which is disappointing. In this particular case, there was almost no useful information provided by any of his three guests, although the idea of the Earth “greening” from increased CO2 was amusing.
The only really redeeming thing in the whole video was Dr. Schmidt’s bizarre antics. No normal person would buy the absurd argument as to why he wouldn’t sit on the stage at the same time – he showed HIMSELF to be to the eccentric crank, scurrying around like a cockroach, and you didn’t have to be a scientist to see it. Really, it is a wonder that he showed at all, and I have to wonder whether there is some real desperation afoot. An unimaginable amount of money has been spent in the name of the climate models of “settled science”, and as of this year the Earth’s actual temperature got to the point where it was below what ALL of them predicted. The models are spectacular failures!
Schmidt gave that bizarre, goofball, rationalization about mankind supposedly having (literally, I guess) “bet the farm” on climate remaining constant, even though he, himself, had just said that natural climate change has gone on forever. The whole idea is ridiculous on it’s face, since agricultural methods are being advanced all the time – change is the norm in agriculture, AGW or no. To think somebody calling themselves a scientist would suggest that ANY industry was so technologically stagnant that it could not adjust to changes that occur over decades is insane. He even seemed to try to tie that into rising oceans, even though most farmland isn’t anywhere near the oceans.
Then he made that ridiculous claim about Sandy causing more damage because the ocean was less than 1 FOOT higher. Last I heard, ocean levels move on the order of a foot a CENTURY. So, a foot higher since WHEN, Dr. Schmidt? Since the Depression? And does anybody really buy the idea that 1 FOOT would be significant, anyway?
All Dr. Spencer said on both these points was a blanket “I agree with most of what he said,” and even Stossel didn’t call him on how absurd it was. All he questioned was the hurricane statistics, and then backed off on the rest, saying he wasn’t an expert. Hell, Dr. Schmidt was spouting nonsense well outside his area of expertise!!
Nobody (neither Dr Spencer nor anybody in here, with one exception) even questioned when Stossel says that everybody agrees the Earth is warming! There hasn’t been any warming in 15+ years!! “Everybody” agrees that the Earth warmed a little between about 1978-1998, but since then CO2 is as predicted, but the global temperature hasn’t budged AT ALL. Obviously, CO2 is NOT the dominant player in any Global Warming that has happened, but Dr. Spencer wouldn’t even say THAT, saying it could be up to 90% responsible! Huh?
Finally, that whole “energy stops slavery” thing was just stupid. Some say slavery was on the way out in the US until the cotton gin was invented, suddenly making the cotton that the slaves produced more valuable. Every economy is always based on people doing work. Just because energy is available to multiply the value of that work doesn’t mean people stop working and therefore don’t need to be enslaved to do it. There’s always a need to have people do SOMETHING. The idea is complete economic nonsense, and it detracts from his larger point (which might be perfectly legitimate).
Svalgaard @ vukcevic
“The red line at the bottom of the graph shows the standard deviation of the values of IDV in each year”] showing the ‘spread’ of the yearly values giving an indication of the uncertainty. Calculating an ‘error bar’ assumes that you have a statistical model for the data. Without that [which in my case would just be an assumption] and error bar is not too meaningful, but the standard deviation is well-defined and is a useful indication of the uncertainty.
Tectonics shows number of events in each year
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/NHO.htm
thus average for a particular year is the same, so standard deviation calculated for each year is 0 , zero .
Tectonics is ‘unpredictable’, no model exists according to the current science, so error bars would not make any sense.
Once article suitable for publication is written, detailed description and sources of data will be given. I take your remarks seriously, when they lead to a step forward, so to the above page link I have appended annual numbers.
Have a Happy New Year.
vukcevic says:
December 31, 2013 at 12:58 pm
Tectonics shows number of events in each year … so error bars would not make any sense.
You dance around this without getting to the point, which is a determination of the goodness of fit between the two time series, not their individual ‘error bars’. In calculating the goodness of fit, you should not use smoothed data and if there is a lag, should show how much the value of the lag influences the fit, i.e. the lag has an error bar. All this is standard scientific method.
I take your remarks seriously, when they lead to a step forward
Is a lopsided and wrong attitude; they should be taken even more seriously if they disagree with your approach.
vukcevic says:
December 31, 2013 at 12:58 pm
Tectonics is ‘unpredictable’, no model exists according to the current science, so error bars would not make any sense.
The proper way to deal with ‘events’ is the Superposed Epoch Analysis. If one thinks [to take an example] that geomagnetic storms are triggering tectonic event [‘earthquakes’ for example], then one uses the storms as ‘key times’ [a storm has a sharp initial phase – a ‘sudden storm commencement, SSC’] and count up the number of tectonic events on day time of the start of the storm, and on the day after the storm and the day after that, etc extending several days before [and particularly] after the storm. That count has an error bar [the square root of the count] as appropriate for counts of rare events [Poisson distribution]. Here is one example: http://www.elif.org/research/Earthquake-Activity.png which BTW shows no relationship rising about the noise.
example: http://www.leif.org/research/Earthquake-Activity.png which BTW shows no relationship rising about the noise.