Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
I was pointed to a 2010 post by Dr. Roy Spencer over at his always interesting blog. In it, he says that he can show a relationship between total solar irradiance (TSI) and the HadCRUT3 global surface temperature anomalies. TSI is the strength of the sun’s energy at a specified distance from the sun (average earth distance). What Dr. Roy has done is to “composite” the variations in TSI. This means to stack them one on top of another … and here is where I ran into trouble.
I couldn’t figure out how he split up the TSI data to stack them, because the cycles have different lengths. So how would you make an 11-year composite stack when the cycles are longer and shorter than that? And unfortunately, the comments are closed. Yes, I know I could write and ask Dr. Roy, he’s a good guy and would answer me, but that’s sooo 20th century … this illustrates the importance of publishing your code along with your analysis. His analysis may indeed be 100% correct—but I can’t confirm that because I can’t figure out exactly how he did it.
Since I couldn’t confirm Dr. Roy’s interesting approach, I figured I’d take an independent look at the data to see for myself if there is a visible ~ 11 year solar signal in the various temperature records. I started by investigating the cycle in the solar variations themselves. The TSI data is here. Figure 1 shows the variations in TSI since 1880
Figure 1. Monthly reconstructed total solar irradiance in watts per square metre (W/m2). As with many such datasets this one has its detractors and adherents. I use it because Dr. Roy used it, and he used it for the same reason, because the study he was investigating used it. For the purposes of my analysis the differences between this and other variations are minimal. See the underlying Lean study (GRL 2000) for details. Note also that this is very similar to the sunspot cycle, from which it was reconstructed.
If I’m looking for a correlation with a periodic signal like the ~ 11-year variations in TSI, I often use what is called a “periodicity analysis“. While this is somewhat similar to a Fourier analysis, it has some advantages in certain situations, including this one.
One of the advantages of periodicity analysis is that the resolution is the same as the resolution of the data. If you have monthly data, you get monthly results. Another advantage is that periodicity analysis doesn’t decompose a signal into sine waves. It decomposes a signal into waves with the actual shape of the wave of that length in that particular dataset. Let me start with the periodicity analysis of the TSI, shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Periodicity analysis of the Lean total solar irradiance (TSI) data, looking at all cycles with periods from 2 months to 18 years. As mentioned above, there is a datapoint for every month-by-month length of cycle.
As you can see, there is a large peak in the data, showing the preponderance of the ~ 11 year cycle lengths. It has the greatest value at 127 months (10 years 7 month).However, the peak is quite broad, reflecting the variable nature of the length of the underlying sunspot cycles.
As I mentioned, with periodicity analysis we can look at the actual 127 month cycle. Note that this is most definitely NOT a sine wave. The build-up and decay of the sunspots/TSI occur at different speeds. Figure 3 shows the main cycle in the TSI data:
Figure 3. This is the shape of the main cycle for TSI, with a length of 10 years 7 months.
Let me stop here and make a comment. The average cyclical swing in TSI over the period of record is 0.6 W/m2. Note that to calculate the equivalent 24/7 average insolation on the earth’s surface you need to divide the W/m2 values by 4. This means that Dr. Roy and others are looking for a temperature signal from a fluctuation in downwelling solar of .15 W/m2 over a decade … and the signal-to-noise ratio on that is frankly depressing. This is the reason for all of the interest in “amplifying” mechanisms such as cosmic ray variations, since the change in TSI itself is too small to do much of anything.
There are some other interesting aspects to Figure 3. As has long been observed, the increase in TSI is faster than the decrease. This leads to the peak occurring early in the cycle. In addition we can see the somewhat flat-topped nature of the cycle, with a shoulder in the red curve occurring a few years after the peak.
Looking back to Figure 2, there is a secondary peak at 147 months (12 years 3 months). Here’s what that longer cycle looks:
Figure 4. The shape of the 147-month cycle (12 years 3 months) in the Lean TSI data
Here we can see an advantage of the periodicity analysis. We can investigate the difference between the average shapes of the 10+ and the 12+ year cycles. The longer cycles are not just stretched versions of the shorter cycles. Instead, they are double-peaked and have a fairly flat section at the bottom of the cycle.
Now, while that is interesting, my main point in doing the periodicity analysis is this—anything which is driven by variations in TSI will be expected to show a clear periodicity peak at around ten years seven months.
So let me continue by looking at the periodicity analysis of the HadCRUT4 temperature data. We have that temperature data in monthly form back to 1880. Figure 5 shows the periodicity analysis for the global average temperature:
Figure 5. Periodicity analysis, HadCRUT4 global mean surface air temperatures.
Bad news … there’s no peak at the 127 month period (10 year 7 month, heavy dashed red line) of the variation in solar irradiance. In fact, there’s very little in the way of significant periods at all, except one small peak at about 44 months … go figure.
Next, I thought maybe there would be a signal in the Berkeley Earth land temperature data. The land should be more responsive than the globe, because of the huge heat capacity of the ocean. However, here’s the periodicity analysis of the Berkeley Earth data.
Figure 6. Periodicity analysis, Berkeley Earth global land surface air temperatures. As above, heavy and light red lines show main and secondary TSI periods.
There’s no more of a signal there than there was in the HadCRUT4 data, and in fact they are very similar. Not only do we not see the 10 year 7 month TSI signal or something like it. There is no real cycle of any power at any frequency.
Well, how about the satellite temperatures? Back to the computer … hang on … OK, here’s the periodicity analysis of the global UAH MSU T2LT lower tropospheric temperatures:
Figure 7. Periodicity analysis, MSU satellite global lower troposphere temperature data, 1979-2013.
Now, at first glance it looks like there is a peak at about 10 years 7 months as in the TSI. However, there’s an oddity of the periodicity analysis. In addition to showing the cycles, periodicity analysis shows the harmonics of the cycles. In this example, it shows the fundamental cycle with a period of 44 months (3 years 8 months). Then it shows the first harmonic (two cycles) of a 44-month cycle as an 88 month cycle. It is lower and broader than the fundamental. It also shows the second harmonic, in this case with a period of 3 * 44 =132 months, and once again this third peak is lower and broader than the second peak. We can confirm the 132 month cycle shown above is an overtone composed of three 44-month cycles by taking a look at the actual shape of the 132 month cycle in the MSU data:
Figure 8. 132 month cycle in the MSU satellite global lower troposphere temperature data.
This pattern, of a series of three decreasing peaks, is diagnostic of a second overtone (three periods) in a periodicity analysis. As you can see, it is composed of three 44-month cycles of diminishing size.
So the 132-month peak in the T2LT lower troposphere temperature periodicity analysis is just an overtone of the 44 month cycle, and once again, I can’t find any signal at 10 years 7 months or anything like it. It does make me curious about the nature of the 44-month cycle in the lower tropospheric temperature … particularly since you can see the same 44-month cycle (at a much lower level) in the HadCRUT4 data. However, it’s not visible in the Berkeley Earth data … go figure. But I digress …
I’m sure you can see the problem in all of this. I’m just not finding anything at 10 years 7 months or anything like that in either surface or satellite lower troposphere temperatures.
I make no claims of exhausting the possibilities by using just these three analyses, of the HadCRUT4, the Berkeley Earth, and the UAH MSU T2LT temperatures. Instead, I use them to make a simple point.
If there is an approximately 11 year solar signal in the temperature records, it is so small that it does not rise above the noise.
My best wishes to everyone,
w.
PERIODICITY THEORY: The underlying IEEE Transactions paper “Periodicity Transforms” is here.
DATA: As listed in the text
CODE: All the code necessary for this is in a zipped folder here. At least, I think it’s all there …
USUAL REQUEST: If you disagree with something I said, and yes, hard as it is to believe it’s been known to happen … if so, please quote the exact words you disagree with. That way, everyone can understand your point of reference and your objections.
“it is so small that it does not rise above the noise”
I love this quote from Pielke Jr:
“My 2¢ on metaphysics: a signal that cannot be seen is indistinguishable from a signal that does not exist”
Classic.
Link to IEEE paper didn’t work for me.
0.8C of warming in 150 years is only 0.00533C per year. If we wish to find if solar variation can cause that, we will have to wait for solar cycle 25 or later and review data from modern instruments.
There are several plausible explanations of possible solar connections to climate variability, but trying to find 0.00533C per year in “reconstructed TSI” or old thermometer readings from 1880 seems a stretch. The corollary of that is nor can we dismiss the possibility of solar influence on such records.
The 2nd harmonic (88 months) looks like it might be there in the HADCRUT4 data as well. Since Roy used HADCRUT3, which might be less diddled with than HADCRUT4, would it be worth looking at?
Polar vortex over the South Pole unabated.
http://earth.nullschool.net/jp/#2014/04/15/0300Z/wind/isobaric/70hPa/orthographic=26.63,-83.93,366
“Polar vortex over the South Pole unabated.”
Wow! That is cool.. thanks!
Ren doesn’t understand what “off topic” means, just because something is cool, doesn’t give you a license to blurt it out on a totally unrelated thread. Had there not been a comment addressing it already I would have deleted it.
Please folks, use TIPS and NOTES
1) TSI is made up of UV, IR and visible light. How far can we go back with those as separate values?
2) I notice the pre-1950 TSI curves are shorter with more periods that are very low.
Lance Wallace says:
April 10, 2014 at 10:51 pm
My bad, it’s here. I also fixed the link in the head post.
w.
Willie Soon claims to have identified a link between solar activity and important temperature metrics. http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2013/03/changing-sun-changing-climate/
Hi from Oz. Interesting analysis (as usual), Willis – thanks. Following up on the comment from sunshinehours1, can you tell me what has the TSI measurement that you used actually measured, in terms of spectral range (width)? Does it include all the solar radiation that might have an effect on global surface temperature, or not (i.e. from the high UV to the low infra-red range, including of course all the visible spectrum). And if not, how much radiation might have been missed by this measure, and what effect might the “missing” energy / insolation have for instance on the sea temperature, noting that (AFAIK) some of the non-visible light spectrum has a far greater heating effect on (sea)water than the visible light spectrum?
Keep up the good work – for us all.
regards, J
Dr Lief Svalgaard has made a new Sunspot series where he has integrated the data from various data sets. He has also made a 21 year Running average of the graph. How well does that running average correlate to the temperature graph?
http://www.leif.org/research/New-Sunspot-Series-21yr-Run-Avg.png
By inspection, TSI is clearly too flat to be a good candidate for temperature correlation. UV, on the other hand, varies much more. A lunar component might also be proposed, since there is a pronounced atmospheric ‘tide.’ Leif claims the thermosphere is too tenuous to have an effect on weather; I’m not so sure. It’s certainly low in density, but it’s thick, and the thickness varies considerably with incoming UV. The odds of a photon escaping from Earth without colliding with an atom or ion in the thermosphere is very small.
Yes, you can play interesting games with sunspots. For example, the following integrates sunspot count using a baseline of 40 – anything below 40 sunspots is considered a “cooling” event. I don’t know how valid it is from a scientific perspective.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1850/mean:50/normalise/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1850/mean:50/offset:-40/integral/normalise
I think this result of Willis is consistent with the claim that the oceans with their immense heat capacity act as heat sinks to average out the annual and sub-decadal temperature variations
I have read the claim that the oceans (PDP, AMO, NAO) “ate the heat” from about year 2000 and will continue to eat the heat during the 30 years or so after 2000 until about 2030.
If we projecting that claim backwards 30 years in time before 2000, the oceans were in their up phase–yielding up the heat to the atmosphere–which would account for the observed global warming between about 1970 to 2000.
The oceans with their immense heat capacity act as heat sinks to average out the annual and sub-decadal temperature variations but the up phase of the 60-year natural cycle from about 1970 to 2000 has been mistaken as a secular increase global warming caused by burning fossil fuels.
I think this explanation is consistent with what Willis shows here and what Kevin Trenberth has offered as an explanation of the “pause”.
Please repeat with ocean temperature data. I suspect you may be surprised!
This is interesting !!
https://malagabay.wordpress.com/2012/12/10/1366-and-all-that-the-secret-history-of-total-solar-irradiance/
Further to the above comment I believe you may see surprisinly short term ocean temperature signals i.e. nothing to do with Frederick Colbourne’s buffering directly although this is doubtless of significant truth.
I used to work on Tropospheric Scatter radio systems where the radio signal was lost in the background noise. You could clearly see this on a spectrum analyser. We were amazed to see that phase correcting 4 different receivers and combining their signal cancelled out some of the noise but enhanced the signal. You could now see sitting well above the noise.
in my greenhouse if the sun comes out its an oven and at night its freezing.so sun effects pretty instant and variable.
if i was looking for sun influence correlations then i would look at earth angle movements, earth sun distances , maybe moon influence, magnetosphere. This would set the the mood within which a lot of other variables would be fitted like volcanoes
in the past space rock hits and close fly bys seem to be the cause the ‘catastrophic’ element in past climate. Sumarians talked of earth being shifted on its axis and earth crust slides eg hudson bay 12,900 years ago, after being hit by debris [and close fly bys of planet sized rocks] from a supernova explosion that they then reported caused a 1000yr winter [ younger dryas].
space rock like the russian 1908 come every 100 years and if it had landed in belgium would have killed everyone in it. So the next one could be a ‘country killer’ if it lands near mass populations.Some say modern civilisation has only a 50 50 chance of making it thro any 100 year space rock hit period. But you can’t tax ‘human caused’ space rock so co2 deathstar is the fashion in the academic beerosphere.
the point being does the earth have a stable climate system that is subject to frequent shocks like space rock and volcanoes that create ‘oscillations’ which take it ages to rediscover the return to the mean? So the effects remain after the cause is long forgotten?
given the melting ice sheets are revealing buried forests then this current warming looks more like a return to the normal mean or at least the warm season in the ice age ‘year’.
Could you please detail the locations and the type of equipment used to measure TSI during the 1880s?
No signal? Gimme a break…
http://climate4you.com/images/SunspotsMonthlySIDC%20and%20HadSST3%20GlobalMonthlyTempSince1960%20WithSunspotPeriodNumber.gif
By just looking at this plot you will notice the solar cycle influence on mean temp.
According to this site the TSI measurement is integrated over the entire solar disc and over the entire spectrum:
http://lasp.colorado.edu/data/sorce/tsi_data/daily/sorce_tsi_L3_c24h_latest.txt
This report came from this website:
http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/sorce/data/tsi-data/
Apparently there are other TSI measuring data sources as well, and apparently they don’t agree with each other as is evident from a plot on Greg Kopp’s web page:
http://spot.colorado.edu/~koppg/TSI/
What Dr. Roy has done is to “composite” the variations in TSI. This means to stack them one on top of another … and here is where I ran into trouble.
I have to admit I haven’t looked at Dr. Spencer’s article, but when you said he’d “‘composite’ the variations in TSI,” what came to mind was a composite of the variations in UV, IR, and so on.
There is a big connection between TSI and Global Temps. TSI drives the AMO in turn the AMO drives not only N hem temps and global temps also I find. Seems in the 1970’s they forgot to tamper with the AMO data?
TSI and AMO
https://twitter.com/NJSnowFan/status/454549366137561088/photo/1
AMO and Global Temps
https://twitter.com/NJSnowFan/status/454550447949217792/photo/1
W: “it is so small that it does not rise above the noise.”
That makes it tricky but not an insurmountable problem.
Have a read of http://www.maximintegrated.com/app-notes/index.mvp/id/1890
Where ‘Spread spectrum’ techniques are described.
It is common, (especially with satellite signals) to demodulate signals that are ‘below the noise floor’.
Sounds daft at first but the above link gives an exceptional description of the process.
How does this apply to spotting ‘signals’ in climate records?
As with spread spectrum, you have to know what signal (or pattern or key) you will be receiving so all we need to do is predict what sine waves made up our 100 year data set (f1 + f2 + f3 etc), sum them and check for correlation with the time series, if a poor match then change the sine wave set and repeat.
The chance of hitting on an educated guess giving a good correlation is slim so:
One could envisage thousands of PCs running R scripts, with pseudo random sine wave sets being compared to a time series. With only ‘reasonable’ matches being flagged up, it would take little time from humans.
Perhaps 5 pseudo random frequencies, with pseudo random start points (phase shift) with pseudo random amplitudes,
do
Generate f’s
Sum
Correlate with Ts
Write variable values and correlation value to text file
repeat
After a certain time, grep the text file for values greater than 0.95 or whatever would be helpful for further diagnosis and share with others.
Even the crazy UNIPCC admit & accept that the Sun drove past climate changes, but irrationally & illogically deny that the Sun has a significant influence on Climate today! I find it somewhat bizarre that the big shiny ball thingamajig in the sky that heats me up when the clouds are away, but cools me down when the clouds are present, possesses 99.9% of the mass of the Solar System, is 332900 times the mass of the Earth, is a vast fusion reactor converting hydrogen (the second most abundant element in the Universe) into helium (the first most abundant element in the Universe) its activity can take out power grids, satellites, & communications equipment, & disrupt tv viewing pleasure, doesn’t affect our climate one jot, not even an iota!!!! Strange, very strange! Ho hum.
Willis says: “The land should be more responsive than the globe, because of the huge heat capacity of the ocean”
Whereas njsnowfan shows us a chart (short on axis data but I presume temperature – unquantified) showing exactly the short term correlation I predict. This graph in its own right contradicts Willis’s assertion despite this being based on on an obvious and true (implied) heat capacity argument.
In fact the ocean is being very responsive and is heating up and down in synchronicty with the TSI. I cannot see much of a phase lag at all but note the upward trend in temperature underlying the fine structure which I certainly believe is due in part to buffering effect mentioned by others and implied by Willis.
The AMO temperature curve is in sync with the TSI curve in fine detail however this is a correlation. No causality is proved. Indeed the AMO curve in my opinion is not caused by the pitiful TSI variation (as is likely the opinion of most readers of this article). The TSI variation is far too small when quantified to account for the ocean temperature changes.
Thanks to njsnowfan for showing us this curve match I predicted some years ago (but didn’t know the data existed).
So help us out Willis. Do your stuff with the ocean data and if we see a positive result I will tell you all what is going on!
No you do not need to divide the TSI anomaly by 4 because the Earth does not receive it ALL OVER but on a hemisphere because we have day/night cycles. So divide by 2.
Your thinking is FLAT EARTH thinking.
“The land should be more responsive than the globe, because of the huge heat capacity of the ocean.”
Somewhat true, but actually the solar cycle temp signal will mainly be found (and is found) inside of the tropics. The signal is lost at higher latitudes, much like the EN/SO-signal.
In retrospect, INMHO, Willis periodicity analysis wouldn’t so much care about who was right with respect to a baseline TSI value as this type of analysis sees low frequency and baseline data as one component all the way to the right of the graph. Instead this analysis provides insight about what is happening over time, where the time scale is anything greater than 1 month. As long as the data sets haven’t been fudged up or down with some kind of predetermined periodic data that just happens to be at 10 years 7 months or “averaged” so greatly over vast regions to produce a monthly values that are mush (ie premasticated so as to be devoid of any meaningful taste-bud signal, Berkley’s data?) – then periodicity analysis like Fourier analysis should show up any signal that repeats. Finding such a signal should then prompt the question, What is causing it? Does the sun have it’s own internal “clock”? And analysis of the magnitude of the variability over the “entire spectrum” should also prompt interrogation of why the “spectrum” was integrated, instead of measured at each wavelength to ascertain the true solar irradiance power, and instead of just staring at the sun, perhaps have a look as well at the earths overall outer atmosphere from a distance to watch how solar flux influences the molecules it bombards, and does this then correlate to cloud formation or any other phenomena below etc.
Would someone be so devious as to “fudge” data so that it had periodicity? I don’t think so. But many well meaning folk could so badly masticate data so that any meaningful periodicity was averaged out. So, NOT finding a signal could have meaning, or it could just reflect on how bad the temperature series currently are in there current “post-adjustment” state at giving us any kind of meaningful energy balance information.
I’ve given up the TSI –temperature link idea few years ago.
North Atlantic SST ( AMO )and the 350 year long CET record are by no means metric of what the rest of the globe is/was doing at the time. However they may help understand possible input from the natural variability, Maximum insolation months Jun + July have near zero trend, while the minimum insolation months December (Y-1) + January(Y) have the strongest uptrend. Graphs includes relevant periodgrams.
One could speculate for reasons, but this would be OT. Climate science is fun.
i remember decades ago back in grad school coming across articles about how sunspots affected the weather, using data claiming that wheat prices in 19th century England correlated with the 11 year sunspot cycle. Sure enough, this stuff can still be found on line. The correlation of the sunspot cycle to wheat prices in the middle ages is discussed here
http://www.nature.com/news/1998/031215/full/news031215-12.html
and an analysis of sorts of modern data is here
http://time-price-research-astrofin.blogspot.com/2012/07/tom-mcclellan-sunspot-cycle-vs-grain.html
It wouldn’t have to be temperature changes affecting the wheat crop. It could be something reacting to keep the temperature from changing — for example, more clouds and rain in response to a rise in sunshine, (already suggested and analyzed in earlier posts here by the author W. Eschenbach)
I have also sometimes wondered whether investigators calculating the TSI have taken proper account of how the time-averaged, effective size of the sun could change over the sunspot cycle as more (and larger) or fewer (and smaller) solar prominences erupt from the sun’s edge. Each solar prominence seen edge-on from the earth would contribute just that much more to the solar radiation reaching the earth — and a similar thing could be happening with more or fewer hot particles being ejected into the solar wind. I think this effect would be very difficult to measure accurately, and of course it wouldn’t have to be a very big effect to change by multiple tenths of a percent the solar radiation reaching the earth over the solar cycle.
I think it makes sense that global temp is not a direct linear response to solar variability. But global temp should reflect energy imbalance which is ultimately about how the system captures and releases energy from the sun. Because of ocean inertia and other climate system properties, I seriously doubt that the ebbs and flows of (solar) energy imbalance is a linear process.
Eric Worrall says:
April 11, 2014 at 12:28 am
Yes, you can play interesting games with sunspots. For example, the following integrates sunspot count using a baseline of 40 – anything below 40 sunspots is considered a “cooling” event. I don’t know how valid it is from a scientific perspective.
I don’t think it is valid, especially not the free parameter 40. What would make sense, perhaps, is to use the overall mean as the base, then you get this: http://www.leif.org/research/SSN-Integral.png
Thanks, Willis — easy to understand. Interesting about the seeming ~44 month periodicity. Some kind of ENSO effect?
One might assume that the 10.7 yr TSI variance is simply too small to have an effect.
This is a very good read that Joe D’Aleo wrote, I found awhile ago, Has info on TSI.
Solar Changes and Climate.
http://myweb.wwu.edu/dbunny/pdfs/Chap10Elsevier.pdf
Not so fast Willis
Others have done this more accurately and found peaks close to 10, 11 and 12 years, very close to your Best and UAH.
http://www.leif.org/research/Scafetta-Report.pdf
” Since Roy used HADCRUT3, which might be less diddled with than HADCRUT4, would it be worth looking at?”
How about the CET temperatures in that case?
Leif
Or we could use a 200 yrs sliding window for the integral, remember?
http://virakkraft.com/Loehle-temps-Steinhilber-integral.png
Here’s the Wikipedia definition of an overtone:
The 44 month signal has a higher frequency than the 132 month signal. (frequency = 1 / period) Thus the 132 month signal is, by definition, not an overtone of the higher frequency 44 month signal.
The term you were probably looking for is undertone (or subharmonic). In my experience, in unamplified systems, subharmonics are usually a lot weaker that their fundamental frequencies. In that light, the 44 month signal is more likely to be a harmonic of the 132 month signal.
Other possibilities:
1 – both signals are harmonics of another, lower frequency, signal
2 – one or both signals are bogus and are products of the analysis
I’m not familiar with periodicity analysis and don’t know what kind of pitfalls it presents. Fourier Analysis suffers from things like aliasing and spectral leakage. I would be surprised if periodicity analysis doesn’t suffer from something similar.
lgl says:
April 11, 2014 at 7:30 am
Or we could use a 200 yrs sliding window for the integral, remember?
That would be yet another free parameter. I’m sure we could find more and thus drive the correlation to any degree of ‘significance’.
Willis, this is an interesting analysis. I am sitting here thinking about what it means. When the Sun is at Solar Maximum, there is approximately a 6 percent increase in ultraviolet radiation. The total TSI increases only .1 percent; so there is reduction in mid frequency radiation. It would appear that sunspots with their much lower temperature, several thousand degrees lower, combined with the fact that the radiation generated varies with the fourth power of the absolute temperature shifts their radiation to lower frequencies and emits smaller amounts. The power generation of the Sun does not slow down and the energy must find other places to escape. The probable areas are the plaque areas on the Sun. These hot white areas radiate the energy blocked by the Sunspots at a higher frequency. In short, the spectrum of the Sun changes and the energy contained in the wavelengths that are absorbed by the substances whose temperatures you are analyzing could actually be decreasing. Just thinking.
lgl says:
April 11, 2014 at 7:03 am
Others have done this more accurately and found peaks close to 10, 11 and 12
Willis found those same peaks for the SSN; they are simply the result of the long 100-yr period]. They are not there for the temperature.
Another factor, when you look at Bob Tisdale’s temperature charts, the Ocean temperatures appear to change in discrete steps, not in a smooth manner, that your analysis would require.
Willis Eschenbach says:
lsvalgaard says:
I think this one to one mapping of TSI or Sunspots to temperature could be missing something. As long as the Sunspot activity stays within some band the whole chaotic climate system just sort of chugs noisily along, but if Sunspot activity either remains below or exceeds the band over a protracted period the climate changes. The recent warming may have occurred during a period where sunspots were greater than average. While there are reconstructions of Sunspot numbers going back millennia, we only have observations of 22 complete cycles starting at the end of the Little Ice Age. Our temperature data is pretty much limited to the same period.
I think we can safely say the Little Ice Age happened as there is just too much evidence to reason otherwise. So…how could it happen?
Either the Sun done it, the Clouds done it or the Oceans done it or they all contrived together to do it.
I think we can rule out the Oceans as the sole cause because they would need to stuff heat down for 350 years and while I guess it is possible for the NAO to stay negative for that long, it is unlikely and the LIA would have only been regional.
So by my reckoning Total Solar Radiation decreased, Albedo increased or there was a combination of the two. From what I’ve read from Leif and others it seems to me that over the long trek the photons make through the Sun they should be pretty homogenized, meaning Total Solar Radiation is probably constant over millennial timescales. So as Sherlock says whatever is left, that being Albedo, done it. So whatever caused the change in Albedo, be it GCR’s , Volcanos, Unicorns or Space Aliens flying rice sized ships, if we can solve that riddle, I think we will be on our way to predicting climate changes into the future. My best guess is that somehow low sunspot counts over protracted periods increase the Albedo of the Earth, ….somehow.
Thanks, Willis. Very good analysis.
I will ponder its consequences in my overall view of the possible influences on climate.
From a comment I posted on Dave Stockwell’s blog back in 2011.
This quarter-cycle phase lag relationship is well known to EEs and signal processing experts.
OOPS! Armagh temperatures not satellite temperatures.
Leif
Willis found those same peaks for the SSN; they are simply the result of the long 100-yr period]. They are not there for the temperature.
That’s three sentences and three errors, congrats.
Willis did not find those same peaks, one of them is at 9 years. The 100-yr modulation is just speculation, (and wrong because the sidebands are not symmetrical and not of the same amplitude) and there are indeed periods around 10, 11 and 12 years in the Best and UAH data.
jorgekafkazar says:
April 11, 2014 at 12:26 am
By inspection, TSI is clearly too flat to be a good candidate for temperature correlation. UV, on the other hand, varies much more. A lunar component might also be proposed, since there is a pronounced atmospheric ‘tide.’ Leif claims the thermosphere is too tenuous to have an effect on weather; I’m not so sure. It’s certainly low in density, but it’s thick, and the thickness varies considerably with incoming UV. The odds of a photon escaping from Earth without colliding with an atom or ion in the thermosphere is very small.
This may be very pertinent. Satellites are affected by thermosphere changes since a hotter states results in expansion and thus more drag on satellites placed in Low Earth Orbit. Cooling has the opposite effect. I’ve heard through grapevine sources that the last few years have seen unexpectedly low requirements for orbital correction maneuvers, meaning the “pause” has had genuine economic effects. Less maneuvering means that the satellite can remain in service longer before it ceases to be maintainable.
One could start with the basics. If we look at solar changes purely as a radiative forcing of 0.15 W/m2 (0.044%), one can calculate a no-feedbacks temperature change of 0.028 degK (using dW/W = 4*(dT/T). Multiple this whatever feedback amplification you prefer: The IPCC’s preferred value for TCR 1.8 degC is 1.5X greater than a no-feedbacks climate sensitivity of 1.2 degC, whereas Nic Lewis’s preferred TCR of 1.3 degC represents essentially no amplification. (For cycles of 11 years, TCR is a more appropriate metric than ECS.) From a purely forcing perspective, the amplitude of the temperature response to TSI forcing is likely to be about 0.03-0.05 degK.
Anyone proposing or finding changes bigger than this is looking for a mechanism that isn’t purely dependent on the change in total energy reaching the earth. The amplitude of the change in UV (about 10%) with the solar cycle is far greater than the amplitude of the TSI change (0.04%) and the change at even higher energies is greater – but these high energies don’t penetrate to the troposphere. The mechanism of their effect must be indirect. Trying to detect these indirect effects using TSI data reported units of W/m2 appears somewhat dubious, when we already know that radiant energy alone can’t produce large changes in temperature. Looking for correlations with some other proxy for solar activity besides TSI (sun spot number, C14, Be10, ?) might be more fruitful.
Willis, writes:
What Dr. Roy has done is to “composite” the variations in TSI. This means to stack them one on top of another … and here is where I ran into trouble.
I couldn’t figure out how he split up the TSI data to stack them, because the cycles have different lengths.
++++++++++
I’m at work, but found this post’s introduction of interest. I look forward to reading it more thoroughly later on, so my input could be moot or incorrect.
It sounds like Roy integrated the rate of TSI over time. In controls, when we integrate, we add up rates over a millisecond time frame so we capture at that level of precision, the accumulation of the rate. So the sample changes from a rate to an accumulation of that rate, or the integral. Thus if we integrate power over time, we get energy. If we integrate speed, we get distance. I hope my input is not insulting, but if this is what was done, readers might find my post of interest.
Kindest regards,
Mario AKA fanboy 🙂
Willis
There is a paper by Dan Pangburn : The Time-Integral of Solar Activity explains Global Temperatures 1610-2012, not CO2
Calculated Mean Global Temperatures 1610-2012
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-time-integral-of-solar-activity.html
This paper considers the effects of solar magnetic cycles on long term ocean heat flux and ocean surface temperature oscillations. This takes into account the total solar effect – UV flux and frequency changes during cycles, ozone production and destruction and solar proton flow that affects ozone heating, hence surface pressures and of course through cosmic ray flux low level cloud formation:
http://climatechange1.wordpress.com/2011/09/19/climate-disaster-declining-rainfall-rising-sea-levels/
http://www.space.dtu.dk/upload/institutter/space/forskning/06_projekter/isac/wp501b.pdf
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2014/04/new-paper-corroborates-solar-cosmic-ray.html
Since it is recognized that global land temperatures largely reflect ocean surface temperatures and ocean heat capacity through heat distribution via the atmosphere and ocean currents this approach that ignores the deficiencies of the land series makes more sense. I would be interested in your take on the paper.
Nice work Willis.
people should do the following thought experiment.
Look at figure 1.
Imagine that Willis had labelled that C02.
Then imagine he had claimed that he could find no c02 effect in the temperature data.
would you accept this result.
Now lets look at the twists and turns. First lets look at them schematically
A) Theory “X” influences the climate.
B) hypothesis, if “X” influences the climate and “X” has property “Y” ( a peak at 11 years)
Then we should find “Y” in the climate.
C:test.
we look for “Y” in the climate and dont find it
D: interpretation
I’ll use this example to make the argument Ive made many times before. Nothing compels us to
“falsify” a theory. Step D is not a logical step or mathematically determined. It is an interpretation
step. It’s governed by pragmatics .
Here are some choices.
1. Falsify the theory?
2. you need to use a different method
3. you need to look at different data sets/ adjust data etc
4. you need to look for different effects in the climate/
5. its too small to see we will have to wait.
6. Stop investigating the theory, chances of it being true are low
Note that there is Nothing in math or logic that dictates what you should do ( 1 through 6)
It a choice. a pragmatic choice.
Folks looking for a big solar influence are wasting their time. That’s a pragmatic choice.
After looking at the off-topic antarctic polar vortex graphic and the D’Aleo paper posted, plus the other comments, with all the feedbacks in place can you really expect a peak anywhere?
My guess are trend changes at best. Changes in UV and solar wind result in changes in ozone and cloud formations which changes wind and frozen precipitation patterns which changes ocean temps which changes jet stream patterns which .. you get the drift. Throw in the thermal inertia of the oceans and it make it worse.
I know the intent of the article was to prove/disprove a statement by Roy Spencer and Willis presented his methodology and findings in his usual easy read and understand method. But if you are heating a large pot of water on the stove and turn the heat down suddenly, the water temperature in the pot will slowly cool. Turn the heat back up and it will slowly warm. I see peaks in the heat going in, but curves in the results.
wow.
I should have read all the excuses before I did my comments.
folks seem to be saying.. Forget feynman…….
What ever you do Willis, dont falsify the theory.. dont do that!!!
forget Feynman, forget Popper…
Instead…
is your data good, look at hadcrut3, look at land, look at ocean, look at CET, arrggg
look at lake levels, look at stream flows, look look look find that 11 years somewhere..
find that unicorn..
is your method right? oh use a different method, use method x, scale by z, integrate the signal,
detrend, then integrate, transform, flip, stretch… find that 11 year signal..it has to be there…
dont look at TSI, look at UV.. look here, look there, look everywhere
Here is the clue folks. When you believe it has to be the sun, there is NO END to where you can look and how you can look.
No end.
No mathematical end,
no logical end.
You can look for unicorns forever.
and the longer you look the higher your chance of finding a spurious result.
if your goal is actually understanding things.. you’d note that the sun supplies the power. the power doesnt vary much.. and you’d look at something else to explain the changes.
I think we can safely say the Little Ice Age happened as there is just too much evidence to reason otherwise. So…how could it happen?
Either the Sun done it, the Clouds done it or the Oceans done it or they all contrived together to do it.
###############
sun + volcanos is the standard theory. it works.
“If there is an approximately 11 year solar signal in the temperature records, it is so small that it does not rise above the noise.”
Willis’s usual masterful analysis of TSI vs temperature quantifies long-held conclusions that variations in TSI are too small to correlate with global temperature changes. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that we should forget about solar variation related to global temperature. It isn’t mere coincidence that global cool periods correlate so well with times of low sunspot incidence (e.g., Maunder, Dalton, 1895-1915, 1945-1977 among others). The 11-year periodicity doesn’t correlate well with global temperature, but the number of sunspots in each cycle correlates very well.
Also interesting is the very good correlation of 10Be and 14C concentrations with sunspot number, which tells us that 10Be and 14C production rates in the upper atmosphere (which depend on radiation flux) are dancing in tune with solar variation and global temperature.
So my question, Willis, is what do the numbers show if you plot numbers of sunspots in each cycle with global temperature, rather than the periodicity?
Steven Mosher says:
April 11, 2014 at 9:40 am
…Folks looking for a big solar influence are wasting their time. That’s a pragmatic choice.
++++++++
Do you really conclude that the sun does not have a big influence on our climate? Riddle me this: What is the most influential source of energy that warms our planet?
I submit that the argument is whether or not relatively small changes in measured TSI could result in slightly higher variations in temperature of a complex system.
tolou says:
April 11, 2014 at 1:54 am
I looked at the plot. I don’t see any such influence. What next? Well, what would normally be next is a mathematical analysis of your data … I await your analysis.
w.
@njsnowfan says:
April 11, 2014 at 2:25 am
Thanks, snowfan. Unfortunately, your accompanying graph is useless, because you haven’t specified where you got your data, or how you have massaged it to get it to that form …
In any case, I just did a periodicity analysis on the AMO data. There is no peak of any kind near the 10 year 7 month period, and in fact the periodicity analysis of the AMO (as one would expect) looks very much like the periodicity of the HadCRUT data … no surprise there, because the AMO is just a detrended subset of the global temperature data.
w.
Kelvin Vaughan says:
April 11, 2014 at 1:35 am
Thanks, Kevin. You are right that kind of task is not too hard to do … if you already know the answer.
By that I mean that in your example you knew a) exactly what the signal looked like that you were searching for, and b) that it was in fact there, and c) you had scads of good clean data.
But as usual, “parallels” from the world of signal analysis don’t transfer all that well to the climate domain. Digging out a signal gets much harder when you don’t know if the signal is even there, or if it is, what it might look like, and when your data is really bad, with lots of gaps and variations in quality … in that kind of situation, you might find the signal and not recognize it, or not find it and think you recognize it.
When you solve that one, let me know. Until then, claims of success in some field other than climate like signal analysis don’t really mean much …
I don’t mean that climate scientists couldn’t learn from signal analysts, there’s much they could learn. But that doesn’t make the underlying problem more tractable.
w.
steverichards1984 says:
April 11, 2014 at 2:34 am
See my post immediately above …
So you are going to run a million possible scenarios, and grep for the extremes using a p-value of 0.95? … if you don’t see the problems with that procedure, I’m not going to try to explain them.
Finally, you ASSUME that the climate can be represented over some long period of time as a simple superposition of sine waves, and your method searches for them. If so … don’t you think a simple fourier analysis would be a better way to go about it? And don’t you think people might have tried that already?
w.
eco-geek says:
April 11, 2014 at 2:46 am
Dear heavens, njsnowfan’s graph shows NOTHING!.
We have no idea what was done to get those two lines to line up. eco-geek, I showed the actual TSI in Figure 1. When you figure out how njsnowfan converted that data to what you see in njsnowfan’s graph, you let us know, OK? Because njsnowfan’s data doesn’t contain an 11 year cycle. Look at Figure 1 before you sign up for njsnowfan’s uncited, unreferenced, and unexplained graph. Does his “TSI” data look like Figure 1? No. Can you explain why? No.
But SIMPLY BECAUSE IT FITS YOUR PREJUDICES, you want to pick up the snowfan’s uncited and unexplained, mystery graph and start bashing me with it? Sorry, my friend … here we do science.
w.
cRR Kampen says:
April 11, 2014 at 2:51 am
Science by unsupported assertion … wonderful. Come back when you actually have something to add to the discussion.
w.
D. Cohen says:
April 11, 2014 at 3:43 am
Yes, this claim can still be found online … so what? Even the most simplistic analysis of Herschel’s original claims about wheat prices and sunspots show that he was totally wrong. Heck, even your citation says Herschel was wrong …
And the citation you give? First off, it appeared in a Nature journal, so that means it’s got a good chance of being totally incorrect, as Nature has a long record of publishing bogus climate studies.
But setting that aside, did you bother to read the underlying document, or were you just fooled by the Nature article? Because the underlying document is a hoot. It’s here, and contains howlers like this one:
Oh, that’s wonderful. They simply throw out the data that doesn’t agree with their theory … and you believe them? Do your homework, friends. There is as much garbage about climate published in “scientific” journals like Nature as there is in the blogosphere … actually, often the quality of the science is much higher in the blogosphere.
I’m not sure why this kind of “science” is all too common in the field of solar studies. Perhaps people get sun-struck or something when they start their analysis …
w.
Steven Mosher says (elsewhere):
……… magic undetectable fairy dust (that) controls the temperature?
Not exactly, but close enough, it’s the flutter of its wings ; see bottom right hand corner,
lgl says:
April 11, 2014 at 7:03 am
Scafetta? If Scafetta told me it was raining, I’d look out the window. The document you cite closes by saying:
Couldn’t agree more …
w.
RobR says:
April 11, 2014 at 8:28 am
Really? And your evidence for this is … what?
Folks, “science by assertion” doesn’t work with me. If you want to make some claim like Rob’s claim, that the climate changes if sunspots go above or below a certain (unspecified) limit, you need more than your mouth to back that claim up.
w.
“Do you really conclude that the sun does not have a big influence on our climate? Riddle me this: What is the most influential source of energy that warms our planet?”
1. the sun supplies all the energy.
2. the variations in that power are small.
3. these variations do not influence the CLIMATE
4. climate is the long term average of weather.
There are exceptions. when we look over really long periods you will find evidence that orbital changes do influence the climate and that the faint young sun does as well.
But to the actual point. The changes from 1850 to today are not solar driven
A) the variations are small relative to the changes
B) there is no coherence between the TSI record and the temperature ( which is just PART OF the climate)
C) If you want to identify the cause of the change in temperature, you need to look at something else.
what is not a cause.
1. natural variation. natural variation doesnt explain natural variation.
2. ocean cycles. ocean cycles describe patterns in data they do not ’cause’
a good candidate for study?
well the intuition that the sun is the main cause is good one. the sun supplies the power received.
does anything else cause forcing or change forcing or modulate forcing.
yes: the atmosphere and what it is made of
Steven Mosher says:
April 11, 2014 at 9:55 am
” sun + volcanos is the standard theory. it works.”
Volcano: I do not thinks so, a big one would need to have gone off every couple of years for 350 years.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/02/24/volcanoes-erupt-again/
Sun: This post is saying no.
pochas says:
April 11, 2014 at 9:08 am
Pochas, I can’t tell you how tired I am of people posting uncited, unexplained, unreferenced plots like yours on the web. The plot you gave is entitled ” ‘Lumpy’ vs Armagh Temps”.
Now, I’m immersed enough in this world to know that “Lumpy” is Lucia’s name for her simplified climate model. And Armagh is a monastery with a very long and very good temperature record.
But above you claim that the temperatures are lagged, saying you had to “lag the model temperatures” … what does that mean, particularly since on your plot it says “lag sunspot data 36 months”. And what “sunspot data” are you using? It’s obviously not the raw data, given the smoothed curve.
Finally, I don’t see any 11-year signal in the Armagh data … hang on, I have it on my computer … OK, here’s the predominant cycles in the Armagh temperatures:
The problem is that there are no predominant cycles in the Armagh data, 11 years or otherwise. So your claim that the Armagh temperatures have a solar component simply doesn’t stand up to examination.
Look, guys. I’m happy to be shown wrong … but waving your hand at some whiz-bang uncited unexplained unreferenced and mathematically unanalyzed graph on the web isn’t anywhere near enough to do it.
w.
PS—Curiously, the same 44-month cycle is the strongest cycle in the Armagh data … WUWT?
“I’m sure you can see the problem in all of this. I’m just not finding anything at 10 years 7 months or anything like that in either surface or satellite lower troposphere temperatures.”
You don’t hear the carrier signal on your AM radio either. If you hypothesize that the Earth’s climate response is dominated by processes with very long time constants, then that could be effectively what is happening – the 11 year “carrier” is filtered out, and you get the “signal” which is carried in the envelope of the rectified carrier.
However, there is another possibility. To appreciably affect the climate, you might hypothesize that you need to get substantial ocean mixing to store up the heat. That would suggest that perhaps the additional solar heating would be modulated by the sloshing of the oceans as forced by nutation of the Earth’s polar spin axis.
The Earth’s spin axis undergoes forced nutation, mostly from lunar influences, with a period of about 18.6 years. The radius of that motion varies in roughly a 3:2 ratio with a period of about half that at 9.3 years. Modulate an 11 year influence with a 9.3 year one, and you get periods of
T1 = 11*9.3/(11+9.3) = 5 years
T2 = 11*9.3/(11-9.3) = 60 years
These are, roughly speaking, evident in the data. I discuss this all here.
Steven Mosher says:
April 11, 2014 at 9:55 am
Thanks, Steven. I dealt with the “volcanoes caused the Little Ice Age” claim in my post “Dronning Maud Meets the Little Ice Age“. Short answer? Ice core data says volcanoes had nothing to do with it.
w.
Willis Eschenbach says:
April 11, 2014 at 11:08 am
“Folks, “science by assertion” doesn’t work with me. If you want to make some claim like Rob’s claim, that the climate changes if sunspots go above or below a certain (unspecified) limit, you need more than your mouth to back that claim up.”
Wow, rereading it does seems I was making the assertion, but I didn’t mean to. I meant to state it as a plausibility. The Maunder minimum which likely had few sunspots occurred during the middle of the LIA. Some have attributed recent warming to above normal sun activity for the last few cycles. So I think the possibility exists and is plausible. Detailed observations really only exist from after the LIA, so proof is unlikely but its seems the plausibility might temper concluding (not putting words in anyone’s mouth) sunspot activity has little effect on climate.
steverichards1984 —-
Steve: I went and read the IEEE paper. It’s PRIMO! Written so that someone with a 30 year old, EE signal theory background, could really understand it. The implications of this are ASTOUNDING in many ways. It says MANY THINGS identified as NOISE could have intelligence in them.
Holy Cow! The right band spread signal, injected…say on “Heavy Metal Music” and you could have Beethoven’s 9th..Or, better yet, you could extract value from “Nightly News”.
The possibilities (and the satire) are endless!
Willis
I said others, in that case Svalgaard and Scafetta. From the pdf:
Svalgaard Scafetta (Years)
10.04 9.99 Figure 3
10.92 10.91 Figure 3
11.92 11.87 Figure 3
RobR
We do have pretty good records back to 1659 with Central England Temperature which I have extended to 1538 here;
http://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/11.jpg
I remain an agnostic about sunspots but it is plausible as some of the solar minimums do coincide with low temperatures. I am currently reconstructing the record to 1200AD and initial indications appear to be that we can infill the period 1500 to 1538 as being pretty warm with the fifty years before that being more unsettled and colder. This century long period overlaps with the Sporer minimum so it would appear to contain a notably warm AND a notably cold period!
Solar activity is not my field but its an interesting subject and hopefully the extended record might give us some more clues as to how the climate is affected by sunspots.
Incidentally it is quite noticeable in the historic record that at times the Aurora Borealis is seen a lot even in Southern Britain, whilst for the vast majority of the time it can’t be seen from this latitude. Presumably that would correlate with solar activity.
I am very dubious about the long term effect of volcanos though. The big ones appear to have an impact for a season or two, other than that the historic record shows their emissions as being lost in the noise
tonyb
Don Easterbrook says:
April 11, 2014 at 9:57 am
Not sure what you mean. Are you talking about a scatterplot of HadCRUt4 temperature vs. sunspot count? If so …
Is there a relationship between HadCRUT4 temperature and sunspots? Most definitely. Is it statistically significant? Yes, the p-value is less than 0.0001.
But does it make any difference? Well, the mean sunspot number is about 50. So when there are no sunspots at all, we can expect the earth to be cooler by 0.0001 * 50 = 0.005°C … five thousandths of a degree.
Like I said, the signal is lost in the noise.
w.
PS—I note that the peak-to-peak swing in the mean TSI values is about 0.6 W/m2, corresponding to the swing in the sunspot numbers of about 70 spots from peak to quiet. This would imply that a swing of 0.6 W/m2 in TSI would give us a swing of 70 * 0.0001 = .007°C … lost in the noise.
It also implies a climate sensitivity of 0.04°C per doubling of CO2, for what that’s worth.
tonyb says:
April 11, 2014 at 12:03 pm
………..
Your “long thaw from LIA to year 2000” axiom appears to be remarkably appropriate to the CET winter temperatures (see link in my graph, post further above).
Solar is in there, but indirectly and a way around, so it gets lost in the noisy crowd of ‘wannabes’.
Bart says:
April 11, 2014 at 11:31 am
T2 = 11*9.3/(11-9.3) = 60 years
Ahh, yes as Dr. Svalgaard would say “numerology”
60 year cycle in the AMO and in the N. Hemisphere, is what one might call an illusion, due to the short length of the data set. In the much longer CET records, which well correlate with NHT, there are two distinct periodicities of about 55 and 68 and possibly 90 years. Spectral analysis can’t separate them clearly in the shorter data sets such as the AMO, but produces a spectral envelope of these frequencies (see link in my post above – magenta line).
In addition, the spectrum of the NA. tectonics data appears to correlate closely.
It is rather premature to announce death of the 60 year cycle, but from here it looks to be in very poor health.
Sorry if someone has already mentioned this but there was a recent claim of sunspot integral correlating well with temp record: http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-time-integral-of-solar-activity.html
Willis Eschenbach says:
April 11, 2014 at 12:09 pm
“Are you talking about a scatterplot of HadCRUt4 temperature vs. sunspot count? ”
What about http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20070208/2006_temp_anom.gif
or earlier
With this: http://www.leif.org/research/New-Sunspot-Series-21yr-Run-Avg.png
“Thanks, Steven. I dealt with the “volcanoes caused the Little Ice Age” claim in my post “Dronning Maud Meets the Little Ice Age“. Short answer? Ice core data says volcanoes had nothing to do with it.”
Sorry Willis, not buying anything you wrote.
Steven Mosher says:
April 11, 2014 at 11:11 am
Thanks, Steven. Indeed something else modulates forcing. By a couple orders of magnitude, the largest factor in modulating the forcing is how much of the sun is allowed into the system. You keep ignoring the fact that there is a throttle on the system controlling the amount of energy which makes it into the earth’s climate system.
This throttle is the tropical clouds. They change the amount of incoming energy by hundreds of watts per square metre, not the pansy-arsed 0.6 W/m2 variation we get from TSI or the wimpy 1.2 W/m2 increase we’ve seen over the 20th century from CO2.
And the tropical clouds in turn are thermally regulated, meaning that the warmer it gets the more clouds you get. A few moments reflection shows that this kind of throttle linkage is theoretically sufficient to keep the temperature of the earth within narrow bounds (e.g. a temperature variation of only ± 0.3°C over the 20th century).
Finally, notice that the balance point of this cloud-based thermal regulation system is set by temperature. Tropical clouds form when the temperature is sufficiently high, not when the forcing (whether from solar or CO2) is high. They don’t care a fig for the forcing levels. They form wherever there is a local hot spot, not where there is a spot of increased forcing.
As a result, the system is largely immune to changes in the total forcing.
So you’re almost there, Steven. You just need to stop focusing on what changes forcing by 2 W/m2, and notice the clouds changing the forcing by 200 W/m2 …
w.
vukcevic says:
April 11, 2014 at 12:28 pm
‘Ahh, yes as Dr. Svalgaard would say “numerology”’
He probably would. But, that would be incorrect. Here, there is an actual, plausible physical mechanism involved.
Steven says:
April 11, 2014 at 12:38 pm
.. a recent claim of sunspot integral correlating well with temp record: http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-time-integral-of-solar-activity.html
Interesting
vukcevic says:
April 11, 2014 at 11:03 am
Steven Mosher says (elsewhere):
……… magic undetectable fairy dust (that) controls the temperature?
Not exactly, but close enough, it’s the flutter of its wings ; see bottom right hand corner,
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/bfly.gif
RobR says:
April 11, 2014 at 11:40 am
Thanks for replying, Rob. Is it plausible that the variations in TSI/heliomagnetism/cosmic rays somehow cause variations in the climate? Absolutely. That’s the reason that so much energy has been expended in trying to demonstrate some such link, including my own.
However, the problem is that there is no such clear or convincing evidence. What I show above is my latest attempt to find such evidence. I thought, well, regardless of whether there are lags in the effect (likely), and regardless of of what the mechanism linking the sun to the earth might be, the one thing I could depend on was that the effect would have a cycle length of right around eleven years. So a few days ago I set out to see what I could find in the way of that cycle in some of the major temperature datasets.
As with all of my previous attempts to find such evidence, this one showed that the effect was so small it didn’t raise above the noise.
Now, I do show above that there is in fact a statistically significant relationship between sunspots and temperature … but it is extremely small. Above, I implied the TSI relationship from the sunspot numbers. Hang on, let me re-do the analysis using the actual TSI numbers versus the temperature.
…
…
Nope, just tested it. There’s no significant relationship between TSI and HadCRUT4, the p-value is .278.
Ah well. You see my problem. While as you point out it is plausible that 11-year solar variations can have an effect on the global temperature, repeated attempts to find evidence for such a relationship have generally failed. And when they haven’t failed, as in my analysis above, the effect is vanishingly small.
To me, this supports my contention that the temperature is thermally regulated by emergent climate phenomena like thunderstorms, El Nino, dust devils, and the PDO. One feature of the system I hypothesize is that it is robust against variations in forcing.
w.
lgl says:
April 11, 2014 at 12:01 pm
Sorry, lgl, but I simply don’t know or don’t remember what you are talking about.
Folks, QUOTE WHAT YOU ARE DISCUSSING. What “pdf”? What “others” What “Figure 3”? I deal with hundreds of comments every day, new people are always joining the discussion, and I simply can’t be bothered to search for your previous pearl of wisdom.
Quote it or forget it.
w.
Bart says:
April 11, 2014 at 12:51 pm
Makes no sense, lack of foundation. Which “here” and which “plausible physical mechanism” are you referring to?
w.
Willis Eschenbach says:
April 11, 2014 at 12:51 pm
This throttle is the tropical clouds. They change the amount of incoming energy by hundreds of watts per square metre, not the pansy-arsed 0.6 W/m2 variation we get from TSI or the wimpy 1.2 W/m2 increase we’ve seen over the 20th century from CO2.
And the tropical clouds in turn are thermally regulated, meaning that the warmer it gets the more clouds you get. A few moments reflection shows that this kind of throttle linkage is theoretically sufficient to keep the temperature of the earth within narrow bounds (e.g. a temperature variation of only ± 0.3°C over the 20th century).
Willis Eschenbach says:
April 11, 2014 at 1:19 pm
..One feature of the system I hypothesize is that it is robust against variations in forcing.
While it maybe robust against warming, it may not be equally robust against cooling.
Richard says:
April 11, 2014 at 1:00 pm
I read the start and couldn’t make heads or tails of it. For example, perhaps one or the other of you gentlemen could shed some light on this statement:
“Averaging-out the uncertainties”? I’d love to do that, but how?
And how does removing uncertainties “produce the average global temperature oscillation”? What does that mean?
Finally, he says that the “average global temperature oscillation” is the result of the “net” oscillation of the surface of the ocean … sorry, but that statement doesn’t seem to touch bottom anywhere. I don’t even know what a “net oscillation” might look like as opposed to say a “gross oscillation”.
Like I said, I couldn’t make sense of it, so I let it go. So many drummers … so little time …
w.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/04/05/courtillot-on-the-solar-uv-climate-connection/
Dr. Vincent Courtillot points out that total solar irradiance only varies by about .1% over a solar cycle, the solar UV varies by about 10% & that secondary effects on cloud formation may vary up to 30% over solar cycles. Hence the variation in UV is 100 times greater than in TSI. Dr. Svalgaard counters that this is still not much energy relative to TSI & adds that he doesn’t like Courtillot’s data handling.
As some have argued on this blog, the small variation in UV could have outsized effects high in the atmosphere in ways not adequately studied yet, such as creating CCNs. Ways in which such a possible influence ultimately affects the climate system might not be immediately obvious in climatic data, without more & better data & the breakdown & analysis thereof, such as effects in regions or at times typically low in CCNs.
Maybe a better place to make this comment might have been in the recent post on Svensmark’s solar magentism modulated GCR-CCN hypothesis, but IMO it applies here as well.
Richard says:
April 11, 2014 at 1:33 pm
While it is clearly not robust against a regime shift to ice-age temperatures, it is robust against normal cooling.
The reason is that there is plenty of heat for the system to draw on. So for example, in the tropics when it is cooler than normal, the clouds form later in the day or not at all.
This means that at noon the tropical surface may be getting as much as a kilowatt of solar energy per square metre … which is a very robust response to cooling, enough to give the planet a bad sunburn if the clouds didn’t return.
w.
Willis Eschenbach says:
April 11, 2014 at 1:26 pm
“Here” refers to the post above, in which the plausible physical mechanism was put forward.
milodonharlani says:
April 11, 2014 at 1:39 pm
Thanks, [s]milodon. That is exactly why I did this type of analysis. It doesn’t matter for my purposes whether the hypothesized connection is a direct TSI effect, or an effect modulated by cosmic rays, or an effect from UV. They all vary on the same ~ 11-year cycle, in line with the sunspots. As a result, if any or all of them had a significant effect, it would show up in the periodicity analysis … but it doesn’t.
w.
Willis Eschenbach says:
April 11, 2014 at 1:45 pm
Which is why more data are needed. IMO only then can solar UV & magnetic flux be ruled out as important influences on climate. The required data are lacking.
PS: Courtillot’s analysis does show a strong solar influence, although as noted Svalgaard thinks that his data handling exaggerates the correlation.
Willis,
Sorry—I should have been more specific. I wasn’t thinking of a scatterplot of HadCRUt4 temperature vs. sunspot count. I was thinking of plotting temperature data older than HadCrut4 against time, then plotting sunspot incidence for the same time period, and overlaying the two plots to see if they correlate. This has been done in a general way (e.g., the Maunder and Dalton), but the time scales aren’t very detailed or don’t go back far enough in time (at least not the ones I’ve seen). In order to get better temperature/time resolution I used the original oxygen isotope data from the GISP2 Greenland core and temperatures from the CET record. The original data has plenty of data points so you can choose your own level of detail. Both the GISP2 ice core and the CET show times of significant cooling that correspond to the historical record. Overlaying these plots on a sunspot/time plot for the same time periods shows a remarkable correlation, even for less pronounced temperature variations. The same is true for the Hoyt/Shatten TSI data. Others have published a variety of correlations (see for example, the one by Dan Pangburn referred to in comments), but don’t go back far enough in time.
So why am I asking you this question? What I’m looking for is better resolution than what you see in the published literature and with your phenomenal knack for digging up data, thought you might have a better handle on this.
Don
Bart says:
April 11, 2014 at 11:31 am
So your hypothesis is that the 11-year solar TSI signal is somehow amplitude modulated to carry another signal at a different frequency, and that upon arrival at the earth, the climate system rectifies the combined signal to remove the carrier frequency entirely and completely, leaving only the modulated signal.
Riiiight … so should I wear something to protect myself from this special amplitude-modulated sunshine, which is presumably carrying some unknown message in an amplitude-modulated manner? I mean, in your opinion would for example a thin layer of aluminum around my main sensory processing center keep this amplitude-modulated signal from affecting me?
I swear, some folks have some decidedly zany physics operating on their planets …
w.
milodonharlani says:
April 11, 2014 at 1:48 pm
That’s a convenient claim … but just how much data do we need? Look, milodon, if UV and magnetic flux were in your words an “important influence” on climate, then why after decades and decades of searching are we still discussing the question? Herschel proposed that sunspots affect wheat prices centuries ago … people are still trying to find such a relationship. Yes, I know, every once in a while someone teases something weak out of the data, but why is there nothing conclusive?
It’s because evidence for such a connection, as I show above in what is merely the latest installment of the very long search, has been remarkably elusive.
Now you can certainly claim that we need more data and more time …
But after centuries of searching, while we can never rule out that solar UV and magnetic flux may be influences on climate, it seems very unlikely that they are important influences. From all evidence to date, they are what I would call third-order influences.
w.
Willis,
I think I see what you mean. I took the graph in good faith OK I imagined axis values but that seemed fair in context -although it was a little too perfect come to think of it – apart from the short cycles of course. In my interpretation it does contradict what you say but fairly you query what “it” is I should have looked with a more critical eye but the quacks just told me I am going blind and I can barely read the screen already.
eco-geek
Willis Eschenbach says:
April 11, 2014 at 2:07 pm
I do not know how you can fail to understand what I have explained. But, it has been obvious for a long time that you do not understand basic signal processing concepts. And, then you compound your ignorance with a bunch of snark. Which is why I generally avoid your posts.
Be that way. Not worth any more of my time…
Willis Eschenbach says:
April 11, 2014 at 2:23 pm
IMO there are data supportive of an important influence, although discounted by Dr. Svalgaard, ie the Maunder & Dalton Minima. There is also experimental evidence, in that cosmic rays have been shown to create CCNs. To confirm the effect on climate, a long term study of regions in which the formation of clouds is limited by CCN number is called for, IMO.
milodonharlani says:
April 11, 2014 at 1:50 pm
From your quotation:
Since the UV varies in lockstep with the sunspots, if that were true, surely it would show up in the temperature as an ~ 11-year cycle. But there is no 11-year cycle in temperatures. Now, I just wandered into this analysis a few days ago. This is all new science to me. I haven’t looked extensively at individual temperature records.
But to date, I haven’t found a single temperature record that shows any power in the 11-year range at all. Not one.
SO … for you and all others that think that such a “strong solar influence” exists, whip out your fourier analysis or your spectrum analysis or your wavelet analysis and bring it on! Let’s get this settled. Find a temperature dataset somewhere that has a strong peak at ~ 11 years, and we can all test it ourselves.
w.
There is a lot of calculatus eliminatus going on in the climate science world. Is it in the oceans? No. Mark that F2-104. Is it in the sun spots? No. Make that one million and three. How about the volcanoes? No? Mark that two dozen and four. To find out what is warming the earth you must find out what is not!
milodonharlani says:
April 11, 2014 at 1:39 pm
“Dr. Vincent Courtillot points out that total solar irradiance only varies by about .1% over a solar cycle, the solar UV varies by about 10% & that secondary effects on cloud formation may vary up to 30% over solar cycles. Hence the variation in UV is 100 times greater than in TSI. ”
=========================================================================
Please help me understand. TSI varies 0.1% and UV makes up about 10% of the TSI and is already included in the 0.1% TSI variance , wouldn’t that mean UV only accounts for 0.01% of the total variance?
Thanks Willis. Lots of information here.
The Role of the Solar Cycle in the Relationship Between the North Atlantic Oscillation and Northern Hemisphere Surface Temperatures
“The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) is one of the leading modes of climate variability in the Northern Hemisphere. It has been shown that it clearly relates to changes in meteorological variables, such as surfacetemperature, at hemispherical scales. However, recent studies have revealed that the NAO spatial patternalso depends upon solar forcing. Therefore, its effects on meteorological variables must vary depending upon this factor. Moreover, it could be that the Sun affects climate through variability patterns, a hypothesis that is the focus of this study. We find that the relationship between the NAO/AO and hemispheric temperature varies depending upon solar activity. The results show a positive significant correlation only when solar activity is high. Also, the results support the idea that solar activity influences tropospheric climate fluctuations in the Northern Hemisphere via the fluctuations of the stratospheric polar vortex.”
http://ephyslab.uvigo.es/publica/documents/file_17418-The%20role%20of%20the%20solar%20cycle%20on%20the%20NAO%20signature%20in%20NH%20surface%20temperature-AAS-2007.pdf
Willis Eschenbach: I read the start and couldn’t make heads or tails of it. For example, perhaps one or the other of you gentlemen could shed some light on this statement:
I couldn’t follow it either. I hope he rewrites it to make better sense.
Also, I liked your responses to Steven Mosher. You might be right.
Good job.
I didn’t remember doing a post on this…so I went back and read it. Sure sounds like my writing. But I still don’t remember it very well. Jeez, I’m getting old. Must have been one of my 1-day studies. 🙂
Tom in Florida says:
April 11, 2014 at 3:03 pm
Total TSI varies by 0.1%, but variation in solar UV is 10%, so relatively more of the variation is from that part of the spectrum than from other parts of TSI. These aren’t actual numbers, but give you the idea:
Low end of the cycle: 1 part UV + 1000.1 parts visible, IR, etc = TSI of 1001.1
High end of the cycle: 1.1 parts UV + 1000.11 parts other = TSI of 1001.21
While UV varies by 10%, the rest of the spectrum varies very little. UV varies a lot more than the rest of the solar spectrum.
milodonharlani says:
April 11, 2014 at 3:33 pm
“Total TSI varies by 0.1%, but variation in solar UV is 10%, so relatively more of the variation is from that part of the spectrum than from other parts of TSI. These aren’t actual numbers, but give you the idea:
Low end of the cycle: 1 part UV + 1000.1 parts visible, IR, etc = TSI of 1001.1
High end of the cycle: 1.1 parts UV + 1000.11 parts other = TSI of 1001.21
While UV varies by 10%, the rest of the spectrum varies very little. UV varies a lot more than the rest of the solar spectrum.”
==========================================================================
So 10% of squat is still squat, right?
BTW, Willis, you make a good point that the total temperature signal contained in the 11 year cycle is very small, so whatever signal we deduce could just be coincidental. I think I alluded to this in my post, too.
Bart says:
April 11, 2014 at 2:29 pm
Excellent news.
However, if you’d care to explain the physics behind how the earth is rectifying an AM signal, I’m all ears. I can’t see how that would work.
To start with, to successfully amplitude-modulate a carrier frequency, the carrier frequency is typically much higher than the signal frequency. So we see the signal as a slow change in the amplitude of the carrier. And yes, we can see something like this in the TSI data.
You could see that as an AM signal, I suppose.
Now, IF your hypothesis is correct, then the 11-year variations in TSI get totally “rectified” in some unspecified fashion, not leaving even a hum behind, and we’re left with something like the gold line below as the signal which has been used to modulate the carrier:
The gold line is something akin to your hypothesized rectified AM signal.
Then the temperature is said to follow that gold line somehow … so my question is:
What physical mechanism would make the climate totally and completely insensitive to the large, 11-year cycles in TSI, and yet respond to the much smaller secular variation and drift in the TSI?
That’s the part of the signal processing that I’m not following. What makes it follow the small overall drift and yet ignore the much larger peaks and valleys?
w.
PS—As a ham radio licence holder (H44WE), I am familiar with signal processing concepts of many kinds, including the things you’ve discussed such as sidelobes, carrier frequencies, signal modulation, bandpass filters, overtones, heterodyning, and the like. I’m also familiar with Fourier analysis, although far from an expert, and with the concepts and mathematics of switching between frequency and time domains.
So it’s unclear which basic signal processing concepts of relevance to this discussion you think I don’t understand.
Tom in Florida says:
April 11, 2014 at 3:40 pm
Not necessarily. It could be big. Nature loves threshold effects, & small changes can make large differences. The state of H2O changes at 32 degrees F, for instance.
When you consider that the sun brightens just one percent every ~110 million years, that 10% amounts to a substantial variation over years to decades, especially as UV rays are more energetic than visible or IR light.
Or consider that a change of one degree C amounts to just 0.35% of our planet’s average T.
If for instance, ozone, the production of which in the stratosphere is mainly by UVC, were to vary 10% over an 11 year cycle, the affect on earth’s climate could be substantial.
Roy Spencer says:
April 11, 2014 at 3:27 pm
I know exactly how you feel, Dr. Roy. After a while, the old posts start to fade together …
All the best, thanks for the comment,
w.
Roy Spencer says:
April 11, 2014 at 3:27 pm
I didn’t remember doing a post on this…so I went back and read it. Sure sounds like my writing. But I still don’t remember it very well. Jeez, I’m getting old. Must have been one of my 1-day studies. 🙂
Dr. Spencer
Not to despair, not all is lost. Fig.2 shows peak at 10 year 7 months, solar magnetic (Hale) cycle is about 21.2 years.
I did
this graph
couple of years ago, it looks convincing.
You were nearly there.
Sorry to come in so late but here is the 3.75 and 7.5 year cycles that I picked out in the satelite data!
best seen in the small trough at 3.75 big trough at 7.5 repeat.
Should be a big trough low coming up in 2016
To summarise, the global temperature anomaly graph can be characterised by
combining three simple formulae:
A = 0.18*SIN(((YEAR-1993)/60)*2*3.14159)+0.2
B = 0.1*COS(((YEAR-1982)/7.5)*2*3.14159
C = 0.25*COS(((YEAR -1980)/3.75)*2*3.14159
The overarching trend is a sixty year cycle: = A
The moving 20-month average adds a 7.5 year cycle attenuated by the truncation of
the positive peaks of the 7.5 year cycle : = A + (IF B>0, 0, ELSE = B)
The monthly average combines a 7.5 year cycle with a 3.75 year cycle (i.e. twice the
7.5 year cycle) to capture the pattern where every second trough in the 3.75 year COS
function is significantly deeper the others : = A + (3/4) * B + C
I use http://www.climate4you.com/images/AllCompared%20GlobalMonthlyTempSince1979.gif
as my source for temp data
Cheers
brantc says:
April 11, 2014 at 3:17 pm
That link is hilarious, Brant, their idea of statistics is a hoot. I should do a post on it. They look at a host of possible correlations between the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), and the Northern Hemisphere Temperature (NHT). They settle on correlations between the two for the following months:
January-February-March,
December-January-February-March,
November-December-January-February-March, and
March-April-May.
Why no February-March-April? Presumably because either the correlations or the astrological signs weren’t favorable … since this claims to be science, I’m guessing it’s bad correlations, not bad astrology.
So let’s see. They’re investigating correlations between 3, 4, and 5 month contiguous chunks of data. There are 12 of each of those for the NAO and for the NHT, for a total of 12 * 3 = 36 individual choices of intervals to compare.
But wait, it gets better. They then divide all the years of record into three groups depending on the length of the sunspot cycle. They call these groups “10-year”, “11-year” and “12-year” so I assume 10-year includes 9-year cycles and 12-year includes 13-year cycles.
And then they pick the best four.
So … out of 36 possibilities, they’ve picked four of them without replacement. There are 36*35*34*33 = 1,413,720 possible ways to pick four of them. Then, as mentioned above, they divided them into three groups by sunspot cycle lengths, calculated all the correlations … and then they seem terribly impressed that some of the results are “significant at a 95% confidence level”, in their words.
Well, duh … with over a million possible combinations to pick from, are we surprised that they’ve been able to pick one of them with lots of correlations?
The mind boggles … the gob is smacked …
w.
Looking at TSI as a cause of global temperature probably isn’t going to get anywhere. As Svensmark has pointed out, the sun’s magnet field shields the Earth from cosmic radiation and when the sun’s magnetic field diminishes, more radiation penetrates the atmosphere where ionization induces nucleation of condensation. The resulting cloudiness changes the albedo and results in atmospheric cooling. Low sunspot numbers are indications of reduced solar magnetic fields, which lead to increased cloudiness on Earth. More clouds equals cooling. So to get at the sun’s role in global climate, we need to look for evidence of low solar magnetic fields and increased cosmic radiation. This can be done by looking at production rates of 10Be and 14C in the atmosphere, both of which are controlled by cosmic ray flux. High cosmic ray flux rates increases the rates of production of both of these isotopes, and 10Be and 14C concentrations can be measured in ice cores and CaCO3 cave deposits.
10Be has been measured in ice cores dating back to the 1400s and guess what? 10Be increases sharply at the Wolf Solar Minimum, the Sporer Solar Minimum, the Maunder Solar Minimum, the Dalton Solar Minimum, the 1880-1915 cool period. Plotting sunspot numbers on the same graph shows that each of these spikes in atmospheric 10Be production corresponds to periods of low sunspot numbers.
Measurement of δ14C and δ18O/16O in calcium carbonate cave deposits from about 6500 to 8,300 years ago shows a similar correspondence between radiocarbon and temperature. The δ14C and δ18O/16O curves match so well it’s like they are dancing in step to the same music.
In more recent times, the cool period from 1945 to 1977 occurred during a period of much diminished flux density.
So the progression is the declining solar magnet field removes shielding of the Earth from cosmic radiation and the increased radiation leads to ionization and nucleation of clouds, which reflect solar energy and cooling. Documenting this progression in the past can be made by 10Be and 14C measurements from ice cores and cave deposits.
Sound like a smoking gun?
Don
Don Easterbrook says:
April 11, 2014 at 8:55 pm
What he said.
Don Easterbrook says:
April 11, 2014 at 8:55 pm
milodonharlani says:
April 11, 2014 at 8:59 pm
Both of you seem to misapprehend what I’ve done. I didn’t look to see whether TSI is a cause of global temperature. I looked at whether TSI or anything else that varies in sync with the sunspot cycle is affecting temperature … and so far, the answer is a resounding “No”.
I invited you all above to point out a temperature dataset which has power in the 11-year cycles … not to show that it was connected to TSI. At present, I’m looking for any effect with that kind of periodicity.
IF we can find the 11-year cycles in some dataset or other, THEN we can begin to speculate on what might cause them as Don does above.
But without that, you have an explanation vainly searching for a phenomenon … so I repeat my call for any temperature dataset with a visible 11-year cycle. Like I said, use the tool of your preference, Fourier, spectrum analysis, wavelets, I don’t care … where is that dataset?
w.
@Willis Eschenbach “The average cyclical swing in TSI over the period of record is 0.6 W/m2. Note that to calculate the equivalent 24/7 average insolation on the earth’s surface you need to divide the W/m2 values by 4. This means that Dr. Roy and others are looking for a temperature signal from a fluctuation in downwelling solar of .15 W/m2 over a decade … and the signal-to-noise ratio on that is frankly depressing. This is the reason for all of the interest in “amplifying” mechanisms such as cosmic ray variations, since the change in TSI itself is too small to do much of anything.”
What do you mean by a downwelling of 0.15 W/m2 over a decade? 0.15 W/m2 multiplied by a decade is a hell of a lot – so maybe you mean something else?
We have accurate readings of TSI from only 26th March 2003. I thought I’d check the data myself. The difference between TSI received from 26/05/2003 to 26/01/2004 and from 4/08/2008 to 6/04/2009, a period of 245 days, is 102 W/m2 or 25.5 W/m2 over the surface of the Earth. That is the Earth received about 1.48×10^16 Watts more during the former period than the latter.
Does this show up in the temperature charts. I think it does. What more of a “signal” do you want?
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_March_2014_v5.png
I got hung up staring at figure 4, since I was earlier looking at a graph of the temperature patterns over the last several ice age stadials. Figure 4 looks like a compressed 110,000 year record of stepped cooling to a low point, with sudden warming of the interstadials. Does the sun employ the same cycle pattern on multiple time scales? I’m beginning to suspect changes in the earth’s orbit aren’t the sole cause of ice ages.
Steven Mosher says:
April 11, 2014 at 11:11 am
“Do you really conclude that the sun does not have a big influence on our climate? Riddle me this: What is the most influential source of energy that warms our planet?”
1. the sun supplies all the energy.
2. the variations in that power are small.
3. these variations do not influence the CLIMATE
4. climate is the long term average of weather.
There are exceptions. when we look over really long periods you will find evidence that orbital changes do influence the climate and that the faint young sun does as well.
But to the actual point. The changes from 1850 to today are not solar driven
A) the variations are small relative to the changes
B) there is no coherence between the TSI record and the temperature ( which is just PART OF the climate)
C) If you want to identify the cause of the change in temperature, you need to look at something else.
what is not a cause.
1. natural variation. natural variation doesnt explain natural variation.
2. ocean cycles. ocean cycles describe patterns in data they do not ’cause’
a good candidate for study?
well the intuition that the sun is the main cause is good one. the sun supplies the power received.
does anything else cause forcing or change forcing or modulate forcing.
yes: the atmosphere and what it is made of
++++++++++
I asked: “Do you really conclude that the sun does not have a big influence on our climate?”
And you said it supplies all the energy. That’s not completely, true, it supplies most of the energy. But let’s just say it’s 100%. You’re saying that something that supplies all of the energy to our planet does not have a big influence on our planet. And then conclude – and only changes in our atmosphere are responsible.
Of course we would agree the sun affects our climate since it supplies all the energy. And of course changes in atmosphere affect our climate.
I also submit that there is good knowledge of our atmosphere being changed by changes in the sun. This is why your original statement was taken to task.
Richard says:
April 11, 2014 at 9:22 pm
Sorry for the confusion, Richard. Curiously, my writing is never as clear to others as it is to me … go figure.
In any case, I didn’t say “a downwelling of 0.15 W/m2 over a decade”. I said a fluctuation in downwelling solar of .15 W/m2 over a decade, meaning that the sun goes up and down by that much over a period of ten years. It doesn’t mean a constant forcing of 0.15 W/m2 as you seem to think.
w.
Richard says:
April 11, 2014 at 9:22 pm
It’s possible that you are looking at something different. It is true that the planet moves closer to and further from the sun, and this changes the instantaneous sun strength (although not by as much as you claim).
However, that doesn’t make sense, because you have compared 245 day of solar data from May to January on one hand to 245 days of data from August to April. So I haven’t a clue why you got that result.
But since (as appears to be your habit) you haven’t provided a link to your data, I’m afraid I can’t comment on it.
In any case, the TSI data that is normally cited and used is standardized so all of it reflects the strength of the sun at a constant fixed distance from the sun. That way, the data only contains the variations in the solar strength itself, and doesn’t contain the changes due to the elliptical orbit of the earth around the sun.
w.
You have to see that cosmic radiation is concentrated in the middle and high widths, causing changes in the ozone, in accordance with the geomagnetic field. If the magnetic activity of the sun falls, the radiation flux will significantly increase in these areas.
http://terra2.spacenvironment.net/~raps_ops/current_files/rtimg/dose.15km.png
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/intraseasonal/temp50anim.gif
Willis,
“I looked at whether TSI or anything else that varies in sync with the sunspot cycle is affecting temperature … and so far, the answer is a resounding “No”.
I agree–as I said, I don’t think that the 11-year periodicity in itself is going to tell us much about the relationship between the sun and global temperature. It’s what happens DURING the 11-year cycles that is telling us something, i.e., the sunspot number is a symptom of what is happening with the sun’s magnetic field and that is the most important variable. The incidence of low sunspot numbers of the Wolf, Sporer, Maunder, Dalton, and 1880-1915 Minimums during cool periods gives us a clue that we should look for evidence of decreased solar magnetic fields at those times. The cool periods span more than one 11-yr cycle, typically up to three cycles of low sunspot numbers. The higher 10Be and 14C isotope production rates during these cycles tell us that the cosmic radiation flux was high and thus the solar magnetic field low. So the solar connection looks very real in the data, but it isn’t going to show up in 11-year periodicity itself. So I don’t think we need to wait for an 11-year periodicity connection to show up before looking at cause-and-effect relationships between the sun and global temperature. The real-time data speaks for itself.
Don
Don Easterbrook
The increase in GCR is just visible especially now, when we have peak activity at 24 cycle.
Don Easterbrook says:
April 11, 2014 at 11:12 pm
Don, you are making the claim that I discussed upthread. This is the claim that the system somehow is impervious to the large 11-year changes in sunspots / TSI / magnetism / whatever… but at the same time it is exquisitely sensitive to the much smaller slow secular variation and drift of sunspots / TSI / magnetism / whatever.
Now … if you can explain how that happens, you might be on to something. Me, I don’t see how that could possibly be the case.
Do you think, for example, that the seasonal changes in solar input could show up in the data, but NOT the daily changes in solar input? Could the system not change from the large solar day/night swing in input, but still change from season to season due to much smaller solar changes?
And if you think so, what physical process could possibly mask out the daily changes but allow in the much slower seasonal changes?
Because this is exactly what you are claiming, that the system somehow ignores the much larger changes in the 11-year solar cycle, but responds to half-century long changes in the same variable(s) that are a couple of orders of magnitude smaller?
Call me crazy, but I misdoubts that claim of yours …
w.
Willis I wonder whether it might be better to pick a single site that has a quality data set, and is not influenced by the UHI effect, and compare its maximum temperatures only, with the various solar measurements.
Ian Bryce says:
April 12, 2014 at 12:39 am
Thanks, Ian. Upthread I showed periodicity of the Armagh data, one of the world’s longest continuous temperature datasets. However, I was using the mean data, not the max. Hang on, I think I have the max data … … OK, dug it out, converted it to R. No difference from the previous analysis of the mean data. Here’s that previous result again:
Note that not only is there no sign of an 11-year cycle, there’s no large cycles at all. The periodicity analysis of both the min and max data is virtually identical to that.
Finally, I looked at the periodicity of the monthly temperature range. I did this because the study of Forbush events that someone linked to above used daily temperature range as a proxy for cloud cover. The thinking is that clouds warm the nights and cool the days, so more clouds would lead to a narrower temperature range.
However, the periodicity analysis of the monthly temperature range showed no ~ 11-year cycle … nor any other cycle for that matter. So now I’ve investigated three more datasets, and found no 11-year cycles.
Still waiting …
w.
I thought of something else: a periodicity that should have popped up in the temperature data sets but didn’t.
1) Since the data was monthly values, and
2) Since the sun warms first one half of the world during half of a year and then the other half of the world during the second half, and
3) Since the data was “land” measurement data, and
4) Since there is much more land mass above the equator than below, and
5) Since there are many more temperature measurements in the northern hemisphere than in the southern, . . . . . . .
well shouldn’t there have been a HUGE periodicity spike at 1/2 year when supposedly the sun was warming all of those northern hemisphere temperature guages?
Willis Eschenbach says:
April 11, 2014 at 10:59 pm
It’s possible that you are looking at something different. It is true that the planet moves closer to and further from the sun, and this changes the instantaneous sun strength (although not by as much as you claim).
However, that doesn’t make sense, because you have compared 245 day of solar data from May to January on one hand to 245 days of data from August to April. So I haven’t a clue why you got that result.
But since (as appears to be your habit) you haven’t provided a link to your data, I’m afraid I can’t comment on it.
This is the data Link. It’s from SOURCE. The reason why I didn’t cite it was because I presumed you knew about it. I have taken the daily data of TSI.
http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/sorce/data/tsi-data/#summary_table
It may not agree with any logic of yours but I have got the result because the data says so.
And I might add its May to Jan 2003/4 and Aug to April 2008/9 Those were the periods of Max and Min Solar Irradiance
PS the computation actually comes to about 119 W/m2 (not 102) or 29.8 W/m2 on the Earth’s surface. And that’s a forcing of about 1.73×10^16 Watts over that period
SORCE even
Willis Eschenbach says:
April 11, 2014 at 10:59 pm
You might get a slightly different result as there are some days with 0 data. For these I have taken values in between the ends of the discontinuity.
Ok Willis
Close your eyes and you will not see it.
http://virakkraft.com/periodicity-sun-temp.png
http://www.leif.org/research/Scafetta-Report.pdf
Richard had said:
April 11, 2014 at 9:22 pm
I questioned that. How could TSI be different by 102 W/m2? And what was the source of his data? The answer:
I never, ever assume what someone used as a data source. I’ve been bitten too many times to guess what you have neglected to specify.
Richard, from your link, showing the SORCE data:
Now … you do see that the variations over the 11 year cycle are on the order of 0.5 to 1 W/m2? The range of the entire scale of the graph is only 3 W/m2.
So while you may claim that the difference between two 245-day periods is 102 W/m2 … I’m not seeing it in the data you used.
w.
lgl says:
April 12, 2014 at 1:48 am
That makes no sense at all. What you have shown in those graphs is simply the graph I showed, clumsily overlaid with a Fourier analysis of “synthetic data”. Now “synthetic data” seems like an oxymoron to me … and a Fourier analysis (FFT) of synthetic data seems perfectly transcendental, by which I mean totally disconnected from reality.
More to the point, I don’t understand what you think overlaying my graphs with the FFT of some random hunk of synthetic data means … but to me it means nothing. I asked for a TEMPERATURE DATASET containing some visible 11-year signal. Overlaying my graph with the FFT of “synthetic data” is nothing like what’s wanted and needed.
w.
Willis Eschenbach says:
April 12, 2014 at 3:24 am
Richard, from your link, showing the SORCE data:
Now … you do see that the variations over the 11 year cycle are on the order of 0.5 to 1 W/m2? The range of the entire scale of the graph is only 3 W/m2.
So while you may claim that the difference between two 245-day periods is 102 W/m2 … I’m not seeing it in the data you used.
Dear Willis,
Please assume what I have said is gospel. I know not a thing about Kopp or Krivovo or Ball or the IPCC AR5 or that graph, though its shown on the page. On the link I sent you there is the TSI data “Available TSI Data Summary Table/Data Access”. I have downloaded the Full Mission Download, Daily Data, which is in a text file. This gives the daily TSI values starting from 26/02/2003 and ending on 5/04/2014. I have converted that into an Excel file and made a graph of the TSI vs the dates. This gives me a clear picture of the TSI variation with time. There are many gaps in the data. I have filled those in with average values over the period.
As for my “claim” that the difference between two 245-day periods is 102 W/m2 (actually 119 W/m2 as I have later said), this “claim” has arisen by adding the TSI vaues of the two 245 day periods together and then subtracting them, which as you know Excel does for you in the blink of an eye. Those are actual values from the data.
Changes in the galactic radiation at both poles of the Earth are the same and depend on the magnetic activity of the Sun and latitude.
http://neutronm.bartol.udel.edu/realtime/southpole.html#levels
http://cosmicrays.oulu.fi/webform/query.cgi?startday=20&startmonth=10&startyear=2013&starttime=00%3A00&endday=06&endmonth=04&endyear=2014&endtime=00%3A00&resolution=Automatic+choice&picture=on
The only real measured data of TSI we have is from 26/02/2003 onwards. All other previous data are reconstructions, mainly from the Sunspot numbers I suspect, and no one really knows if they are true or not.
Richard says:
April 12, 2014 at 4:23 am
The only real measured data of TSI we have is from 26/02/2003 onwards. All other previous data are reconstructions, mainly from the Sunspot numbers I suspect, and no one really knows if they are true or not.
Not so. The real data starts in 1978.
lsvalgaard says:
April 12, 2014 at 4:31 am
Richard says:
April 12, 2014 at 4:23 am
The only real measured data of TSI we have is from 26/02/2003 onwards. All other previous data are reconstructions, mainly from the Sunspot numbers I suspect, and no one really knows if they are true or not.
Not so. The real data starts in 1978.
And where does that come from? Who measured it and how accurate is it? Where is the link to that data?
jeez Willis
If you had scrolled through Leifs pdf you would have fond the ‘synthetic’ years:
9.91
10.78
11.87
and Leifs SSN FFT:
10.04
10.92
11.92
Uh what a difference! But you just do not want to see this do you?
From Tuesday 15 April the U.S. touch another wave of arctic air. In Canada frost.
These are the realities associated with solar activity and pressure over the Arctic Circle.
Some interesting discussion here — even Mosher does well enough, except for the volcano stuff.
And for the UV aficionados, TSI includes UV, of course. So that’s falsified — again. “Theories” need throwing away when they’re falsified.
Richard says:
April 12, 2014 at 4:36 am
“Not so. The real data starts in 1978.”
And where does that come from? Who measured it and how accurate is it? Where is the link to that data?
http://solarphysics.livingreviews.org/open?pubNo=lrsp-2010-1&page=articlesu7.html
Willis,
First, I would never call you crazy! You’re just plenty smart!
Your last post was 3:33–do you ever sleep!!
“Don, you are making the claim that I discussed upthread. This is the claim that the system somehow is impervious to the large 11-year changes in sunspots / TSI / magnetism / whatever… but at the same time it is exquisitely sensitive to the much smaller slow secular variation and drift of sunspots / TSI / magnetism / whatever.”
I see what you’re getting at here. It’s interesting that the normal variation in sunspots for a single 11-yr cycle is from near zero to ~150-200 sunspots (SSN) with corresponding fluctuations in TSI and AP Index but, as you’ve shown, there isn’t a corresponding 11-yr temperature fluctuation. Your point is well taken, but perhaps there is an explanation for this apparent anomaly. A friend of mine once said, “just because something seems impossible doesn’t necessarily mean that it is—if it happened then it must be possible. You just need to figure it out.” So, just thinking out loud, let’s look at a real situation, say the Dalton. (I tried to paste some graphic data in into the comment box, but it wouldn’t take it, so I’ll send it to you via email).
Cycle 4 (~1785-1795) was a normal cycle with a peak of about 150 sunspots, but in cycle 5 (~1800-1810), sunspots dropped to about 50 and cycle 6 (~1810-1820) was very similar. SSN (sun spot number) in Cycle 7 was a bit higher, but still below normal. Cycle 8 (1835-1845) then popped back up to 150 or so. The CET temperatures dropped about 0.8˚C from Cycle 4 to Cycles 5 and 6, then popped back up ~1.0˚C in Cycle 7. GISP2 oxygen isotope ratios show a similar temperature drop during the Dalton. 10Be production rates in the atmosphere rose sharply during this time. So what do we make of all this? The data is far too consistent to be merely coincidental, so my conclusion is that ‘it happened so it must be possible.’ Similar, consistent data exists for the Wolf, Sporer, Maunder and 1880-1915 cool periods. Way beyond ‘coincidence’ probability.
So back to your point about the range of SSN during single cycles and the range during an event like the Dalton. How do we explain that? I don’t know, but the big reduction in sunspots is telling us something. The most significant difference between Cycles 5 and 6 and normal cycles is the low SSN, during which the sun’s magnetic field was presumably lower, accounting for the high 10Be atmospheric production rates. So it would appear that the critical issue here is not the range of SSN, but the fact that during Cycles 5 and 6, they never reach ‘normal’ levels because of a weaker solar magnetic field. The SSN do not drive global climate, they are merely a symptom of weaker solar magnetic field that is allowing increased cosmic radiation to the Earth. Does this make sense? What do you think?
Best to you,
Don
lsvalgaard
As you know in Scandinavia and southern Europe will also be snowing in the coming days.
Don Easterbrook says:
April 12, 2014 at 7:46 am
The most significant difference between Cycles 5 and 6 and normal cycles is the low SSN, during which the sun’s magnetic field was presumably lower, accounting for the high 10Be atmospheric production rates. So it would appear that the critical issue here is not the range of SSN, but the fact that during Cycles 5 and 6, they never reach ‘normal’ levels because of a weaker solar magnetic field.
First, the SSN during cycles 5 and 6 is very uncertain.
Second, the solar magnetic field causes a variation of UV flux and of the magnetic field in space impacting the Earth. The former we have monitored since 1722 and the latter since the 1830s. There is a good relation between the two so we can estimate with good accuracy the sun’s magnetic field back to at least the middle of the 18th century and cycles 5 and 6 were not unusual seen in perspective of the whole data set.
Third, there is evidence that the high 10Be is not due to the sun, but [probably – but there is discussion about this] to volcanoes and the climate itself. The 10Be in ice cores is not made in the atmosphere above Greenland or Antarctica but elsewhere at lower latitudes and must be transported by atmosphere circulation to the polar regions.
Steven Mosher says:
April 11, 2014 at 9:53 am
Here is the clue folks. When you believe it has to be the sun, there is NO END to where you can look and how you can look.
No end.
No mathematical end,
no logical end.
You can look for unicorns forever.
and the longer you look the higher your chance of finding a spurious result.
if your goal is actually understanding things.. you’d note that the sun supplies the power. the power doesnt vary much.. and you’d look at something else to explain the changes.
One of my profs told me something that I have never forgotten. I can still hear him saying it in his Polish accent. “Presuppositions have a nasty habit of reappearing as conclusions.” This cuts both ways. Neither those claiming the sun has no influence nor those claiming the sun has influence are immune.
Don Easterbrook says:
April 12, 2014 at 7:46 am
Similar, consistent data exists for the Wolf, Sporer, Maunder and 1880-1915 cool periods.
For the 1880-1915 period where we have good data, the 10Be data ‘misbehaves’ and is not consistent with anything. A special workshop has recently been dedicated to this misbehavior http://www.leif.org/research/Svalgaard_ISSI_Proposal_Base.pdf and the findings [to be published soon] is that the cosmic ray record is at fault and perhaps is not accurate at low solar activity.
Willis Eschenbach says:
” April 11, 2014 at 10:16 am
Thanks, snowfan. Unfortunately, your accompanying graph is useless, because you haven’t specified where you got your data, or how you have massaged it to get it to that form …
In any case, I just did a periodicity analysis on the AMO data. There is no peak of any kind near the 10 year 7 month period, and in fact the periodicity analysis of the AMO (as one would expect) looks very much like the periodicity of the HadCRUT data … no surprise there, because the AMO is just a detrended subset of the global temperature data.”
w.”
Sorry I forgot to put the link Will.
Here it is.
This chart comparing the AMO and the total solar irradiance computed by
Hoyt/Schatten and Willson using multiple solar components and calibrated to the
recent ACRIMSAT satellites is rather convincing for me. It shows a very tight
tracking of the AMO (and not shown AMO+PDO) with TSI since 1900.
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/THE_ROLE_OF_THE_OCEANS_IN_CLIMATE_CHANGES_SHORT_AND_LONG_TERM.pdf
Daryl M
Can you explain the changes in ozone differently than solar activity?
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/intraseasonal/temp30anim.gif
Leif, I take it that this particular slowdown of Solar processes as been a driving force behind learning how and why things fluctuate. It seems then that when the Sun seems to be rather sleepier than usual, more can be learned about it and its past behavior? As opposed to an active sunspot popping pot upon the stove.
Pamela Gray says:
April 12, 2014 at 8:19 am
Leif, I take it that this particular slowdown of Solar processes as been a driving force behind learning how and why things fluctuate.
Indeed, and that makes it exciting to work in this field right now.
Thanks for the info and reference, Leif. I’ll look forward to reading your new publication when it comes out.
Don
njsnowfan says:
April 12, 2014 at 8:11 am
This chart comparing the AMO and the total solar irradiance computed by Hoyt/Schatten
Their old TSI guess is totally out of date and should not be used for serious work.
Experts need not read, as they already know differently.
North Atlantic is the key to most of the natural variability, home of the AMO, with a vigorous tectonic activity further north.
The area has the longest (350 years) instrumental, most scrutinised, least fiddled and most accurate temperature records available, known as the CET.
So what these three: CET, AMO and NA tectonics tell us?
Rather a lot, if one looks not only at ‘wiggle’ matching, which I shall omit this time, but at the spectral composition .
Willis Eschenbach says:
April 11, 2014 at 4:18 pm
“The gold line is something akin to your hypothesized rectified AM signal.”
How in the world did you miss that before?
“What makes it follow the small overall drift and yet ignore the much larger peaks and valleys?”
There are many ways. But, I don’t care. Vukcevic was commenting on the other candidate I had for explaining things, one which I find more intriguing. But, you didn’t read that far down, didja?
lsvalgaard says:
April 12, 2014 at 7:18 am
“Not so. The real data starts in 1978.”
And where does that come from? Who measured it and how accurate is it? Where is the link to that data?
http://solarphysics.livingreviews.org/open?pubNo=lrsp-2010-1&page=articlesu7.html
Thanks for that Dr Svalgaard. I note that Nimbus gives far higher values of TSI than SMM/ACRIM which in turn gives higher values than ERBS, SOHO/VIRGO, so the question again arises who is correct or where does the truth lie?
Daryl M says:
April 12, 2014 at 8:03 am
Steven Mosher says:
April 11, 2014 at 9:53 am
Here is the clue folks. When you believe it has to be the sun, there is NO END to where you can look and how you can look…
if your goal is actually understanding things.. you’d note that the sun supplies the power. the power doesnt vary much.. and you’d look at something else to explain the changes.
“One of my profs told me.. “Presuppositions have a nasty habit of reappearing as conclusions.” ”
I’m glad Steven Mosher thinks he “actually understanding things”. That power that “doesnt vary much” regularly plunges the Earth into ice ages when it varies a little.
“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.” Sherlock Holmes
Richard says:
April 12, 2014 at 11:32 am
so the question again arises who is correct or where does the truth lie?
The only one that is ‘correct’ is SORCE/TIM, but the other ones are ‘precise’, that is the variation from day to day, year to year is correct, but the ‘baseline’ is not. The reason is known and can be corrected for. It has to do with a slight design flaw in the earlier instruments that will allow a little bit of extra light to enter the instrument, see: slide 29 of http://www.leif.org/EOS/10S1_0616_GKopp.pdf
njsnowfan says:
April 12, 2014 at 8:11 am
Sorry, Snowfan, but that link contains no more information about the graph than did the graph itself. Still useless.
w.
Bart says:
April 12, 2014 at 9:57 am
What makes you think I missed it? This is why I ask people to QUOTE MY WORDS—otherwise we end up like this, where no one but you has a clue what you are babbling about.
I’ll take that as an admission that you either don’t care, or more likely, you don’t know.
Taking you at your word, if you don’t care enough to answer questions about your curious beliefs, then why are you posting here? This is a scientific site, so we answer scientific questions and we care about these kinds of things. If you truly don’t care, then please go bother someone else, because around here folks who don’t care are just a waste of electron.
Sadly
w.
Willis Eschenbach says:
April 12, 2014 at 12:19 pm
What is this curious tic you have? You read as far as you like, then you stop, and argue something you make up in your own mind.
If you want to determine the manner in which the long term demodulated solar signal affects the climate, then you can investigate it as you please, once you have rid yourself of such notions as what “would make the climate totally and completely insensitive to the large, 11-year cycles in TSI”. It isn’t insensitive. It may just have a low SNR, and you wouldn’t be able to pick it out.
OR, IF YOU HAD READ MY EFFING POSTS, you might find that it is conceivably modulated in the climate signal into components near 5 years and 60 years, which are indubitably and readily observable IN THE CLIMATE RECORDS.
THAT is what I care about. We’re not even arguing that point here. Just meandering off into some swamp that you prefer to slog through, but which I have no interest, myself, in entering right now.
Is it really too much to ask that you read my rather pithy posts all the way through before responding? Read the posts at Hockey Schtick or Tallbloke, as well as the comments, for further info. Then, argue with me respectfully and logically ON THE SUBJECT ONCE YOU UNDERSTAND THE POINT I AM TRYING TO MAKE.
beng says:
April 12, 2014 at 6:19 am
Some interesting discussion here — even Mosher does well enough, except for the volcano stuff.
And for the UV aficionados, TSI includes UV, of course. So that’s falsified — again. “Theories” need throwing away when they’re falsified.
+++++++++++
Your comment partially misses the point of people who talk about UV wrt a changing sun. When the sun wanes, there is more UV – a good several times more. And the claim, which is fairly substantial, is that UV has an effect on other things including ozone production. The point is that the atmosphere changes in response to a waning sun. The total TSI is one thing, but causing a change to the atmosphere is a feedback.
Bart says:
April 12, 2014 at 1:33 pm
Damn skippy I stop when in my opinion someone goes off the rails. I’m doing it right here here and now. Why? I stop here because you’ve made an unpleasant accusation that I I have no real issues, I just “make up [something] in my own mind” as an excuse to stop reading.
Now, I can live with that kind of accusation if I know what you are referring to. What is it that you claim I “make up in my own mind”?
You see, despite my express request, you’re accusing me of doing something wrong without quoting what it was that you think is wrong. As a result, I cannot defend myself against whatever might have your knickers in a twist, because I don’t know what I said that set you off. QUOTE MY WORDS if you’d like me to read further in your screed. Is that so hard to understand? And yes, I will stop reading your comment if you accuse me without quoting me. Get used to it.
In any case, Bart, here’s the deal. I’m constantly doing triage on comments. I make every effort to answer scientific objections and questions. So I look at each comment and I must decide … worth a short answer? Worth a long answer? Not worth an answer?
So in general, I’ll read a comment until I realize that there is something important that the commenter and I disagree on.
Rather than continue the discussion and ignore the disagreement, I do one of two things at that point. I either decide it’s a lost cause, stop reading, and move on, OR I stop to deal with the disagreement. To do that, I’ll skim the rest of the comment, but only to see if the disagreement is explained further downstream. Then I’ll reply regarding the disagreement, and usually nothing else.
Once the disagreement is settled one way or the other, then it’s worth moving on. But until it is settled, there’s no point in my going onwards to discuss some other strange claim the commenter might be making further down in their comment.
The issue for me is that I am always short on time. I’m always either doing research, writing up my research, commenting on someone else’s research, or defending my research … and I have a day job. So if someone says something that is e.g contrary to the laws of physics, I haven’t got time to figure out what else they might be mistaken about. Until we can agree on the basics, I see absolutely no point in getting into the details …
Regards,
w.
Bart says:
April 12, 2014 at 1:33 pm
OK, my bad. Instead of saying completely insensitive to, I mean that the most sensitive analyses I know of (periodicity, Fourier, wavelet) can’t find the signal … so does that make a difference? I can’t see it, but yes, we can say it has an SNR that is so bad we can’t even find a residual hum, much less a significant signal. Is that better?
My dear friend, I know that it is theoretically possible that it is modulated into components of “near” five and “near” sixty years. There are lots of things that one can do with a signal, split it into parts, heterodyne it, signal analysis offers a host of ways to transform a signal.
What I don’t know is how it is theoretically possible for that to happen in the climate system. I’ve never heard of anything even remotely resembling that occurring in a chaotic system. You are saying that you are driving the system with an 11-year signal, and that there is no detectable response in the 11-year band anywhere in the system … but somehow, all of the energy in the 11-year signal is transferred to two other signals at “near” 5 and 60 years.
Here’s your explanation:
So … the earth wobbles slightly on its axis. You say that what you are calling the radius of nutation varies with a period of 9.3 years.
Now, to start with I don’t understand that. Nutation is a slight “nodding” of the axis of rotation.
Nutation is show by the red line, with the direction of the nutation (inwards and outwards shown) by the red letter N and the arrow.
So … what is the “radius of nutation” you’re referring to?
In any case, let’s agree for the sake of argument that some slight cyclical change occurs in the earth’s obliquity (the angle of the spin axis to the vertical). So what? Seriously, without the finest of astronomical instruments we wouldn’t even know that such a fluctuation exists. So why would you think it would be powerful enough to convert an 11-year solar signal into 5 and 60 year signals without leaving a trace of the original signal?
Look, Bart, I know that you are good in signal analysis. The problem is, the earth isn’t at all good at signal analysis. You can no doubt whip out an electronic circuit that would convert an 11-year input signal into two other signals … but how on earth can the climate system do that trick?
It’s far from enough to say that something is “theoretically possible”. You have to figure out HOW it might be not only actually possible, but actually actual. Until then, it’s just another neat trick from a good signal engineer who hasn’t fully considered whether the real world can do what he can do.
w.
PS: Where is the 5-year cycle you so glibly speak of? I have a 3+ year cycle in a couple of the datasets, but that’s too far from 5 to be a result of your procedure shown above. So where’s the evidence for your theory? Where is the 5-year cycle?
Heck, I don’t even understand the meaning of that length of cycle. The second of your calculations is:
This is called the “synodic cycle” of the two periods, and physically, it is the interval between when the two underlying cycles are in conjunction. I understand that, although I think it’s meaningless in this context … but what is this one:
In any case, I’m not finding the 5 year cycle. There’s a 44 month cycle … but for that to be the result of your calculation for T1, the sunspot cycle (your 11 years) would have to be only 5.3 years … not happening.
In short, you have a theory which has no physical mechanism, is related to a slow change in the miniscule “nutation” of the spin axis, and is missing evidence of a 5-year cycle … perhaps you can see why it’s getting zero traction with me.
Mario Lento says:
April 12, 2014 at 1:42 pm
Thanks, Mario. I don’t think you quite get what I’ve done. I’ve looked, not for TSI, but for ANYTHING that moves in sync with sunspots. This includes UV, TSI, heliomagnetic field, and cosmic rays. If any of them through any mechanism were affecting the temperature, it would show up as an ~ 11 year signal in the temperature data … but to data, we find no such signal.
This negative result includes, as Beng says, ultraviolet, because UV varies on the same ~ 11 year cycle as the sunspots and the TSI and the cosmic rays.
w.
Willis Eschenbach says:
April 12, 2014 at 5:31 pm
You have to figure out HOW it might be not only actually possible, but actually actual. Until then, it’s just another neat trick from a good signal engineer who hasn’t fully considered whether the real world can do what he can do.
The problem with Bart is that he is afflicted with what Ken Schatten calls Cyclomania. First it was sun cycles, now it is moon cycles, there may be more cycles in the offing. Put in a different way: to a hammer everything looks like a nail. He applies the one thing he can do regardless of the physics of the problem.
Willis Eschenbach says:
“To me, this supports my contention that the temperature is thermally regulated by emergent climate phenomena like thunderstorms, El Nino, dust devils, and the PDO. One feature of the system I hypothesize is that it is robust against variations in forcing.”
Willis, your hypothesis on emergence is to me cogent and I am fully convinced, however; it is likely unprovable, as are my thoughts. So here are my thoughts:
1.) The billions of year old Sun radiates at a constant level on the time scale of millennium or tens of millennium. It has some kind of pulse on an 11/22 year cycle, the sun spot cycle.
2.) The Little Ice Age existed and was global.
If either of these statements are untenable to you, then you can stop now and blow me off as a nutcase.
I was once a Process Engineer. We have a process under control ( by Emergence) with an incoming variable, sun spots (well not sun spots themselves but some other parameter tied to them) and a controlled output – temperature. As long as the incoming variable stays within an UCL (Upper Control Limit) and the LCL (Lower Control Limit) the system (temperature) remains Under Control. If the incoming variable exceeds the limits for an extended period of time, the system (temperature) will go out of control – singular or small duration excursions outside of limits may not make the system go out of control.
No correlation analysis will find anything about the incoming variable under these circumstances. Coefficient and p-values will mean nothing.
My understanding of your Emergence hypothesis is that it is energy driven, so the upper control limit in the above idealization is probably rather soft. The Emergence would just keep kicking up and higher temperature would be fully constrained (while there may have been a snowball Earth I have never heard or a fireball one). But not so at the LCL. The LIA occurred and given 1.) above albedo must have increased, reducing energy to fuel Emergence – not that any would be needed. Extended excursions below the LCL could result in high albedo making higher albedo and cold.
I hope this makes sense. My only concern with your Emergence hypothesis is and has been the Little Ice Age. Maybe we should just make it go away.
Rob Rider
It will record the ice in Antarctica.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/antarctic.sea.ice.interactive.html
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.ice.area.withtrend.jpg
[snip . . your link doesn’t work so please repost with a working link. BTW, insulting people and calling them names is not normally considered a viable method of changing opinion or having a debate . . mod]
Moderator , my comment
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/10/solar-periodicity/#comment-1611715
I accidentally posted here, but it was meant for the other thread
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/11/claim-odds-that-global-warming-is-due-to-natural-factors-slim-to-none/
no surprise I couldn’t find it there, my apologies to Willis and anyone else concerned.
Moderation indeed !, a bunch of cretins who can’t handle the basic cause of temperatures rising with the appearance of the Sun and their falling with its disappearance are hardly going to handle global temperatures in any shape or form –
” It is a fact not generally known that,owing to the difference between solar and sidereal time,the Earth rotates upon its axis once more often than there are days in the year” NASA /Harvard
The single cause of ‘global warming’ hysteria is the lack of a stable narrative and that narrative ain’t going to happen with nuisances like Watts and his troupe pretending to stand in opposition.
G.Kelleher says:
April 13, 2014 at 4:49 am
Moderation indeed !, a bunch of cretins who can’t handle the basic cause of temperatures rising with the appearance of the Sun and their falling with its disappearance are hardly going to handle global temperatures in any shape or form
It takes a cretin to claim that
” It is a fact not generally known that,owing to the difference between solar and sidereal time,the Earth rotates upon its axis once more often than there are days in the year”
has any relevance to the topic.
Isvalgaard
It is a genuine phenomenon that there isn’t a single individual capable of comprehending that when a society can no longer mesh the Sun rising and setting within a 24 hour day with one rotation of the Earth,and that is what the statement actually does,then something more insidious at work than any perceived carbon dioxide hysteria.
Read the amazing work of fiction once again –
” It is a fact not generally known that,owing to the difference between solar and sidereal time,the Earth rotates upon its axis once more often than there are days in the year” NASA /Harvard
Personally,even with the greatest courtesy, I believe people have truly lost their minds and not so much that they can manage to believe there are more rotations than there are sunrise/sunsets in a year but that when presented with the actual external references which go into discerning the Earth’s dynamics and its effects on terrestrial sciences,including climate,nobody wants to know.
Willis says:
“Now, at first glance it looks like there is a peak at about 10 years 7 months as in the TSI. However, there’s an oddity of the periodicity analysis. In addition to showing the cycles, periodicity analysis shows the harmonics of the cycles. In this example, it shows the fundamental cycle with a period of 44 months (3 years 8 months). Then it shows the first harmonic (two cycles) of a 44-month cycle as an 88 month cycle. It is lower and broader than the fundamental. It also shows the second harmonic, in this case with a period of 3 * 44 =132 months, and once again this third peak is lower and broader than the second peak.”
Well looking at the solar metric that has considerable variability, and that does relate at an event level to teleconnections such as ENSO and the AO/NAO, i.e. the solar wind, it does not simply follow the sunspot cycle. There is typically a reduced level just after the cycle minima, and again around the cycle maxima, with an interval of about a third of a cycle, 3.69yrs or 44.33 months for the average cycle. That period would likely be far more consistent than the periods between cycle minima, and particularly the highly variable periods between cycle maxima.
Ulric Lyons says:
April 13, 2014 at 8:22 am
the solar wind, it does not simply follow the sunspot cycle.
Actually, it does follow the cycle, but not closely the sunspot numbers, here is the Ap-index since 1844 http://www.leif.org/research/Ap-1844-now.png
The various parameters of the solar wind [field strength B, speed V, and density n] also show a solar cycle behavior, but, again, not directly related to the sunspot number, e.g., for the average cycle: http://www.leif.org/research/Climatological%20Solar%20Wind.png
lsvalgaard says:
“Actually, it does follow the cycle”
Actually the largest drops in the geomag index are as I described, typically just after minimum and around maximum, and you know it.
Ulric Lyons says:
April 13, 2014 at 8:43 am
Actually the largest drops in the geomag index are as I described, typically just after minimum and around maximum, and you know it.
The ‘largest’ is not correct. There is a small drop near maximum and a very large drop at minimum. The reason for this is well understood http://www.leif.org/research/Climatological%20Solar%20Wind.png
and is simply the combination of the curves for B, V, and n.
Willis Eschenbach says:
April 12, 2014 at 5:31 pm
I explained the mechanism above in my very first comment:
You can disagree if you like. I was pointing out a linkage, and I hedged appropriately. But, if you think nutation is no big deal, then you should go talk to designers who Earthquake-proof the buildings in Tokyo, or the NASA engineers who put nutation dampers aboard their satellites. Nutation is THE dynamical property of interest for stability in spin dynamics.
lsvalgaard says:
April 12, 2014 at 6:03 pm
Already anticipated.
lsvalgaard says:
“There is a small drop near maximum and a very large drop at minimum.”
Boy have you changed your tune, on another thread a few years back you insisted that the larger drop was at the maximum, and I had to argue the point of the big drop just after minimum with you.
Ulric Lyons says:
April 13, 2014 at 8:56 am
Boy have you changed your tune, on another thread a few years back you insisted that the larger drop was at the maximum, and I had to argue the point of the big drop just after minimum with you.
Nonsense, my plots of Ap, and the solar cycle behavior of B, V, and n are old, but if you think otherwise provide a precise link to your argument.
Bart says:
April 13, 2014 at 8:48 am
the sloshing of the oceans as forced by nutation of the Earth’s polar spin axis.
If you knew anything at all about the nutation you would know that it is the other way around: changes in ocean and atmospheric circulation modulates the nutation, but in any case, that forcing is too minute to be worth discussing.
Remove DC component from Ap index, give it polarity sign of the contemporary solar magnetic field, combine with secular oscillation of the Earth’s magnetic field (as calculated from changes in the core’s angular momentum):
Result
However, that would be a meaningless numerology, would it not?
lsvalgaard says:
April 13, 2014 at 9:10 am
You are talking about unforced nutation, the “Chandler Wobble“. This is the forced nutation from Sun and Moon dynamics, which is 30X larger. Read up on it.
The tides are not minute.
Bart says:
April 13, 2014 at 9:39 am
This is the forced nutation from Sun and Moon dynamics, which is 30X larger.
“The principal term of nutation is due to the regression of the moon’s nodal line and has the same period of 6798 days (18.61 years). It reaches plus or minus 17″ in longitude and 9″ in obliquity. All other terms are much smaller; the next-largest, with a period of 183 days (0.5 year), has amplitudes 1.3″ and 0.6″ respectively”
Enough said.
Com on, Leif. Do I really have to spoon feed this to you? How many kilometers of motion does that represent at the Earth’s surface at the equator? The Earth has a radius of 6378 km. This is what we typically consider a “large” number. Do the math.
Bart says:
April 13, 2014 at 9:56 am
Com on, Leif. Do I really have to spoon feed this to you? How many kilometers of motion does that represent at the Earth’s surface at the equator? The Earth has a radius of 6378 km. This is what we typically consider a “large” number. Do the math.
No need to, as you obviously don’t understand what you are talking about. So, don’t bother.
vukcevic says:
April 13, 2014 at 9:39 am
However, that would be a meaningless numerology, would it not?
It would, so spare us the nonsense.
I spent a fun morning watching Monty Python’s Life of Brian. I could not help myself. I thought of Vuk and Ulric and Steven and Bart standing upon their platforms explaining their theories to a now and again enthralled audience who lift up their sandals and gourds, as well as to that small faction who declare “He’s making it up as he goes along!”
Too funny!!!
Leif, I cannot find the exact thread that I had in mind at the moment but here is something equivalent:
“Solar wind velocity is often high near solar minimum, where the absence of solar activity favors the creation of large coronal holes”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/15/hey-dude-where%E2%80%99s-my-solar-ramp-up/#comment-392261
lsvalgaard says:
April 13, 2014 at 9:57 am
6378e3 * sqrt(9^2+17^2)/60*pi/180 = 35,687 meters
Yeah, that’s small.
Pamela Gray says:
April 13, 2014 at 10:12 am
Nice to see you brought along your sandals and gourds.
Ulric Lyons says:
April 13, 2014 at 10:12 am
“Solar wind velocity is often high near solar minimum, where the absence of solar activity favors the creation of large coronal holes”
Yes, you can see that in my plot http://www.leif.org/research/Climatological%20Solar%20Wind.png
where the green curve shows solar wind speed. Note that it peaks just before solar minimum
Bart says:
April 13, 2014 at 10:14 am
Yeah, that’s small.
completely irrelevant. There are three components of the nutation;
1) luni-solar tides
2) polar motion [wobble] due to changes of inertia
3) core nutation
(1) is large, the others are small.
You claim that the nutation moves the oceans around. “the sloshing of the oceans as forced by nutation of the Earth’s polar spin axis”. It is the other way around. /end-spoon-feeding
lsvalgaard says:
April 13, 2014 at 10:23 am
No, Leif. The Lunar/Solar induced nutation is due mostly to the fact that the Earth is an oblate spheroid. The Sun and the Moon tug on the Earth’s spin axis, due to the gravity gradient torque (see equation (6.17)). This is well-known and understood.
But, have it your way. It is moot. Either way, it has a strong periodicity of about 18.6 years, and the tilt with respect to the nominal spin axis has a period of half that, at 9.3 years. Combine it with the 11 year solar cycle, and you get 60 years and 5 years. Combine it with a more detailed model of solar activity, with harmonics at 10, 10.8, and 11.8 years, and you get a more complex waveform, which has periodicities in the range of ~60 years, and less than 5 years.
That is what is seen in the temperature records. It is a powerful influence – nothing like the infinitesimal influence of other planets.
“But, have it your way. It is moot.”
It is moot for the argument at hand. But, I hasten to add, it is in no-wise a concession. For the nutational dynamics in general, Leif is wrong. The forced nutation of the Earth’s spin axis is mostly from the oblate mass distribution of the Earth, and the oceans in their entirety form only a small portion of that mass.
Bart says:
April 13, 2014 at 10:39 am
It is moot
You avoided responding to the point which was your claim that the nutation moves the oceans around: “the sloshing of the oceans as forced by nutation of the Earth’s polar spin axis”.
That is your nonsense I pointed out.
That is what is seen in the temperature records.
The old saw ‘correlation is not causation’ applies here.
Bart says:
April 13, 2014 at 10:47 am
It is moot for the argument at hand. But, I hasten to add, it is in no-wise a concession. For the nutational dynamics in general, Leif is wrong.
OK, I should have said the lunar-solar torques. I guess ‘tides;’ slipped in because you said “The tides are not minute.” Strange how the mind can get trapped,
Anyway, you avoided responding to the point which was your claim that the nutation moves the oceans around: “the sloshing of the oceans as forced by nutation of the Earth’s polar spin axis”.
lsvalgaard says:
April 13, 2014 at 10:51 am
See above.
lsvalgaard says:
April 13, 2014 at 10:57 am
It is your belief that the movement of the Earth’s spin axis does not affect the tides?
Bart says:
April 13, 2014 at 10:57 am
See above.
Not responsive. Let me try this: Verify here that you said and mean “the sloshing of the oceans as forced by nutation of the Earth’s polar spin axis”
It should be obvious to any reasonable onlooker, other than perhaps Pamela in her cheerleader outfit, that the motion of the Earth’s spin axis affects the tides. The motion of the ocean affects the manner in which it stores radiant energy from the Sun. This creates a modulation of the solar cycle with the nutation of the Earth’s spin axis to affect the climate.
It is a powerful influence, and it is, at least at the top level, consistent with observations of temperature variations. That is the point I was trying to make, and I have made it. Since I do not stand a whelk’s chance in a supernova of influencing the hidebound opinions of Dr. Svalgaard, I am going to call it a day. Anything further he has to say on the topic, I refer you to Joe Pesci’s opening argument in the trial portrayed in My Cousin Vinny.
Bart says:
April 13, 2014 at 11:06 am
I am going to call it a day
Running away from responding to “the sloshing of the oceans as forced by nutation of the Earth’s polar spin axis”.
It should be obvious to any reasonable onlooker, other than perhaps Pamela in her cheerleader outfit, that the motion of the Earth’s spin axis affects the tides.
People that research this, e.g., http://www.leif.org/research/Thesis-Weiss-Ocean-Tides.png do not find this ‘obvious’, but perhaps you would not call them ‘reasonable’.
lsvalgaard says:
“Yes, you can see that in my plot http://www.leif.org/research/Climatological%20Solar%20Wind.png
where the green curve shows solar wind speed. Note that it peaks just before solar minimum”
What I can see *nearest* to the minima is the low in plasma speed, and the second lowest point is at the maxima, where the density/pressure is also at it’s lowest. So clearly with lows near sunspot minima AND maxima it does not follow the cycle, and I restate my original comment:
Well looking at the solar metric that has considerable variability, and that does relate at an event level to teleconnections such as ENSO and the AO/NAO, i.e. the solar wind, it does not simply follow the sunspot cycle. There is typically a reduced level just after the cycle minima, and again around the cycle maxima, with an interval of about a third of a cycle, 3.69yrs or 44.33 months for the average cycle. That period would likely be more consistent than the periods between cycle minima, and particularly [more consistent than the] the highly variable periods between cycle maxima.
Pamela Gray says:
April 13, 2014 at 10:12 am
I thought of Vuk and ……explaining their theories …
Hi Ms. Gray
I am flattered indeed, that you would think of me first, surely my minor persona is hardly worth of your esteemed attention, but that said, I thank you.
In my case, with respect and no reflection on efforts of the others, mentioned or implied, theory hardly, even hypothesis is an unattainable proposition, just an idle mind’s data manipulation.
Dear Ms Gray I wish you a pleasant and effortless progress in all of your endeavours.
m.v
Ulric Lyons says:
April 13, 2014 at 11:20 am
What I can see *nearest* to the minima is the low in plasma speed, and the second lowest point is at the maxima, where the density/pressure is also at it’s lowest. So clearly with lows near sunspot minima AND maxima it does not follow the cycle,
[You] are not being clear. If we see the same behavior in every cycle, then obviously the variable has a solar cycle variation. All the solar wind parameters have a solar cycle variation that is different from that of the SSN. In particular the solar wind speed has a maximum just before solar minimum. A typical example is for the year 2008. See slide 18 of http://www.leif.org/research/Historical%20Solar%20Cycle%20Context.pdf
Folks, I collect data all the time using research based valid and reliable tools, and am quite familiar with proper as well as improper use of statistics and analysis of statistical result. To the extent that I have put my job on the line for standing behind proper statistical methods. And have suffered for it. Would you be willing to lose your job over your awkward mechanism and statistical nightmare?
You may have fallen into this trap: Wriggle matching between two separate entities that have a variety of short and long term random walk oscillations combined with additional subcomponents and having many variables, can and often are forced to, match. That a match is found is predictable and can even be shown mathematically.
Thought experiment: Randomly generated signal data produced with separate signal generators (to the degree that they are made differently by two different and separate manufacturers, the signals on their face are clearly not the same, and one is on the Moon and the other on the Earth) thus described can be correlated, even highly correlated if analysed and tortured enough. That a plausible mechanism can be made that links the two signal generators is dubious but many will cough one up anyway.
I am bound to suggest that were I to give you guys a data series from the sounds of starlings and a data series from windshield wiper oscillations obtained from a school bus, and call them some kind of sciency sounding universe/galaxie/solar system/moon/Earth/Neptune signal, you would find a correlation and say that one is related to the other, with a plausible mechanism waiting to be found.
Until such a time as the climate trend null hypothesis (intrinsic variability, which DOES have a plausible mechanism) can be dismissed, I recommend this: Accept that you have nothing to show for your research into this or that solar system-related idea or pet theory that can be demonstrated to have superiority over the null condition.
That Leif puts his money where his mouth is, shares his raw data, stands in front of equals and better to present, has been peer reviewed/vetted at every stage, and has proposed reasonable mechanisms, gives him a large leg up compared to you guys. So yes, I readily admit to cheerleading good scientific work once I have vetted it for myself. And based on my reading, I don’t see any comparison at all between Leif’s work and what you all have proposed.
Willis Eschenbach says:
April 12, 2014 at 5:36 pm
..Thanks, Mario. I don’t think you quite get what I’ve done. I’ve looked, not for TSI, but for ANYTHING that moves in sync with sunspots. This includes UV, TSI, heliomagnetic field, and cosmic rays. If any of them through any mechanism were affecting the temperature, it would show up as an ~ 11 year signal in the temperature data … but to data, we find no such signal.
This negative result includes, as Beng says, ultraviolet, because UV varies on the same ~ 11 year cycle as the sunspots and the TSI and the cosmic rays.
w.
—————————————————
“””but for ANYTHING that moves “””” pssst don’t go hunting with Willis..lol
Well, I have something that moves, breathes and lives with solar cycle. GCR cosmic radiation messing up solar radiation.. perhaps.. But I’m skeptical of the TSI not varying enough..
This little study from Athens, incorporates the Cosmic Ray Induced Ionization CRII models (1+2) into their local model, giving a global view of GCR induced ionization in Earth’s atmosphere.
Even going so far as to say, that during a Maunder type minimum, the primary cause of ionization in Earth’s Atmosphere would come from GCR…
Calculation of the cosmic ray induced ionization for the region
of Athens
P Makrantoni1, H Mavromichalaki1, I Usoskin2, A Papaioannou1
Abstract. A complete study of ionization induced by cosmic rays, both solar and galactic, in
the atmosphere, is presented. For the computation of the cosmic ray induced ionization, the
CRII model was used [1] as well its new version [2] which is extended to the upper
atmosphere. In this work, this model has been applied to the entire atmosphere, i.e. from
atmospheric depth 0 g/cm2, which corresponds to the upper limit of the atmosphere, to 1025
g/cm2, which corresponds to the surface…
..2. The CRII model
The CRII model is a full numerical model, which computes the cosmic ray induced ionization in the
entire atmosphere, all over the Globe. The model computations reproduce actual measurements of the
atmospheric ionization in the full range of parameters, from Equatorial to Polar Regions and from the
solar minimum to solar maximum.
Roughly, the CRII rate expressed as the number of ion pairs produced in one gram of the ambient
air per second (ion pairs/gr. sec) at a given atmospheric depth x can be represented in as follows:
..3. Results
Using the CRII model [1], [2] a study of the distribution of ionization during the solar cycle 23 on a
monthly and yearly basis was performed. A gradual increase of the ionization rate from the solar
maximum to the solar minimum was observed.
The results at the solar maximum (year 2000) and minimum (year 2010), for a Polar region (Rc=0.1
GV), an Equatorial region (Rc=14.9 GV) and a middle latitude region (Athens, Rc=8.53 GV), as a
function of the atmospheric depth, are presented in Figure 1. It is obvious that during the solar
maximum (2000), the ionization has minimum values, while during the solar minimum (2010), the
ionization is maximum. This indicates that the ionization follows the behavior of the cosmic rays,
which is negatively correlated with the solar activity. It is important to mention that during the solar
maximum, the ionization is almost two times greater at the Poles than in Athens, while during the
solar minimum, it is almost three and a half times greater. In all cases, the ionization rate is maximum
at the atmospheric depth x=100 g/cm2, with a shift to lower atmospheric depths in the Polar regions.
..Furthermore, we compared
these distributions with the value of ionization in the case of zero solar activity, as it was during the
«Maunder Minimum», and found that the ionization in the atmosphere due to cosmic rays is constant
and greatest! This means that the contribution of galactic cosmic rays, even if the contribution of solar
cosmic radiation is negligible, it is essential to the creation of ions in the atmosphere and with the
maximum value of ionization. This may be associated with the Little Ice Age (1645-1715), during
which occurred the Maunder Minimum, i.e. zero solar activity (φ = 0).
http://iopscience.iop.org/1742-6596/409/1/012232/pdf/1742-6596_409_1_012232.pdf
Carla says:
April 13, 2014 at 3:08 pm
This may be associated with the Little Ice Age (1645-1715), during which occurred the Maunder Minimum, i.e. zero solar activity (φ = 0).
No cigar, Carla, the modulation parameter (φ) was not zero during the MM. In fact, solar modulation of cosmic rays was as strong back then as now.
lsvalgaard says:
“[You] are not being clear. If we see the same behavior in every cycle, then obviously the variable has a solar cycle variation.”
As there are two local minima in the solar wind through each cycle, one just after minimum and another around maximum, the periods between these minima are 3.69yrs, 7.38yrs, and of course both repeating every 11.07yrs on average. So it’s not a simple ~11yr signal. But due to the variation in cycle lengths, the 7.38 and 11.07 periods have more variation in length than the ~3.69yr min-to-max section of the cycles, so the 3.69yr periodicity should be stronger signal.
Ulric Lyons says:
April 13, 2014 at 3:45 pm
So it’s not a simple ~11yr signal.
Yes it is as the signal repeats every 11 years. It is not a sine-curve, but who said it was?
Ulric Lyons says:
April 13, 2014 at 3:45 pm
so the 3.69yr periodicity should be stronger signal.
You make the same mistake as Bart, believing that there is a physical signal of that length. There is not. The ‘signal’ comes about because there are different physical reasons for the various peaks.
lsvalgaard says:
April 13, 2014 at 3:30 pm
Carla says:
April 13, 2014 at 3:08 pm
This may be associated with the Little Ice Age (1645-1715), during which occurred the Maunder Minimum, i.e. zero solar activity (φ = 0).
No cigar, Carla, the modulation parameter (φ) was not zero during the MM. In fact, solar modulation of cosmic rays was as strong back then as now.
——————————————————
Yes, I know Dr. S.
Since NASA announced the Space Age High in GCR, you have mentioned it a gazillion times, bout the modulation during MM and so ..
Starting to get a phobia about the atmosphere lowering again, but this time a little lower than last time, which was already 38% lower than the time before that..
This GCR ionization doesn’t come with any up and out solar wind and eeeeeek…
Willis say:
“Thanks, Mario. I don’t think you quite get what I’ve done. I’ve looked, not for TSI, but for ANYTHING that moves in sync with sunspots. This includes UV, TSI, heliomagnetic field, and cosmic rays. If any of them through any mechanism were affecting the temperature, it would show up as an ~ 11 year signal in the temperature data … but to data, we find no such signal.”
++++++++++++
Thank you Willis. Is love how you look at data with an open mind, trying to find evidence to support and or debunk claims. This is good science – and why I call you a scientist. Your work can be followed. Makes me appreciate how much mental energy it takes for me to go back to what I’d done in my college years!
That said, I see that you have found that the correlations are not there in the same time domain. I, perhaps wishfully, believe that integrating the sun spot spot cycles with a baseline of about 40, above which accumulates energy and below which reduces energy to our system shows something different. Of course this presumes something magical about the number 40!
The integral of strength of the solar cycles shows a different story, which may or may not be correct. However, I do believe effects (changes in solar output –not just TSI) take time to show up in our temperature records. As the frequency make up of the energy changes there are hypothetically varying physical effects that change as well, which might lead to feedbacks. So Just looking at TSI and what happens in the same time domain won’t show anything obvious.
When we use PWM (pulse width modulation) to control temperature, there are tuning parameters called PID loops (Proportional Integral Derivative) that effects the timing of the input. Without looking into these, we will not necessarily see the signals.
Bart says:
April 13, 2014 at 8:48 am
I neither agree nor disagree. I don’t understand. When someone says the solar heating is “modulated by the sloshing of the oceans”, I’m lost. That’s just handwaving, that’s not a mechanism.
Then you make the claim that the “sloshing of the oceans is forced by nutation”. I fear you have the causation backwards. You are claiming that the nutation is forcing the ocean to slosh … but in fact the tides cause the nutation:
Bart, to move forwards, you need a testable result of your hypothesis. You’ve proposed that the 11-year solar cycle is somehow “modulated” into a ~ 5-year and a ~ 60-year cycle. That was good. That was testable … but unfortunately, it failed the test. There is no 5-year cycle in the data.
So right now, that’s all air, it’s not a mechanism of any kind. Your explanation boils down stating that the ocean sloshes around in the various basins (true), plus an incorrect claim that the sloshing is driven by nutation.
I agree that nutation can be important in some special situations like you mention. I can see that for satellites damping nutation would be essential, and for earthquakes as well. But most buildings on the planet pay no attention to nutation at all … and certainly not to the nutation of the earth itself.
But then, I didn’t say that nutation is no big deal in skyscrapers and satellites, did I? Because we were talking about the nutation of the earth.
Instead. I said that the nutation of the earth was tiny, so small it needs very specialized instruments to measure it. As a result, I doubted that it could modulate much of anything.
You still haven’t dealt with the fact that your whiz-bang theory failed its very first test, because there’s no 5-year signal in the data … but I hope you will. Otherwise, you’ll be stuck there forever.
w.
DonV says:
April 12, 2014 at 1:09 am
Don, that’s a good question, but there is a subtlety in there …
Consider … how many times per year does the sun strongly warm the northern hemisphere in the manner you suggest?
The answer, of course, is once per year … so the phenomenon you mention is simply swept up into the rest of the yearly cycle data. All that your phenomenon does is make it so that the shape of the yearly cycle is not a sine wave.
w.
Richard says:
April 12, 2014 at 1:10 am
Thanks, Richard. I think I see what you’ve done. You say:
It seems that what you have done is summed the TSI over 245 days. The SUM of these over 245 days is 102 W/m2 larger than the sum over the other 245 days.
But all that means is that the average imbalance over the time is 102/245 ≈ 0.4 W/m2, which is well within the variations shown in their dataset.
w.
Willis Eschenbach says:
April 14, 2014 at 1:02 am
But all that means is that the average imbalance over the time is 102/245 ≈ 0.4 W/m2, which is well within the variations shown in their dataset. [Actually 119/245 ~ 0.49 W/m2]
Its is well within the range, but that 0.49 is not the Range of the TSI as in, mathematically, the difference between the highest and lowest values but, as you pointed out the average difference over 245 days, which amounts to a hell of a lot of heat energy. And as I pointed out this is reflected in the Temperature record.
Oops just meant he Range to be in bold… but never mind
[Fixed. -w]
Willis Eschenbach says:
April 13, 2014 at 10:12 pm
“You are claiming that the nutation is forcing the ocean to slosh … but in fact the tides cause the nutation:”
No. Tidal “forces” are the stresses induced by the gravity gradient. When the paper refers to tidal forces, it is not referring just to the oceans. The oceans comprise only a small part of the mass of the Earth. Most of the nutation comes about because of the oblateness of the Earth acted upon by the gravity gradient torque, as I explained above.
“That was testable … but unfortunately, it failed the test. There is no 5-year cycle in the data.”
There is a close to 5 year quasi-cycle in the data. When you add in more detailed models for the solar cycle, the overall periodicity of the short term components decrease from there. That is enough to indicate that there is potentially a match, and it makes it worth investigating further. Your motion for arbitrary dismissal is denied.
“But most buildings on the planet pay no attention to nutation at all … and certainly not to the nutation of the earth itself. “
Oh, for crying out loud. Yes, Willis, I concede that steel and reinforced concrete respond very little little to the nutation of the Earth. Sheesh.
We are looking for the cause of a 0.7 degC shift over 30 years. This is small. It has a small forcing. And, water is not steel.
“I said that the nutation of the earth was tiny, so small it needs very specialized instruments to measure it.”
A backyard refracting telescope will do. That’s how it was discovered!
“You still haven’t dealt with the fact that your whiz-bang theory failed its very first test…”
It isn’t a “theory”. It is an observation – the lunar-induced nutation cycle is 18.6 years. It can interact with the solar cycle to produce ~60 year and ~5 year cycles. And, that is what is seen in the record.
It is worth investigating further. Given the utter failure of the GHG theory to account for the temperature observations, there is another cause out there somewhere. This one looks promising. If you don’t want to think about it, don’t – no skin off my nose. But, you will never get anywhere puzzling this phenomenon out by capricious dismissal of portentous leads.
“I said that the nutation of the earth was tiny, so small it needs very specialized instruments to measure it.”
BTW, 36 km of motion at the surface is not terrifically “small”.
Richard says:
April 14, 2014 at 4:43 am
So that works out to a 24/7 change in average incoming energy of a bit more than 0.1 W/m2 …
Now, while I agree that 0.1 watts per square metre over 245 days over the entire surface of the planet is “a hell of a lot of energy” in some circles, the world is a hell of a big place. Typical downwelling radiation at the surface is about half a kilowatt per square metre … and on that scale, 0.1 W/m2 is not a lot of energy, it’s a pathetically small, almost unmeasurable amount of energy …
Next, I must have missed the part where you show that the half watt variation in the TSI affects the temperature in the slightest … if you could re-link to that it would be great.
Regards,
w.
Bart says:
April 14, 2014 at 10:32 am
BTW, 36 km of motion at the surface is not terrifically “small”.
Sigh, it is irrelevant as everything on earth including the oceans and the atmosphere nutates the same amount. We are also rushing around the Sun at 30 km/s, not terrifically small either, but just as irrelevant, or at 230 km/s around in the Galaxy, or at 600 km/s towards the Virgo cluster, etc.
Bart says:
April 14, 2014 at 10:04 am
OK, you don’t like my terminology. Let me restate. You have claimed that the nutation “forces” the tides, vis (emphasis mine):
I gave you a citation showing that the nutation wasn’t “forcing” the tides, and that in fact, the causation went the opposite direction—the tidal forces are creating the nutation. I backed this up with a citation, viz:
Leif Svalgaard made the same point:
Now, you return with some kind of semantic argument that it’s tidal forces and not tides that control the nutation … so what? That’s exactly what my reference said, and in complete contradiction to your earlier claim that the causation goes the other way around.
The point is the same. Your claim that the nutation is “forcing” the tides to slosh is BACKWARDS, no matter what kind of persiflage you bring up to try to gloss over your error.
Bart, I’ll let in on a secret. You ever notice that you get almost no traction around here? You want to know how to get more people to believe you?
ADMIT IT WHEN YOU ARE WRONG!!!
You made an ignorant claim, that nutation was causing the oceans to slosh. Two people have pointed out your error and I provided a scientific reference that says clearly that your claim is wrong.
When you continue flailing and trying to cover it up, Bart, everyone just points and laughs. They can read. They know you were wrong, and Leif and I were right. They see you trying your best to spread peanut butter over that fact so no one notices, and failing miserably.
So my advice is, admit your errors and move forwards. You made an ignorant statement about nutation, and someone corrected you. You could learn from that … or you could continue to insist that you were right.
Your choice …
In friendship,
w.
lsvalgaard says:
April 14, 2014 at 10:38 am
Thanks, Leif. I was trying to figure out how to answer his irrelevant claim. You’ve done it more clearly than I could.
Your point is clear. When you and everything around you is experiencing the same motion, it doesn’t matter.
The truly bizarre part to me is the missing mechanism. Bart claims that the nutation of the earth, BECAUSE it has a period of 9.3 years, acts to transform an 11-year signal into the combination of two signals, one at 5 years and one at 60 years … but so far, he’s been remarkably shy about explaining the actual mechanism involved in the “nutational transformation” system …
In fact, I don’t even understand the math involved. Oh, I understand the math itself fine, it’s just addition and distraction, but it’s just plucked out of the air with no rhyme or reason. I asked him about that … crickets.
w.
lsvalgaard says:
April 14, 2014 at 10:38 am
Sigh, indeed. Nutation is angular acceleration, and the amount of acceleration varies with radius and angular position.
Nutation is THE quantity of interest in dynamical problems involving stability of spinning bodies, as you would know if you had any clue what you were talking about. I have designed, built, and tested nutation dampers in the lab, and published a peer reviewed paper on the subject. I know far, far more about this topic than you ever will.
Willis Eschenbach says:
April 14, 2014 at 10:51 am
“I gave you a citation showing that the nutation wasn’t “forcing” the tides…”
No, Willis. That is only what you think the paper says. I explained to you what it meant. Your understanding of nutation dynamics is very poor.
Leif was wrong, and so are you, not I. It is very difficult for me to communicate to you on this, because you apparently start out assuming I am wrong, and searching for reasons to support your view. And, you pull out references you do not understand to “prove” me wrong.
One. More. Time. Lunar forcing of Earth’s nutation, with a period of approximately 18.6 years, is produced by the inertia distribution of the Earth interacting with the tidal forces, i.e., the gravity gradient torque. It is NOT primarily an oceanic phenomenon. Read here:
You guys are completely barking up the wrong tree. You are demanding that an expert in these matters defer to your amateur opinion. It is surreal.
Let me highlight that:
This precession motion is driven by the gravity of the Moon and the Sun acting on the Earth’s equatorial bulge.
That is HOW THE MOON GETS A GRIP to produce a torque. If the Earth were a perfect sphere, THERE WOULD BE NO NUTATION!!!
Get a book. Attend a lecture. Do SOMETHING to try to understand the system.
Nutation produces angular acceleration. It is unsteady motion. Though, I’m sure one of you will jump on my earlier imprecision. You guys are clueless and hopeless. I don’t know why I bother.
Willis Eschenbach says:
April 14, 2014 at 10:36 am
Now, while I agree that 0.1 watts per square metre over 245 days over the entire surface of the planet is “a hell of a lot of energy” in some circles, the world is a hell of a big place. Typical downwelling radiation at the surface is about half a kilowatt per square metre … and on that scale, 0.1 W/m2 is not a lot of energy, it’s a pathetically small, almost unmeasurable amount of energy …
Next, I must have missed the part where you show that the half watt variation in the TSI affects the temperature in the slightest … if you could re-link to that it would be great.
Hi Willis, That energy a forcing of about 1.73×10^16 Watts maybe incredibly small compared to the downwelling of about half a kilowatt per square metre (per day?), but its represents an inbalance in the energy being supplied by the Sun. Small differences can cause the temperatures to rise and fall, by small amounts. 0.4 degrees is also small compared to the average temp of 16 degrees.
This is the Link:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_March_2014_v5.png
If you notice the temperature during that period 1998-1999 has fallen by about 0.4 degrees compared to the previous period. Incidentally the Sunspot number is also low during that period.
Bart says:
April 14, 2014 at 11:25 am
Get a book.
Read Weiss’s thesis http://www.leif.org/EOS/Thesis-Weis-Ocean-Tides.pdf
imbalance too
Or if you take the 13 month running average by about 0.2 C
lsvalgaard says:
April 14, 2014 at 12:24 pm
Perhaps you should read it:
Page 24:
So, they consider the polar motion to be important, and make sure to model it.
Page 89:
Their simulations only cover 400 days at a time, and do not capture 18.6 year effects. However, they suggest further study, coupling the long term polar motion with dissipative dynamics. Quite reasonable. Their meaning is entirely clear to me. Nutation and energy dissipation are the meat and potatoes of spin dynamics.
This is typical. You toss up a paper, without apparently having read it, and claim it contradicts what I am trying to say, while it does nothing of the kind.
Bart says:
April 14, 2014 at 12:55 pm
claim it contradicts what I am trying to say, while it does nothing of the kind.
It contradicts that the ocean sloshes back and forth forced by the nutation. People have been looking for an 18.6 year cycle in ocean tides for a long time, and if there is any, it is very small, of the order of one centimeter in amplitude over 18,6 years. Not exactly ‘sloshing’.
Richard says:
April 14, 2014 at 12:23 pm
Thanks, Richard. Here’s the thing. Yes, as you point out, a tenth of a watt is an imbalance. My point is that in the climate system, it is a miniscule, trivially small imbalance.
First, thanks for the link. That’s the University of Alabama Huntsville Microwave Sounding Unit satellite-measured lower tropical temperature, usually referred to as UAH MSU T2LT.
Now, if your claim is that the variation in TSI is affecting the UAH MSU lower tropospheric temperature, you could show it one of two ways. You could either do a periodicity analysis, or a cross-correlation analysis. I did the periodicity analysis in the head post, viz:
As discussed in the head post, there is no sign of the TSI affecting the lower tropical temperature.
OK, so how about a cross-correlation? Hang on … ok, special for you, here it is, hot off the press:
Nothing. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada. This shows that at any positive lag (TSI leading temperature), the correlation of the TSI and the T2LT temperature is pathetically small.
This is the recurring problem I have, Richard. I started out this quest some years ago thinking that there WOULD be a signal, a sign, some trace of the 11-year sunspot / TSI / heliomagnetism / cosmic rays cycle somewhere in the terrestrial climate records.
But no matter how hard I look, I keep coming up with a null result. So I’m sorry to say, Richard, that to date there is absolutely no evidence of any 11- year TSI-related variations in the UAH MSU T2LT lower tropospheric temperature dataset that you reference. None.
I’ve not only searched myself. I’ve asked other people to BRING ME THE EVIDENCE! If there is a climate dataset that you think shows an 11-year cycle, bring it on … but at this point, I’ve yet to find even one. Nor am I the first man to look, lots of folks have tried. The inescapable conclusion is, any possible effect of the 11-year solar cycle on climate is so small that it lost in the weeds.
Regards,
w.
lsvalgaard says:
April 14, 2014 at 1:05 pm
It is a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_tide#Tidal_constituents"well known constituent. And, if it is small, it takes place over a long time. Integrate an 18.6 yearly sinusoid versus a daily one. The multiple in integrated amplitude is 18.6*365.25 = 6794.
Bart says:
April 14, 2014 at 1:47 pm
It is a well known constituent. And, if it is small, it takes place over a long time
There is an 18.6 year [very small] cycle simply because the positions of the sun and the moon repeat in a 18.6 year cycle, so the luni-solar tidal potential will vary slightly with that period giving rise to a [hard to observe] cm-scale tide, but this has nothing to do with nutation and there is no sloshing of the ocean..
lsvalgaard says:
April 14, 2014 at 1:52 pm
No, that is not why.
This is pointless.
Bart says:
April 14, 2014 at 1:54 pm
This is pointless.
I agree with Willis that this is indeed pointless for the reason he stated.
“Periodicity analysis” is fine for detecting STRICTLY periodic signals exhibiting complex wave-forms, such as musical tones, diurnal cycles, etc. in a noisy record These signals are characterized by LINE spectra at some known fundamental frequency and its harmonics. It can’t, however, decompose a more general signal in a variance-preserving way; the results produced by a whole range of periodicities will not not add up to the original signal sans the noise. There is a categorical difference between strictly periodic and “quasi-periodic” signals, characterized by a spectral CONTINUUM in a narrow band of frequencies. The former will produce a strictly periodic acf (aside from noise contribution at zero lag) that never dies out with increasing lag, whereas the latter will produce an acf with a decaying envelope. Such is the case with SSN data when examined over lags of several decades.
1sky1 says:
April 14, 2014 at 5:25 pm
Mmmm … not exactly sure what that means. The results produced by an FFT will not magically make the noise disappear either.
I guess my problem is not understand what you mean by “decompose a signal … in a variance-preserving way”. You can decompose a signal using either FFT or periodicity analysis. As you might expect, when you combine the underlying frequencies in either method, you reconstruction the original signal exactly.
The difference between the two is that the FFT decomposes the signal into an orthogonal set of waves. So the results are the same regardless of the order in which you remove the underlying sine waves.
In periodicity analysis, on the other hand, the signal is projected on to non-orthogonal periodic spaces. So the order in which you remove the underlying waves leads to different results.
Note, however, that I’m NOT trying to “decompose a more general signal in a variance-preserving way”, no matter what you might mean by that. I’m not trying to decompose the signal in any manner or form.
Instead, I’m using periodicity analysis to display the strength of the cycles at each underlying period. The huge advantage of periodicity analysis for this purpose is that periodicity analysis is linear in period, rather than being linear in frequency as is FFT. This lets me examine the question in detail.
The other advantage is that it doesn’t find just sine waves. Instead, you can examine the actual form of the 11-year or any other cycle, as in Figures 3 & 4.
More confusion. Don’t mistake me, I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’m saying it’s hard to understand your meaning. For starters, you were talking about periodicity analysis. Now you’ve shifted to discussing autocorrelation. I don’t understand the connection.
In any case, we are not dealing with strictly periodic cycles, nature is never that regular. For example, TSI / sunspot cycles vary between about 9 and 13 years … go figure. This is revealed quite clearly by the periodicity analysis. It shows up in the width of the peak in Figure 2.
Note that from about ten to about eleven and a half years we have increasing and then decreasing power in the various cycles. I assume that this is what you are calling “a spectral CONTINUUM in a narrow band of frequencies”.
Did you read the IEEE Transactions paper I referenced above? I think it might answer some of your questions.
Anyhow, thanks for your thoughts,
w.
lsvalgaard says:
“You make the same mistake as Bart, believing that there is a physical signal of that length. There is not. The ‘signal’ comes about because there are different physical reasons for the various peaks.”
Yes I do realise that there are “different physical reasons for the various peaks”, but the issue is here is simply about where they occur, not why they occur.
Ulric Lyons says:
April 15, 2014 at 6:18 am
but the issue is here is simply about where they occur, not why they occur.
But that is not an ‘issue’. The data themselves show us that: http://www.leif.org/research/Historical%20Solar%20Cycle%20Context.pdf
Geomagnetic activity, A, can be calculated from the contributions from the three parameters B, V, and n: A = k B V^2 n^(1/3) giving you the several bumps that we see.
sorry, wrong link. Should be:
http://www.leif.org/research/Climatological%20Solar%20Wind.png
Ulric Lyons says:
April 15, 2014 at 6:18 am
Yeah, well, Leif is also the author of such howlers as “everything on earth including the oceans and the atmosphere nutates the same amount.”
He does not understand the frequency response way of characterizing phenomenon. He does not understand functional bases and their usefulness.
There is a physical signal of that length, every bit (pun intended) as much as 101010 = 42.
Bart says:
April 15, 2014 at 7:46 am
He does not understand the frequency response way of characterizing phenomenon. He does not understand functional bases and their usefulness.
Whatever…
But I do understand the physics of the system
lsvalgaard says:
“Geomagnetic activity, A, can be calculated from the contributions from the three parameters B, V, and n: A = k B V^2 n^(1/3) giving you the several bumps that we see.”
Well thanks for that, but I’m only concerned with the frequency of the main Ap drops, not the bumps. Though would the periodicity analysis pick up such a signal?
Willis:
You say: “I guess my problem is not understand what you mean by “decompose a signal … in a variance-preserving way”. You can decompose a signal using either FFT or periodicity analysis. As you might expect, when you combine the underlying frequencies in either method, you reconstruction the original signal exactly.”
Because FFT uses orthogonal basis functions, it will reconstruct the discretely sampled finite RECORD–but not the entire signal–exactly in the general case. In non-orthogonal “periodicity analysis” you get entanglement of different frequencies of the continuum in the general case, and the signal reconstruction can be exact if and ONLY if that signal is strictly periodic. (In that case, noise is reduced by averaging of waveforms.) Otherwise, the periodic extension of the computed waveform becomes a grossly misleading artifact of analysis.
The structure of the acf, which is well-defined for all continuing (non-transient) signals, provides a means of discriminating between random signals and those with a deterministic periodic component. Upon Fourier integral transformation in accordance with the Wiener-Kintchine theorem, one obtains spectral continuums for random signals and discrete line spectra for periodic ones. BTW, SSN refers to sun-spot number, which is strongly coherent with TSI variations, not SST, which is not.
Hope this helps.
Ulric Lyons says:
April 15, 2014 at 1:04 pm
Well thanks for that, but I’m only concerned with the frequency of the main Ap drops, not the bumps. Though would the periodicity analysis pick up such a signal?
It all depends on what you trying to do [on the ‘functional bases’ so beloved by Bart; more formally treating the problem as a ‘field’, over a combination of functional bases, defining a ‘space’ containing all the statistical and physical properties of what you are investigating]. If you think that Ap [geomagnetic activity] directly is the driver, then you must consider the combined effect of B, V, and n. If you think only the solar wind velocity, V, directly is the driver, then only the V-signal is important, and so on. So, the ‘signal’ is different in each case. You cannot separate the signal processing from the physical understanding and make any real progress.
1sky1 says:
April 15, 2014 at 4:11 pm
I’m still not getting it. I take a discretely sampled finite record. I do a periodicity analysis. I decide how I want to decompose it and I do so.
To reconstruct the record, I just run the process in reverse. I add back in the frequencies that I took out. I get back to where I started.
So I’m not understanding why you think the reconstruction of a periodicity function can’t reconstruct the signal. The operations involved are all reversible.
However, again I don’t understand the underlying objection, because I’m NOT decomposing a wave form. I’m just checking the signal strength at the various cycle lengths.
Next, you talk about the “periodic extension of the computed waveform”. I assume you mean extending the waveform “out-of-sample”. My experience with this in the world of climate is that both FFT and periodicity analysis are pretty useless for that purpose.
But again, I’m not using periodicity analysis for that purpose either. I’m just using it as a tool to determine if there are any 10-11 year signals in the various temperature datasets. It happens to be very good at that. But you can use whatever you’d prefer for that analysis, FFT, wavelets, whatever. All I’m interested is whether the signal is actually there … and to date, I haven’t found it in any temperature datasets.
All the best, thanks for the response,
w.
Willis Eschenbach says:
April 16, 2014 at 3:02 am
“…and to date, I haven’t found it in any temperature datasets.”
There are two possibilities then:
1) variations in solar output cause no effect on Earthly climate
2) you are searching for the wrong observable
Instantaneous responses are typically weak. For long term climate effects, you should be looking for things which result from energy storage mechanisms. This is a weighted integration of the input, with the weighting being provided by the cyclical behavior of the storage medium, i.e., the oceans.
Nutation of the Earth does, indeed, cause the oceans to “slosh” with an 18.6 year periodicity, plus a strong 2X harmonic, and in the weighted integral, these would produce harmonics which match those evident in the PSD.
I only put quotations around slosh because it is a slow process to our immediate senses, and it would not be a turbulent flow, which is opposite to how a lay person might typically picture the word applying. But, speed up the film, and you would see the oceans tilting from one side of their basins to the other in time with the nutation, modulated of course by the diurnal motion of the tides.
Bart says:
April 16, 2014 at 9:01 am
Willis Eschenbach says:
April 16, 2014 at 3:02 am
I do love how you throw out claims like “Instantaneous responses are typically weak” without any attempt to substantiate them. In fact, at most points on the planet, the day-to-day changes are often larger than the month-to-month changes, and these are in turn often larger than the year-to-year changes. Does that sound like weak instantaneous response to you?
And while there is indeed a weighted integration of the input, that doesn’t make the input signal disappear. Perhaps you would be so kind as to tell the lurkers what the integral of a sine wave is, and whether integrating such a sine wave changes the cycle length …
Bart, so far your theory seems to be:
1. The moon causes tidal forces.
2. Inter alia, the tidal forces cause the oceans to “slosh” in their basins and also cause the earth to nutate.
THEREFORE …
3. There is no sign of an ~ 11-year cycle in the 10Be records, because the ocean sloshing has transmuted the 11-year cycle into two cycles with periods of “about” 5 and 60 years.
I’m sorry, but you’ll have to show me the math about how the THEREFORE part of your theory works. And not just hand waving math about here’s some cycles, you add them together, mix them up, subtract the synodic period of Jupiter and Saturn, and presto! the mystery number 11 disappears and is replaced by the numbers 5 and 60.
I mean real math, you know, the kind with UNITS.
As both Leif and I have both stated and provided evidence for, the nutation doesn’t “cause” the oceans to slosh. The tidal forces cause both the sloshing (which comes from a host of factors, not just nutations) and the nutations themselves.
What we are still missing is anything resembling a mechanism for your claimed actions, or any data showing the results you claim. For example, you say it’s nutation. Nutation has an 18.6 year period … and you claim that is supported by your graph showing the HadCRUT3 dataset with a 21-year period. How does that work, Bart? Does the sloshing of the oceans stretch the 18.6 year cycle to 21 years?
EVIDENCE! You can speculate and make your theoretical claims all day long … but where is your evidence? Here, for example, is the periodicity analysis of the San Francisco tides. There is a very weak cycle near to 18.6 … but I fear that near only counts in horseshoes. If you want to show say an annual cycle in the data, it’s no good showing an 11-month cycle, even though 11 months is assuredly “near” to 12 months.
Me, I employ people’s usage of the word “near” to separate the real cycles from the poseurs. If someone tells me that phenomenon A has cycles that are “near” to say the synodic period of Jupiter and Saturn, I just laugh. If phenomenon A were in fact driven by that synodic period, then the long-term average of phenomenon A would show a cycle that is within measurement error of the synodic period.
For example, in your citation above, you point to a 21-year period in some data or other as evidence in support of your claim of an 18.6 period … sorry, my friend. Doesn’t fly. Yes, 21 is indeed “near” to 18.6, as you point out.
But a 21-year cycle is NOT evidence of an 18.6 year forcing mechanism.
Regards,
w.
Willis Eschenbach says:
April 16, 2014 at 11:33 am
“I do love how you throw out claims like “Instantaneous responses are typically weak” without any attempt to substantiate them.”
Sorry. In the circles I travel in, this would not be particularly notable. Systems with long lag response time typically have higher dc gain.
“2. Inter alia, the tidal forces cause the oceans to “slosh” in their basins and also cause the earth to nutate.”
No. The Earth nutates independently of the ocean tides. If the oceans were not there, the Earth would still be undergoing forced nutation from the Sun and Moon. The tidal forces also cause the oceans to slosh, and that motion does affect the nutation. It’s a coupled system. But, the oceans are a small part of the mass of the Earth, and are not responsible for the lion’s share of nutation.
That lion’s share comes about because the Earth is an oblate spheroid, and has mismatched axial and transverse inertias. That creates a torque on the Earth via gravity gradient in the gravitational field of another body like the Sun or the Moon. Google “gravity gradient torque” to learn more.
“I’m sorry, but you’ll have to show me the math about how the THEREFORE part of your theory works. “
What do you get when you beat an 11 year sinusoid against a 9.3 year one? This.
Take two sinusoids, one with period T1, and another with period T2. Multiply them together, and you get components with periods T1*T2/|T1 +/- T2|.
“As both Leif and I have both stated and provided evidence for, the nutation doesn’t “cause” the oceans to slosh.”
You have not provided evidence, and you are both wrong. Nutation is an unsteady angular motion which produces accelerations which vary with distance from the center of rotation, and direction relative to the instantaneous axis of rotation. Acceleration times mass equals force. If you have a problem with that, take it up with Mr. Newton.
“…and you claim that is supported by your graph showing the HadCRUT3 dataset with a 21-year period.”
It’s an old plot. The annotation was simply pointing out the largest formations.
The nutation looks like this. It takes 18.6 years to complete a full circuit. It is elliptical, and the radius of motion has a 9.3 year period.
The solar cycle is dominated by peaks at frequencies corresponding to 10, 10.8, and 11.8 years. Beat those against the 18.6 and 9.3 year nutation harmonics, and you get terms close to the greater and lesser peaks in the temperature anomaly PSD.
“But a 21-year cycle is NOT evidence of an 18.6 year forcing mechanism.”
We’re not looking for 18.6. Nor 9.3, 10, 10.8, or 11.8. We are looking for the harmonics when you modulate the frequencies of the source with those of the energy storage mechanism.
“EVIDENCE! You can speculate and make your theoretical claims all day long … but where is your evidence?”
You misapprehend. I am not trying to prove anything here. I am showing that you have not proved anything. That there are possibilities which you have not explored, and you are not yet in any position to dismiss a solar variation to climate connection.
Longer response appears to be held up in the queue. But, another comment:
“If someone tells me that phenomenon A has cycles that are “near” to say the synodic period of Jupiter and Saturn, I just laugh.”
I don’t laugh. I was raised to be more polite than that when people are making an honest effort. I just don’t put much stock in it. Short of an unappreciated resonance phenomenon, there is no physically significant mechanism to connect the climate to planetary cycles, and the existence of a resonance condition which would tend to build up stored energy on the Earth from that source over a lengthy interval seems a long shot.
But, the Earth’s nutation is an observable quantity, and well known. The effect of tides on climate are significant. The solar cycles, again, just so. There are substantial connections to the Earth’s climate worthy of exploration in that mix.
Willis says:
“I’m still not getting it. I take a discretely sampled finite record. I do a periodicity analysis. I decide how I want to decompose it and I do so.
To reconstruct the record, I just run the process in reverse. I add back in the frequencies that I took out. I get back to where I started.
So I’m not understanding why you think the reconstruction of a periodicity function can’t reconstruct the signal. The operations involved are all reversible.
However, again I don’t understand the underlying objection, because I’m NOT decomposing a wave form. I’m just checking the signal strength at the various cycle lengths.”
===========================================================================
Getting back to “where I started” proves nothing relevant! It can be done with subtraction of ANY ARBITRARY time-function g(t) from a signal function f(t), as shown by the trivial equality f(t) = f(t) -g(t) + g(t). My objection is that obtaining g(t) as a periodic extension of the T-long average of the ASSUMED periodic signal form f(t) = f(t + kT) over all k doesn’t provide meaningful results, unless f(t) truly IS strictly T-periodic AND that period is an integer multiple of the data sampling period. Otherwise, you get a result that is NOT an orthogonal measure of “signal strength at the various cycle lengths.” In that general case, the summation of the “variance index” will not add up to the variance of the data!
Periodicity analysis offers the advantage of compact wave-form determination and noise suppression–but only when ALL the stringent prerequisites are strictly met. As your results for San Franciso tide data show, it fails to produce credible identification of tidal constituents even for a line-spectrum signal. It cannot be expected to provide anything better for geophysical signals caharcaterized by a CONTINUOUS spectral structure!
Bart:
Although the idea of tidal influence on climate via oceanic mixing crops up quite regularly when academic oceanographers seek NSF funding, no one has yet demonstrated any convincing connection. Nor does the 18.631yr lunar node precession cycle figure prominently in the long list of tidal constituents. It certainly does’nt create any “sloshing” in ocean basins, whose fundamental resonance modes are on the order of days in period, not decades.
1sky1 says:
April 16, 2014 at 7:11 pm
Exactly, which is why I didn’t understand your claim.
Not sure why the exclamation mark, but yes, I’m aware of that.
Again, we’re back into not clear. First, why on earth would you assume that the SF tidal data is a “line-spectrum signal”. Perhaps you could do what you think is the appropriate type of signal decomposition, and link to your results.
Provide anything better that what? I’m not clear what your argument is here.
You seem to be claiming that the tides are a line-spectrum signal but that temperature or something else unspecified is a CONTINUOUS spectrum signal. I’ve provided periodicity analyses upstream for a number of datasets. Which of them are line-spectrum and which are CONTINUOUS, and how do you distinguish the two?
Be clear I’m not saying you’re wrong, 1sky1, and there’s always more for me to learn. I’m just not understanding your objections and your claims that some other method is better, or about the type of signals. I work better with real examples. So how about this:
The SF tide data is here, monthly data 1850 to 2014 as a .csv file. Link to your graph of what you consider to be a proper signal analysis of that data, and we’ll go forwards from there.
w.
Bart says:
April 16, 2014 at 6:48 pm
Sorry, in the cycles I travel in, people quote the relevant parts of the question. In this case I’d asked:
You have ignored the examples entirely, explained nothing, substantiated nothing, and merely replaced one unsubstantiated claim with another. This is one of the most frustrating aspects of discussing anything with you. Instead of providing anything solid, any real world examples, any math with UNITs, or responding to anything solid, you keep retreating to some theoretical world. Or as in this case you tell us what happens in your (unspecified) “circles” … circles of friends? Circles of people working in climate? Crop circles? Circles of theoretical climate scientists?
You seem to forget, you are ANONYMOUS. I have no idea what kind of work you do or what circles you move in … nor do I much care unless it is climate. You seem to think that anything you can do with a signal, the climate can do with a signal. But you haven’t given us ONE STINKING REAL WORLD EXAMPLE of whatever it is you are talking about when you claim that an 11-year solar signal can get transmuted by the freaking nutation into a 5-year and a 60-year signal. Heck, you haven’t even provided any data that your claimed 5-year signal EXISTS!
How about we start by you discuss each of my examples above in light of your claim that instantaneous responses (daily or monthly variations) are so much smaller than annual, decadal or century-long variations, and explain how the instantaneous response to changing forcings is so small … then we can move on to the next real, substantial question that you ignored.
That would be the question where I asked you for the math with the UNITS showing the transmutation of the 11 year solar signal into the other 5 and 60 year signals … to which you replied using math without a single unit. Again, Bart, I know you can do it with math. That’s the easy part of your cycle transformations. Any idiot can do things to theoretical signals with math.
What you’ve failed to show is that the climate system can do it with molecules …
w.
1sky1 says:
April 16, 2014 at 7:54 pm
“Although the idea of tidal influence on climate via oceanic mixing crops up quite regularly when academic oceanographers seek NSF funding…”
Well then, obviously, I’m not the only loon out here.
“It certainly does’nt create any “sloshing” in ocean basins, whose fundamental resonance modes are on the order of days in period, not decades.”
It’s not a question of resonance. It’s a question of mixing the heated surface waters into the depths. It’s a question of the dominance of inertial forces over viscous ones.
I think you guys perhaps are confused by the wording. “Slosh”, in my neck of the woods, means the second of the definitions here:
It does not mean foamy seas splashing up against cliff sides. It means it moves about. And when I say “it”, I don’t mean waves on the surface, but the entire mass of the oceans.
Nutation is a dynamic angular motion of a spinning body. It does accelerate, and put into motion, any flexible or fluid elements on the spinning body. The induced lunar/solar nutation for the Earth’s axis puts the oceans in motion, resulting in mixing, as well as viscous energy dissipation.
You can argue that you do not think it is significant, but that is just an expression of belief at this point in time. It’s a given that there is no known influence. Nobody knows the reason for the ~60 year periodicity in the climate. Obviously, it’s hiding where people haven’t yet discovered it. This is as good a candidate as any.
Willis Eschenbach says:
April 16, 2014 at 10:44 pm
“But you haven’t given us ONE STINKING REAL WORLD EXAMPLE of whatever it is you are talking about when you claim that an 11-year solar signal can get transmuted by the freaking nutation into a 5-year and a 60-year signal.”
Sure I have. If you heat something with a T1 period cycle, and that something stores and releases heat on a T2 cycle, then the two cycles are going to modulate, and the amount of energy stored is going to evolve in periods of T1*T2/|T1 +/- T2|.
“Heck, you haven’t even provided any data that your claimed 5-year signal EXISTS!”
Five years is idealized, given the modulation of a perfectly synchronous 11 year cycle with a 9.3 year one. The reality is that the solar cycle is quasi-periodic, with several peaks near frequencies associated with 10, 10.8, and 11.8 years, and non-trivial bandwidth. The polar motion of the Earth is also not perfectly localized, either.
But, we do see some, at least superficial, similarities. Compare this with this. A perfect match? No, of course not. But, considering measurement error, random events, and the vast simplification of just an 11 year and 9.3 year cycle beating against each other, it’s rather suggestive if you ask me.
“…explain how the instantaneous response to changing forcings is so small…”
Energy storage is about accumulation, about integration over time. Take a sinusoid x(t) = cos(w*t) and integrate it. What do you get? sin(w*t)/w. It’s inversely proportional to the frequency. The accumulation of a yearly cycle versus a daily one is going to be amplified 365X. A 60 year cycle, 21,915X.
When you are dealing with quantities that integrate over time, a slow process can easily dominate a faster one, even if the driving forces appear instantaneously mismatched in favor of the faster one.
“What you’ve failed to show is that the climate system can do it with molecules.”
No, I’ve merely failed to show that it does do it. I don’t do this stuff for a living, you know. A proper analysis would be a major undertaking.
By the way, here’s something else you might want to consider. You know your period chart here? Where you’re looking for something at 18.6 years? What do you see at about 9.3 years? That is the period you should have been looking for.
Appropriate line above should have been “Compare this with this.”
Bart says:
April 16, 2014 at 11:20 pm
You seem to misunderstand the burden of proof here. I do not argue that nutation is not significant in the climate system. I argue that you have not demonstrated that it IS significant, and that’s your job, not mine.
To do that, you need to show the 18.6 year frequency of the nutation has an effect, not on the tides, but on some climate dataset. That’s the part that I have repeatedly pointed out is missing in your argument—evidence that nutation is doing something.
I don’t have to show that nutation is insignificant to the climate, Bart. It’s your theory, not mine. So it’s your job to provide EVIDENCE to show it IS significant … and to date, far from completing that task, as far as I know you have not even begun it.
w.
PS—Nobody knows if there even IS a 60 periodicity in the climate. Sure, it looks like there is … but there are big problems with that.
The first problem is that we really don’t have enough temperature or other climate data to show it. My own rule of thumb is that I don’t trust any apparent “cycle” that is longer than a third of the length of the dataset. With less than three full cycles, you may just be looking at a momentary disturbance in the force. So the maximum cycle we can detect in the HadCRUT data is about 50 years …
The second problem is that there is no clear cycle at 60 years. There is a very broad spread of power in the region, which stretches from about 50 to 70 years … which makes it very hard to say anything real about the purported “cycle”. Here’s a look at what I mean.
Willis Eschenbach says:
April 17, 2014 at 11:27 am
“I argue that you have not demonstrated that it IS significant, and that’s your job, not mine.”
That is not my purpose here. My purpose is to challenge the assertion that there is no evidence of solar variation driving the climate based on the lack of an observed 11 year periodicity in the temperature data. My point is that the influence on the climate would not necessarily manifest directly as an 11 year periodicity.
Other than that, I’d just like to get people thinking. The 9.3 year nutation amplitude is showing up in your own periodicity chart for the tides. Combine energy storage varying at 9.3 years, and the solar quasi-cycles, and you get something that looks very like the observations. I think it is significant. YMMV.
“To do that, you need to show the 18.6 year frequency of the nutation has an effect, not on the tides, but on some climate dataset.”
Or, somebody does. On a hunch, I went over to our friends at The Hockey Schtick and searched on “tides”. Interesting, the number of papers focusing on the 18.6 year cycle, like here, here, and and here. Lots of activity in this arena, it appears. Somebody will figure it out.
“With less than three full cycles, you may just be looking at a momentary disturbance in the force.”
Not with this kind of regularity. The odds against it are high. Two essentially uniform full cycles cannot, or should not, be blithely dismissed.
“The second problem is that there is no clear cycle at 60 years.”
Shows up pretty clear in my PSD. Of course, that’s because 60 years +/- 10 in period is 0.0167 years^-1, +0.0024/-0.0033 in frequency.
It is normal to have spreads of this kind. It isn’t a pure cycle. It’s a stochastic system, a series of lightly damped resonances being driven by random inputs. The energy is spread out. You’ve got the 18.6 year lunar forced nutation cycle, which is changing all the time as the Moon recedes in orbit. You’ve got the Solar cycle components, which are quasi-periodic. Nothing here is a pure sinusoid. There is a certain level of futility in trying to pin an exact number on it.
Bart says:
April 17, 2014 at 1:54 pm
My point exactly. YOU need to demonstrate that “the influence on the climate would not necessarily manifest directly as an 11 year periodicity”. It’s your claim, not mine.
So far, you’ve stated it over and over, waved your hands a whole lot, and shown that your hypothesis is possible in theoretical signal analysis. Yes, it’s theoretically possible … and no, I’m not impressed. Where are the observations to back up your claim that a strong ~ 11 driving signal will NOT have an 11-year component in the result, but will be mystically transmuted into ~5 and ~60 year cycles if we simply repeat the magic phrase “nutation, nutation, nutation”?
And where is the math with the units? I fear that math without units doesn’t impress me much either …
w.
Willis Eschenbach says:
April 17, 2014 at 3:25 pm
I cannot believe you are too dim to grasp what I have explained numerous times. Therefore, this is likely a tactic to avoid acknowledging the obvious.
“Yes, it’s theoretically possible … and no, I’m not impressed.”
OK, then. Willis is not impressed. I’ve done all I can with the time and resources available. Others, hopefully, will not be so obstinate.
Bart, let me try this a different way.
I am well aware that in the lab, we can do lots of things with a signal. We can double the frequency, or halve it. We can heterodyne the signal with another signal, extract the resulting beat frequency, rectify it, and retrieve the signal that was riding on a carrier. We can amplitude modulate a carrier wave, pick one of the sidebands, throw away the carrier and the other sideband, and just broadcast the sideband. And on the other end, the receiving end, we can resupply the original carrier frequency and restore the original signal.
Your hypothesis is that an 11-year cycle can be transformed into say a 5 year and 60 year cycle, and giving me the math to prove it.
I know that. I know that in the lab, that 11 year signal could be doubled, or halved, or heterodyned, or rectified, the list is endless. You don’t have to demonstrate that, it’s obvious.
But the climate system is not the lab. There are no single-sideband radios, or any analogue of them, in the climate system. In fact, there’s a whole host of things that we can do to signals in the lab that just don’t seem to happen in the climate system.
So you can’t just point to the fact that you can take an incoming AM radio signal, heterodyne it, bandpass filter it to retrieve the frequency of interest, rectify it, and extract the news broadcast from the carrier wave DOESN’T MEAN THAT THE SAME THING IS HAPPENING IN THE CLIMATE SYSTEM.
That’s the missing link I keep pointing at. Be clear that I AGREE WITH YOU. You can do what you claim. You can transmute one signal into two signals at different frequencies than the original. Doing it on paper is no problem. Doing it in the lab is harder, but almost always possible for a given combination of one input and two output signals. So yes, Bart, I agree with the math and I agree with the lab results. It is possible.
But is it happening in the climate system? I am aware of no evidence that any transmutation of an input signal of that nature is happening in the climate system. For example, the annual variations in the strength of the sun are not somehow transmuted into a 3-month and a 10-year cycle.
The same thing is true of the daily cycle of forcing. It’s not transmuted into something else. We see the clear imprint of the 24-hour variation in total solar irradiation at a given location as a corresponding 24-hour variation in the temperature record.
And we also see the clear imprint of the seasonal variations in total solar irradiation in the corresponding seasonal temperature variations.
So why would we expect the 11-year variation in total solar irradiation to behave differently than the 24-hour and the seasonal variations in total solar irradiation? It’s possible, sure, I agree. You can do it with the math. You can do it in the lab. But you have yet to show the climate system is doing it, or anything like it.
However, yes, that may be possible. To show that it is anything more than a signal engineer’s fantasy, however, you need to show evidence that it is happening somewhere, anywhere in the climate system. I can do lots of things with math that will never happen in nature.
Let me recap the bidding:
• We agree a host of signal transformations can be done with math. Some, but not all of them can be translated into physical systems in the lab, and we are constantly learning how to do more.
• However there are no natural single-sideband signals in the climate system that I know of. Man does things with signals that simply do not occur in the climate system.
• You have no examples of your proposed effect occurring anywhere in the climate system.
• You haven’t even put forward an example of a similar effect occurring somewhere in the climate system.
• You have no proposed physical mechanism.
• Other variations in total solar irradiance behave as expected (cycles of input solar forcing reappear with the same period in the output temperature at all other timescales).
Given that, Bart, I’m not buying the idea that nutation ate the evidence …
I continue to say that IF there is an 11-year temperature signal corresponding to the ~ 11-year solar cycle, it is so small as to be lost in the weeds … and to me, than means the solar cycle doesn’t appear to be affecting the climate on a decadal scale.
Again, I make no overarching claims. I’m just saying, I can’t find evidence of the 11-year solar cycle in any of the temperature records I’ve examined to date. Doesn’t mean it’s not there. If you have such evidence, bring it forward.
I do think you understand signal anaysis, Bart. I just don’t think you considered the messy realities of climate.
w.
Bart, in writing that last comment, I got to thinking about why some kinds of signal transformations don’t seem to happen in natural systems like the climate.
What I realized was that many of the physical signal processing systems depend in some form on the concept of resonance. An oscillator naturally resonates at a certain frequency. Or a bandpass filter allows resonant frequencies.
I think the main issue is that natural flow systems are heavily damped. Curiously this is a result of the Constructal Law. The Constructal Law governs the direction of evolution of flow systems. It states that flow systems far from equilibrium (e.g. the climate) evolve to increase the size of the interface between the individual flows that make up the system.
One corollary of the Constructal Law is that natural flow systems evolve towards configurations which would stop the most quickly if the driving force is removed. This is because of the extensive contact between individual flows going in opposite directions.
As an example, consider the flow of the Hadley cells. At the surface, the air is moving constantly from about 30°N to the Equator. But just a few miles above the surface, the air is moving constantly from the Equator to about 30°N.
So we have a giant sheet of air about 2,000 miles long (Equator to 30°N) and a few miles thick going south, and directly above it the same thing going the other way …
Systems like that don’t “ring”. They don’t feature much in the way of overtones. There is too much turbulence and counterflow at the interface, and that interface covers the entire region 30N-30S.
Anyhow, that’s my guess about why we can do things with signals in the lab that don’t seem to occur in the climate system. It’s too heavily damped by turbulence and counterflow.
w.
Willis says:
“You seem to be claiming that the tides are a line-spectrum signal but that temperature or something else unspecified is a CONTINUOUS spectrum signal. I’ve provided periodicity analyses upstream for a number of datasets. Which of them are line-spectrum and which are CONTINUOUS, and how do you distinguish the two?”
============================================================================
If the tides did not intrinsically consist of the superposition of a large number if pure sinusoids, they would not be predictable over the far time-horizons that they patently are. The tidal constiuents are indeed LINE spectra; see Fig. 17.12 in http://oceanworld.tamu.edu/resources/ocng_textbook/chapter17/chapter17_04.htm
The complicating factor is that many of the constituents are incommensurable in period; hence, they are smeared into adjoining frequencies, because they do NOT correspond to a harmonic set of frequencies as in FFT or “periodicity” analysis. Tides require special methods of analysis, outlined in Bruce Parkers monograph at http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/publications/Tidal_Analysis_and_Predictions.pdf
Other geophysical variables, on the other hand, are not driven by a discrete set of periodic astronomical forces and manifest a CONTINUOUS power spectrum, characteristic of chaotic or random processes. This includes wind-stress-driven variations in water level that also register in tide-gauge records–adding another complication.
It’s a nice try to invite me to provide suitable analysis of the S.F. tide record. While I’m experienced in doing such analyses, I don’t do free consulting. You’ll have to learn enough to credibly analyze that data yourself.
Bart:
Outside of some coastal waters, the flow velocities in tidal streams are generally not fast enough to push the [ Reynolds number] into the turbulent range. The tidal flow field is usually irrotational. And not even the most funding-hungry academics claim that the lunar precession cycle, which modulates the diurnal tidal range by several centimeters, is what [produces] “tidal mixing.”
Willis Eschenbach says:
RobR says:
“Extended excursions below the LCL could result in high albedo making higher albedo and cold.”
Well I spent a lot of time trying to back up my idea. I thought if I plotted the trend of the temperature around high and low periods of sunspot activity, I would see a difference. So I downloaded the massive HadCruT4 and filtered it only to realize it only went back to 1850. I wanted to look at sunspot cycles around 5, 6, 7 and 8 so I downloaded the CET record. There is no trends I could tie to sunspots in the CET data. I messed with anomalies, raw, even plotted the moving slope for each month looking back 6 years and ahead 5. The slopes oscillated around but never in correlation with sunspots. I did trends and there were negative trends during high sunspots activity and positive trends during low. There was nothing, nothing, nothing to reinforce my idea.
While there may be something to my thoughts, I can not find any evidence. I think I thought what I thought because I always thought it, from stuff I heard or read. At this point, I have to grudgingly believe, based on the direct observation data (who knows about proxies and what) there is no correlation between sunspots and temperature as far as I can tell.
RobR
Moderator:
Please correct my last comment to read Reynolds number, instead of Richardson number.
In my comment to Bart, please read Reynolds number, instead of Richardson number.
1sky1 says:
April 17, 2014 at 5:19 pm
Well, that’s the last time I ever communicate with you on a scientific matter, 1sky1. You just burnt your bridges with me Your claim, that I’m asking you to do valuable consulting for free, is the most ludicrous excuse for not answering a simple question that I’ve heard in all my time blogging.
Look, 1sky1, if you don’t have the interest or the time or the balls or the smarts or the whatever it is to answer my question, that’s fine. You can bail on the challenge, you don’t need to explain why. Your explanation doesn’t matter, in any case—people see you running from the question in a cloud of dust, and none of your excuses will change that.
But claiming you are backpedaling because I’m trying to take commercial advantage of you? Did you really believe that would fly? Do you think the lurkers are blind?
I asked you to compare your analysis with mine in the spirit of friendly scientific inquiry, and anyone reading the thread knows that. To cast that as a “nice try”, to accuse me of trying to take commercial advantage of you is sick, my friend. That’s all you, not me.
I leave you to talk to the others if they can stomach you. I’m done with you.
w.
Bart says:
April 17, 2014 at 1:54 pm
Like I said, Willis. If you heat something with a T1 period cycle, and that something stores and releases heat on a T2 cycle, then the two cycles are going to modulate, and the amount of energy stored is going to evolve in periods of T1*T2/|T1 +/- T2|.
Think, maybe, of a heat source being alternatingly pushed toward a thermometer, and then pulled away. Now, move the thermometer back and forth, too, with a different period. What periods will show up in the temperature reading from the thermometer?
I’m tired, Willis. I’m tired of being attacked for saying things I know to be true, but without the means in this venue to demonstrate that I am right. I really don’t need this in my life. If you don’t get it, if you don’t believe it, then you don’t. The world will get along.
1sky1 says:
April 17, 2014 at 5:19 pm
There are no pure sinusoids in nature. Even our best crystal oscillators are merely the excitation of a high Q oscillating mode with a sympathetic input.
1sky1 says:
April 17, 2014 at 5:28 pm
Doesn’t have to be turbulent. Max effect is at the transition between steady and unsteady flow. But, it does not have to be at the max to have a significant effect on climate. Remember, we’re talking something on the order of 0.7 degC over 30 years.
And, I’m not talking about precession.
Bart says:
April 17, 2014 at 9:18 pm
Bart, I guess my last message didn’t get through. Let me try again. I agree that lots of things can happen IN THEORY, as in your theoretical example above. And I agree that lots of things can happen IN THE MATH. And I agree that lots of things can happen IN THE LAB.
What I don’t see, and have never seen, is a natural single-sideband signal in the climate. I use this as a simple example of a fairly simple signal transformation that happens in theory, in the math, in the lab, in radios around the world … but doesn’t appear in nature.
So what your theory needs, Bart, and what it doesn’t have, is a single real world example of what you claim is happening in the climate system. Let me give you a f’rinstance.
The earth moves closer to and further from the earth over the course of the year. This is exactly the situation that you describe above, with the “heat source being alternatingly pushed toward a thermometer, and then pulled away”
Now, I’ve never seen that 12-month cycle end up modulated into say a 5-month and a 60-month cycle, as you and I both agree can happen in the lab. But perhaps it is actually happening.
But until you find an actual example, Bart, it’s just a signal engineer’s fantasy. You need to go beat the bushes and show how the earth approaching and then receding from the sun creates an 18-month cycle somewhere.
Until you can show it actually happening, not in theory, not in the math, not in the lab, but in the real climate systems somewhere, anywhere, you have nothing but an unsupported theory.
Ding-burst it, how many times do I have to say it? I AGREE WITH YOU! The things you say are true. All of that stuff does work the way you say it does, in the lab and in the math and in theory.
And for all we know, they may be happening in the climate system … but until you can come up with one real-world example, you have nothing. Zip. Zero. Nada. Zilch. Nicht. Nulevoy.
The problem is, Bart, that theories about cycles are a dime a dozen … actually, that overvalues them. There are uncountable folks out there on the web, each with his own cycle theory, each as convinced as you are that they are right … and we know you can’t all be right.
What you theorize is a forcing at one frequency disappearing totally and being transformed into two widely separated resultant signals at very different frequencies.
I DO BELIEVE THAT IS POSSIBLE. I know all kinds of signal processing can happen in theory, in math and in the lab. Certainly it can happen.
What I have absolutely no evidence for is anything like you describe (the period of variations the forcing disappearing entirely and reappearing at other periods in the resulting temperature) happening anywhere in the climate system …
I don’t say it’s not possible. I don’t say it’s not happening.
I do say I’ve never seen evidence of it happening. And being a scientist, without evidence, I give your theory a pass.
w.
Bart says:
April 17, 2014 at 9:18 pm
“Now, move the thermometer back and forth, too, with a different period.”
Actually, that’s a bad example. A better one would be assume no motion, just that the power to the heat source is alternatingly ramped up and down with one period. Then, have a screen extend and retract between the source and the thermometer with some other period. Now, what periods will show up in the thermometer reading?
“But until you find an actual example, Bart, it’s just a signal engineer’s fantasy. You need to go beat the bushes and show how the earth approaching and then receding from the sun creates an 18-month cycle somewhere. “
It was a bad example. It is the unsteady mixing of the oceans storing heat, not the distance, which would create the modulation of the solar input. The new example I put in above, which oddly I wrote just before your new post flashed up, is much more representative.
“I don’t say it’s not possible. I don’t say it’s not happening. I do say I’ve never seen evidence of it happening.”
But, until you can say for sure it isn’t, then you cannot say that solar variation is not affecting the climate. That has been the point all along.
These things are in my favor, from my point of view:
1) The GHG theory has failed. It does not explain the trend and ~60 year periodicity, both of which have been in evidence since the end of the LIA. With just those two components removed from the observations, there is very little which needs to be explained or worried about.
2) The Sun and the Moon have known, large effects on the Earth’s climate. A mechanism involving them is really the first place that should have been looked to explain the observations. The temperature variations are really a fairly small. Second order lunar and solar effects are probably the cause.
3) There are known lunar/solar/terrestrial processes which would produce the observed periodicities if modulated together.
4) This looks suspiciously like this.
5) What other viable processes are there which could produce the observations?
I see no other viable competitor. I think this is it. Time will tell.
Willis says:
The SF tide data is here, monthly data 1850 to 2014 as a .csv file. Link to your graph of what you consider to be a proper signal analysis of that data, and we’ll go forwards from there.
=============================================================================
Throw whatever tantrum you want about my refusal to spend my day doing a proper signal analysis of the SF data, but anyone expert at that will recognize that it’s you who’s running away from the manifest inability to recognize what’s involved in such. You plainly failed to grasp my earlier analytic expanation about the continuing periodic acf of line-spectrum signals versus the decaying acf of continuous-spectrum signals. And you continue to believe that the wave form produced by “periodicity analysis” can be meaningfully extended as in your Figs. 3 &4. Try comparing that extension with the actual signal and you’ll find that works only if that signal IS periodic (such as the annual temp cycle), but not with narrow-band aperiodic signals (such as sunspot data).
Bart:
I only have time to say that pedantry about physical periodicities hardly conceals that you don’t know what you’re talking about in matters oceanographic.
1sky1 says:
April 18, 2014 at 5:22 pm
Whatever you say, 1sky1, say what you want, but I’m done with you. I told you in friendship to that it was difficult to understand your theoretical explanations. I asked you in friendship to show us a practical example of what you meant, by doing a simple analysis to compare to my analysis, so we could understand the differences.
You response was to accuse me of trying to slip something by you, to accuse me of sneakily trying to get you to reveal your infinite wisdom for free, when everyone knows that your time is oh-so-valuable …
Fine. You don’t want to play, that’s fine.
But I’m not interested in your further excuses for not doing it, no one is. Everyone sees you running from the challenge. No one cares what you are mumbling as you bolt for the door after refusing to provide a simple example.
As to your further claims that I don’t know what I’m doing, perhaps I don’t. But I’ve provided data, code, theoretical support, and an IEEE paper to back up what I said … you’ve not shown that anything I’ve done is wrong, even though you have to code to inspect. Instead, you’ve provided nothing but insults and opaque theory. I’m more than happy to let the lurkers decide who knows what here.
Address your further remarks to Brad, 1sky1, because as far as you’re concerned, I’ve left the building.
w.
1sky1 says:
April 18, 2014 at 5:25 pm
Meh. You have shown no particular acumen. You don’t even seem to know the difference between turbulent and unsteady flow, or precession and nutation.
lsvalgaard says:
April 14, 2014 at 12:24 pm
Thanks for that link, Leif. It’s a nice piece of work.
w.