Guest essay by David Archibald
A couple of years ago the question was asked “When will it start cooling?” Of course solar denialists misconstrued this innocent enquiry. There is no doubt – we all know that lower solar irradiance will result in lower temperatures on this planet. It is a question of when. Solar activity is much lower than it was at a similar stage of the last solar cycle but Earthly temperatures have remained stubbornly flat. Nobody is happy with this situation. All 50 of the IPCC climate models have now been invalidated and my own model is looking iffy.
Friss-Christenson and Lassen theory, as per Solheim et al’s prediction, has the planet having a temperature decrease of 0.9°C on average over Solar Cycle 24 relative to Solar Cycle 23. The more years that pass without the temperature falling, the greater the fall required over the remaining years of the cycle for this prediction to be validated.
The question may very well have been answered. David Evans has developed a climate model based on a number of inputs including total solar irradiance (TSI), carbon dioxide, nuclear testing and other factors. His notch-filter model is optimised on an eleven year lag between Earthly temperature and climate. The hindcast match is as good as you could expect from a climate model given the vagaries of ENSO, lunar effects and the rest of it, which gives us a lot of confidence in what it is predicting. What it is predicting is that temperature should be falling from just about now given that TSI fell from 2003. From the latest of a series of posts on Jo Nova’s blog:
The model has temperature falling out of bed to about 2020 and then going sideways in response to the peak in Solar Cycle 24. What happens after that? David Evans will release his model of 20 megs in Excel in the near future. I have been using a beta version. The only forecast of Solar Cycle 25 activity is Livingstone and Penn’s estimate of a peak amplitude of seven in sunspot number. The last time that sort of activity level happened was in the Maunder Minimum. So if we plug in TSI levels from the Maunder Minimum, as per the Lean reconstuction, this is what we get:
This graph shows the CET record in blue with the hindcast of the notch-filter model using modern TSI data in red with a projection to 2040. The projected temperature decline of about 2.0°C is within the historic range of the CET record. Climate variability will see spikes up and down from that level. The spikes down will be killers. The biggest spike you see on that record, in 1740, killed 20% of the population of Ireland, 100 years before the more famous potato famine.
I consider that David Evans’ notch-filter model is a big advance in climate science. Validation is coming very soon. Then stock up on tinned lard with 9,020 calories per kg. A pallet load could be a life-saver.
David Archibald, a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C., is the author of Twilight of Abundance: Why Life in the 21st Century Will Be Nasty, Brutish, and Short (Regnery, 2014).
UPDATE:
For fairness and to promote a fuller understating, here are some replies from Joanne Nova
This entire episode is useful to remind us all of important considerations as we talk about or devise alternative models to CO2 AGW. There are other cases of scientific conduct that the British courts have seen fit to decide and in the end, did not look favorably on regarding the scientific methods used. The US does not view this lightly either. Even when non-scientists seek to improve learning, such as with special educators and programs, methods and curriculum used need to be research based. Parents have won compensatory education for their child when the court has discovered that the curriculum used had not been shown in the literature to be tied to the amelioration of the child’s specific learning disability.
It behooves one and all to follow standard research methods and practice, be it in clinical practice, developing models, or smearing substances onto the gellatinous surface of a petre dish. Develop your introduction, do your literature review on both sides of your problem statement. Choose only unimpeachable investigative methods. Choose only unimpeachable statistical analysis and visual representations in graphic or other forms. State your results whatever they are, described as measureably significant or not significant. Leave no stone unturned in your attempt to falsify your own work. And come to only supportable conclusions.
Again, as this case serves to remind us. The consumer (that’s us) MUST learn to critique scientific practice else we place ourselves at the mercy of all manner of primrose path.
For one I’m not terribly impressed with TSI variances of 0.1% over a solar cycle when the UV output can vary 100% between cycles.
Statistics can neither prove nor disprove a relation of cause and effect, and abusing the numbers is not science.
The topic is climatic cooling, thanks perseverators for making it, per usual, about you, again.
From Monckton of Brenchley on July 2, 2014 at 10:54 am:
Oh goody. His Lordship shall kindly extend his magnificent forbearance to Anthony Watts, for now, and shall refrain from crushing Anthony Watts with ruinous legal fees as an insignificant bug beneath his mighty heel of justice, for now.
But Dr. Evans may not feel so restrained, and for the crimes against him there is no defense!
Beware, Anthony Watts, thou vile harborer of free speech and open scientific discussion. The British are coming!
REPLY: Oh, please. If I write an essay, or Monckton writes an essay, that’s one thing. Comments about essays is something else. I’ve been in touch with the Evans, they know that I bear them no malice. Quit making up scenarios without knowing what is going on with the actual people involved. – Anthony
Monckton of Brenchley says:
July 2, 2014 at 2:02 am
The allegations that he did so are regarded as grave not only in the British-law sphere but also in the courts of the United States, and for the same reason. The allegations were circulated on the world’s most-read climate blog. Damages – on both sides of the Atlantic and in Australia – would be enormous.
As regards ‘both sides of the Atlantic’ I doubt that very much, in the USA libel suits are rare because of the difficulty of prevailing in such cases. Given the changes in the English law, in particular the attempt to reduce ‘libel tourism’, it seems likely that the English courts would refuse to hear the case.
“The court will have to be satisfied that, of all the places in which the statement complained of has been published, England and Wales is clearly the most appropriate place in which to bring an action in respect of the statement.”
In any case the US SPEECH Act makes foreign libel judgements unenforceable in US courts.
So to the scientific point at issue. The courts, contrary to what Mr Eschenbach says, are a very good place to sort out disputes of this kind, where one side is making allegations of dishonesty and deception about the other.
Yet again the British government disagrees with you, Lord McNally in a speech on the new defamation law said, inter alia:
“A core concern underlying our commitment to reform the law was to protect scientific and academic debate from the threat of unjustified libel proceedings. The Draft Bill contained a range of measures which will help to encourage open and robust scientific and academic debate. These include generally applicable measures such as the introduction of a harm threshold, simplification and clarification of defences, and a single publication rule, together with specific ones such as the extension of qualified privilege to reports of scientific and academic conferences. ”
2. Method. Dr Evans’ basis for saying a decline in solar activity began in 2003 or thereby is founded upon 11-year smoothing of the data. The court would have regard to the fact that Dr Evans had made that plain from the outset, but that those who had alleged that his conclusion was deliberately false had shown a graph of data with 27-day smoothing, which had been tampered with to extend the smoothing curve across a period of several months were there were no underlying datga.
Not ‘tampered with’, the missing data was replaced with data from another satellite with the appropriate offset made.
http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-SORCE-Cycle-24.png
The court would have regard to the fact that those who have accused Dr Evans of having added bogus data to his system had themselves explicitly stated that if there were no data the analysis should stop there, and yet one of them had himself done, and can be proven to have done, exactly what he had condemned in Dr Evans.
What Leif condemned in Evans analysis was adding additional data into the future (termed extrapolation as opposed to interpolation, the distinction is well known to scientists but apparently not to you). Evans states that he assumes that he can extrapolate the data from September 2013 to December 2015 with the average value from Sept 2012-Aug 2013.
The court would conclude that the attack on Dr Evans had been widely circulated, intemperate, unscientific, excessive, premature, unsoundly founded in logic, persisted in beyond reason and after repeated requests to desist and calculated to damage him in his calling as a scientist, and to do so at a moment when the libellers knew he was about to release the fruit of many years’ work, and that the principal libeller, having demonstrably tampered with a graph himself in a fashion not dissimilar to that of which he had wrongly accused Dr Evans, did not in any event come to the court with clean hands.
What Evans had already released was in Leif’s opinion flawed because of the invalid data:
“Apart from the use of the obsolete Lean TSI for the early years, the most blatant error is the statement that TSI has had a sharp unprecedented drop starting in 2003-2005 to now. This is complete nonsense. Here is TSI since 2003 http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-since-2003.png
There is no such drop. If anything TSI is now higher than it were in 2003. As far as I am concerned, the model is already falsified. Not by the observations but by the use of invalid input to begin with. This concludes my comments as the prediction is worthless on its face.”
Coming in late to this sorry old debate here. People disagree about politics, and often bitterly. Science gradually corrects itself via the weight of evidence.
Perhaps the bigger surprise is that the likes of Willis Eschenbach seem so surprised by this whole blowup. What else would one expect when someone – a lay person as he admits – CM – is trying to get their way in a debate of science, when their background is primarily one of journalism and politics – where such posturing is quite normal. He is NOT a scientist: he’s just some “gentleman of leisure” (bloke) who knows how to sound “clever”. That is what journos and politicians do. Anyone surprised by that?
It’s a good example of why the climate debate has gone the way that it has – most of the real noise comes from people operating in a political sphere, attempting to do politics with science. The problem with that is that science is over time a self-correcting process across the sub-disciplines. Politics, by contrast, is an endless circus of errors and bluster, operating on very short-term (5 years or less) cycles, making it utterly inadequate in terms of securing a sustainable long-term future for Mankind. Monckton knows this. Morano knows this. Heck, Palin might know this! This is the future of your kids, grandkids and great grandkids that they are prepared to gamble with, like the counters on a blackjack table. But they all play the same game. Any gue$$ why? Google the following song: “Motorhead – Get back in line!”
In the meantime, I continue to volunteer for Skeptical Science, and though some may hate that site through their own politics, I promise you one thing. I have never lied in any of my posts on there, and never will. I can confidently say the same for the rest of the crew – we reference everything. Climate change poses a huge problem for Mankind – of that I have no doubt. So let’s stop squabbling over the petty politics and bloody-well do something sensible about it!
Willis erred with :
You have taken my usage of the noun form of “bully” and translated it erroneously to the verb form, “to bully”. Because of your serial penchant to bully your readers, the noun “bully” is appropriate. Notice I did not say, and you cannot find where I said that you bullied Monckton of Brenchley. If you like I can certainly dig up all the examples of your bullying others (See your “Open letter to…” posts for starters) but this isn’t the place for it.
I note too that you did use this diversion to artfully avoid responding your words which I quoted per your instructions. I also note you have not commented on my post regarding your claim that David Evans is (I paraphrase your words here) repeating exactly the words of Mann and Jones.
richardscourtney says:
July 2, 2014 at 8:59 am
Friends:
Phil. says at July 2, 2014 at 8:51 am
“It’s not in his style to admit errors.”
The irony of that is so extreme it is beyond possibility of mockery.
Surely, you guys must be able to see you have ‘jumped the shark’ when the troll who posts as Phil. has joined in.
Please desist.
Why don’t you?
One of us replies to comments and makes substantive posts the other makes drive-by comments of no substance like the one quoted here, easy to see who’s the troll. No doubt you’ll get your friendly moderator to remove this post too?
Regards “Reply” in previous comment:
Ah I don’t know, it just all sounds so serious as people yelp about being wounded when they brush up against the sharp edge of a word. A little levity seemed in order.
Plus there’s a strange synchronicity as this seems determined to drag out to the Fourth of July. Does make me want to laugh.
[snip – yes other things are off topic, but that doesn’t give license. I’m not going to allow you to bring a religious discussion into this, we have enough volatility as it is – Anthony]
Gary. Listen carefully. Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) includes all infrared radiation frequencies emminating from the Sun, including UV. Visible light is a very good source of heat. In fact all the shorter-wave infrareds are a very good source of heat. UV is in the much shorter-wave range and is a much smaller portion of the entire solar irradiance. It is also not as energetic in terms of its ability to heat up a large body of water. It’s very good at killing stuff. It just isn’t that good at heating water. So if variations in the entire solar spectrum, including the powerful heat-warming portion of solar irradiance does not appreciabily show a connection with surface temperatures, how do you think the much smaller less heat-producing portion would be?
The equation standards:
http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/spectra/am1.5/ASTMG173/ASTMG173.html
Why we have equation standards:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MODIS_ATM_solar_irradiance.png
The UV portion versus the light spectrum visual:
http://energy.lbl.gov/coolroof/intro.htm
The UV portion band in the literature:
http://www.agu.org/books/gm/v141/141GM10/141GM10.pdf
Anthony says
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/06/28/a-cool-question-answered/#comment-1674922
Henry says
You had ample opportunity to put all of this to bed,
in fact I asked you to,
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/06/28/a-cool-question-answered/#comment-1674802
yet now you censor me????
REPLY: I can’t read every comment. I never saw it until just now.
You wrote:
So its OK for YOU to tell everyone to stop and Go home, on a place that YOU don’t manage, but not OK for me to keep this from turning into a religious flame session on top of everything else?
Sheesh.
And I’ve warned you before about bringing your religious pursuits here. Feel free to be as upset as you wish, but let me say that I get dozens of emails/comments a day telling me what I should and should not do. I can’t be everywhere, 24/7 to handle every situation.
Your comment was clearly out of line with policy of WUWT. Let me be clear. Do not bring religious discussions here.
– Anthony
John Mason,
You say,
I find a certain irony to your making this statement given Dana’s post today, which looks like little more than a policy discussion to me.
Would you agree that Dana is merely making noise?
Clearly, there are some people here that have some trouble hearing,
and they will continue to sit with that problem,
until they realize that there is a God
Blessings to you all
Henry
Pamela Gray says:
July 2, 2014 at 12:41 pm
Very roughly, of TSI IR is 40%, Visible 40%, UV 20%. Do the math.
Mr Mason says there are no falsehoods at “Skeptical” “Science”. However, there are several references to a paper claiming 97.1% “consensus” for the proposition that global warming is mostly manmade, when my read-down of the authors’ own datafile of all 11,944 papers whose abstracts they reviewed shows that they themselves marked only 64 papers, or 0.5% of the sample, as explicitly endorsing the quantitative or majoritarian consensus. The discrepancy between the 0.5% the authors found (and hid by not publishing the results for each of their levels of consensus separately) and the 97.1% they reported seems to me to be more than serious.
Besides, no one talks of “consensus” that the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. Science does not advance by “consensus” because, in formal logic, argument from consensus is fallacious. Rather, it advances by the testing and rejection of defective hypotheses, for it is very seldom possible to prove a hypothesis in the physical sciences.
If one were to apply the scientific method to the paper claiming “97.1% consensus”, one would have to conclude that the hypothesis of such a consensus had failed, in that the authors of the paper themselves, who very much wanted a large consensus, were unable to mark more than 64 papers as actually endorsing that “consensus”. A re-examination of those 64 papers (Legates et al., 2013) found that only 41 of the 64 abstracts actually endorsed the majoritarian definition of consensus. That’s 0.3%. Accordingly, the hypothesis that there is a 97% consensus must fail, on two grounds. First, it’s only 0.3%. And secondly, science is not consensus, and consensus is not science. And, in this not unimportant respect, “Skeptical” “Science” has neither been skeptical nor scientific. Nor, given the results hidden from readers of the “97.1% consensus” paper, has it been truthful or forthright.
Indeed, Bedford & Cook (2013) contains several explicit and serious misstatements of the findings of the “97.1% consensus” paper. There, too, truthfulness – for whatever reason – seems absent.
My point is we are continuing a practice of tossing about numbers and abstractions as tho certainties like the number of our fingers and toes while ignoring the patently obvious.
Our climate in MN has changed. Arguing whether it can be the Sun is idiocy.
Gary, your statement is overly broad. UV enetration depends on the type of surface (water versus land) and what is on/beneath that surface. Most, if not all of it is reduced to 10% by the time it reaches 20 meters below the ocean surface. But be careful, even that statement is highly variable. The variation in solar UV output is TINY compared to the noise that Earth’s atmosphere and surfaces do to UV.
Please refer to the linked visual with the following footnote:
“Ultraviolet B (UV-B) radiation reaches different depths in ocean water depending on water chemistry, the density of phytoplankton, and the presence of sediment and other particulates. The map above indicates the average depth UV-B penetrates into ocean water. At the depth indicated, only 10 percent of the UV-B radiation that was present at the water’s surface remains. The rest was absorbed or scattered back towards the ocean surface. (Image courtesy Vasilkov et al., JGR-Oceans, 2001)”
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/UVB/uvb_radiation3.php
typo “penetration”, not enetration.
Whatever happened to common courtesy?
If a similar guest post from the warmist camp was posted I am sure robust debate would ensue but not the embarrassing mudslinging going on above. Disagree, point out errors, falsify, request data yes, but accusations and mudslinging reflects poorly on the accuser, whether your right or wrong. Some have gone too far.
I came here from Jo Nova’s blog to check what all the fuss was about. I saw this post when it was first raised (because I visit practically every day), but I hadn’t been following the comments.
I’m just a layman who’s been coming here ever since Climategate broke; no one of any significance. But I’ll tell you what: I never thought that one or two hitherto respected people were capable of behaving so stupidly and vindictively before now, nor so intransigently. Comparing David Evans with Michael Mann because he hasn’t yet released his data after only a few weeks? Accusing him of intentional malfeasance? What’s that all about?
This blog has gone way down in my estimation. I wouldn’t be surprised if that applied to many others who’ve been regular and loyal readers for quite some time now. Anthony, keep an eye on your visitor hits from this point on. I know I won’t be visiting as often, and it’ll be interesting to see whether others won’t be, either.
I’m no climate scientist. I don’t really understand Evans’ model, and await the Cliff Notes version. For all I know it could be right or wrong, but for crying out loud, whatever happened to civility and patience? Whatever happened to the capacity to introspect and see what a damn fool one might be making of oneself, not to mention how much damage one might be doing to WUWT’s reputation?
I despair, I really do. I don’t care how smart people are or how many letters they might have after their names. If they behave like a brats in a tantrum, then they lose my respect, and even more importantly, my inclination to trust them.
Micahel Larkin, well noted, I don’t like the situation either, and I have taken some steps to improve the level of discourse here, but remember I’m damned if I do, damned if I don’t.
1. If I delete too many rude comments, comments which may have a point in the middle of all that rudeness, I’m immediately branded as the censor from hell.
2. If I leave the comments in, I’m accused of letting people run wild.
There’s no perfect solution. I will say that if you want to blame me and my blog for one comment thread out of 11 thousand published here, then that’s your right, though I think it is rather a knee jerk reaction that punishes me for the catch-22 that I am in.
Monckton of Brenchley, of course “no one talks of “consensus” that the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides”. That’s because it is a mathematical truism, proven using mathematical techniques. There are a lot of areas of science where a consensus has grown and is a reality. That’s because there are a number of areas of science where there are a handful of people who refuse to accept the established scientific position that has been arrived at based on scientific evidence.
A short list of these would include HIV/AIDS, evolution, vaccination, Moon landings and so on. Amongst those is climate change. As a rhetorical technique, your conflation of the two ideas looks good on paper. It is, however, not a fair comparison, as I expect you must have known when choosing the example. Maths is lucky in that it can deal with pure entities. Science has to deal with the messier, multivariate real world. That it has managed to achieve so much says something about scientists, and perhaps less about dilettantes.
“Hot under the Collar” is right. Allegations of criminality and dishonesty should be avoided. If either were present, a blog would not be the best place to deal with them.
Gary, for our sub-thread discussion it is more important to consider percent of solar energy in TSI as a function of wave length. Overall, the UV band contains far less than 20% of the energy available from total solar irradiance. So again, why concern yourself with UV variation when the total bandwidth, and in particular the bandwidth with most of the solar energy, doesn’t demonstrably show a global temperature solar cyclic pattern?
For the main discussion, Dr. Evans should have done a proper literature review which would have surely included this, which constitutes Lean’s current work on TSI reconstructions and climate modeling.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2010GL045777/full
Margaret Hardman says:
July 2, 2014 at 2:12 pm
“There are a lot of areas of science where a consensus has grown and is a reality.”
I think you mean has become accepted as a reality. No one has the faintest idea what reality actually is.
“That’s because there are a number of areas of science where there are a handful of people who refuse to accept the established scientific position that has been arrived at based on scientific evidence.”
This statement is indistinguishable from religious rhetoric, and in any case upside down. Those who refuse to accept established paradigms merely because a consensus exists about the interpretation of available evidence are the ones who are being properly sceptical and therefore behaving in a scientific way. Moreover, the real breakthroughs in science quite often come from one or a handful of sceptics.
From Pamela Gray on July 2, 2014 at 2:31 pm:
I mentioned that yesterday!
Good news Pamela, you’re my Echo of the Day.