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
I think the rapidity with which some impugn motives is unfortunate and unnecessary.
As I read this work it starts with an assumption TSI => GST without recourse to GHGs, and looks at the consequences. It steps its way through making a number of further assumptions about cause and effect that are chosen not to violate empirical evidence and concludes we can reasonably model the process without having to include GHGs, if we assume an external Force X. (“If we had eggs, we could have ham and eggs, if we had ham” where ham and eggs is GST, eggs is TSI and ham is Force X).
Somewhat speculatively the model is also used to project future states.
Where does this leave us in the pursuit of our understanding of the earth’s climate system?
First, reductio ad absurdum is in the fine tradition of scientific method. If the process had led to a contradiction it would have disproved the initial assumption. Since the analysis comes down to the assumption of the existence of Force X that is what this turns on. If the existence of Force X or something that could manifest itself in that form is unphysical, this increases the evidence that GST does depend on internal states.
However reductio ad absurdum disproves things, it doesn’t prove them.
Second, the model produced does provide a basis for testing the various assumptions made along the way. If the model not only doesn’t reduce to a contradiction but also shows skill in projecting phenomena out of range of the information used to create the model (not just GST, but also intermediate results) then this adds credence to the assumptions (i.e. maybe we don’t need to understand the internal states to project GST). On the information I’ve seen so far however the investigators don’t seem to have used part of the historic information to independently project what the model would show for the balance, and are waiting for the future. This is a (unfortunate) limitation.
Finally, the approach is useful to remind that top down modeling does often help our understanding of a system – particularly by drawing attention to where greater effort in understanding a subsystem could be warranted, and where materiality suggests it is necessary.
David Archibald’s post is just wishful thinking. When will it start cooling ? Global temperature is unlikely to cool significantly in the short to medium term as there is no physical reason why it should. A major eruption would cause short term cooling, but we don’t know when the next one will be.
He overplays the temperature response to solar variation – and we have little real idea of what future solar cycles will bring.
Also, what are “lunar effects” in this context ?
HAS says:
June 28, 2014 at 4:36 pm
As I read this work it starts with an assumption TSI => GST without recourse to GHGs, and looks at the consequences. It steps its way through making a number of further assumptions about cause and effect that are chosen not to violate empirical evidence
Except that it does. The TSI reconstruction they use is not empirical evidence and we know today that it is wrong. Even Lean who is cited for her 2000 reconstruction has long ago given up on it.
Belvedere106 says:
June 28, 2014 at 3:53 pm
They will never ever admit that the sun drives out climate and not human induced greenhousegasses. That does not mean we can polute btw. Because our way of living makes account a lot of UFP’s floating around in the air we breath. And UFP’s causes cancer.
===
Well if the whole enviro movement would stop pretending that CO2 is pollution and wasting everyone’s time and effort, then maybe they’d have some time to take care of REAL pollution issues.
The trouble is at this stage, I suspect it’s too late and next time they try to “sound the alarm” about something, even if they are right, no one will listen, they’ve over played their hand so badly.
That is a shame and it will do no one any good. But that’s the way it is.
Well, I have never put much stock in the various attempts to deny that GHGs do indeed capture LWIR radiation emitted generally from the surface thus slowing its escape, and warming the atmosphere. The basic physics is not in much doubt.
But I have also always believed, that such perturbations, including variability of TSI, are simply washed out by the strong negative feedback due to clouds.
Less clouds, more surface insolation (ocean), more evaporation, more water in atmosphere, eventually more clouds, less surface insolation.
Or, more clouds, less surface insolation, cooler surface and lower atmosphere, more precipitation, less clouds, more surface insolation.
So it is not at all surprising, that the global Temperature, basically ignores a lower incoming TSI, regardless of what the primary cause of that lower TSI may be.
So when Leif says that a 0.1% lower TSI during a solar minimum, causes less than 0.1 degree change; about 78 m deg. C if you use a BB S-B assumption; that is a thermal equilibrium change one would expect if NOTHING ELSE CHANGED.
But the clouds do change, so the temperature pays no attention to small TSI shifts; either up or down.
Negative feedback works in both directions to oppose changes from any quarter. Le Chatalier’s Principle even says as much.
The true effect of global cloud cover, is something that cannot be monitored from out in space. Even with a flock of satellites giving 24-7 , and 4pi global coverage, you can’t see what makes it through the clouds to the surface.
And no adequate surface monitoring cloud system exists. The cloud level horizon, around any surface monitoring point is a few km, or tens of km at most. And clouds come and go in mere minutes.
So it is likely cloud negative feedback, that frustrates Willis E’s search for a 11 yr solar cycle signature.
Well that is my conclusion anyway. All are free to differ.
James Abbott says: David Archibald’s post is just wishful thinking.
I suspect you are right. A lot people seem to be jumping this because it’s what they want to hear. Bias confirmation.
“When will it start cooling ? ”
About 2005. But it won’t anything like the Evans projections.
The drastic drop you refer to is in the model part of his work, which is the part I don’t find much value in. I wasn’t reading carefully at that point. I’m sure you are right about this, although I would be very reluctant to impute malicious motives here. I believe Dr Evans to be a man of integrity.
This error however merely balances another error. His model will fail to pick up the overall drop in magnetic field strength due to the lessening of solar activity because he is inferring this totally from TSI using an 11 year delay filter. That will work when the sun is doing its usual thing, but not when the sun is entering a period of overall low activity. It is that overall low activity which will be responsible for cooling (should that occur) – and a model based purely on TSI won’t detect it.
cynical_scientist says:
June 28, 2014 at 4:49 pm
although I would be very reluctant to impute malicious motives here. I believe Dr Evans to be a man of integrity.
Incompetent thus. I did allow for that [‘almost’], and as they say “Never ascribe to maliciousness what can be explained by stupidity”
george e. smith says: So it is likely cloud negative feedback, that frustrates Willis E’s search for a 11 yr solar cycle signature.
Oh, he’s not at all frustrated, he’s very happy not to find it since that supports his global thermostat hypothesis.
The SORCE TIm instrument seems to be working again. Or at least, there is 3 months of recent data now.
It looks to be 0.3 W/m2 to 0.5 W/m2 lower than is should be at this time of solar cycle.
http://lasp.colorado.edu/data/sorce/total_solar_irradiance_plots/images/tim_level3_tsi_24hour_3month_640x480.png
Divide by 4 and multiply by 70% and the net solar irradiance is about 0.07 W/m2 lower than it should be. That is only about 0.02C worth of impact according to climate and the Stefan Boltzmann equations. (That is unless there is long-term accumulation of energy levels which is important which the seasonal cycle and the lags in the seasonal cycle tell us is actually important – this is about 10% of the daily change in energy levels that occurs in the seasonal cycle when temperatures change by 20.0C over 180 days, So the drawdown in energy of 0.07 W/m2/time is going to have an important temperature effect the longer this downturn in TSI occurs).
Climate science has gotten to this important energy flux over time question.
lsvalgaard, “The assumption was that a running 11-yr average of the Group Sunspot Number would be a measure of that background [so indeed the sunspots were counter twice], see 34 of http://www.leif.org/research/Another-Maunder-Minimum.pdf
Hagenaar et al [2008] have shown that this assumption is false, and that ERs erupt at a rate that is almost, if not absolutely, unrelated to the sunspot number. ”
Thank you.
So there is still the ER factor that is variable but almost, if not entirely, unrelated to SSN. That would mean that a purely SSN based reconstruction is incomplete. Even if ER is uncorrelated to SSN it seems that it was accorded a fairly significant magnitude. Has that disappeared too?
Is there an implicit assumption that whatever ERs do is random and is hoped to average out?
BTW, you were kind enough to provide a source to basic polarisation data that the rotation FFT was derived from but I don’t really understand the format.
There is daily binary “x” and “.” values, how is that processed to get to something that is FFT-able?
john robertson says:
June 28, 2014 at 9:56 am
Has the world gone mad? David Evans has said exactly the same thing that Michael Mann and Phil Jones told us—we don’t have to give you the data until we want to, and so far we don’t want to.
I begged David Evans, begged him please, please, to release the hidden code, to stop keeping the model equation a secret, to reveal the data, to expose the numbers of tunable parameters, to show the results of the out-of-sample tests that Jo says he’s already done … but no, he’s too busy channeling Lonnie Thompson and the rest of the serial non-archivers among the alarmists by hiding everything he can from public view.
John, while you may personally like his approach, the rules in science are simple. It’s like the sign you see in the restaurant that says “No shoes, no socks, no service” … except this sign says:
No code, no data, no science.
I find the actions of David Evans and Joanne Nova in this to be totally against science. Joanne said that they had sweated and gone unpaid for five years to develop their model, and it was their right to not reveal it right now if they didn’t want to … I told her I was sorry, but Anthony and Steve McIntyre and I have sweated in our respective hovels for five years as well, but that doesn’t buy any of us one minute’s exemption from the normal rules of scientific transparency.
As a result, it is terribly depressing to see my good friend Christopher Monckton once again defending someone who spits in the face of transparency and refuses to expose his work to the harsh light of day. Last time Christopher was defending Nicola Scafetta, another man who thinks he’s above the rest of us and has no need to show his work. The sad part is that in both cases Christopher was not defending science of any sort—as Steve Mosher observed, without data and code it’s not science, it’s just an advertisement for your ideas.
And David and Jo have been advertising for all it’s worth. And as a result, they have developed a whole coterie of suckers who’ve bought into the deal BEFORE GETTING THE TEST RESULTS! How dumb is that? Well, it’s dumb on the part of those buying in, but it’s genius on the part of Jo and David, because people hate to admit that they were wrong. So, sadly, we’re gonna see people advancing their cockamamie “notch theory” ten years from now, whether David and Jo ever reveal their secrets or not. They’ve got a guaranteed long-term cheering squad at this point … but no test results …
And it is more depressing how many people are standing up here at WUWT and applauding this kind of pseudo-science. Look, guys, the rules don’t just apply to the alarmists. You can’t say that Phil Jones was wrong when he refused to give data to Warwick Hughes on the grounds that Warwick might find fault with it, and then give David and Jo a big round of applause when they are doing exactly what Phil did, refusing to give us the data for fear we might find fault with it. Applauding them for that is venal hypocrisy of the worst kind. Busting your opponents for something and giving your friends a pass for the same thing is despicable. Applauding David and Jo for refusing to reveal their work is exactly like the alarmists applauding Peter Gleick for his actions. Both cases call for approbation, not applause.
When David and Jo decide to cut out the crap, come to the party like the rest of us mortals, and act like scientists by being transparent about their work, we’ll have something to discuss. But until then, as I told David and Jo, if I want advertisements I’ll watch Mad Men …
Sadly,
w.
Bill Illis says:
June 28, 2014 at 5:05 pm
It looks to be 0.3 W/m2 to 0.5 W/m2 lower than is should be at this time of solar cycle.
I don’t know where you get that idea from. If you plot TSI against the Sunspot Number, you find that TSI currently is actually a bit too high compared to what we what it should be for the current sunspot number.
Greg Goodman says:
June 28, 2014 at 5:11 pm
So there is still the ER factor that is variable but almost, if not entirely, unrelated to SSN.
I may have given you the wrong impression. The ER emergence rate is almost constant within the error bar. What little, inconsequential, variation there is, is not related to the sunspot number.
Greg Goodman says:
June 28, 2014 at 5:16 pm
There is daily binary “x” and “.” values, how is that processed to get to something that is FFT-able?
Assign -1 to the ‘x’ and +1 to the ‘.’
Willis Eschenbach says:
June 28, 2014 at 5:25 pm
As a result, it is terribly depressing to see my good friend Christopher Monckton once again defending someone who spits in the face of transparency and refuses to expose his work to the harsh light of day.
And ‘defending’ him in a such a rabid way that it demeans himself. Depressing indeed. How can some people sink so low…
In reply to Willis Eschenbach, if we were dealing with a rational scientific community it would be possible for David Evans to publish in a scientific journal and let people pick his work apart in an honorable and straightforward fashion. However, the climate debate is no longer rational. David and Jo have thought long and hard about how to announce their project, and they have decided to describe it in outline and then – quite soon now, in fact – to reveal all of the code and data, which Willis will find to be in an exceptionally transparent and user-friendly form.
It has been interesting to see how many of the usual suspects – the unspeakable Connolley for one – have been drawn out and are sounding off, doing their best to tear down David’s work before it is published. We all suspected that would happen. It shows how worried they are. David is using a brand of mathematics that most climate scientists have very little familiarity with. His work has very much impressed those scientists whom he has consulted. It is well above my pay-grade to say whether or not he is right: but he has at least conducted a genuine and quite difficult scientific enquiry. He may or may not be right, but at least he has made the effort to try to work things out for himself, and he has the courage – which is more than can be said for the “official” climate scientists – to say what will constitute falsification of his theory.
So don’t complain: everything will very soon be available to everybody, and then – and only then – will people be in a proper position to criticize David’s work. One hopes the criticisms will be less immature and more soundly founded than those of Mr Svalgaard.
Monckton of Brenchley says:
June 28, 2014 at 5:54 pm
David is using a brand of mathematics that most climate scientists have very little familiarity with.
None of this matters: Garbage in, garbage out. And it does not matter if it is deliberate garbage or just incompetent garbage.
Oh well at least I’M whiter than white . . . 🙂
Oops , hold on . . . what’s my name?
Neither Mr Svalgaard nor his apologists have been able to defend his malicious and uncalled-for attack on Dr Evans for having used TSI data virtually indistinguishable from the historical record on the SORCE/TIM website, which is an updated version of the data used in the most recent IPCC report. Mr Svalgaard can no longer be taken seriously as a scientist. Let readers compare the two graphs for themselves.
Well recent weeks ( with the David Evans and Steve Goddard work ) have told me something. There are huge egos involved in this debate on both sides. I am no expert, just someone who wants to learn and reads many sources to do so. Many people I have respected in this debate have gone down several notches in that respect in recent weeks. One in particular is acting like a spoilt teenager –I want it and I want it now. You won’t give what I want so I’ll throw the toys out of my cot.
The models we used to design fracture stimulations are built around known physical laws. They are generally very good these days. However in one basin the models were just wrong. We included a fudge factor on one of suspect variables and Bingo the model worked. To this day I do not know why trebling the value of a input variable to a quite unrealistic value made the model useful again. But it worked and we got good results and made money. The engineer in me is frustrated by not understanding the cause to this effect. But it would have been plain nuts not to use the fudge factored model. If Evans model turns out to be good, don’t ignore it just because there is no explanation for its abilities.
And here is confirmation, in detail, that Dr Evans is indeed shortly going to release all his code and data. It is frankly astonishing that he should have been criticized for lack of transparency when he has made it quite clear from the outset that he was going to release everything. The vicious attacks on him have shown just how worried the Forces of Darkness are that he might have stumbled upon something other than Man that drives the climate, and – alas – just how jealous some skeptics are of the attention that his idea is attracting.
This is what Dr Evans says about the forthcoming release of the code and data:
““Our climate model is in a spreadsheet that we will be releasing shortly. We chose to do all the work for this project, right from the beginning, in a single Microsoft Excel spreadsheet for PC. It’s not the fanciest or the fastest, but an Excel spreadsheet is the most ubiquitous and one of the friendlier programming environments. It runs on most computers (any PC with Excel 2007 or later, maybe on Macs with Excel 2011 or later), can hold all the data, makes nice graphs, and all in a single file.
“The models use VBA code, a form of the BASIC programming language that is part of Microsoft Office. The spreadsheet is professionally presented, and you press buttons on the sheets to make models run and so on. You can inspect and run or step through the code; it will be all totally open. Thank you for your patience, but giving away the spreadsheet early would pre-empt the blog posts and disrupt a focused discussion.”
RossP says:
June 28, 2014 at 6:19 pm
As I’ve had occasion to write here before, that’s just Willis being Willis.
I’m confidant that Dr. Evans will provide data & code in a timely manner. To compare him to Jones & Hansen is IMO absurd. Waiting to while promising promptly to present everything in support of a model is a far cry from fighting tooth & nail, grabbing & holding onto wood work while being dragged screaming & kicking to comply with a FOIA request to follow basic scientific procedure by showing your data & work.
NASA’s page on TSI shows both types of TSI plots, one Space Age and another longer term, and the long term one shows a recent uptick in the regular zig-zagging of a falling trend since about 1970:
http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/sorce/data/tsi-data/
A Photoshop overlay of Evans versus the NASA page shows a fair match with a downturn since 1970 and a recent uptick that corresponds to Leif’s bowl back only to 2003:
http://oi61.tinypic.com/2meafea.jpg
So the TSI is indeed falling but is noisy or chaotic in short term trend. The debate here seems to be about how the level of Leif’s bowl pulls down the average since 2003 even though the level itself recovers to that lower 2003 value. I don’t see much issue here either way now that I look at the plots in detail.
Monckton of Brenchley said in part June 28, 2014 at 5:54 pm:
“…David is using a brand of mathematics that most climate scientists have very little familiarity with….”
Possibly.
It is fair to flip this about to say that David’s theory crucially involves this “brand of mathematics” (signal processing) that many “non-full-time climate scientist” have a LOT of familiarity with? Indeed, isn’t David advertised first as a DSP engineer?
Yet he ignored, often with what seemed true resentment (on Jo’s blog), our pointing out clear mistakes. Well, engineers do their very best work standing around a blackboard, coffee cup in one hand, chalk in the other, calling out errors, laughing at our usual foolishness. In the end, we get things right. Blogs – not so much!
Cooling, unlike a lack of warming for 17 years, is a game changer. There will be significant cooling in time for the US presidential election. Cooling of the planet that correlates with an abrupt change to the solar magnetic cycle during a presidential election will be a major news story. There will be panic in the science community as the paradigm rapidly changes.
http://cc.oulu.fi/~usoskin/personal/nature02995.pdf
Unusual activity of the Sun during recent decades compared to the previous 11,000 years
Here we report a reconstruction of the sunspot number covering the past 11,400 years, based on dendrochronologically dated radiocarbon concentrations. We combine physics-based models for each of the processes connecting the radiocarbon concentration with sunspot number. According to our reconstruction, the level of solar activity during the past 70 years is exceptional, and the previous period of equally high activity occurred more than 8,000 years ago. We find that during the past 11,400 years the Sun spent only of the order of 10% of the time at a similarly high level of magnetic activity and almost all of the earlier high-activity periods were shorter than the present episode.
How many sunspots do you see on the sun. This is the peak of solar magnetic cycle 24. There will be no solar magnetic cycle 25. A simpleton can predict what will happen to planetary climate. There are cycles of warming and cooling in the paleo record that correlate with changes to the solar magnetic cycle.
http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/assets/img/latest/latest_4096_4500.jpg
Is there any other physical explanation for the sudden and significant increase in Antarctic sea ice?
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.antarctic.png
Antarctic sea ice is now more than 2 sigma greater than the 30 year average for ever month of the year.
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_stddev_timeseries.png
Arctic sea ice is recovering. The predicted minimum Arctic sea ice for 2014 is above the 30 year average.
To avoid career ending political retribution for climate gate type shenanigans, US government scientific agencies and US universities will suddenly become neutral concerning reporting of what is happening to the sun and cooling climate change. There will suddenly be discussion of past cyclic abrupt climate changes that correlated with solar magnetic changes. Those who were center in climategate type research and public discussion will suddenly become isolated.