Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW)
Guest essay by Dr. Norman Page
1.The Problems with the IPCC – GCM Climate Forecasting methods.
Harrison and Stainforth say in: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/eost2009EO13/pdf
“Reductionism argues that deterministic approaches to science and positivist views of causation are the appropriate methodologies for exploring complex, multivariate systems … where the behavior of a complex system can be deduced from the fundamental reductionist understanding. Rather, large, complex systems may be better understood, and perhaps only understood, in terms of observed, emergent behavior. The practical implication is that there exist system behaviors and structures that are not amenable to explanation or prediction by reductionist methodologies … the GCM is the numerical solution of a complex but purely deterministic set of nonlinear partial differential equations over a defined spatiotemporal grid, and no attempt is made to introduce any quantification of uncertainty into its construction … [T]he reductionist argument that large scale behaviour can be represented by the aggregative effects of smaller scale process has never been validated in the context of natural environmental systems .”
The modelling approach is inherently of no value for predicting future temperature with any calculable certainty because of the difficulty of specifying the initial conditions of a sufficiently fine grained spatio-temporal grid of a large number of variables with sufficient precision prior to multiple iterations. For a complete discussion of this see Essex:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvhipLNeda4
and for a detailed discussion see Section 1 at
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2014/07/climate-forecasting-methods-and-cooling.html
Section IPCC AR4 WG1 8.6 deals with forcings, feedbacks and climate sensitivity.It recognizes the the short comings of the models.The conclusions are in section 8.6.4 which concludes:
“Moreover it is not yet clear which tests are critical for constraining the future projections, consequently a set of model metrics that might be used to narrow the range of plausible climate change feedbacks and climate sensitivity has yet to be developed”
What could be clearer. The IPCC in 2007 said itself that it doesn’t even know what metrics to put into the models to test their reliability (i.e., we don’t know what future temperatures will be and we can’t calculate the climate sensitivity to CO2). This also begs a further question of what erroneous assumptions (e.g., that CO2 is the main climate driver) went into the “plausible” models to be tested any way.
Even the IPCC itself has now given up on estimating CS – the AR5 SPM says ( hidden away in a footnote)
“No best estimate for equilibrium climate sensitivity can now be given because of a lack of agreement on values across assessed lines of evidence and studies”
Paradoxically they still claim that UNFCCC can dial up a desired temperature by controlling CO2 levels .This is cognitive dissonance so extreme as to be irrational.There is no empirical evidence which proves that CO2 has anything more than a negligible effect on temperatures.
Equally importantly the climate models on which the entire Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming delusion rests are structured without regard to the natural 60+/- and more importantly 1000 year periodicities ( observed emergent behaviors) so obvious in the temperature record. The modelers approach is simply a scientific disaster and lacks even average commonsense .It is exactly like taking the temperature trend from say Feb – July and projecting it ahead linearly for 20 years or so. The models are back-tuned for less than 100 years when the relevant time scale is millennial.
Fig1 (Amended ( Green Line Added) from Syun-Ichi Akasofu)http://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?paperID=3217
Figure 1 above compares the IPCC forecast with the Akasofu paper forecast and with the simple but most economic working hypothesis of this post (green line) that the peak at about 2003 is the most recent peak in the millennial cycle so obvious in the temperature data.The data also shows that the well documented 60 year temperature cycle coincidentally peaks at about the same time.
The temperature projections of the IPCC – UK Met office models and all the impact studies which derive from them have no solid foundation in empirical science being derived from inherently useless and specifically structurally flawed models. They provide no basis for the discussion of future climate trends and represent an enormous waste of time and money. As a foundation for Governmental climate and energy policy their forecasts are already seen to be grossly in error and are therefore worse than useless.
A new forecasting paradigm needs to be adopted.
2. The Past is the Key to the Present and Future . Finding then Forecasting the Natural Quasi-Periodicities Governing Earths Climate – the Geological Approach.
2.1 General Principles.
The core competency in the Geological Sciences is the ability to recognize and correlate the changing patterns of events in time and space. This requires a mindset and set of skills very different from the reductionist approach to nature, but one which is appropriate and necessary for investigating past climates and forecasting future climate trends. Scientists and modelers with backgrounds in physics and maths usually have little experience in correlating multiple, often fragmentary, data sets of multiple variables.
It is necessary build an understanding of the patterns and a narrative of general trends from the actual individual local and regional time series of particular variables. Earth’s climate is the result of resonances and beats between various quasi-cyclic processes of varying wavelengths.
It is not possible to forecast the future unless we have a good understanding of where the earth is in relation to the current phases of these different interacting natural quasi-periodicities which fall into two main categories.
a) The orbital long wave Milankovitch eccentricity,obliquity and precessional cycles which are modulated by
b) Solar “activity” cycles with possibly multi-millennial, millennial, centennial and decadal time scales.
2.2 The Present Warming in Relation to the Milankovitch Cycles.
Fig. 2 (From Wiki-Milankovic)
We are past the peak of the latest interglacial warming ( Fig.2) with a declining trend for the last 3500 years. (Fig 3)
2.3 The Quasi – Millennial Solar Cycle -Periodicity.
Fig 3 (http://www.climate4you.com/) -(See Humlum’s overview section)
Note the peaks at about 10,000,9000,8000,7000,2000,1000 BP and then the latest peaks seen more clearly at about 990 in Fig 4 and about 2003 in Fig 5.
Fig 4. ( Christiansen and Ljungqvist 2012 (Fig 5) http://www.clim-past.net/8/765/2012/cp-8-765-2012.pdf )
Fig 5.
From Figures 4 and 5 the period of the latest millennial cycle is from about 990 to 2003 or 1,013 years. This is remarkably consistent with the 1,024 periodicity seen in the solar activity wavelet analysis fromhttps://epic.awi.de/30297/1/PNAS-2012-Steinhilber-1118965109.pdf
It is of interest that the quasi millennial peaks in Fig 3 are from Greenland while the 1024 year periodicities in Fig 6 are from Antarctica.
Fig 6
2.4 The Quasi-Millennial Temperature Cycle – Amplitude
A useful empirical estimate of the amplitude of the NH temperature millennial cycle can made from the 50 year moving average curve (red) of Fig 4 above.It is about 1.7 degrees C from the 990 peak to the LIA minimum at about 1640.This is consonant with the estimate of Shindell, Schmidt,Mann et al Solar Forcing of Regional Climate Change During the Maunder Minimumhttp://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2001/2001_Shindell_etal_1.pdf
2.5 The Solar Driver.
.The most important factor in climate forecasting is where earth is in regard to the quasi- millennial natural solar activity cycle which has a period in the 960 – 1024 year range. From Fig 4 above it is trivially obvious that the earth is just approaching ,just at or just past a peak in the millennial cycle.
The best proxy for solar activity is the neutron monitor count and 10 Be data.
The general increase in solar activity which accounts for the temperature rise since the Little Ice Age is obvious in the ice core 10 Be flux data between about 1700 and the late twentieth century.
Fig. 7 ( From Berggren et al) http://www.eawag.ch/forschung/surf/publikationen/2009/2009_berggren.pdf
My view ,based on the Oulu neutron count – Fig 8 combined with Figures 4,5, 6 and 7 above is that the solar activity millennial maximum peaked in Cycle 22 in about 1991.
Fig 8
There is a varying lag between the solar activity peak and the corresponding peak in the different temperature metrics. There is a 12 year delay between the solar activity peak and the millennial cyclic temperature peak seen in the RSS data at 2003.( Fig 5 above )
3.Forecasts
3.1 Long Term .
I am a firm believer in the value of Ockham’s razor thus the simplest working hypothesis based on the weight of all the data is that the millennial temperature cycle peaked at about 2003 and that the general trends from 990 – 2003 seen in Fig 4 will repeat from 2003-3016 with the depths of the next LIA at about 2640.
3.2 Medium Term.
Looking at the shorter 60+/- year wavelengths the simplest hypothesis is that the cooling trend from 2003 forward will simply be a mirror image of the rising trend. This is illustrated by the green curve in Fig,1.which shows cooling until 2038 ,slight warming to 2073, then cooling to the end of the century.
3.3 Current Trends
The cooling trend from the millennial peak at 2003 is illustrated in blue in Fig 5. From 2015 on,the decadal cooling trend is obscured by the current El Nino. The SOI peaked in late 2015.Temperature peaks usually lag the SOI peak by 6-7 months so there may be further modest warming through April 2016. Thereafter during 2017 – 2019 we might reasonably expect a cooling at least as great as that seen during the 1998 El Nino decline in Fig 5 – about 0.9 C
It is worth noting that the increase in the neutron count in 2007 seen in Fig 8 indicated a possible solar regime change which might produce an unexpectedly sharp decline in RSS temperatures 12 years later – 2019 +/- to levels significantly below the blue trend line in Fig 5.
4.Conclusions.
To the detriment of the reputation of science in general, establishment climate scientists made two egregious errors of judgment in their method of approach to climate forecasting and thus in their advice to policy makers in successive SPMs. First, they based their analyses on inherently untestable and specifically structurally flawed models which included many questionable assumptions. Second they totally ignored the natural, solar driven , millennial and multi-decadal quasi-cycles. Unless we know where we are with regard to and then incorporate the phase of the millennial cycle in particular, useful forecasting is simply impossible.
It is fashionable in establishment climate circles to present climate forecasting as a “wicked” problem.I would by contrast contend that by adopting the appropriate time scale and method for analysis it becomes entirely tractable so that commonsense working hypotheses with sufficient likely accuracy and chances of success to guide policy can be formulated.
If the real outcomes follow the near term forecasts in para 3.3 above I suggest that the establishment position is untenable past 2020.This is imminent in climate terms. The essential point of this post is that the 2003 peak in Fig 1 marks a millennial peak which is totally ignored in all the IPCC projections.
The best proxy for solar activity is the neutron monitor count and 10 Be data.
The general increase in solar activity which accounts for the temperature rise since the Little Ice Age is obvious in the ice core 10 Be flux data between about 1700 and the late twentieth century.
Berggren shows that the 10Be count 400 years ago was comparable to what it is today, demolishing your 1000-year wave. Berggren’s conclusion is that the count ” do not indicate unusually high recent solar activity compared to the last 600 years”, demolishing your 1000-year wave.
The Waldmeier Effect [ http://www.leif.org/research/The-Waldmeier-Effect.pdf ] shows that solar activity has not had any upward trend since 1700, demolishing your 1000-year wave.
As Einstein said: “make it as simple as possible, but no simpler”.
It seems to me that fall short of his advice,
….. lsvalgaard is a ” Sun Climate Change D’ nier ” !! LOL
And you are gullible enough not to be.
..No, just very open minded and not fixated on only one possibility, unlike somebody around here !!
perhaps your mind is so open that your brain has fallen out…
Like Page’s fixation on his claim…
It looks like the dispute between Isvalgaard, Page, and others is over just how adequate solar activity proxies are. History and various proxies on paleoclimate give one answer, while Dr Svalgaard cannot find an adequate base of evidence for such cycles in the proxies he is familiar with. Surely someone will correct me if I am wrongin that statement.
I think that the temperature series has more uncertainty than the solar, cosmic ray, auroral, and geomagnetic records.
…Is that what that big gray thing is on the floor ??? LOL
No, it is that tiny, slimy clump…
…ROTFLMBO !!!
Your condition is really bad when you react like that to your own comment. Perhaps you have had enough fun now, so you can contribute something substantial…
lsvalgaard , I’m impressed !! ..Your sense of humor is much improved…good boy !!
It seems that we are in a race to the bottom. And I think you are winning.
Marcus, uncalled for. Stop it.
If you claim the 1000-year wave is real, you demolish your claim that a similar solar wave is the cause. Pick your poison: one of the two claims has to go.
The Waldmeier Effect: just to be clear, this is an empirical “rule of thumb” of unknown consistency and reliability, yes?
Look at the link. There is a theoretical explanation for it too. It is reliable in the sense that several solar indices show it.
“…several solar indices show it….”
…over particular intervals, isn’t it?
“… taken as evidence for an ‘eruption-type’ sunspot cycle freed from ‘the shackles of unduly close adherence to harmonic analysis’…”
Mmm… Sounds a little speculative.
“The Fits to Cycle 6 to 9 are not Good. – Every method has its strong points and its weak points”
Yes so, not always reliable.
OK, so you have some evidence of consistency and reliability, but not perhaps enough to be hurling verbs like “demolish”, I think. I’d advise “makes it unlikely” or even “highly unlikely”, if you feel it is worth sticking your neck out.
…over particular intervals, isn’t it?
In aggregate over the past 300 years
Yes so, not always reliable.
In aggregate there are enough indices that we can tolerate some variation between them.
And the result is strong enough to ‘demolish’ a flaky claim of a 1000-year solar cycle. There simply is no evidence for that cycle. Or is one wants to be generous, the cycle does not show up the past several centuries [which are the interval we care about].
lsvalgaard: “And the result is strong enough to ‘demolish’ a flaky claim of a 1000-year solar cycle.”
The Minoan, Roman and Medieval warm periods and the concomitant cold periods such as the Dark Ages and Little Ice Age tend to indicate otherwise. If the apparent cycle is not solar in origin, what do you suggest produced – and apparently is still producing – it?
apparently is still producing it
No, that is pure extrapolation of noisy data.
You don’t have to have a theory that explains the 1,000-year cycle or the 60-year cycle. You just have to look at the data and see the pattern. Then you can talk yourself hoarse about the causes of them. This is in fact how science works. Debate is healthy, if not mandatory. However, I have observed this interesting phenomenon: people always seem to to like their own theories so much better than the other guy’s theories. In complex natural systems, though, they may both, or all, be right to some extent.
Has anyone come up with any evidence that the 1,000-year or the 60-year cycles are not real? Or the 100,000-year cycle and its mysterious sudden mutation from the earlier 41,000-year cycle? Of course not, they are so bloody obvious that only climate scientists can’t see them. Or if they can see them, they try and make them “disappear”.
Debate away gentlemen and ladies. I really enjoy reading these threads. Please don’t develop a consensus, that would be asking for trouble.
lsvalgaard: “apparently is still producing it
No, that is pure extrapolation of noisy data.
Congratulations on neatly skipping the original query – what is the cause of the the Minoan, Roman and Medieval warm periods and the concomitant cold periods such as the Dark Ages and Little Ice Age in the first place – there is very convincing evidence for their existence – hence the ~1,000 year cycle – in many different disciplines, such as history, archeology, architecture and geology. Or does climate “science” deny the relevance of such disciplines?
My own fault, I should be wise enough by now to realise that putting a get-out-of-jail-free card in my query would permit you to slide neatly out of actually answering the question.
The answer is well-known: any complex non-linear system has quasi-periodic internal fluctuations at frequencies determined by the parameters of the system. Our climate is no different. I thought you would know that.
Smart Rock – March 24, 2016 at 2:55 pm
“You don’t have to have a theory that explains the 1,000-year cycle or the 60-year cycle. You just have to look at the data and see the pattern. …”
___
And let’s not forget that in the 125K planetary cycle, of glacial/inter-glacial of the past 5 to 6 million years, solar input control is clearly implicated in the warming and cooling.
So is it unreasonable to suggest and investigate that the Sun’s processes itself, and not just orbital alignments, might play an unforeseen key role in the variability of next lower and higher orders of magnitude, re planetary warming and cooling?
And on top of this, we’re regularly discovering that the Earth and other planets do have episodic events or cycles occurring in their atmospheres, that do have dramatic effects on albedo and environmental flux.
So why should the Sun be assumed ‘invariable’? Is it even reasonable to be treated as an invariant factor on longer time scales? We already know that it does vary greatly, even on observational instrumental time. And we know that other stars vary stupendously even over quite brief instrumental observations.
So it’s worth exploring fully, without preset bounds as after all discontinuity leaps of thinking that move science forward have tended to come from outside when a discipline or specialization area had become self-satisfied and self-limiting.
solar input control is clearly implicated in the warming and cooling.
Solar insolation varies [due to orbital changes] a hundred times more than the intrinsic variation due to solar activity. But none of this matters. The orbital change over the last 400 years have been to small to measure and solar activity has not varied as assumed for a 1000-year cycle, so even is there is a 1000-year cycle in the [uncertain] temperature series it does not match a similar [non-existent] solar cycle. That is all.
There is good evidence [I have already cited some] that the 10Be count is heavily influenced by atmospheric circulation [e.g. climate] so the 10Be variation is not ‘agnostic’ as to its cause., as you would be correlation climate with climate.
lsvalgaard
March 24, 2016 at 3:37 pm
“… any complex non-linear system has quasi-periodic internal fluctuations at frequencies determined by the parameters of the system. Our climate is no different. …”
___
Our Sun is no different also – right?
catweazle666 March 24, 2016 at 3:32 pm
My own fault, I should be wise enough by now to realise that putting a get-out-of-jail-free card in my query would permit you to slide neatly out of actually answering the question.
The answer is long. You can find my answer [as far as answer can be given] here: http://www.leif.org/research/Climate-Change-My-View.pdf
Your answer in your document is long AND maybe wrong…
You said in your document that the atmosphere without GHGs the atmosphere would be at a constant blackbody temperature of -18. That could only happen if the temperature of the atmosphere was constant and that requires energy of the atmosphere to increase with height!
Lets assume a molecule of N2 is moved from one height to another, what you are effectively saying is that PE + KE is not constant – and the PE just appears without the loss of KE (temperature), so where does the potential energy come from?
As the height of a molecule moves upward and gains potential energy it LOSES translational Kinetic Energy such that in a static atmosphere, where no energy exchange is happening but containing constant energy per mole there must be a temperature gradient from bottom to top of the atmosphere. Think PV=nRt the ideal gas law. The surface temperature being a function of the energy received and the pressure at the surface. This would give a theoretical lapse rate (from the tropopause down) of 9.8 deg/km, however the energy is constantly streaming outward via conduction, convection and radiation which REDUCES the lapse rate. Radiative gasses like water act to cool the surface not warm it.
Remove the energy from the atmosphere and it would collapse to KE=PE=0 and form a thin dense layer at the surface (ie would liquify or freeze).
I can’t see how this does NOT happen seems like pretty basic physics/chemistry to me?
Maybe I misunderstood you?
” without GHGs the atmosphere would be at a constant blackbody temperature of -18.”
If Leif really thinks that, then one has to really reconsider his so-called understanding of anything to do with anything.
Without GHG the surface would be warmed by incoming radiation to -18C, at which point the radiation out would equal the incoming radiation. The only way for the atmosphere to heat would be by conduction / convection. The bottom of the atmosphere would heat to a maximum of -18C by contact with the surface, and the lapse rate would result in the atmosphere cooling with altitude. I am guessing that the good doctor meant the bottom of the atmosphere, or a maximum temperature.
seaice1, Surface radiation would increase dramatically, and the oceans would increase the residence time of said insolation increase. Thus while the GHL (greenhouse liquid oceans) held solar insolation in the oceans, incoming radiation would continue, thus increasing heat content above a simple blackbody. If the oceans could not evaporatively cool, (No GHG correct) then even warmer.
A sufficiently damped (linear or non-linear) system will have no periodic or quasi-periodic fluctuations.
re: lsvalgaard-March 24, 2016 at 10:26 pm
http://www.leif.org/research/Climate-Change-My-View.pdf
Thank-you so much for your link to your personal view link. I have a much better image of where your evaluation of the AGW evidence flows from. Your link expresses your viewpoint succinctly. I have been patiently waiting for such a posting. I will read it carefully again. THX GK
seaice1 ,
Yes, this is the quote I was referring to, it seems on the face of it to repeal the law of conservation of energy, Perhaps Lief should rewrite this because its either wrong or misleading as to meaning.
CommieBob, Leif – Complex nonlinear systems don’t always have quasi periodic fluctuations often they energy SATURATE – sometimes they have odd oscillatory behaviour but its far from always.
It May well be that the climate is in a saturation situtation eg where more warming causes a non-linear response in cloud which limits the energy for warming ( particularly) in the tropics.
Seaice1, Leif seems to have it backward, the TOA will be at -18 with everything below it at a higher temperature due to the compression of the gas. Without that it would be impossible to ignite the Nuclear reaction that powers the sun and Jupiter would have a cold core. PV=nRT.
BobL. why would the TOA be at -18C? All the radiation is absorbed at by surface.
DavidA “Surface radiation would increase dramatically…” Why?
I am content to let readers judge for themselves from Fig 7 whether solar activity was higher or lower in 1700 than in the 20th century .Similarly I say re the millennial cycle ” Note the peaks at about 10,000,9000,8000,7000,2000,1000 BP and then the latest peaks seen more clearly at about 990 in Fig 4 and about 2003 in Fig 5″
See also 1024 year cycle in the wavelet analysis in Fig 6
Looks to me the like quasi millennial cycle is a well supported working hypothesis.
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1004/1004.2675.pdf
“given our current understanding (or lack of it) of the correspondence between 10Be production, sunspot numbers and the 10Be observed in ice cores, this is really not a reliable “concept” to use for historical extrapolation. The sunspot number itself remains the best indicator of cyclic (11-year) solar activity after ~1700 A.D.”
“this implies that more than 50% the 10Be-flux increase around, e.g., 1700 A.D., 1810 A.D. and 1895 A.D. is due to non-production related 224 increases!” [climate regulating the deposition].
So Figure 7 is not something to build upon.
You quote the Berggren at al. paper without mentioning [knowing?] that the caution that “Combined snow pit 10Be measurements and local weather data covering almost a year at Law Dome, Antarctica, indicate that 30% of short term 10Be variability is related to meteorological factors [Pedro et al., 2006].” and “10Be
variations in both cores reflects a regional response to production and climate changes”.
I see “it” as flat from 1980 to 1992, then rising till 2002 then flat from 2002 to 2015. Unfortunately, I don’t know what “it” is since there is no label on the axis.
G
If something hasn’t been idiot-proofed, I generally treat it as would a live high voltage wire.
I’ll poke at it, but very carefully.
I would want to know just how high voltage it might be, before I would poke any wire.
G
Nevertheless, a millennial scale cycle (clearly not a simple thousand year interval) is present in the GISP2 Holocene data plot and requires explanation, so is reasonable as you recently said, to “speculate” on the cause, in the face of next to no reliable data or observations.
Your specialist inputs are, well, another input, but there’s no final-word possible here, and no clear answers, so also reasonable to explore and entertain the solar speculation.
Plus it’s interesting.
Whatever one thinks of the solar influence on climate. the posts arguments and main thrust through figure 2.4 do not depend on them.
There is much to be said for this article but it is an association argument which is in some ways no better than the CO2 association argument. Associations by themselves do not constitute proof and more importantly do not explain precisely how such things translate to reality. The computer models were an attempt to translate ideas of climate science into actual proof but they fall short on so many levels it is not worth going into here.
I believe for instance that ultimately we do have to explain the ice ages and the variations described in this article in terms of physical processes. One that has become I think very compelling is the idea of the oceans impacted by heat from the mantle. I have a blog on this here: https://logiclogiclogic.wordpress.com/2016/02/18/another-big-failure-in-climate-science-underwater-volcanoes/
The article above tries to argue the end of Climate science by 2020. I have thought for 15 years that the science was dead but it lives on in spite of obvious reasons which the author above points out as well. Continued failure is not enough to end this ridiculous waste of money and time. Scandal isn’t enough. I believe there are only 2 things that will enable the real rejection of this science: 1) New political forces which realign the money being spent to align more closely with reality and useful science. 2) Discovery of alternative theory which refutes the current one rather than simply disproves the existing one. Disproof was stated by Hansen to be irrelevant. You can disprove his theories all day but he and his fellows will keep asserting “validations” which they then believe negates disproof when anyone who knows science knows validations are not useful in the face of bad data. The other thing is that they keep adjusting the data to validate rather than changing the theory. Ultimately either 1) someone does something truly egregious on their side (hard to believe this hasn’t been done already considering the scale of the things they’ve been doing) 2) someone creates a theory that refutes the existing theory and explains things better and that has real physical explanations for things like the ice ages and some better historical correspondence. 3) people on the Hansen side defect and admit the science is bogus because of dissafection with funding changes or personal scandals
There is the old snarky comment that the sign of intelligence is how much a person agrees with you. Page is by that standard very intelligent, as this commentary fits my understanding (admittedly casual) of the issues in describing climate, and how it changes over time.
It’s called Stone throwing. The one deflecting needs to do all the work and the thrower will never be convinced otherwise, flinging literature around, you either have the knowledge to discuss it or not without regurgitating, that bugs me. Too much copy paste going on.
“…establishment climate scientists made two egregious errors of judgment in their method of approach to climate forecasting…”
They jumped to a conclusion on the basis of a temporary congruence between measured temperatures and CO2 level in the latter 1/3rd of the 20th century. By the time it became clear in the mid-00’s that the spurious relationship was diverging, they were too heavily invested to back down.
Now, they’re doing everything they can to keep the music going, hoping that they can buy time until another propitious coincidink appears.
When Jones confessed fabricating every tenth degree he added to a global database since 1995, in his Feb 2010 BBC don’t-go-to-jail interview, He was still squirming.
Because of all those indictment threats that went around when Al Gore put their falsity in his movie and the entire world started looking at what he, Angry Bird Mann, Rowboat Hansen, and Sky Terror Trenberth among others – all government administrators in weather/’climastrology’ – had been getting away with.
About two dozen of Al Gore’s ”magic made the sky hot pay me for using fire” carbon scheme associates actually were indicted and pled or were jailed.
They were so afraid they were going to be indicted for all that stuff… Jones was talking about it at length in ClimateGate when one of their own Snowdened them and they were seen lying about every word of warming since 1998.
The now famous spontaneous glib admission of it by Phiddling Phil July 5 2005 comes to mind:
”The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world cooled since 1998. Ok it has but it’s only seven years of data (every year between ’98 and when he told scientist John Christy in an email) and it isn’t statistically significant.”
Bartemis
March 24, 2016 at 2:03 pm
Now, they’re doing everything they can to keep the music going, hoping that they can buy time until another propitious coincidink appears.
..All you have to do is mention the Sun and lsvalgaard goes batty !!! He is an anti-Sun kind of guy !!
Marcus, tone it down or I’ll be forced to put you on moderation.
ok, I’ll run away like Janice……
..P.S…Sorry, past my nap time !!
@ Marcus,
Even if you call her name, I’m not sure Janice would help you to keep digging your hole deeper.
Marcus, you’re becoming the person who sticks like a fart in a phone booth.
Are you trying to protect your “top commenter” status?
clipe
Foul.
Uncalled-for Visual/Olfactory Memory Violation.
10 Minutes in the Box for you
Definition of a mathematically chaotic system: “the GCM is the numerical solution of a complex but purely deterministic set of nonlinear partial differential equations over a defined spatiotemporal grid, and no attempt is made to introduce any quantification of uncertainty into its construction “
Nor any linkage to any real physical system known to exist anywhere.
G
When I used to use an electrolytic tank to map electric fields in a multi electrode electron gun system for a CRT, we actually used to measure Voltages at specific spatial grid locations, and then use FEA to compute the expected electron trajectories, after matching the complete field to the MEASURED gridded points.
If you don’t have MEASURED values for the points on your spatiotemporal grid, you can never get a solution to your FEA problem.
If your model is realistic, it at least has to match real world measured values at as many real world grid positions as it is possible for you to make observational measurements at.
Otherwise it is GIGO
G
I had never heard of an electrolytic tank so I googled it. Here is a great paper. It gives enough detail that it could be duplicated at home. Neat stuff.
This is the inherent problem in climate modelling. It is not possible to program the correct value for all known variables (clouds?). It is obviously not possible to program unknown variables (solar fluctuations?). It is, in fact only possible to program by omitting and simplifying, which defeats the purpose of modelling a complex system. E=MC2 works as a simple model of a process while 42 is not the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything. They should give up and go home.
“…while 42 is not the answer to Life…”
Probably not.
But 34B-23-36 may be.
Norman;
Good article IMHO.
Do you have any comments Valentina Zharkova’s work.
Oh No, you mentioned VZ.. Now lsvalgaard is really going to go spastic !!
No more comments like this Marcus
Again, sorry..
Here is one: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1512.05516.pdf
“We show that the Zh15 model fails to reproduce the well-established features of the solar activity evolution during the last millennium. This means that the predictive part for the future is not reliable either.”
End of story.
I’m afraid “end of story” is meaningless. Well I’m not afraid 🙂
Not reliable means uncertain, not end of story. You must have read it wrong, but a single tree and fudge fest models, no problem there sure.
If you would even look at the link [which you obviously have not] you would see that ZkV make specific predictions [of the past] and they come out very wrong, so, yes End of THAT Story.
Tut tut, just because alarmist science disappears uncertainty doesn’t mean the rest of the scientific community should do same eh nudge nudge, wink wink. 😀
There is no uncertainty here. They make a detailed numeric prediction and it comes out dead wrong, so EOS.
What Leif fails to see, is that just like Tom Wiggley, he forecasted his changes to the solar record well before he “found” a reason for those changes.
His constant bluster and carrying on about it seems to have fooled some people.
But many can see through it, just like they can see through the GSS “adjustments”.
Nonsense. The authors [not me] of the paper compare the Zh15 prediction with the actual observations and found that they disagreed grossly, hence tha the paper was no good. How about you actually read it.
YAWN..
And just how much “interference and bluster” did you contribute. !!
4 or 5 of you mates , a consensus.
I’ll listen to Lean , Usoskin etc way before I’ll pay any attention to someone like you who pre-empted his “adjustment” to real data.
Not the end of the story.
Take a look at http://www.nature.com/articles/srep15689#comments
And the forthcoming http://www.spaceclimate.fi/SC6/
Look carefully at their graph:
http://www.leif.org/Zh15-Failure.png
http://www.leif.org/research/Zh15-Failure.png
Zh15 makes it hard by plotting every other cycle upside down. If we undo that it looks like this:
http://www.leif.org/research/Zharkova-2015-Double-Dynamo-Fail.png
EOS
Good piece Dr. Page.
Chaos + Chaos X’s Chaos to the 5th power divided by total Chaos = Some other Chaos yet unknown.
..Yea, but do you a computer model to prove that ?
do you have …arrrg…..
I would comment here, but since I rather disfavor being called a witless idiot I’ll skip it.
Yet again there is the deceptively annotated Alley GISP2 graph posted up here.
No – the end of it is not now – it is 1855 !!
Before modern warming started.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/04/13/crowdsourcing-the-wuwt-paleoclimate-reference-page-disputed-graphs-alley-2000/
And atmosphere is now at 400ppm – up ~40% since the end of the graph below the GISP2 one.
Also the top of a glacier on Greenland is not a proxy for the whole world — as denizens on here would be quick to point out *if* it were used as an argument from others.
FGS: The temps hover near -30C on it. An extreme is very sensitive to local climate changes and Greenland just happens to lie north of the biggest transport of heat mechanism on the planet – the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, which via SST’s would markedly effect the NAO. A disturbance in that *could* easily cause a delta of 2C there but not affect global averages hardly at all.
Your woodfortrees RSS graph is now defunct as there is now version 4.0 in the pipeline for TLT.
Use the surface data-sets as they are more reliable – UAH is on v5.6 or something now.
I mean we wouldn’t want any deceptive “adjustments would we?
Leif has more than adequately dealt with the rest of it.
But Correlation, least of all such a poorly presented one, is not causation.
“But Correlation, least of all such a poorly presented one, is not causation.’
Have to remember this next time someone claims rising CO2 is causing anything besides more veggies in my garden.
Thanks!
Try Google and you will find the empirical science behind the correlation.
Toneb: “Try Google and you will find the empirical science behind the correlation.”
LOL!
You Warmists are funny!
“empirical science” does not demonstrate causality and, in fact, is not science.
cat, Pat:
““empirical science” does not demonstrate causality and, in fact, is not science.”
And other “warmest” sniping……
Then we are all living a life of delusion and not just denizens on here.
To say that we cannot “by the balance of probability” rely on what science has taught us this last 150 years.
I suppose we could all throw our hands in the air and say “inshallah” and return to the dark ages but that would make for nought the endeavours of people like Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, Faraday, Hawking, Darwin, Einstein.
Nothing in life is certain my friends BUT some things are more certain than others.
But there you go such are the vagaries of the human condition …. Not to say logic.
Toneb, your post implied assigning causality to an empirical correlation between air temperature and CO2. You’re proposing inductive inference to be science, which it is not. None of the scientists you cited used inductive inference to establish causality.
As to air temperature itself, there is no science whatever that establishes CO2 as causal for any of the recent warming.
And one tree ring set is not a proxy for the whole world !
Toneb says:
…Correlation, least of all such a poorly presented one, is not causation.
That applies in spades to your own comment.
Yes, there has been recent global warming. But there is ZERO empirical, testable evidence showing that it was caused by human CO2 emissions.
You keep trying to peddle that lie here. Stop it. It just discredits you.
Oh, look an unknown comet, looks like a strike for sure, may change the climate, do we adjust for the dust now or 10,000 years out once it all settles.
Take a poll , and oh, 40% agreement will be ok.
Forward….
I don’t know where to look between comets and boulders jumping out of the sea!
“The models are back-tuned for less than 100 years when the relevant time scale is millennial …”.
=========================
And the supposedly observed temperature record they are tuned to is an utterly unreliable hotchpotch dog’s breakfast of mainly US and European city stations collected, interpreted and curated by a gentleman from an entirely unrelated discipline who believed the Earth was heading for a Venus-style ‘thermageddon’ even before he looked at temperature spreadsheet.
Why are you insulting my dog’s breakfast like that?
Huh?
Good thing you did not insult my cat’s vomit.
That would be going too far!
…LOL
Aren’t they the same thing?
Yes, John. Funny how a cat’s vomit makes what a dog considers to be a fine lunchtime snack.
ALL parts, attached or not, of a cat are edible, from the perspective of the dog.
“To the detriment of the reputation of science in general, establishment climate scientists made two egregious errors of judgment in their method of approach to climate forecasting and thus in their advice to policy makers in successive SPMs.”
I would add a third egregious error that you seem too gentlemanly to mention. I would add that besides the two egregious errors you mention in the text, that the so-called scientists made the egregious error of deciding the answer ahead of time and then cooking the books to support the conclusion they started with.
You might call error three “conformation bias run amok”.
Harrison and Stainforth are also wrong that emergent phenomena are, “not amenable to explanation or prediction by reductionist methodologies.”
Reductionist explanations for observed phenomena are necessary to even recognize emergent phenomena (EP). The EP are described using or adapting theoretical formalisms that have been proved powerful by their consistent explanatory coherence with observed phenomena.
I see their claim as part of a general effort by climate modelers to remove their work from the rigorous and relentless critical examination common to the physical sciences. And for good reason. Application of common scientific criticism to climate models would show them (have shown them) predictively useless.
Yup!
The modelling approach is inherently of no value for predicting future temperature with any calculable certainty because of the difficulty of specifying the initial conditions of a sufficiently fine grained spatio-temporal grid of a large number of variables with sufficient precision prior to multiple iterations.
Translation: It ain’t where you is. ‘S where you is on the coive.
Quite right. We don’t know enough about the curves, even the ones we even know about. We can make some good suggestions and inferences. We can deduce from observations. But we do not know as much about the 100%-complete true picture as we think we do.
We don’t even know the scale. Is it one die roll or the average of a hundred die rolls? And how relatively important are each of those die rolls? Opinions vary. I have mine.
There is always a gray area, one where even the unknowns are unknown. We game designers and modelers like to think of them as net neutral in effect, but they never are. Our storyboards (for those who bother to make them) always fit the data after the adjustments. Very nice. See my error bars. See how teeny-weeny they are. Drinks with little umbrellas, all round.
But the problem is that the data is often bad (and, worse, sans metadata), and if that is so then even the known, needed adjustments can be wrong (TOBS, Equipment, etc.), even if you are making all of them empirically correctly. And even if they are net neutral, they may not be so over all known intervals. Do they oscillate? Do they balance or unbalance? Are they systematic or sporadic?
And if you homogenize, you are playing a potentially valuable, but tremendously dangerous intellectual game. You must do it at the right point, after all necessary adjustments are applied. Because if you do it at the wrong point (which is real darn easy, given the gray areas), the omission may contain a systematic bias and rather than make the overall result better, you make it worse (sometimes, much worse).
So very true, to bad most people don’t understand it. I started question climate science when the started to adjust the past, Data is data, is bad data, is bad data good data is good data, the problem is what is the bad data and what is good data. That is the guessing game and then adjusting the data good or bad does make it any better data. If it was bad to begin with is is still bad data if was good data to begin with, it is now it bad data. How how do you know what is the good data and what is the bad data. We know humans make errors but I have yet to find someone who would know, how much, which way and who made the errors. So have you corrected the data or are your corrections just more errors, To bad climate scientist are not bright enough to admit they simply do not know.
But some people are bright enough to have noted that the sum total of all the “adjustments” just happen to match, and match with great precision, the increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration.
What is the likelihood that all of the errors made in thousands of places over more than a hundred years just happen to match the parameter that the people doing the adjusting want it to match so they can get a whole bunch more money and attention?
I do not know the odds, but I know they are mighty slim.
Slim enough to make a sheet of paper turned edgewise look like a big thick magic climate tree.
if you homogenize good milk with rotten milk you will get rotten milk. climate science believes if you homogenize good data with rotten data you will get good data. apparently dairy farmers know more about the real world than do climate scientists.
I looked at some satellite footage of the earth when I was at NASA for the launch this week. It is amazing how much cloud cover there is on this planet. It is amazing that most miss the idea that clouds can really effect the climate. They also miss the fact that there are so very many pieces of the puzzle of what makes this planet’s weather machine work.
In spite of the loud and contentious one here who claims the sun is not part of the puzzle, I believe that JoNova’s husband David Evans has crafted a very interesting hypothesis — with which he made a prediction that is very short range. The man has the courage of his convictions. He has an interesting hypothesis of how the star can effect cloud cover on this planet and thereby climate. (note: my words and understanding of the theory, all errors explaining it are mine and not Dr. Evens)
Many others (some who not allowed to be mentioned here) are also believers that the sun is a major piece of the puzzle. The whole puzzle is very complex with many pieces but the local star is certanly part of the puzzle.
+ 10,000 ( from the nameless one )
Well I think NASANOAA puts the global cloud cover at about 60% in some measure or other.
That is a whole lot of negative feedback to the system input, which is the TSI (fixed annually) to the TOA above those highly variable cloud layers that stop all of the TSI from hitting the oceans and the ground to get stored as heat.
Global Temperature regulation needs no other information beyond that and some measure of Surface Temperature / Total evaporation/precipitation factor which you can get from Wentz et al.
7% per deg. C
G
I still think solar remains more of a question than an answer. We wait and see.
And no more so than co². The whole of Climate cr@p has tangentially migrated to a world of it’s own.
The thing I love about these discussions is the sort of presumption that if it were not for the “anthropogenic climate disturbance” things would just keep rolling on climatewise, presumably forever.
It’s as if no one is aware, and therefore does not consider, that as best we can tell, the Holocene is 11,719 years old this year http://epic.awi.de/12532/1/Ras2005a.pdf based on the end of the Younger Dryas.
As Wallace Broecker tells us:
“In order to estimate how long it will be before the present period of interglacial warmth comes to an end, we first have to estimate how long previous periods of extreme warmth lasted. Our best indicator is 180 records in benthic foraminifera. In these records, the periods of extreme warmth appear to be roughly one half of a precession cycle (i.e., “‘ 11,000 yr) in duration.”
“However, the duration of these intervals of peak warmth were not likely to have been exactly 11,000 yr. Take, e.g. the duration of the present warm period. Depending on one’s definition as to when it started, it has already lasted somewhere between 17,000 calendar years and 11,500 calendar years. The 17,000-year estimate would place the onset just after Heinrich event # 1, when a rapid retreat of the ice sheets commenced. If, instead, the onset is pegged at the beginning of the Bolling warm interval, then its current duration would be about 14,500 calendar years. Finally, if the Younger Dryas cold punctuation is assumed to lie within the glacial period, then the current duration would be about 11,500 calendar years. But, regardless of the choice among these definitions, the present interglacial has already lasted at least one half of an insolation cycle.”
http://www.personal.kent.edu/~jortiz/paleoceanography/broecker.pdf
The precession cycle varies between 19-23kyrs and we are at the 23kyr point now, making 11,500 half. Of the 8 interglacials since the Mid Pleistocene Transition only 1 has lasted longer than about half a precession cycle (MIS-11). MIS-11 had two precession based insolation peaks separated by near glacial conditions in between, so not exactly an ideally extended interglacial.
The problem here is that very few of us are even cognizant of exactly when we live, about 219 years longer than half the current precession cycle length. And that makes the discussion about anthropogenic global warming very interesting indeed.One might be tempted to conclude that we are presently living in the Anthropocene extension of Holocene interglacial warmth.
All who want to end the Anthropocene say “aye”.
And this is where it gets ugly:
“The possible explanation as to why we are still in an interglacial relates to the early anthropogenic hypothesis of Ruddiman (2003, 2005). According to that hypothesis, the anomalous increase of CO2 and CH4 concentrations in the atmosphere as observed in mid- to late Holocene ice-cores results from anthropogenic deforestation and rice irrigation, which started in the early Neolithic at 8000 and 5000 yr BP, respectively. Ruddiman proposes that these early human greenhouse gas emissions prevented the inception of an overdue glacial that otherwise would have already started.”
conclude Muller and Pross (2007) http://folk.uib.no/abo007/share/papers/eemian_and_lgi/mueller_pross07.qsr.pdf
and:
“We will illustrate our case with reference to a debate currently taking place in the circle of Quaternary climate scientists. The climate history of the past few million years is characterised by repeated transitions between `cold’ (glacial) and `warm’ (interglacial) climates. The first modern men were hunting mammoth during the last glacial era. This era culminated around 20,000 years ago [3] and then declined rapidly. By 9,000 years ago climate was close to the modern one. The current interglacial, called the Holocene, should now be coming to an end, when compared to previous interglacials, yet clearly it is not. The debate is about when to expect the next glacial inception, setting aside human activities, which may well have perturbed natural cycles.”
Crucifix, M. and J. Rougier, 2009, On the use of simple dynamical systems for climate predictions: A Bayesian prediction of the next glacial inception, Published in Eur. Phys. J. Spec. Topics, 174, 11-31 (2009)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/0906.3625.pdf
Bringing this discussion up to date, Ganopolski et al (2016):
“The situation is completely different for a CO2 concentration of 240 p.p.m., which is close to that observed at the end of MIS19. In this case all four model versions simulate rapid ice growth several thousands of years before the present and large ice sheets exist already at the present time (Extended Data Fig. 1). This means that the Earth system would already be well on the way towards a new glacial state if the pre-industrial CO2 level had been merely 40 p.p.m. lower than it was during the late Holocene, which is consistent with previous results.”
Paywalled here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v529/n7585/abs/nature16494.html
Fascinating isn’t it? Just think about it, all it took to delay glacial inception was a measly 40ppm! So, I ask query the readership once again:
All who want to end the Anthropocene say “aye”.
Because if warmists are absolutely correct about the heathen devil gas CO2, then they might be dead wrong about what to do about it.
Which is why talk of capture & storage or geoengineering scare the bejesus out of me. People advocating such measures should be taken out and shot (or at least given a stiff talking to).
So the warmists are either so right they are wrong, or so wrong they are right?
30% of all CO2 emitted has been in the past two decades, which is a time of a notable pause in global temps.
The next twenty years will be very interesting to see.
I do not pretend to know what is going to happen in the future, but if someone held a gun to my head and made me bet one way or the other, warming or cooling…I would hope for warming, but bet on cooling.
I don’t need a gun to my head. A little warming is just fine. A new ice age is about as bad as it gets. I live in Canada and I do not want to shovel glacier off my walk every day while watching for polar bears.
In July!
John, I agree with that sentiment and view 100%.
I simply meant that I do not believe anyone really knows what will happen.
Wishing and hoping is a human preoccupation.
So is deciding on things before the facts are know.
I feel like i have learned enough to know how little I know, and am almost humble enough to avoid letting myself believe that my own thoughts can substitute for objective reality.
One good mid-summer freeze in a major growing region like the corn belt would be the start of some bad days here on planet Earth.
William McClenney March 24, 2016 at 3:26 pm
“… One might be tempted to conclude that we are presently living in the Anthropocene extension of Holocene interglacial warmth. …”
___
Are you jesting? Do you really think we have that capacity? Or rather, that CO2 rise has that capacity?
Are you forgetting that the CO2 rise lags the warmth rise, and that even if humans all dies of a virus, and WX cooled for a hundred years straight, that the lagged CO2 rise would rise anyway amid blizzards in the lower tropics?
And if it lags temp change, as it undeniably does, is this not the evidence that the CO2 had nothing to do with the real driver of both the warming and the cooling phases?
Thus CO2 is clearly an entirely irrelevant factor in the alleged (and loaded) ‘Anthropocene’ bunk, other than as a secondary (and very much junior to H2O) G/H lagged overshoot contribution, that could only have a minor moderating effect on the onset of a cooling cycle. In which case the ongoing CO2 lagged overshoot rise might then make for a flat pause-like feature at the peak, and before a decline proper begins … oh … wait …
You were jesting!
William McClenny, thank you for the links. The Muller and Pross link seems to be broken. If the Ganopolski8 et al paper ever escapes from behind the firewall, I hope someone will post a link.
Norman, interesting long view and a top down analysis which is the only workable approach. You don’t get to say it will warm by 3.1C a hundred years hence like the IPCC, Mosh and other bottom up climate model enthusiasts can do with such ‘precision’ and impunity, but you can more likely get the trend of things-to-come better. I think trying too hard to show attribution may be your flaw. Remember Wegener got continental drift right but didn’t know what caused it. They skinned him alive for not having attribution, but it was a seminal first step. I advise that you go with the “record” without the speculation on Be10, sunspots, and the like – these are loose threads that leave your main point in limbo.
I had the pleasure of being a small part of an early (1970s) attempt to produce an economic model of the Canadian economy with the new ‘powerful’ electronic computing capacity of the time. The econometric wiseguys identified all the bits and pieces of an economy and assembled just the kind of thing done by the IPCC. Test runs like increasing unemployment, or changing metal prices, or inserting a 5% annual decline in manufacturing, etc led to curves of future GDP, etc that always needed some adjustments and fudge factors to keep them real. A good friend of mine of a somewhat skeptical bent said,
“Gentlemen (gatherings like this didn’t often have many ladies at the time), I am going to show you a model of the future GDP of Canada that short circuits all this detail, but gets the gross magnitude of the future economy within a few percent on a 10 year forecast. If your model doesn’t replicate this it is highly likely to be wrong.”
He then walked up to the blackboard, sketched the ordinate and abscissa axes and made a low angle slowly rising trace on the graph. He said this represents a annual growth curve for the GDP of Canada – growth at 2% for 3 years and picking up to 3% in the following 3 years (I don’t remember the figures exactly but we were in a recession following the new OPEC cartel quotas in 74). As a joke, he pinned up a carefully calculated graph on a piece of paper and annotated it each year. He was close to right on for the half a dozen years remaining of my civil service career.
Just like today. The government can stick the country on whatever growth track gets them reelected just by how much money they borrow. But soon we will all be like Greece with nobody left to borrow from. The depression that’s coming will probably transpire in a colder, hungrier world. But hey, Happy Easter!
I don’t actually worry much about attributions- here is what I say on another post
“NOTE!! The connection between solar “activity” and climate is poorly understood and highly controversial. Solar “activity” encompasses changes in solar magnetic field strength, IMF, CRF, TSI, EUV, solar wind density and velocity, CMEs, proton events etc. The idea of using the neutron count and the 10Be record as the most useful proxy for changing solar activity and temperature forecasting is agnostic as to the physical mechanisms involved.
Having said that, however, it is reasonable to suggest that the three main solar activity related climate drivers are:
a) the changing GCR flux – via the changes in cloud cover and natural aerosols (optical depth)
b) the changing EUV radiation – top down effects via the Ozone layer
c) the changing TSI – especially on millennial and centennial scales.
The effect on climate of the combination of these solar drivers will vary non-linearly depending on the particular phases of the eccentricity, obliquity and precession orbital cycles at any particular time.
Of particular interest is whether the perihelion of the precession falls in the northern or southern summer at times of higher or lower obliquity.”
“NOTE!! The connection between solar “activity” and climate is poorly understood and highly controversial.
It is not only poorly understood, there is very little solid observational support for it.
a) the changing GCR flux – via the changes in cloud cover and natural aerosols (optical depth)
There has been no trend in GCR flux the last 300 years
b) the changing EUV radiation – top down effects via the Ozone layer
The EUV radiation is closely related to the sunspot number, and there had been no trend in that either the last 300 years
c) the changing TSI – especially on millennial and centennial scales.
Ditto for TSI
So, none of your proposed mechanisms have had the right variation to account for your cycles.
early humans learned to predict the seasons long before they learned the cause. to this day knowing why the seasons change has very little value as compared to knowing when they will change.
we still have no idea what causes gravity, yet we can predict its effects. yet climate science is all hung up on why climate changes without having solved the problem of reliable prediction.
The current warming up from the Little Ice Age is very similar to the warm up from the Dark Ages Cooling Period that occoured about 1300 years ago. Modesl have been generated that show that the climate change we have been experiencing is caused by the sun and the oceans and Mankind does not have the power to change it. Despite all the cliams, there is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on climate. There is no such evidence in the paleoclimate record. There is evidence that warmer temperatures cause more CO2 to enter the atmosphere but there is no evidence that this additional CO2 causes any more warming. If additional greenhouse gases caused additional warming then the primary culprit would have to be H2O which depends upon the warming of just the surfaces of bodies of water and not their volume but such is not part of the AGW conjecture. In other words CO2 increases in the atmosphere as huge volumes of water increase in temperature but more H2O enters the atmopshere as just the surface of bodies of water warm. We live in a water world where the majoriety of the Earth’s surface is some form of water.
The AGW theory is that adding CO2 to the atmosphere causes an increase in its radiant thermal insulation properties causing restrictions in heat flow which in turn cause warming at the Earth’s surface and the lower atmosphere. In itself the effect is small because we are talking about small changes in the CO2 content of the atmosphere and CO2 comprises only about .04% of dry atmosphere if it were only dry but that is not the case. Actually H2O, which averages around 2%, is the primary greenhouse gas. The AGW conjecture is that the warming causes more H2O to enter the atmosphere which further increases the radiant thermal insulation properties of the atmosphere and by so doing so amplifies the effect of CO2 on climate. At first this sounds very plausible. This is where the AGW conjecture ends but that is not all what must happen if CO2 actually causes any warming at all.
Besides being a greenhouse gas, H2O is also a primary coolant in the Earth’s atmosphere transferring heat energy from the Earth;s surface to where clouds form via the heat of vaporization. More heat energy is moved by H2O via phase change then by both convection and LWIR absorption band radiation combined. More H2O means that more heat energy gets moved which provides a negative feedback to any CO2 based warming that might occur. Then there is the issue of clouds. More H2O means more clouds. Clouds not only reflect incoming solar radiation but they radiate to space much more efficiently then the clear atmosphere they replace. Clouds provide another negative feedback. Then there is the issue of the upper atmosphere which cools rather than warms. The cooling reduces the amount of H2O up there which decreases any greenhouse gas effects that CO2 might have up there. In total, H2O provides negative feedback’s which must be the case because negative feedback systems are inherently stable as has been the Earth’s climate for at least the past 500 million years, enough for life to evolve. We are here. The wet lapse rate being smaller then the dry lapse rate is further evidence of H2O’s cooling effects.
The entire so called, “greenhouse” effect that the AGW conjecture is based upon is at best very questionable. A real greenhouse does not stay warm because of the heat trapping effects of greenhouse gases. A real greenhouse stays warm because the glass reduces cooling by convection. This is a convective greenhouse effect. So too on Earth..The surface of the Earth is 33 degrees C warmer than it would be without an atmosphere because gravity limits cooling by convection. This convective greenhouse effect is observed on all planets in the solar system with thick atmospheres and it has nothing to do with the LWIR absorption properties of greenhouse gases. the convective greenhouse effect is calculated from first principals and it accounts for all 33 degrees C. There is no room for an additional radiant greenhouse effect. Our sister planet Venus with an atmosphere that is more than 90 times more massive then Earth’s and which is more than 96% CO2 shows no evidence of an additional radiant greenhouse effect. The high temperatures on the surface of Venus can all be explained by the planet’s proximity to the sun and its very dense atmosphere. The radiant greenhouse effect of the AGW conjecture has never been observed. If CO2 did affect climate then one would expect that the increase in CO2 over the past 30 years would have caused an increase in the natural lapse rate in the troposphere but that has not happened. Considering how the natural lapse rate has changed as a function of an increase in CO2, the climate sensitivity of CO2 must equal 0.0.
This is all a matter of science
However, even interglacial warming causes a mere 100ppm added to the atmosphere after a 10C+ shift. I don’t think there’s a lot of doubt that the vast bulk of the CO2 increase is anthropogenic. It’s just that the affects are raw-only (~1.1C forcing per doubling), with little or no net positive feedback.
Thank you for reading my post and commenting. There is no doubt that the recent increase in CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere is caused by Man’s efforts to burn up the Earth’s finite resources of fossil fuel just as quickly as possible. In a recent article the author of that article found that the original calculations of the 1.1C figure is off by a factor of more than 10 to much and as I pointed out the feedbacks are really negative as they have to have been for the Earth’s climate to have been stable enough for life to evolve. In the original calculations they forgot to include that adding CO2 to the atmosphere causes a slight decrease in the lapse rate in the troposphere which in itself causes cooling and in effect offsets radiative effects warming that might have been caused by the adding of CO2. The convective greenhouse effect has been observed on all planets in the solar system with thick atmospheres. Take for example Venus. The high temperatures in the surface of Venus can all be accounted for by the planet’s proximity to the sun and thickness of the planet’s atmosphere which causes a surface pressure of more than 90 times what it is on Earth. Even though CO2 comprises more than 96 percent of the atmosphere of Venus there is no additional radiant greenhouse effect on Venus. The IPCC, in more than two decades of effort has not been able to refine the range of their guesses of the climate sensitivity of CO2 one iota. They will not even consider the idea that the climate sensitivity of CO2 may be a number very close to zero for fear of losing their funding.
Will,
Thank you for the detailed summation above.
IMO, the point that the feedbacks must be negative or we would not be here are the most compelling piece of the entire puzzle.
Also to compelling to be ignored is the lag in CO2 behind temps in the ice core record, and the near total lack of correlation between CO2 and temp in the long term paleoclimate reconstructions.
As for the credibility of the IPCC and government funded “climate scientists”…I do not take car reliability advice from used car salesmen either.
I believe that Man’s burning up the Earth’s very finite resources of fossil fuels just as quickly as possible is really a very terrible thing and I would have liked to add AGW as another reason to conserve on the use of fossil fuels but the AGW conjecture is just too full of holes. It is based on only partial science.
Problem is, these used climate salesmen get money from us via the government to bombard us all with their b.s.
If it was only a deluge of BS that would be one thing, but it now goes far beyond mere hand
waving and wrong-headed theorizing.
We are now seeing destructive and expensive policies being imposed that will affect us all for a long time to come, even if they are reversed in the near future. Basing actual policy on BS is not just werdz…it is much worse than that.
As for conserving precious resources and avoiding squandering fossil fuels, we could easily be building nuclear plants for our electricity needs. That this is not being done and is actively opposed by many of the same voices that decry CO2 emissions tells us very clearly that the agenda is not what is purported.
We are not being governed by rational, pragmatic and solution oriented peoples.
the lapse rate is about 6.5 C/km. the center of mass of the convecting troposphere is about 5km. this works out to 6.5*5 = 32.5 C of the calculated 33 C GHG warming due to convection. the missing 0.5C might be CO2, or round off error.
32.5 C is close enough considering the approximations in your calculation. If the LWIR absorption properties of so called greenhouse gases is involved then the primary culprit has got to be H2O and not CO2. But adding H2O and CO2 to the atmosphere causes a decrease in the lapse rate in the troposphere which causes a cooling effect. Such is completely ignored by those who support the AGW conjecture.
The Warmists should sign up to go to Mars where they can stay nice and cool despite the nearly 100% CO2 atmosphere.
willhaas March 24, 2016 at 3:55 pm
It’s a +1 from me.
“So too on Earth..The surface of the Earth is 33 degrees C warmer than it would be without an atmosphere because gravity limits cooling by convection.”
Without the GHE how can the surface ever warm up that 33C you talk of? Without atmosphere surface temp would be -18C according to Lief. Can we agree on that? If you then surround this with an atmosphere that is transparent to radiation, the surface remains at -18C because nothing changes the energy balance in or the energy out. The bottom of the atmosphere would warm to -18C by conduction. How would we ever get to 33C warmer? Where does the energy come from? If you double the atmospheric pressure, you do not change the equilibrium surface temperature. At most you would have a temporary rise due to compression, but that would just radiate away.
Good time to buy stock in KOL, DOW and DTD.
As Dr Norman Page points out, quote “2.1 General Principles.
The core competency in the Geological Sciences is the ability to recognize and correlate the changing patterns of events in time and space.”
Here follows an example of studying the pattern of events in time and space from a retired geophysicist.
The atmospheric CO2 concentration for the Mauna Loa Observatory may be downloaded at no cost from the Scripps Institute website. Further, satellite lower tropospheric temperature may be downloaded at no cost from the University of Alabama, Huntsville, site run by Dr Roy Spencer. Comparison of the two data sets clearly shows that the 1997-‘98 El Nino event exposes the deception by the IPCC in proposing that CO2 causes global warming.
The early phase of the El Nino event is marked by a prominent maximum in August 1997 for the annual rate of change of the satellite lower tropospheric temperature for the Tropics. As the corresponding maximum in the annual rate of change in the atmospheric CO2 concentration at Mauna Loa did not occur until March 1998, it is impossible for the CO2 change to have caused that temperature change seven months earlier. Furthermore the correlation between the two variables was 0.13 for the Tropics – Land temperature component and 0.03 for the Tropics – Ocean component for the period December 1978 to February 2016.
Remarkably, the maximum in the annual rate of change of the CO2 concentration on March 1998 coincided with the El Nino 13 month moving average Tropics temperature and the maximum in the Water Vapour Departures from Average (60̊N to 60̊S zone) from Dr Roy Spencer’s web site at http://www.drroyspencer.com/2016/03/record-rainy-cloudy-humid-february-over-the-oceans/
It is not feasible for the rate of change of CO2 concentration to cause a set value for either the temperature or the water vapour concentration. However it is reasonable to consider that the level of the temperature and/or water vapour could control the rate of change of the CO2 concentration. This is further evidence of the IPCC deception.
If the temperature controls the rate of change of CO2 concentration then the rate of change of temperature would correlate with the Second Derivative of the CO2 concentration with respect to time. Sure enough, the El Nino maximum in the rate of change of the Tropics temperature at August 1997 corresponds to a maximum in the estimated Second Derivative of the CO2 concentration at September 1997 with a correlation of 0.6 between the two variables (December 1978 to February 2016), a zero probability of the correlation being zero and the sensitivity, much loved and quoted by climate scientists, was determined to be a rate of 1.3 ppm per annum change for a one degree Celsius change in satellite Tropics temperature.
My favoured explanation (lacking training in biology) is that microbial life forms in the Equatorial zone generate the CO2 concentration in proportion to the temperature. As the Equatorial zone has the highest water vapour concentration and regional temperature for the globe and is the location of the greatest profusion of carbon-based life forms on Earth, it is reasonable for it to be the source of the major changes in atmospheric CO2 concentration.
Conclusion: the natural change in the global temperature has been the major driver of the increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration over the past century not the reverse as falsely claimed by the IPCC, the WMO, the UN and all of the gullible politicians around the world.
Note: the quoted correlations are from Ordinary Linear Regression. The Durbin-Watson test shows that there is a positive autoregression for the variables so Generalised Linear Regression using a First Order Autoregression Model is required but takes a little longer to apply. Results to date show only a small change in the correlation and the t-test which have not, so far, altered the conclusion.
Yep.
http://i1136.photobucket.com/albums/n488/Bartemis/tempco2_zps55644e9e.jpg
Yep
“It is not possible to forecast the future unless we have…”
Sorry, you lost me there. It is not possible to forecast the future. All the creative curve fitting you can muster won’t help, it’ll be the same shiny detritus as the IPCC produces.
How do you think we forecast eclipses, equinoxes etc except by observing natural periodicities?
Those works because the cycles are real [and there is a good theory for them], but yours are likely spurious and as such have no predictive capability.
We can check their predictivity to some extent by 2020.See forecasts above also this excerpt from
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-epistemology-of-climate-forecasting.html
“Ava asks – the blue line is almost flat. – When will we know for sure that we are on the down slope of the thousand year cycle and heading towards another Little Ice Age.
Grandpa says- I’m glad to see that you have developed an early interest in Epistemology. Remember ,I mentioned the 60 year cycle, well, the data shows that the temperature peak in 2003 was close to a peak in both that cycle and the 1000 year cycle. If we are now entering the downslope of the 1000 year cycle then the next peak in the 60 year cycle at about 2063 should be lower than the 2003 peak and the next 60 year peak after that at about 2123 should be lower again, so, by that time ,if the peak is lower, we will be pretty sure that we are on our way to the next little ice age.
That is a long time to wait, but we will get some useful clues a long time before that. Look again at the red curve in Fig 3 – you can see that from the beginning of 2007 to the end of 2009 solar activity dropped to the lowest it has been for a long time. Remember the 12 year delay between the 1991 solar activity peak and the 2003 temperature trend break. , if there is a similar delay in the response to lower solar activity , earth should see a cold spell from 2019 to 2021 when you will be in Middle School.
It should also be noticeably cooler at the coolest part of the 60 year cycle – halfway through the present 60 year cycle at about 2033.
We can watch for these things to happen but meanwhile keep in mind that the overall cyclic trends can be disturbed for a time in some years by the El Nino weather patterns in the Pacific and the associated high temperatures that we see in for example 1998 ,2010 and especially from 2015 on.”
Opinions are not facts, no matter how authoritatively they are enunciated.
we only learned the cycles were real long after we learned to predict future events. to argue what is real and what is not before you can reliably predict is a fools errand. successful prediction tells you the answer. opinion matters not one whit. history is full of opinions that such and such is impossib
lsvalgaard: Those works because the cycles are real [and there is a good theory for them], but yours are likely spurious and as such have no predictive capability.
Right there I think you take a step too far. It is too soon to claim that the 950 year periodicity is spurious and has no predictive capability. It is not to soon to show, as you have done, that to date none of the solar mechanisms proposed for it as been supported by the evidence. As you noted above, the apparent 950 year cycle could be the result of a bunch of (so far unknown or poorly known) nonlinear energy transfers. The possibility that it is real is too important, imo, to dismiss glibly. One of the things to do now is look for the ways that such a process might have left its mark in other parts of the Earth, and investigate whether such marks exist and have the character predicted of them. That was done for the hypothetical “iridium layer” that eventually supported the existence of an asteroid, and revealed where it had landed. And it is being done as people look for markers of the earlier Holocene warm periods around the world.
I should have been more precise. The 1000-year solar cycle is spurious as it does not fit the observations. So, the claim that it drives the climate is not likely to be correct.
the case against CAGW can be made a lot simpler if we consider the flaw in the empirical evidence they have presented to link warming with fossil fuel emissions.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2725743
it’s the same with COD (catastrophic ozone depletion).
it falls apart if you look at the empirical evidence
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2748016
My paper on this same topic was rejected by Tellus last month. See: http://www.scienceheresy.com/statisticsheresy/index.html
Before that it was rejected by J. Roy Stat Soc. Maybe I should try SSRN.
Although I agree with everything in this article, I must take issue with this statement:
I would say something more like “The core competency in the Geological Sciences is the ability to recognize and correlate changing patterns of events in time and space and the ability to recognize and correlate patterns of events that are constant in time and space
To illustrate, I do mineral exploration for a living (a rather poor living since commodity prices have all gone south, I might add). If I want to explore for a magmatic nickel deposit, for example, the things I look for and the things I hope to find are essentially identical if the rocks are 3 million years old or 3 billion years old. Whereas if I am exploring for uranium, the things I look for and hope to find are very different if there was no oxygen in the atmosphere (i.e. pre about 2 billion years) or if land plants existed (post about 450 million years). The geochemistry of uranium is dominated by the fact that oxidized (6-valent) uranium is readily soluble in water while reduced (4-valent) uranium is not. That’s constant through time, of course, but oxygen in the atmosphere oxidizes so uranium becomes mobile in groundwater, while accumulations of plant detritus are reducing agents, and cause uranium oxides to be concentrated in and around them. (As an aside, that’s why there’s a significant level uranium in most coal and that’s why old-style coal burning generating stations put millions of times more radioactivity into the environment than any nuke has done). So we really do need to distinguish between constant processes and changing processes to fully understand earth history.
You could also add a third element of competency – the ability to recognize and distinguish between cyclical and secular changes. That is what this article is about and why I ranted on up the thread at 2:55 pm.about the (presumably deliberate) inability of those who regard themselves as climate scientists to recognize cyclicity when it stares them in the face, and their repeated attempts to make the peak of the last 1,000-year cycle (the MWP) go away. Even when it’s evidenced by indisputable historic facts like the Viking farms in Greenland and harvest records in China. These aren’t stupid people; they must be under the influence of very strong motivational forces like power, prestige and (not so sure about this one) money.
One of their main problems is that their time scale is inadequate. It is like looking at a pointillist painting too close.- so they cant see the picture only the dots. They are or not seeing the wood for the trees
Lots of nitty gritty details appear in these blogswith every post, but earths temperature seems as clear as the difference between day and night……its also so quite moderate now I live on the coast (by the sea.. All that water aound me) compared to my early work on the mines in central WA in Oz….then again, I am but a child.
I looked at the PDF(http://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?paperID=3217) and saw no “Green line extension” as indicated in Fig. 9. What am I missing.
Also I am unsure about how applicable “Ockham’s razor” is to any science project. For example when an electron is combined with a proton one would expect simply a charge cancellation combination that produces a neutron. However the electron mysteriously changes one of the “quarks” in the proton to make it a neutron. Another example is statistical handling of clusters (cancer for example) which in many cases acquit what would appear to be an obvious cause such as leaked radiation or other poisons.
See Fig 1 title – Fig1 (Amended ( Green Line Added) from Syun-Ichi Akasofu
I added the green line.
Sometimes things can be a lot simpler that they seem. If one wants to learn about the relationship between two variables, one has to get the best data available for as long time as possible and then observe how they change. Dr. Svalgaard is right. Periods of high solar activity do not coincide with periods of high temperatures. But there is a clear relationship. It is the periods of low solar activity that coincide with periods of low temperatures. Whenever you get periods of low solar activity, specially grand minima, and very specially clusters of grand minima, temperatures are always below average. The cycles are very clear, a ~2500 years cycle, a ~1000 years cycle, and a ~210 years cycle. Sometimes they become weak and disappear, but they always come back. The ~210 years is only apparent near the lows in the ~2500 years cycle lows, like now. The ~1000 years cycle disappeared between 5000 and 2000 years BP, but is back now. They are detected not only in solar activity or temperatures, but also in glacier dynamics, ocean sediments, tree rings, cave speleothems…
In my opinion the millennial cycle will peak in the third quarter of the 21st century, but we should not see much more solar warming since we are very close to its peak. We have entered a short period of reduced solar activity that should last until around 2050, so not much warming coming for the next decades.
So in the next figure what you have to look is not to the highs in solar activity, but to the lows, they are the ones telling how the cycle is doing.
DO NOT PAY MUCH ATTENTION TO THE HIGHS IN SOLAR ACTIVITY. JUST WATCH FOR THE LOWS!
http://i1039.photobucket.com/albums/a475/Knownuthing/Scafetta2_zpsa4hcvfi3.png
If you are still doubtful, just draw there any cold period using your favorite temperature reconstruction or CET.
By the way, temperature is not determined by the level of solar activity, but by the degree of obliquity of the Earth’s axis. Low solar activity causes cooling followed by slow recovery after solar activity recovers due to the system inertia. The recovery from a low in the 2500 years cycle takes up to 400 years. After the recovery ends temperatures slowly move towards the value determined by obliquity, which in the present is below current average by 0.4-0.6°C.
Leif,
Nature is full of cycles and quasiperiodic oscillations. Some respond to permanent causes and persist even if they come and go. An example is the Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle. It comes and goes depending on conditions, but when it returns, it does so with the exact same periodicity that it had before, indicating that the mechanisms causing the oscillation have been ticking even when no effect was produced.
Others are simply oscillations that appear, repeat for some time and then disappear, indicating that they are a product of changing conditions, like waves in the water from a random stone.
In any case the use of this oscillations improves the predictive capabilities over other methods. One can learn more about what is a watch, how it works, and what is measuring, simple by observing it and opening its back (top down), than by starting from its pieces, specially if one does not know how to put them together (bottom up).
I have reached the same prediction as you about cycle 25 (about the same as 24) simply by looking at how cycles evolve. I can even predict cycles 26 to 29 as returning to values close to cycles 21-22. To you this has no value because I can’t explain why, but neither can you, and a description of how the system works is important and useful to investigate why it works that way. By rejecting this description of cyclical phenomena in solar output you blind yourself to its causes. I will not find out why the solar cycles take place and how, but that is not my job, as I am not a solar physicist. I am a scientist in biological sciences very used to see cycles in nature and all type of biological pacemakers. Some cycles are real and others are not, but a thorough description of the system is an essential first step to start understanding how it works. Carl Linnaeus was not an evolutionist, but his accurate description of taxonomical groups without understanding how they arose was essential to the evolutionary theory and is still used.
Why do you not think that the last millennial temperature cycle ran from 990 – 2003 (Figs 4 and 5) -1013 years.
The wavelet analysis Fig 6 shows a periodicity at 1024 and the solar peak is plausibly at 1991- add on a 12 year delay = 2003. Fig 8
I think these are close enough not to be coincidental.
What about a deVries cycle from 1810 – 2020.That would suggest a Dalton type minimum at the 24/25 low at about 2020.
See also section 3.3 above “It is worth noting that the increase in the neutron count in 2007 seen in Fig 8 indicated a possible solar regime change which might produce an unexpectedly sharp decline in RSS temperatures 12 years later – 2019 +/- to levels significantly below the blue trend line in Fig 5.”
Cyclomania
Simple common sense a la Ockham
Norman,
You are running the millennial cycle from high to high, it has to be run from low to low. Starting 11,200 years BP, and once the ~2500 years cycle is accounted for, there are 12 lows in the millennial cycle giving its average duration at ~985 years. Lows in the cycle tend to produce grand solar minima but they can take place within a three centuries period of the low, so the dating has some imprecision.
Lows numbers 12 to 8 coincide with Bond events 8, 7, 6, 5b and 5a. Then the cycle starts to weaken and lows 7 and 6 contribute to two peaks in Bond event 4. You can see the weakening of the millennial cycle between 5000 and 2000 years BP in the wavelet analysis shown in your figure 6. Still the lows 5 and 4 contribute to the much reduced Bond events 3a and 2b. The low 3 is nowhere to be seen in the Bond series, but is marked by the grand solar minimum at -2310 BP (360 BC) named the Greek grand solar minimum, whose end marks the start of the Roman Warm Period. Then the millennial cycle resurges and the next low is marked by the Roman grand solar minimum at -1265 BP (685 CE) that together with a strong volcanic eruption dated at 682 CE caused a marked decline in temperatures and a global glacier advance, separating the Roman Warm Period from the Medieval Warm Period. The last low is at the Little Ice Age, that is also a low in the ~2500 years cycle and together produce four grand solar minima, making it difficult to date the low in the millennial cycle but probably around 1670 CE. The next low should therefore be around 2650 CE.
You are more interested about cycle highs, but this is a cycle defined by its lows. There is no high in solar activity and grand solar maxima do not show any periodicity nor appear to affect temperatures much. Peak temperatures during the cycle are not necessarily at mid-cycle and they are affected by other factors, like volcanic eruptions and the ~1500 years oceanic cycle. Given that Late Holocene temperatures are declining due to falling obliquity, peak temperatures tend to happen before mid-cycle. Previous mid-cycle was at about 1200 CE but temperatures seem to have peaked around the 11th century.
The de Vries cycle goes from 1670 to 1880. The next low should be around 2090, but since we are already far from the ~2500 years cycle low, it might not have much of an effect. The Dalton minimum was a product of the millennial cycle being still close to its low. Current reduction in solar activity should not produce a grand solar minimum, nor the next as we are close to the high of the millennial solar cycle. We are essentially safe from grand solar minima until after 2200 CE. Cycle 25 should be about the same as cycle 24, and cycle 26 should start a recovery in solar activity.
We are truly living the best of times, as the Romans did. Global warming should stall and we might see a moderate reduction until 2030-2050, with a moderate increase afterwards, being pretty much in a plateau interrupted temporarily by El Niño Southern Oscillation and occasional volcanic eruptions. The dangerous cooling is left for future generations.
You call it “Cyclomania”, but the fact is that we know there ARE cycles, and we know they impinge on temperature. Yes, it’s a difficult problem to solve, but throwing your hands up and chanting “CO2, CO2, CO2” isn’t helping.
“Guest essay by Dr. Norman Page”.
I read your page a couple of days back, nicely done, enjoyed it the first time so read it twice, good to see it re-posted on WUWT.
Now to me if I look to the future to predict future climate I’m guessing but if I look at the past climate (which is certain unless modified by NOAA) I can have a basic but very rough assessment of what the climate might be like next year .
Or even further out Co2 or no Co2 induced , don’t know why it’s so hard for the boffins .
The graph of surface temperatures in figure 1 is out of date and doesn’t truly reflect how poor the IPCC models have performed. Surface temperatures have plummeted since 2009 with some of the coldest years on record in the last few years. We are now back to 1970 temperature levels on some days. At this rate Syun-Ichi Akasofu’s prediction of cooling might be an underestimate.
The cooling green line is my amendment of Akasofu’s paper.
I am not very keen on Leif’s dismissive attitude to problems. Blaming the 1,000-year temperature cycle on noise is just too simplistic and convenient. A true scientist would be piqued by the mystery, and want to know more.
We had this before, when Leif dismissed the missing precessional cycles in the ice age record. Rather than dismissing it, I put the grey matter to use and developed the dust-ice albedo theory of ice age modulation (which is in formal peer review at the moment). But despite being so animated about that topic, Leif will not even comment on it. (A much improved final version was uploaded last week.)
I find this strange. There are mysteries still to be solved out there, and by solving them you might discover something else. In my case, the dust-ice albedo theory completely negates the role of Co2 within ice age temperature modulation. It is simply not required. So solving one small mystery has undermined the great theory of our age.
Ralph
Our sun is cyclic in many ways, those that deny it are cyclophobic.
Can you be prosecuted for cyclophobia? Or is that another one? There are so many modern taboos, I get confused sometimes. 😉
Only if you have it but deny having it in a rash tweet.
I think Rash Tweet would be a groovy name for a band, man.
Groovy!
Could you add more recent data points onto figure 1 please? 2008 is included, but that is a long time ago. If you added recent data we could see which line was closer to reality.
From a quick view it looks as tough the green line is hopelessly off target, whilst the IPCC prediction looks much closer to what has happened.
…You truly are delusional !!
See Fig 5 which goes through Feb 2016.
Yes, that is what I mean. The anomaly shown in figure 5 is close to 1C. If we plot this on figure one, it looks like it would be close to the IPCC line, and way off the green line.
Marcus – why do you say I am delusional? A simple look at the numbers in the article seems to show I am right.
catweazle666 (March 24, 2016 at 3:03 pm) asks
“If the apparent (millennial) cycle is not solar in origin, what do you suggest produced – and apparently is still producing – it?”
Millennial cycle is caused by aliasing between lunar orbital ocean tides (lunar synodic month 29.53 days) and the change in the annual insolation caused by the Earth’s orbital period of 365.25 days
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/MC.gif
3.1 Long Term .
I am a firm believer in the value of Ockham’s razor thus the simplest working hypothesis based on the weight of all the data is that the millennial temperature cycle peaked at about 2003 and that the general trends from 990 – 2003 seen in Fig 4 will repeat from 2003-3016 with the depths of the next LIA at about 2640
You have Occam’s Razor wrong. The best answer is not the simplest, but the one with the fewest assumptions. Simple assuming that previous trends will continue requires more assumptions than physical explanation of the temperature. Occam’s Razor does not support your predictions.
I am the one who does not assume straight line projections for the future The main take away from this post is that the millennial cycle peaked about 2003 and we are headed for a general cooling for the next 650 or so years. The establishment projects straight ahead. You can’t have fewer assumptions than one.!!
The establishment says “more carbon == more heating” and says that it’s simple physics, and if you don’t reduce carbon in the atmosphere, you ARE GOING TO (97% agreement) have more warming.
Russ Nelson (@russnelson)
How many government self-called “climate scientist establishments” can you buy for 92 billion in research funds, salaries, travel, new labs, new computers, endless publication promises, promotions, bureaucracies, offices, staffs, programming and publicity?
How many government establishments can you buy for 1.3 trillion dollars a year in carbon taxes?
How many establishments and governments and banks and stock markets and futures markets can you buy for 31 trillions dollars a year in carbon futures trading and unregulated carbon offset purchases and exchanges?
Oh. I’m sorry. $25,000.00 in a one-year contract forever corrupts a conservative, doesn’t it?
How many of Hillary’s 31,000 deleted emails were about carbon taxes and carbon offset bribes from the oil-producing cartels?
The answer is well-known: any complex non-linear system has quasi-periodic internal fluctuations at frequencies determined by the parameters of the system.
================
the sun is just such a system
occasionally it does get out of control as it did in 1780s, otherwise it is a well behaved star.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/C14s.png
I am now convinced that the sun has only a minor effect on our climate. My eyes have been opened by the following “powerful” arguments:
1. Cyclomania.
2. Sun too weak.
3. Your brains are falling out.
4. Volcanoes, aerosols, manmade influences, oceans, etc.
Did I miss any?
5. We don’t know the cause so it can’t be the sun.
If it’s not the sun then it must be CO2.
See how that works?
I am happy to let you know that my brains have been put back into their proper place now that the ” Cyclophobic ” has left the building !!
*laughs so hard milk comes out of nose*
And to all of the above, remember and add http://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/03/16/climate-variations-analyzed-5-million-years-back-in-time-show-repeating-fractal-patterns/ : that the Earth’s climate is a non-linear, chaotic system. Complex doesn’t begin to describe it.
Re solar effects. The emphasis here appears to be primarily on the solar output. A far greater effect is probably the solar magnetic field’s effect on cloud-causing cosmic radiation.
http://drtimball.com/2011/svensmark%E2%80%99s-cosmic-theory-confirmed-explains-more-than-solar-role-in-climate-change/
http://www.solarstorms.org/CloudCover.html
http://www.sciencebits.com/ice-ages
Except that cosmic rays have not varied the same way as global temperatures
Leif I’ve always admired your paper and Fig 5 at http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1004/1004.2675.pdf
I like to stay as close to the basic data as possible. This Fig shows very clearly in the Be10 flux data the increase in solar activity from the late 17th century Maunder minimum to the later 20th century solar maximum .Note also the solar low at the Dalton minimum.-about 1815.
For an intriguing speculation I repeat an earlier comment from above.:
“Why do you not think that the last millennial temperature cycle ran from 990 – 2003 (Figs 4 and 5) -1013 years.
The wavelet analysis Fig 6 shows a periodicity at 1024 and the solar peak is plausibly at 1991- add on a 12 year delay = 2003. Fig 8
I think these are close enough not to be coincidental.
What about a deVries cycle ((210 years )) from 1810 – 2020.That would suggest a Dalton type minimum at the 24/25 low at about 2020.”
That would be a real shocker if it turns up.!!
I’m aware of your original conclusions “this implies that more than 50% the 10Be……..etc”
I think you would do better sticking with Fig 10 as a guide to the solar – temperature connection.
Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
Anyway thanks for the work on original paper- very helpful.
This Fig shows very clearly in the Be10 flux data the increase in solar activity from the late 17th century Maunder minimum to the later 20th century solar maximum
First, it is wrong to base the trend from a minimum to a maximum. Second: the paper purports to show that the data is unreliable. Progress happens. Here is the evolution of cosmic rays and the sunspot number the past 400 years:
http://www.leif.org/research/Comparison-GSN-14C-Modulation.png
The Waldmeier Effect says the same thing, see Slide 23 and 27 of
http://www.leif.org/research/The-Waldmeier-Effect.pdf
“From which one can conclude that our records that show that Solar Activity reached the same level in each century from the 18th onwards (and possibly from the 17th as well) are very likely correct
• Therefore the Modern Maximum has not been particularly Grand compared to the maxima in previous centuries”
So, no recent 1000-year cycle peak in Solar Activity.
What about a deVries cycle ((210 years )) from 1810 – 2020.That would suggest a Dalton type minimum at the 24/25 low at about 2020. That would be a real shocker if it turns up.!!
Many people have suggested that, so the shock will not be all that great. There is a 100-year quasi-cycle, but that could just be a random fluctuation that may not be something one can predict on. As far as we can tell at this time, Cycle 25 will be like Cycle 24 [but it is really to early to make an actionable prediction – NASA and ESA actually use our predictions for satellite de-orbit planning], see http://www.leif.org/research/Comparing-HMI-WSO-Polar-Fields.pdf
You say “First, it is wrong to base the trend from a minimum to a maximum. ” I’m not. I say it is common sense to look at the minimum envelope – connect 1695 ,1810 1905,2000.That trend is the trend of increasing solar activity. I do not understand why you can’t accept that.Obviously during the period of this graph there is some general maximum cut off at 800 – 850 Mev. We enter a new regime about 2007/8.
connect 1695 ,1810 1905,2000
2000 is a sunspot maximum year. Try 2009.
And often you say that 1700 was small compared to late 20th century. You cannot compare a single year with half a century. Try to compare 1700 to 2008 for proper perspective.
The solar data shows that there is no trend from the 18th to the 20th century. If you don’t want to accept that, there is really not much further discussion needed nor desirable.
Actually that trend is the rising leg of the asymmetric 1024 year cycle.
There is no trend connecting the minima either:
http://www.leif.org/research/Estimate-of-Group-Number.png
Leif – just do it. Stretch the vertical scale a bit for visibility and carefully join the minima from 1697. -the present.Although the previous graph was a better representation of the Maunder –
Recent relative flux strength.
Be my guest:
http://www.leif.org/research/Fig-36-Estimate-of-Group-Number-Big.png
Leif, I think Norman is referring to something like this:
A straight line joining the maximal number of spots from the lower cycles turns out to be the average of recorded temperatures.
http://i1039.photobucket.com/albums/a475/Knownuthing/Scafetta2b_zpsudzo8hhu.png
If that is what he means, he should make that Figure the central one on his post and website. I’m waiting for him to do that.
Javier No – just join the actual minimas as I said.
You mean like this???
http://i1039.photobucket.com/albums/a475/Knownuthing/Scafetta3_zpssmplfapv.png
Looks good to me:
http://www.leif.org/research/Page-Fail-1.png
Shows the falling branch of the “1000-year” cycle …
Javiers version is what I meant. .This shows why in my forecasts I rely on the cosmogenic data. as the most useful proxy for solar activity ( including especially Leifs Fig 5 )
See fig 1 at http://arxiv.org/pdf/1512.05516.pdf.
Both the GSN and the cosmic ray data are proxies for” solar magnetic activity”. with some deeper solar origin .How ever the GSN only captures a portion of the effects of solar variability which is better captured in the NM count on earth ( Oulu is my choice) and which is ,I think ,the main control on climate on millennial time scales via clouds and natural aerosols (optical depth). and closely related to temperature.
the effects of solar variability which is better captured in the NM count on earth
I have given you several links to show that the NM count is heavily influenced by climate and is a poor measure of solar activity.
And here is Usoskin’s (middle panel, from http://arxiv.org/pdf/1507.05191v1.pdf ) cosmic ray modulation parameter:
http://www.leif.org/research/Usoskin-et-al.png
As you can see there is no trend since 1700.
I think you meant to say the 10 Be ice core flux.
The 10Be ice core flux is highly unreliable, up to half of it due to non-solar effects, e.g. climate.
While not exactly identical, as they shouldn’t be since there is a known contribution to temperatures by many other factors, like volcanic activity, oceanic currents, changes in GHGs, and so on, these two things (temperatures and solar irradiance) bear a striking similarity. So, is it just chance?
http://i1039.photobucket.com/albums/a475/Knownuthing/NotFlimsyTempTSI_zps1xdzheln.png
The bottom figure is a northern hemisphere temperature reconstruction from multiples proxies and sources by Wenner et al. 2008 in their Holocene review.
If the relationship is not by chance, then any periodicity found in one by Fourier/wavelet analysis could show up in the other. I think we have the cause/effect relationship sufficiently clear to not claim that temperatures on Earth are influencing solar irradiation variability.
Earth temperature is primarily and to the greatest extent controlled by our local star, or at least that is what our longest instrumental temperature record appears to show.. According to scientists solar activity is well represented by the C14 proxy.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/C14b.png
This may be to a degree correct, but there is an un-natural burst in 1780s. There is no logic or reliable data to justify this. An up tic in solar activity equal to that in the previous or following decades is most likely
There is a good reason for the CET not following the sun, since there was strong volcanic activity in Iceland at that time, which had large effect on the N. W European climate for a number of years.
The Laki eruption starting in June 1873 lasted for about 8 months, ejecting an estimated 14 km3 of basaltic lava from more than 100 vents along more than 20 km fissure and cones. This was one of the largest basaltic eruptions known. Nearby Grímvötn erupted more than half a dozen times from 1783 to 1785. For Iceland itself, the following winter (1783/84) was known as the ‘Famine Winter’: 25% of the population died.
UK winter (1783 December – 1784 February) was one of the coldest, CET was 1.2C, some 2.5C below the all-series average. The Thames was completely frozen in February and traffic crossed on the ice.
1784 was cold year (in the ‘top-10 coldest years in the CET record), the summer was very wet in London/South; sleeting in the Moray Firth in August with a heavy snow in London on in October.
Above graph shows that CET apparently leads solar C14 modulation.
Explanation could be as follows:
The C14 data shown in the graph is extracted from tree rings . There is a primary delay of one year due to the time solar wind takes to reach heliopause where the solar modulation takes place, so intensity of cosmic rays reaching us today was modulated by solar activity of a year ago.
The greatest amount of delay (I am told by the resident expert) is due to the ‘the residence time of 14C which is of the order of 40 years’.
Or (as I suspected in past) the amount of C14 in the atmosphere could be also dependant on atmospheric precipitation which is dependant on the temperatures, in which case the C14 proxy is an excellent proxy only for the C14 itself, as is is the case for the other well known proxy, the 10Be.
Evidence of climate being controlled by sun for all or at least the most of 350 years of the CET records would be compelling if the C14 data was good proxy for solar activity, but that is a big if.
New Svalgaard’s sunspot data from the 1700s is based only on an average of 22 sun observations/annum, it has 40% difference between minimum and maximum estimates, and surprisingly the mid value(despite its + or – 20% uncertainty) happens to closely follow the C14 average.
I am sceptical about the total reliability of the C14 data itself as well as the C14 being a reliable proxy for the all solar energy delivered into the geo-sphere’s totality.
New Svalgaard’s sunspot data from the 1700s is based only on an average of 22 sun observations/annum
The ‘classic’ sunspot number [that you seem to like] is based on the very same observations…
And 22 observations per year are all it takes to get a good average yearly value [Hoyt & Schatten, 1998].
But, as usual, you don’t know what you are talking about.
Hoyt and Schatten in their first look at solar activity concluded
http://www.leif.org/EOS/H-and-S-1992-GSN.pdf
that “the yearly peak for 1769 should be about 139. The 13 month running mean equals 146.8 and occurs in October, 1769. Thus solar cycle 2 is much like solar cycle 8 with a smoothed peak of 1837, solar cycle 11 with a smoothed peak of 140.5 in 1870, or solar cycle 18 with a smoothed peak of 151.8 in 1947”.
– than just as bad as the newly designed ones
– they would say so, wouldn’t they.
– not knowing, preferable to telling wrong
YOU WROTE:
“It is not possible to forecast the future unless we have a good understanding of where the earth is in relation to the current phases of these different interacting natural quasi-periodicities which fall into two main categories.”
MY COMMENT:
The sentence would be more accurate is it stopped after:
“It is not possible to forecast the future.”
It would be possible to have a goof understanding of what causes climate change … and still be unable to predict the future climate.
Data on sunspots and very rough estimates of CO2 levels and average temperatures from climate proxies may be far from reality.
Earth’s ice ages, I’ll assume five of them so far, were not evenly spaced in the past 4.5 billion years.
Should one focus on the current ice age and ignore the prior four?
Or is that done only because the data for the current ice age are better?
THE PRIMARY PROBLEM with the current sorry state of “climate science” is too many predictions of the future.
I guess with every decade of my life I realize more and more that predictions of the future are so often wrong I’m better off ignoring them.
It is certainly not possible to forecast the future without a correct climate physics model that ex[plains climate change.
Until that model exists, and probably after it exists, predictions of the future climate are likely to be wrong.
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Not so .If you take a view over an appropriate time scale – a couple of thousand years say and know where you are re the natural periodicities, reasonably accurate predictions are fairly straightforward.
Provided that there is a real periodicity. The standard way of showing that is to make a forecast and see the forecast come true, which you have not done [it will take 1000 years].
I made some forecasts in the posts above .Here is what I say about verification See
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-epistemology-of-climate-forecasting.html
“Ava asks – the blue line is almost flat. – When will we know for sure that we are on the down slope of the thousand year cycle and heading towards another Little Ice Age.
Grandpa says- I’m glad to see that you have developed an early interest in Epistemology. Remember ,I mentioned the 60 year cycle, well, the data shows that the temperature peak in 2003 was close to a peak in both that cycle and the 1000 year cycle. If we are now entering the downslope of the 1000 year cycle then the next peak in the 60 year cycle at about 2063 should be lower than the 2003 peak and the next 60 year peak after that at about 2123 should be lower again, so, by that time ,if the peak is lower, we will be pretty sure that we are on our way to the next little ice age.
That is a long time to wait, but we will get some useful clues a long time before that. Look again at the red curve in Fig 3 – you can see that from the beginning of 2007 to the end of 2009 solar activity dropped to the lowest it has been for a long time. Remember the 12 year delay between the 1991 solar activity peak and the 2003 temperature trend break. , if there is a similar delay in the response to lower solar activity , earth should see a cold spell from 2019 to 2021 when you will be in Middle School.
It should also be noticeably cooler at the coolest part of the 60 year cycle – halfway through the present 60 year cycle at about 2033.
We can watch for these things to happen but meanwhile keep in mind that the overall cyclic trends can be disturbed for a time in some years by the El Nino weather patterns in the Pacific and the associated high temperatures that we see in for example 1998 ,2010 and especially from 2015 on.
Why is Leif allowed to be snotty to everyone who disagrees with him, but if Marcus is snotty back he is threatened with moderation?
It is OK, Leif believes climate science is a contact sport – it is just the way he is. His remarks are usually extremely pertinent and make one think – this is not a bad thing. You usually don’t learn much from people who agree with you.
…mummble…mummble mummble………mummble !!! ( I’m safe talking this way though !! ) LOL
..Probably not quite as funny though !!
Not bad the first time, really.
I was going to ask the exact same question Keith.
‘Twas ever thus it seems.
Norm Page,
And yet, your approach is also a model. Any theory constructs a model of past events in order to project future events. If you are saying models are “inherently of no value”, then no attempt to make projections should be made at all. Your article then serves no purpose.
No, that is what you are doing. You are criticizing the act of plugging past events into a mathematical model, constructing a trendline, and projecting that line forward, without any understanding of what caused the past events to occur. That is precisely your own approach.
Oh, wait, you are merely saying this simplistic form of projecting-without-understanding should use a longer timeline. The error you are decrying is the error you are yourself committing — you’re just doing more of it. And then you’re claiming that any attempt to understand the causes of the observed changes is doomed to failure. In other words, the whole idea of science and technology, you say, is silly.
Yet you say this over the internet. Very amusing.
As “Smart Rock” put it above:
No, that’s exactly not how science works. A collection of observations is, at best, uncategorized data. If there is no attempt at understanding the cause behind the observations, it is mere trivia. In contrast, science is the process of determining and proving the causes. Collecting observations is just one of the tools of science.
Smart Rock (and some others) seem to be saying that any proposed explanation is as good as any other, and all are really irrelevant — what matters is the mathterbation of imagining “cycles”. Norm Page seems to be saying something similar, in his contempt for “modelling” [sic] (even though his “cycles” also constitute a “model”. albeit a laughably simplistic one). The process of explanation-by-cycles is precisely equivalent to constructing constellations by imagining them to be outlines of terrestrial animals.
The desire to “explain” by used of unexplained “cycles” is a most regrettable form of anti-science.
Explain why some rocks will spin to face north.
Oh, you can’t?
Obviously, they don’t, then, without your explanation.
I am not trying to explain the cycles – merely in the first instance observing them and their periodicities – like e g the Babylonians who were then able to forecast eclipses
For a detailed explanation of why the IPCC climate models are useless see Section 1 at
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2014/07/climate-forecasting-methods-and-cooling.html
Precisely my point. Since correlation is not causation, your past observations are of less value than an theory based on actual physics which satisfactorily explains the causes of past events. You claimed the opposite, that an understanding of causes is less valuable than non-causal pattern-seeking.
The constellation of Orion is not actually a big man up in the sky, even if you think you see a pattern there. Documentation of patterns might help in an effort to seek knowledge about the underlying realities, but such pattern-making does not, in itself, tell us anything we didn’t already know.
For example, when unprecedented influences happen (such as massive injection of infrared-absorbing gasses into the atmosphere), the already limited value of non-causal pattern-making vanishes completely. Pattern-making cannot tell us anything about what might happen next. Only an understanding of the underlying physics can tell us what effect, if any, the unprecedented influences will have, and what the extent of that effect is likely to be.
My favorite TV show was aired every Thursday at 8:00 pm for many years when I was a child. It was an unmistakable pattern, and quite reliable. I could project it unto the future, because the cycle was well-documented. Then the network canceled the show, and it vanished. A knowledge of the cycle couldn’t predict that, and couldn’t explain it. Only a knowledge of the television industry could have helped, and even then, it would have to be augmented by knowing about ratings, aging actors, and a variety of other facts.
So too here. Your cycles don’t explain anything, and since they don’t, there isn’t even any reason to think they have any more reality than the guy up in the stars whom we call Orion.
You say ” It was an unmistakable pattern, and quite reliable. I could project it unto the future, because the cycle was well-documented”
My contention is that based on my experience in these matters the evidence presented in the Figs in the post ,documents the evidence well enough to make useful predictions. You disagree . We will see.
“I am not trying to explain the cycles – merely in the first instance observing them”
but Dr. Page, climate cycles don’t exist, they are product of our imagination
http://killingbatteries.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/loch_ness_monster.gif
…LOL
Insight. I would say
Scientific investigations are competitions to see who are the best cherry pickers of the data to come up with a testable hypothesis.
Your hypothesis cannot be tested for a couple of centuries…
But we can certainly see which way the wind is blowing c f the IPCC projections.
Wishful thinking.
A being wrong, does not make B right.
Let’s go back to basics.
We know that there have been episodes of warmer and colder climate in the recent past. Given the complexity of the Earth’s climate and natural variation, should we really expect these to fit precisely into narrowly defined timescales?
Obviously not. But just because they don’t does not mean that natural cycles don’t exist.
And just because we cannot explain them also does not mean they don’t exist.
And until we can properly explain them we cannot begin to understand recent warming.