Guest essay by David Archibald
From a post a couple of days ago: “an F10.7 flux above 100 causes warming and below that level causes cooling.” Greg asked “Can you prove that?” I already had in this WUWT post from 2012. But it is worth revisiting the subject because it answers the big question – If all the energy that stops the Earth from looking like Pluto comes from the Sun, what is the solar activity level that corresponds to our average climate? Because solar activity is falling and climate will follow.
As Nir Shaviv observed, the oceans are a big calorimeter. First, proof of concept comes from a much smaller body of water: Lake Victoria in East Africa. Back in the 1920s it was realised that the level of Lake Victoria went up and down with the solar cycle. Then the relationship broke down in the 1930s, corresponding to the beginning of the Modern Warm Period, before resuming again in the 1970s.
Figure 1: Lake Victoria lake level 1896 to 2005 (data courtesy of Dr Peter Mason)
If we take out the period of non-correlation and detrend afterwards for the 2 metre rise from 1962 to 1964, this is what the relationship between lake levels and solar cycles looks like:
Figure 2: Solar Cycles and Lake Victoria lake level 1896 to 2005
The relationship is very clear, in fact beyond indisputable. It also holds true for the body of water that covers 70 percent of the Earth’s surface as shown by Figure 3:
Figure 3: Solar Cycles and Sea Level 1909 to 2000
From that data, a 33-year subset from 1948 to 1987 has a high correlation:
Figure 4: Sea Level Change and Solar Activity 1948 to 1987
Bingo. If we take the change in sea level from one year to the next plotted against average sunspot number for that year, we get a near-straight line relationship. The breakover between sea level rise and sea level fall, and thus warming or cooling climate, is a sunspot number of 40, which in turn corresponds to an F10.7 flux of 100. The average sunspot number over the Holocene was 40 which in turn makes sense of the last half-century of climate. The Earth’s climate was in equilibrium with an average sunspot number of 40, and the higher solar activity of recent years disturbed that. Now we are returning to normal.
At the end of this decade, at the solar cycle 24/25 minimum, we might get a few years of as much as 2.0 mm per annum sea level fall. If you don’t believe that, perhaps you would rather believe this:
Figure 5: Global Mean Sea Level Time Series 1993 to 2016
That is from the clown show that is the Colorado University Sea Level Research Group.
That graphic is based on satellite data and shows a scary, nearly monotonic sea level rise of 3.4 mm per annum. How they get that is explained in this graph:
Figure 6: Creating a graph that keeps the grant money flowing
Figure 6, from this paper, shows that sea level, as measured by satellites – the lower line, has been flat. How they generate the graph they need, the upper line, is by adding an isostatic adjustment, which is a number plucked from thin air. No more needs to be said.
David Archibald is the author of American Gripen: The Solution to the F-35 Nightmare
Whenever I see an actor doing something easy — like pretending to be asleep or dead, I jokingly say “I could do that!”.
I had an “I could do that!” moment over this: “by adding an isostatic adjustment, which is a number plucked from thin air”.
How much does it pay, and where can I apply?
isostatic adjustment…tried that with my check book
And when do you get out?
See, now that is funny.
Thank you for the lolz.
The link to the paper for figure 6 is broken. Do you have another link and can you please quote author(s) and title? Thanks!
I just tried it on Google Chrome and it opens Figure 6, etc.
I just tried it on Google Chrome and it opens Figure 6, etc.
or try this
To cite these plots or data, please use: Nerem, R. S., D. Chambers, C. Choe, and G. T. Mitchum. “Estimating Mean Sea Level Change from the TOPEX and Jason Altimeter Missions.” Marine Geodesy 33, no. 1 supp 1 (2010): 435.
Jason 2 –
“Measure the surface topography of the world’s oceans to within a few centimetres, which is important for accurately describing seasonal and inter-annual climate variations, etc. ”
https://www.eumetsat.int/jason/print.htm
I can’t get the paper for Figure 6 from the link either, running Chrome on a Mac.
rd50, you say that it is from “Estimating Mean Sea Level Change …”. That paper is here.
However, it does NOT contain the graphic shown here as Figure 6.
Finally, Figure 6 has nothing to do with the Jason/TOPEX satellite sea level as David erroneously claims. Instead, it shows results from the GRACE gravity measuring satellite.
w.
OK, I found the paper David cited for Figure 6, and fixed the link in the head post. It is here.
Regards to all,
w.
Thanks!
“Finally, Figure 6 has nothing to do with the Jason/TOPEX satellite sea level as David erroneously claims. Instead, it shows results from the GRACE gravity measuring satellite.”
That’s correct. Odd chart though.
Hmmmmm. If one believes the IPCC, a large part of sea level rise is thermal expansion as the ocean warms. Does thermal expansion change ocean mass or just ocean volume? My top o my head guess would be that it doesn’t.affect mass.
…sea floor volcanoes..increase gravity….pull satellites down….satellites show sea level rise
…sea floor subduction zones..decrease gravity….push satellites higher…satellites show sea level fall
…
Lattitude: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
equal and opposite coupled with the appropriate lag time.
For every action, there is an equal and opposite grant application.
Don K
You will be in over your head if the oceans warm enough!
Thermal expansion of water increases the volume and decreases the density. This gives rise to some interesting phenomena: when all the water in an ocean is warmer, it is ‘higher’ because it expands, but it is also lighter per vertical metre. It does not weigh more in total, so the gravity anomaly has to detect the change in altitude of the centre of mass. Can it?
A radar signal, however, would detect the elevated surface and one could perhaps conclude there was ‘more water’, but it would not necessarily be true. There is only ‘more water’ if it is elevated and not warmer (or some combo, obviously).
GRACE is so sensitive that it can detect the change in gravity of water leaving the ground during a drought. If the top of the ocean was warmer and expanded, and the bottom was colder and shrunken, what would GRACE detect? Anything even if there was no SL change?
I think only a combination of temperature measurements, GRACE gravity measurements and radar to the surface could yield an accurate picture of actual SLR. Then one would have to factor in the winds that slosh the Pacific, for example, back and forth to the tune of 18″.
Many times I’ve heard that the coupling between solar activity and world weather / sea-level / climate / glacier advance-or-decline is just “not there”. Other times, I hear that there is a significant if not strong correlation, especially when one tweaks both data sets a bit for unusual offsets such as the Lake Victoria abnormal +2 m rise in the data above.
The point is, that Leif and others proclaim that there IS a strong correlation, and that it takes a particularly cheeky disregard for data nominalization in order to ‘do nothing and thus wash out the signal’.
I do wonder.
We’ve definitely accumulated instrument-measured data showing the late 20th century has been a period of strong solar activity. This most-recent solar cycle likewise measures on the “weenie” side of solar cycles, as they go. Will the next 10 years bear out yet more potentially time-delayed correlations between weather / sea-level / climate / glacier advance-retreat in turn?
And if so, what the hêll is the possible causation between the Sun’s slumbering cycles and the world’s ability to be influenced by it. Or is that theory of high solar wind and low solar wind affording different levels of interstellar / galactic charged particle fluxes at play? Providing an almost-invislbe but macroscopically measurable different of cloud nucleation to change the planet’s albedo, or the propensity of clouds to ‘hit or miss’ being precipitators, and so on?
Just musing
GoatGuy
Strong correlations between solar cycle fluctuations and a variety of climatic phenomena have long been observed, such as Asian monsoons.
Solar cycle effects on Indian summer monsoon dynamics
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364682614001370
Large difference in the Tropical Easterly Jet between solar maximum and minimum is noticed.
‘However, no consistent relation between the ISM rainfall and solar cycle is noticed over Indian region unlike reported earlier but there exists a delayed effect around 13 years.’
Good catch, I’ll pay that.
Other studies going back about a century have however found correlations between the solar cycle and rainfall in Asian monsoons and tropical South America, at least.
Yeah…., something like that…
a simple link to changes in temperature and other climate phenomena over time if the suns output does not vary enough to cause the changes directly would surely be the rate of cooling . steady output from the sun warms the oceans to a level that sees a reduction in ice at the poles . as the ice reduces more heat escapes from the poles until the oceans cool enough that the ice begins to expand again,insulating the oceans and reducing heat loss until the cycle begins again.
most definitely too simplistic, but that is me in a nutshell.
Hi from Oz, GoatGuy. You asked: ‘what the hêll is the possible causation between the Sun’s slumbering cycles and the world’s ability to be influenced by it.’
That is a very good question that I also ponder. I’m no scientist, but I do know that water is a polar molecule, which means that is attracted / repelled by electrostatic forces, as I learnt from my 1960’s high school science class, using a charged plastic rod to deflect a thin stream of water poured from a jug. Now, it seems to be a fact that both the solar and cosmic winds shower the earth with large amounts of charged particles (and incidentally that these particles are related to cloud nucleation). IMO it doesn’t seem to much of a stretch to think that these charged particles would also attract or repel water atmospheric vapor sufficiently to have a significant affect on the amount and maybe the location of cloud formation. What I don’t know is stuff like how close the charged particles have to be to deflect the water molecules, or at what density, etc.
I have heard many times that the influence of the solar cycles has a 11 years delay on earth??
How do the above graphs correlate if you move the solar input by 11 years??
ColA, the “cycle” averages 11 years but varies, with intervals of up to 13 years. I don’t recall the minimum interval.
Changes in the temperature profile of the upper levels of the atmosphere leading to changes in the jet stream?
Why do the graphs only go up to 2005? What is the fascination with the period 1948-1987? We are 30 years past that 40 year period.
Would be nice to have all of the chosen endpoints justified. Tom, as you mentioned, the Lake Victoria data only goes to 2005 (And I must point out that the description “The relationship [between SSN and lake level] is very clear, in fact beyond indisputable.” is overstating things. The whole middle of the time series is missing. In other words, yes, there is a clear relationship, but only when you remove the data that doesn’t show the the clear relationship.) The sea level data shown in figure 3 inexplicably stops at 2000.
I wouldn’t base anything on Lake Victoria. link It’s too messed up by human activity.
My immediate thought on seeing the jump was “Aswan High Dam”. It’s got the right timing, but seems a stretch, as it is quite far downriver. Still, it marked an era of rapid development, and the two are probably correlated that way.
Good suggestion. Waterworks development in general.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Victoria#Nalubaale_Dam
The only outflow for Lake Victoria is at Jinja, Uganda, where it forms the Victoria Nile. The water since at least 12,000 years ago drained across a natural rock weir. In 1952, engineers acting for the government of British Uganda blasted out the weir and reservoir to replace it with an artificial barrage to control the level of the lake and reduce the gradual erosion of the rock weir. A standard for mimicking the old rate of outflow called the “agreed curve” was established, setting the maximum flow rate at 300 to 1,700 cubic metres per second (392–2,224 cu yd/sec) depending on the lake’s water level.
In 2002, Uganda completed a second hydroelectric complex in the area, the Kiira Hydroelectric Power Station, with World Bank assistance. By 2006, the water levels in Lake Victoria had reached an 80-year low, and Daniel Kull, an independent hydrologist living in Nairobi, Kenya, calculated that Uganda was releasing about twice as much water as is allowed under the agreement,[81] and was primarily responsible for recent drops in the lake’s level.
With climate science, there is all too much “data” like figure 6. POOMA is so very useful.
Is that like Finagle’s Infinitely Variable Constant? The number you multiply your observed lab results by to get the “correct” answer?
David neglects to mention that every other altimeter sea level data producer (there are 5 of them) has arrived at pretty much exactly the same conclusion as the ‘clown show’ at CU.
Just follow the link labelled ‘GMSU Rates’ to the left of the chart at the CU website: http://sealevel.colorado.edu/content/global-mean-sea-level-time-series-seasonal-signals-removed
We sure do seem to be spending an awful lot of money for state-of-the-art sensors that produce results nobody likes, and so they essentially write over them with data from the old, presumably inferior (or, why would we have invested the resources in the first place?) instruments.
Since the solar cycle affects SST, it reasonably also should influence MSL, or at least regional sea levels.
https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/rind_03/
“Total solar irradiance changes, though of small magnitude, do appear to affect sea surface temperatures (SSTs), most obviously at latitudes where cloud cover is small and irradiance is abundant, such as the Northern Hemisphere subtropics during summer. The increased SSTs then help intensify circulations spiraling away from the subtropics, again favoring reduced rainfall near the equator and to the south, as well as northern mid-latitudes. Hence, both the UV and TSI forcings produce similar effects, with the latter helping to sharpen the response.”
The next paragraph naturally pays obeisance to CACA.
Regarding figure 1.
“Averaged over the global ocean surface, the mean rate of sea level change due to GIA is independently estimated from models at -0.3 mm/yr (Peltier, 2001, 2002, 2009; Peltier & Luthcke, 2009). The magnitude of this correction is small (smaller than the ±0.4 mm/yr uncertainty of the estimated GMSL rate), but the GIA uncertainty is at least 50 percent.”
All the GIA correction is doing is adding increasing error in favour of higher rise.
Why not model igneous rocks consuming space in the ocean basins from volcanic activity to balance this bias GIA correction out?
Not only is this a very difficult guess to estimate, the guess for GIA is so high it could be closer to 100% wrong.
They don’t care about science only getting the desired conclusions already pre-planned.
It’s impossible to measure ‘Global Sea Level’, watch this 3 min.video.
Oh you don’t need to measure it, you need to establish an anomaly and then adjust it according to theory. Then your modelled sea level supports the theory.
No mention of variable Lunar gravitational forces entering into the uncertainty or imprecision of measurement of sea level averages.
This is also yet another case of climate scientists ignoring error. While it is a fact that the earth is still adjusting from the loading of the last glaciation, according to the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (psmsl.org) the errors involved in estimation are a MINIMUM of 50%.
The global isostatic adjustment used by the Colorado University Sea Level Research Group is only 0.30 mm/year. The FAQ page says;
The difference is slopes of the Grace and GIA corrected Grace curves of your figure 6 is 1.66 mm/yr (9.7 mm/5.83 yr). Apparently 1.36 mm/yr of the slope difference is something other than GIA.
Quite so. But that 0.3mm/year contribution to SLR uncertainty is insignificant compared with the overall uncertainty with satellite altimetry of oceanic surfaces. The Topex/Poseidon altimetry system only allowed measurement of ocean topography over major basins with an accuracy of ±50 millimetre. Moreover tidal models have a similar accuracy.
So charts of global mean SLR using satellite data have mostly been obtained by adjusting satellite data series to fit an expected linear trend, where that linear trend is based on the mean of selected (hopefully representative) tide gauge results.
I like to think of the ocean(s) as a gigantic battery. It absorbs heat from sunlight and slowly releases it over time giving the entire planet a nice stable temperature range. Disturbances in the ocean, like El Nino, emit a quick surge of heat, dropping the stored energy level a bit. It follows that an ice age would have weaker or less frequent El Ninos for unknown reasons. Perhaps the ocean(s) discharges a lot of its stored energy with frequent El Ninos for a period of time leading up to an ice age, with the effect of having an unusually warm atmosphere during that period. That might explain why ice ages appear to come on quickly in the proxy data.
Regarding Figure 4: Is that 33 years, or from 1948 to 1987? It can’t be both.
Methinks the reason both Victoria and sea level correlations break down entirely in the 30’s is more interesting than the otherwise unimpressive correlation. Sea level also correlates with ENSO…somewhat.
Ninos have absolutely no right to raise sea level since they add no new energy to the ocean. They just let slowly accumulated warm water spread out.
A very reasonable hypothesis is that the unknown forces at work with ENSO also affect sea level. Perhaps they also disrupted the weak influence of the solar cycle on sea level in the 1930’s. The oldest index is the SOI and it only goes back to 1933, but the 30’s were ENSO neutral except for the moderate nino of 38-39.
Year Ave SOI
1933 0.13
1934 -0.05
1935 0.18
1936 -0.42
1937 -0.23
1938 1.2
1939 -0.58
Why are you assuming that the detrended wiggles are due to thermal effects?
Eric Worrel pointed out that the 2011 dip was apparently attributed to water retention on land in Queensland after extensive flooding. I would be looking for asian monsoons in that calculation too.
Ninos cause flooding here, droughts there…the monsoonal signal would be seasonal.
The units are all different. Lake Victoria is meters with an amplitude of about a meter. Archibald is rates if rise in mm/yr with amplitudes of about 5mm. I have no idea what the “normalized values” from Colorado University are.
You could figure out how many cubic kilometers of water removed it would take to lower sea level a centimeter and compare that with ninos and monsoons, but I’m not in the mood.
When huge bodies of water warm they expand and trade winds cause sea level to increase where they are blown too against coastal lines.
During an La Nina cold upwelling ocean water prevents the water accumulating on top and warming, so it therefore is unable to expand.
During Ninas there are fewer clouds and the Pacific Ocean is warmed to about the depth of the mixed layer, mostly by visible light.
During Ninas the trade winds are strong and they push the warm surface water towards Indonesia, where it languishes in a “warm pool”. These same strong trade winds cause upwelling along the coasts of the Americas AND along the ITCZ in the Pacific.
In a Nino, the trade winds take a powder, and all that warm water piled up against Indonesia relaxes back, aided by reaction waves that constantly bounce off the walls of the Pacific Ocean.
The problem is that the thermal volume of the ocean depends on the entire profile, from the surface to the abyss. If cold water comes up and tempers surface water, the cold water will expand, and the warm water will contract.
It is a zero sum game ultimately dependent on the total kinetic energy of the ocean. Warm water contracts very little under pressure.
It’s not a zero sum when cold water upwells that had previously not been warmed as much by mostly visible light than if it stayed there as before.
For example if the top 100m were exchanged with the depth 100m-200m, the ocean has gained energy because that new top 100m will eventually recover by solar warming to previous levels it originally was.
The more cold upwelling from below the visible light warming range, the greater the volume of water that gains energy that previously would have been stranded in a cold layer, where virtually no solar warming occurs.
Yes, the oscillations in sea level around the trend correlate with ENSO, but given enough time those oscillations average to zero.
There are several possibilities about why ENSO affects sea level, as it is associated with heat transfers, ocean water accumulation, wind changes, and finally related to changes in the speed of rotation of the planet (measured as changes in the length of day).
But that still leaves us with the trend which is a clear increase in sea level that also shows a near 60 year periodicity in its rate of increase. This periodicity appears related to the 60 year quasi-cycle observed in many oceanic and sea-ice indexes and well described by the Stadium Wave hypothesis. A solar origin in the pentadecadal solar cycle cannot be ruled out, but it is not well supported at this time.
The relation between changes in sea level rate of increase and the 11 year solar cycle are not convincing.
Javier, david touches on “threshold”, saying that a sunspot number above or below 40 is the difference between warming and cooling. In your back and forth with svalgaard (y’all looked like two china men playing ping pong… ☺), you used the term “average”. Correct me if i’m wrong, but the average for the twentieth century was near 100. There is nothing special really about the average. It is the threshold that makes the difference between warming and cooling. The last thing you want to do is give svalgaard a leg up on something like that (don’t let ‘im push you ’round like a school yard bully!)…
Afonzarelli,
I agree with Leif in more things that I disagree. One of the many things that I agree with him is that the climatic effect of the 11 year solar cycle is very, very small. If it had a clear effect like the one David Archibald defends it would have been identified in the data long time ago and accepted by all. If there is no clear effect, then the effect has to be small.
This tells us that if there is a clear effect of solar variability on climate, as the paleo record supports, it has to be due to a slow cummulative effect over decades of reduced solar activity. That would explain why the 11 year solar cycle doesn’t have a climatic signature, but the Maunder Minimum has it.
You are correct that there is likely a threshold and once below it the climate will start moving very slowly towards a different state that probably involves an atmospheric reorganization. In every cycle the sun will be a few years below that threshold and a few years above it so it won’t affect climate. Only when the number of years below the threshold is much higher that the number of years above it, which happens when the 11-year mean solar activity drops below its long-term average, the climate appears to be significantly affected. The longer the period of low solar activity the more intense the climatic effect through a cummulative effect. This cummulative effect that explains a much higher climate effect for grand solar minima is not compatible with the high effect of the 11 year cycle that David Archibald proposes. It is compatible however with a low solar activity contribution to the 21st century pause in global warming.
If the hypothesis is correct the pause should not end until solar activity average is back again above its long-term mean, and the 2014-16 warming due to El Niño should be completely retraced by 2019-20. So at least this hypothesis has testable predictions.
footnote: the beginnings of the last three centuries all had below average solar activity and all three correlated with warming…
The beginning of the 18th-20th centuries correlate with periods of below average temperatures. The beginning of the 21st century correlates to an unexpected pause in global warming. The sun is not the only factor that affects climate or temperatures, but the effect of the centennial solar cycle has been noticed four out of four times.
BTW, what do you make of this:
http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/sorce/files/2011/09/TIM_TSI_Reconstruction-1.png
Thanx…
Fonzie,
To me it says that the solar-induced Little Ice Age ended in either c. 1840 or 1890.
Yeah, Gabro, what i’m really looking for from javier is his take on the validity of the data. i once ran lisird by svalgaard and he gave me some specifics as to why he thinks it isn’t valid. (specifics in lisird’s own literature) That’s the sort of thing that i’m hoping javier will comment on…
http://lasp.colorado.edu/lisird/tsi/historical_tsi.html
Afonzarelli,
TSI reconstructions have been evolving with time in the literature:
The trend is clearly towards less support for the idea that the modern maximum represents an unusual period of very high solar activity.
I can’t argue about TSI reconstructions but the conclusions that I have reached about the relationship between solar cycles and climate variations during the Holocene do not rest or require a modern maximum. They are perfectly compatible with Leif’s reconstruction. It appears that climate effects are observed only towards cooling when there is a prolonged decrease in solar activity, while the absence of cooling that we call “Optimum” corresponds to normal solar activity without periods of prolonged low solar activity. Thus the optima appear when there is enough time without a grand solar minimum, like now.
Whence the 60 years? Folks can stand up and sit down in a stadium at many different rates.
Everything averages out. Centrifuging the water towards the equator (changing the length of day) will lower the levels towards the poles. Wind can pile up water here, but at the expense of there. Rain in China, drought in the Amazon.
Everything seems to reduce to energy. Somehow energy (including potential energy) accumulates and dissipates in the ocean such that sea level becomes a proxy for ENSO, or the other way around.
We get to see a lot more Ninos than 60 year cycles. There is at least the potential that ENSO holds the key to cracking the 60 year code.
Gymnosperm,
In chaotic systems like climate, the system easily enters into resonance producing quasi periodic variations due to changes in forcings with time and intrinsic delays in the climatic response. Those resonance waves, like the waves in a pond, propagate through the system reaching different parts of it at different times and explaining why they show persistence.
The energy of the system enters mainly at the tropical band where insolation is higher, and leaves mainly at the polar bands where there is a clear energetic deficit. What matters is the meridional energy gradient that determines how much energy and therefore work is available for climatic manifestations and to determine the average temperature of the planet.
ENSO behaves as an arc that short circuits the poleward transfer of energy by taking the faster and more efficient atmospheric route instead of the oceanic one.
You won’t understand ENSO unless you study how it behaved during the Holocene and think deeply about it. ENSO is a manifestation of a cooling planet. It didn’t happen during the Holocene Climatic Optimum when temperatures where higher than now and there was no sea ice in the Arctic during the summers. ENSO depends on a strong meridional temperature gradient and a cooling planet. With global warming and the decrease in the meridional temperature gradient ENSO frequency is bound to decrease. Has in fact decresed. ENSO activity was much higher during 1200-1500 when the planet was cooling, according to ENSO proxies, like Laguna Pallcacocha sediments in Moy et al., 2002.
Interesting take on ENSO. My own information is equivocal regarding temperature and ENSO strength. Cobb (2013) found highest ENSO “variability” =amplitude during the little ice age and the present over the last 7000 years. Her data were from drilling coral. Leduc (2009) and Ford (2015) using ODP data found reduced variability at the LGM.
Javier:
“This tells us that if there is a clear effect of solar variability on climate, as the paleo record supports, it has to be due to a slow cummulative effect over decades of reduced solar activity. That would explain why the 11 year solar cycle doesn’t have a climatic signature, but the Maunder Minimum has it.”
Maunder was a stark shift in atmospheric teleconnections, for three sunspot cycles, peak to peak, from around 1672 to 1705, with a very brief respite at the 1686 sunspot cycle maximum. Cumulative effects would be in the oceanic modes, and as fast as an AMO phase shift. TSI variability is a red herring, the drivers would be the solar plasma effects.
https://climexp.knmi.nl/data/tcet.dat
“Yes, the oscillations in sea level around the trend correlate with ENSO, but given enough time those oscillations average to zero.”
And what if El Nino increase through solar minima?
According to sunspot group number reconstruction, the Maunder Minimum went from 1630 to 1715, and thus lasted about 85 years which should correspond to 7-8 11-year solar cycles.
What TSI does show is that these do not represent what global temperatures actually should be at the time because changes within those time lines, never cause global temperatures to become equilibrium.
The best example refers to the CET (Central England Temperature) and the Little Ice Age. Although the CET only represents a triangle of locations in one country and not the globe. It still behaves like global temperatures with warming and cooling trends longer term.
One interesting observation was the CET kept cooling until the TSI started recovering from the LIA. This means that a ~85 year period was still not long enough for equilibrium to be met. With the likely occurrence that if it had continued, then the CET would have continued cooling further.
What does this mean?
We could be looking at a period of around 100 years of solar activity to be the same until the planet reaches a equilibrium that scientists could understand, the climate better with especially regards to solar activity. The problem of course being this period is very often longer than average humans life time.
“According to sunspot group number reconstruction, the Maunder Minimum went from 1630 to 1715”
From 1645, but the 1650’s and 1660’s were mostly very warm for NW Europe, and annual mean temperatures were mostly back to normal from 1706. The bulk of the cold was through just three solar cycles, peak to peak. The same pattern happened in the Dalton Minimum but for just one cycle, with the bulk of the cold between the maxima of solar cycles 5 and 6, 1807-1817.
These were the coldest 30 year periods in the CET finishing before a new decade.
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Annual
1691-1720 2.6 3.3 4.7 7.4 10.7 14.0 15.8 15.5 12.9 9.1 5.8 3.8 8.8
1681-1710 2.4 3.0 4.5 7.3 10.8 13.9 15.6 15.3 12.6 9.0 5.6 4.0 8.7
1671-1700 2.6 2.6 4.4 7.1 10.7 13.9 15.5 14.9 12.3 9.0 5.3 3.3 8.5
1661-1690 2.9 3.1 4.8 7.4 11.0 14.3 15.8 15.3 12.8 9.5 5.7 3.4 8.8
Why was a scatterplot and statement of high correlation shown only for a “33 year subset” instead of the whole period for which data was used to make the Figure 3 graph?
It’s a bit like CO2 , you see. You have to focus on the segment of the data which supports you hypothesis and cut out the bits ( like the early 20th warming ) which falsify it.
It’s basic climatology, where have you been?
Problem with CO2 the correlation is almost non existent when compared from human rising CO2 levels. Just matching warm ocean cycles is a massive improvement on this.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1940/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1979.9/to:1997/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2014.2
Only the green section represents a correlation with global temperatures and CO2. That is only 17 years since 1940 out of 77 years.
The El NIno 1997/98 and recent blue section El NIno 2016/2017 have nothing to do with CO2, so are not included.
The second red period has a century-class El Nino in its beginning and the strongest El Nino after the century-class one is in the blue section. The increase from the 1998 spike to the 2016 spike is manmade via increase of manmade greenhouse gases.
Will Alexander paper on predicting 500-year floods of the Nile, in study for four dams for South Aftrica…https://anhonestclimatedebate.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/2982-journal-of-civ-eng-vol-49-no-2.pdf
which in turn corresponds to an F10.7 flux of 100
Here is our best estimate (red curve) of the F10.7 flux since 1741:
http://www.leif.org/research/F107-since-1741.png
The blue curve is the [scaled to match] group sunspot number
Here is how we estimate F10.7 in the past:
http://www.leif.org/research/Reconstruction-of-Solar-EUV-Flux-1740-2015.pdf
Darn, we are definitely fluxed, we are.
Looks like similar graphs, on different axis, odd scalings.
Why not throw in the “price of wheat”. birth of mice and democrat votes?
They may make pretty pictures.
All they indicate is a topic of interest.
Not a “proof”.
Yes, correlation is possible; but ignorant of the actual mechanism. Exactly what does cause what?
Those sunspots and 10.7 frequency energy do not directly affect lake levels.
I seriously doubt they affect sea levels, except by a long indirect chain.
A) Identify the actual mechanisms.
B) Explicitly explain how the mechanism works.
C) Provide experimental proof.
D) Provide examples of replication.
Otherwise this article is announcing causation based on personal opinions; must as the climate scammers do.
Thirty years of CO2 claims,
pretty pictures,
faked graphs with unrelated axis and scales,
grandstanding researchers,
research news by press releases.
Yet, there are zero solid research studies defining CO2 explicit proven effects on neighboring atmospheric molecules and surface molecules. Instead there are only assumptions and “models”.
Don’t fall into climate team methods.
Well firstly David, thanks for taking up the challenge from my comment. Now allow me apply some of that scientific scepticism we are all proud to have.
Seems to correlate except for when it doesn’t ? That is a hallmark of someone kidding themselves. What’s the story with figure 2? Is there really a break in the data or are you only prepared to show us the bits that fit your proposed hypothesis?
Figure 1: Lake Victoria lake level 1896 to 2005 (data courtesy of Dr Peter Mason)
Well I don’t see any “data” here, all I see is three straight lines of questionable origin and not a single data point indicated. Why do you not plot the data so that we can see it and make our own conclusions, rather than those you are trying to impose by your undocumented selection of periods and line fitting.
Could we have a link to the datasets you are using ?
What I do see though, as far as Victoria goes, is a strong correlation between Solar Max and Monsoon rain events within the Lake Victoria Watershed area
So you add a tentative explanation but do not address the issues I raised. Like why only show the data which “works” and hide the rest?
If you accept that kind of presentation you will see the “correlation”. You presumably also accept the CO2 correlates with global temps, if you ignore the first half of the 20th century and the late 19th cooling.
Just reading the patterns myself.
But Greg,
Ask yourself…What happened between the late 1930’s and the late 1970’s?
Just in case yiou aren’t sure, here is a little clue
All of which can be found in this post
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/08/01/a-comparison-of-adjusted-vs-unadjusted-surface-data/
The recorded data indicates cooling…between .5 and .8C
… and your point is ?
solar activity was at its highest in the 50s and 60s, so that is a bit of a problem for the alleged correlation.
My point is that whatever process/cycle (AMO/PDO etc.) occurred to turn the warming of 1910 – 1930 into cooling from then until the later 1970’s might have had some effect on the correlation. Unfortunately the time of no correlation isn’t presented to make any type of determination. But correlation seems to be strongest during the warming phases.
Thanks for making a clear statement Bryan. I agree with most of that. But if you have to cherry pick to find a correlation it probably means you are falsely identifying the cause.
If the major cooling event has to be removed ie “hide the decline” then the idea that there is a strong correlation and the solar variations are the primary cause of temperature and sea level variations become highly suspect.
Unfortunately David Middleton has done copied most of the mistakes and one-sided pseudo-science that mainstream climatologists have been doing for three decades to establish that CO2 is the primary driver.
I don’t find it any more convincing now he claims it’s the sun.
Can you state what sea level dataset was used to come up with Figure 3?
Yes, this article is very weak without any proper citations of what the datasets actually are. Links to data would also be much better.
Figure 3 is another case of works, except for when it doesn’t, correlation.
This is not actually surprising because the PDO changed from positive to negative and brought about global cooling. The Pacific shift then occurred in the late 1970’s and the PDO changed from negative back to positive again. Ocean cycles have different influences on sea level and regions of upwelling. These ocean cycles also hide solar influence when they cause more upwelling cold waters towards the surface during negative phases.
What has been shown this relationship only matches with positive ocean cycles that cause warming.
Or maybe it’s a false correlation or only half the story. If the ocean is a giant colorimeter, why isn’t the PDO driven by sunspots too?
You should also remember that PDO is just the difference between one region of N. Pacific RELATIVE to the global mean. It is not a direct temperature index.
Not forgetting the AMO and probably have most of the story. The ocean has circulations that last months, years or numerous decades to complete. The PDO and AMO are based on changes via these over decades and have no noticeable influence from solar activity at least during one short full ocean cycle (60+ years). Upwelling cold ocean water towards the surface has little influence from solar activity so it distorts the trend.
The PDO difference when positive are conditions that favours El Niño’s to form so that’s why it is significant to the global mean temperatures.
Rate of global sea level change from satellite data: error bars required.
Solar (not necessarily cycles) influence on the regional climate change (since there is no global climate, it follows that global climate change is a non-existent abstract) at the current state of science can not be conclusively proved or disproved.
And finally, the so called ‘climate science’ is a more rhetorical exercise ‘in order to produce an effect or to make a statement rather than to elicit information’.
typo: ‘more’ = mere
“And finally, the so called ‘climate science’ is a more rhetorical exercise ‘in order to produce an effect or to make a statement rather than to elicit information’.”
This understates the case rather dramatically, not sure if understated for effect or what.
The IPCC and the CAGW bandwagon have been on a systematic campaign to obfuscate, rather than illuminate.
Wherever information contradicted or cast in doubt the idea that CO2 level was the thermostat of the atmosphere, it has been altered, denied, lied about, covered up…whatever could be done by hook or by crook.
The global warming sc@m has eliminated any possibility of discovering, confirming, or refuting anything with regard to the historical temperature records and any correlations or lack thereof with other physical geographic parameters.
Since sea level shenanigans are also a part of the ruse, this data has been likewise corrupted.
Trying to sort it all out now is not just more difficult, it is by design impossible.
Years and years of effort have gone into producing false correlations by any means possible
There is no way to know what is real and what is made up.
What all of this amounts to is giant crime has been and is being perpetrated on all of the world and on the accumulated knowledge of several fields of inquiry.
IMO, people need to go to jail…lots of them.
IIRC sunspots were first recorded in 1662, are you sure that your Cromagnon observations are compatible with the Wolf group number ?
Seriously you can’t just make stuff up. What is this Holocene record you are referring to? Links, data, citations.
Cro-Magnons predate the Holocene by more than 30,000 years.
The first written record of sunspots was made by Chinese astronomers around 800 BC. Court astrologers in ancient China and Korea, who believed sunspots foretold important events, kept records off and on of sunspots for hundreds of years. English monk John of Worcester made the first known drawing of sunspots in December 1128.
Soon after the invention of the telescope in 1608, several astronomers used the instrument to observe sunspots. They weren’t at first quite sure what to make of these spots on the Sun, which is why I guess you reference so much later in the 17th century.
Thanks Gabro, the Cro-Magnons comment was tongue in cheek , not seriously historical.
Thanks for the other info but sporadic and dissociated observations from different civilisations are not going to enable an assessment of a Holocene average and 800 BC is hardly the beginning of it either.
So my question stands about what the heck the Holocene average = 40 bit was supposed to represent.
Number of authors, including Dr. Joan Feynman, sister of Richard (https://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/nilef-20070319.html) have written about the Nile’s floods ‘correlation’ to the sunspot activity.
Here is an ancient Egyptian carving from time of pharaoh Akhenaten, where the sphinx appear to be observing sun with an object (possibly smoke darkened piece of glass) in one hand and some kind of ‘reference’ records in the other.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/Egypt.jpg
Akhenaten (Akhen-aten, aten is name for the disk of the sun in the Egyptian mythology) lived around 1350 BC, instituted new religion of the solar disk worship. By 1500 BC Phoenicians mastered casting of glass, thus it is possible that pharaoh Akhenaten had access to it.
All speculative, nevertheless interesting.
btw. In early 1960s I, as many other school kids not having appropriate glasses or filters, observed a total solar eclipse through candle darkened pieces of glass.
Greg,
Please pardon the pedantry.
The Holocene sunspot average is derived from a variety of proxies, to include 14C and 10Be flux.
to add to the mystery compare the solar disk blemishes on the above carving (click on the image to enlarge) to one of the NASA’s photo of the actual S. Hemisphere sunspots
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/SHSS.jpg
(multi-millennial cycle?)/sarc
Thanks for the image of that carving, very interesting. He definitely seems to be holding some kind of observation tool, more complex that a flat plate of glass.
I had not noticed the “sunspots” since there are similar blemishes all over the carving. It would need very careful inspect to say whether there were intentional marks on the sun and that these are not just knocks and marks which appear everywhere. Interesting idea to look into.
here is another photo of that low relief engraving:
http://mfas3.s3.amazonaws.com/objects/SC11191.jpg
I was mistaken about him holding a larger object : it is the little flame on the end of each ray which is typical of these representations.
Also there are several engravings which seem to relate the same event and posture and the upper arm is cupping with the lower arm and probably not holding anything in front of the eye as it may appear in the first image.
http://www.archaeometry.org/images/SphDxtHAJ.jpg
However, there are some more definite marks on the sun here so possibly sun spots were known at that time. Neither do you need a lens or glass. You can project an image of the sun in a dark room with a pin hole in paper. Larger sunspots would be visible in such a projection.