This Bloomfield is not a “financial statistician” in the slightest. He’s a frequency-domain guy as is Nychka of UCAR. I’d asked that they put someone on the panel who was familiar with time-domain statistics, but needless to say NAS was not going to do anything along those lines.

Bloomfield, like Nychka, sat like a bump on a log when Mann said that it would be “foolish and incorrect” to calculate an r2 statistic. As the statisticians on the panel, I think that they had a responsibility to wade into that issue – which, after all, was the very issue that NAS called Barton on.

I thought that the Panel needed a good lawyer for a couple of reasons. Good litigation lawyers are quick on their feet and can often think on the spot of the questions that you think of when you go home and think, damn, I wish I’d asked that. They are also quick studies at getting the gist of a file quickly; I didn’t get the impression that the panel had the gist of the issues on March 2. They probably do now. In some ways, they’d have been better having written submissions in March and oral presentations in April. Finally, if you might have to get along with the other party afterwards but there are still some issues that you want to get on the table, sometimes it’s handy to have the lawyer be the bad guy. So all in all, you wouldn’t call them a hard-hitting panel.

I really wonder how they can say much on such a broad issue, as how they have restated their charter? It’s one thing to dig into an individual paper. But to pass judgment on a field is even trickier. Requires more time and background.

What was your impression of Bloomfield from the panel discussion? I saw that you had concerns about his addition (glad that a financial statistician was added, but worried about the previous connects to climate researchers). How did he come across?

From http://www.ghcc.msfc.nasa.gov/MSU/images/strato_temp.gif it appears that the factors causing largest stratospheric heating are volcanic eruptions.

However, I would encourage caution about attempting to deduce too much from too little data.

I think the direction of the “torque” put on the earth’s magnetic field depends on the polarity of the sun’s field, which flips during the height of the sunspot cycle. So, the spinning up/down of earth from this should cancel out over time (but the amount of change for single events is important in estimating the energy involved). OTOH, frictional drag on the earth’s atmosphere by the solar wind causes a small but always-slowing effect on rotation.

Still, there seems like alot of energy involved, and no process (dynamo-like changing of the earth’s rotation rate, just like an electric motor) is perfect, which would result in “waste” heat occuring somewhere, maybe below the earth’s surface via fluid-friction. Of course, that could be negligible or forever sealed away by the insulating crust.

I’m pretty sure the ionsphere and maybe even the upper stratosphere expand outward from heating during high-sunspot activity. Since the tropopause state (altitude/pressure/temp, gas composition, etc) is very important in the GHG radiational effects, I’m wondering how much this expansion/contraction would effect it and if it’s been accounted for in the models.

See http://maia.usno.navy.mil/lplot1.gif and http://www.john-daly.com/press/lods1860.gif for a longer term view.

See http://www.john-daly.com/press/lods1974.htm for sources of data.

Gribbin, J., and S. Plagemann 1973. Discontinuous change in Earth’s spin rate following Great Solar Storm of August 1972. Nature 243, 26-27, doi:10.1038/243026a0.

The question of a link between changes in the Earth’s spin rate and the activity of the Sun is of topical interest, and there is good evidence that the changing length of day is influenced by the mean level of solar activity. The possibility of a one-to-one correlation between specific events on the Sun and specific changes in the length of day has remained more controversial, however, although there was a suggestion of such an effect associated with the great solar storm of 1959. Specifically, Danjon suggested that there was an increase in the length of day when the nucleonic component of solar cosmic rays increased ; this was in addition to the usual steady increase in the length of day. Other observers questioned the reality of this effect, and because the 1959 solar storm was the greatest recorded since the time of Galileo, there was no immediate hope of an independent test of Danjon’s claim. In August 1972, however, an even greater disturbance occurred on the Sun. It seemed to us that this might provide the ideal opportunity to resolve the controversy, and we have indeed found a discontinuous change in the length of day, and a change in the rate of change of the length of day (a glitch) immediately after that event. Changes in the length of day, and thus in the spin rate of the Earth, are revealed by regular measurements of Universal Time (UT) carried out at many observatories around the world. For our purpose, we are interested in UT2, the version of Universal Time with the effects of the Chandler Wobble and seasonal variations removed. The difference between Atomic Time (AT) and UT2 shows, on average, a monotonic increase as the Earth’s spin slows down and the length of day increases.