Continued from http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=3159.
Solar topics seem to draw out personal theories and Leif has been very indulgent in discussing such theories – far more indulgent than I would be. However, please limit your discussion to published literature rather than your own bright new ideas. (You know who I mean.) One topic that would interest me (and which I perceive Leif as hoping to get some discussion on) is the impact of new concepts of “small” changes in solar irradiance on “traditional” explanations of the association between the Maunder Minimum and the Little Ice Age.
Climate Audit 
514 Comments
Leif, in response to my ongoing question asking a reference for an engineering quality derivation of 3 deg C from doubled CO2, Michael Tobis referred to Annan and HArgreaves 2005, which is nothing of the sort. All it does is try to combine probabilities of different estimates, an interesting topic for a small paper, but nothing even remotely approaching the desired engineering quality study.
The reference intersects your area of interest though. Annan and Hargreaves 2005 state:
Rind et al 2004 http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2004/2004_Rind_etal.pdf state that their solar irradiance change assumptions were:
Just to confirm things for me: your graphic at http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-LEIF.pdf shows present-day views of Maunder-present irradiance changes as being far less than those of Lean 2000. Thus the sensitivity analysis of Rind et al 2004 relying on Lean 2000 irradiance changes would not be usable under current solar theory? (Thus the present conundrum).
This is only one of the examples in Annan and Hargreaves, but it seems to me that, if Tobis is citing such analyses in 2008, warning caveats should be attached. Or perhaps this is merely one more example of “sloppiness”.
326 (SteveM): The Lean (2000) TSI-reconstruction as you have discovered has a difference between the Maunder Minimum and Now that is much too large. Even Judith Lean now agrees that the variation is much smaller, if any. Back in Svalgaard #6, post #529 I showed one of her recent slides [SORCE, Santa Fe, 2008] where she admits: “longer-term variations not yet detectable – do they occur?”. So your caveats are well justified.
326 (SteveM): there is ‘ordinary sloppiness’ and there is ‘convenient sloppiness’.
326, 327, 328 (Leif and SteveM) A&H excluded the Maunder Minumum simulations from their conclusion. The sensitivity estimate was based on 20th Century warming, volcanic cooling, and cooling of the Last Glacial Maximum.
#315 (Erl)
Up in the top left of each CA page there is a link to the CA Forum message board. It will whisk you off to a seperate php driven bulletin board system where we discuss new theories and topics outlawed by Steve M on here. You cann start a new thread on the ‘unthreaded’ section there, and feel free to drop in on threads started by others.
Welcome to the dark side 🙂
#329. For their conclusion that “we cannot assign a significant probability to climate sensitivity exceeding 6C without making what appear to be wholly unrealistic exaggerations about the uncertainties involved”, I agree that Annan and Hargreaves ndid not directly use the Maunder Minimum in this calculation.
However they said:
and purported to illustrate this using the now obsolete solar irradiance change estimates. IF their results are “supported” by results from incorrect solar irradiance estimates, then surely this is a little disquieting if those estimates are later proven incorrect. An engineering-quality analysis would have tor resolve this. And surely this is a rather infelicitous Tobis example of an “engineering quality” calculation – which requires consideration of the most up to date information.
Not that Annan and Hargreaves purport to provide an A-to-B derivation of 3 deg C proceeding from the infrared absorption physics through analysis of all the feedback parameterizations to. It is bizarre that Tobis is unable to provide a more relevant “engineering quality” derivation.
It seems to me that the evidence here is simply against variations in irradiance being the “forcing” at work in solar modulation of terrestrial climate. You can add to that all the evidence of bidecadal variations in climate metrics, since what little variation there is in irradiance is over the 11 year sunspot cycle, with no further variation over the 22 year double sunspot cycle.
Can we not presume, though, that during periods of reduced solar activity, like the Maunder Minimum, that cosmic ray flux will be at a maximum for the duration of the solar minimum (since the two are inversely correlated)? The jury is certainly still out on just how cosmic ray flux acts to modulate terrestrial climate (assuming it does), but unlike irradiance this is a solar phenomenon which still has some evidence of possible correlation with variations in terrestrial climate. Now if someone can just come up with a satisfying explanation of the causal relationship, the since will be settled. 🙂
That was supposed to be “the science will be settled.” 🙂
7 (Basil): The cosmic ray intensity shows an 11-year [inverse] cycle. During the Maunder Minimum this 11-year modulation did not go away. There was still a ‘cosmic ray cycle’ operating although there were no sunspots.
9 (Leif)
CFR modulation was in effect during the Maunder minimum but do we have a good proxy for X-type flares and CME events? This could be one of the major differences from this current period and grant minimum events.
I’m hoping Dr Svalgaard will critique Landscheidt’s last paper, “New Little Ice Age Instead of Global Warming”.
Steve – I’m hoping that he doesn’t. The primary purpose of this blog is to discuss articles and papers relied upon by IPCC.
Steve, you wanted to know how all this might effect traditional Muander LIA connections. Well, this may be helpful. I qoute from acrim.com
Obviously, if the .25% percent variation did not occur, it can’t be the forcing involved (unless climate is very sensitive to TSI variations). Now Leif can correct me if I’m wrong, but it is still possible (unlikely?) that some unknown mechanism could cause long term variability, but any of the mechanisms previously suggested would not do it. This may actually be bad news for those trying to attribute recent warming to greenhouse gases. If TSI did not cause the LIA, what did, and how do we know that it did not reverse and cause most of recent warming?
10 (JimA): We believe that X-ray flares and CMEs then would have been the same as they are now, i.e. none. But these have very little impact on climate, if any.
11 (Lenihan): Me spending time on Landscheidt’s papers does not seem to be very fruitful. My experience is that it is not needed for non-believers and will have no impact on the true believers anyway. You can try to convince me first that my review will potentially change anybody’s view, e.g. starting with your own.
#12. I urge people not to use words like “bad news”. I, for one, am not cheering for any side, though people often misunderstand this.
Personally, I think that the assumption that all “forcings” in wm-2 are equal is one that needs to be argued, rather than assumed. The entropy of solar radiation is completely different than back-radiated infrared and perhaps its forcing properties are different. Or maybe they aren’t. But it’s an issue that I’d like to see discussed in more detail.
12 (Andrew): the elegant solution [promoted by some] to the problem of what caused the LIA is to posit that the LIA [and the MWP and others] didn’t happen in the first place. This should not have escaped your attention 🙂
12,15 (Andrew,Leif): I’m not saying that the Sun is not causing climate changes. [For the gazillionths time] I’m saying that if it does, the climate system must be very [hyper-] sensitive to solar input. No mechanism has been proposed and demonstrated to provide such sensitivity. This does not mean that it is not there, although it might mean that; we don’t know as yet. As long as we are thinking in terms of ‘bad news’ or ‘good news’ for this or that viewpoint we are not doing science. And as long as we simply regard solar influence as a ‘dumping ground’ for what we don’t otherwise understand, we cannot make progress.
6 (SteveM) A&H rejected the assumptions of the MM calculations, if not their conclusions. I don’t see a reason for caveats since their conclusion does not depend on assumptions of solar activity. I suspect that the answer lies in cloud and ozone feedbacks, but that is a problem for the modelers.
Regarding your sensitivity questions, have you looked at Manabe and Wetherald (1967)?
Click to access sm6701.pdf
Steve: I’m not talking about caveats from Annan and Hargreaves, but caveats from Tobis. Tobis represented this study as his candidate for an “engineerung quality” assessment. Given that the Maunder assumptions are not consistent with current solar thinking, any engineer would have noted this and warned readers to bear this in mind in considering the article and explicitly excluded that portion of the article. You seemed to have missed the other point: if the Annan conclusions are supported by what are now regarded as incorrect calculations, that raises some question as to why. However, if the same article were presented today, you’d want them to address this and it is an open question for people citing this article. Again I’m not criticizing A&H for using views presumably current in 2005, but Tobis for citing an article in part relying on obsolete results as his “engineering quality” exposition – not that the article is an A-to-B derivation using physics in the first place.
Manabe and Wetherald is an interesting article, but hardly up to date or much more than a sketch. An “engineering quality” report needs to be up to date and more than a sketch.
Leif
On solar forcing of climate, I would welcome your comments on models of solar parameters affecting droplet nucleation with consequent amplification affecting on albedo and/or fraction of solar absorbed. e.g.,
The global atmospheric electric circuit and its effects on cloud microphysics
B A Tinsley 2008 Rep. Prog. Phys. 71 066801 (31pp)
Experimental evidence for the role of ions in particle nucleation under atmospheric conditions
BY HENRIK SVENSMARK et al. Proc. R. Soc. A, Oct. 2006
(See also http://www.dsri.dk/~hsv/ Henrik Svensmark, Cosmic rays and Earth’s Cloud Cover)
Steve: None of these studies is relied upon by IPCC. For the 1000th time, I ask people to discuss studies relied upon by IPCC rather than studies not relied upon by IPCC. I want at least a 3-month moratorium on cosmic rays, cosmic electricity, barycentric movements etc etc
#15 — such people might be called “climate change deniers.” Peculiar turn-about, that, isn’t it? 🙂
18 (DavidH): These are long papers and are concerned with the production of aerosols and subsequent low clouds. There is little doubt that more low clouds will affect the albedo and the hence the solar incoming. My main problem with this mechanism is that there does not seem to be a solar cycle change in the albedo [I posted a plot a few days ago] so where do we go from here? I’m not inclined to comment extensively on the papers as they speak for themselves. Whether this mechanism works must be borne out by direct observation of the albedo, and there I simply don’t see it. As there was also cosmic ray modulation during the Maunder minimum, this mechanism does not seem effective in producing the LIA. In the end this seems to be an observational issue: does the albedo vary with the solar cycle? If so, there is enough variation in insolation to affect the climate.
19 (Pat): ‘turn-about’ ? I think these people have been at for a while now…
Steve McIntyre says:
June 30th, 2008 at 11:10 am NO 14
I have mentioned before that this whole way of looking at the energy budget of the earth, as if radiation is a conserved quantity, does not sit well with my inherent physics instincts.
Radiation is not a conserved quantity, energy is the conserved quantity. Energy in the form of radiation inputed as watts/metersquare is logical when discussing the supply of energy to earth from the sun, at the boundary from space.Also at the boundary, since energy is radiated from the earth to cool it, radiation is enough.
In between we have to deal with volumes, not surfaces, as far as what happens to the energy coming in, heat capacities of these volumes, transformations into kinetic and chemical, even electromagnetic (thunderstorms) energies etc. etc. Not to mention albedo and cloud effects. The concepts of radiation budgets and “forcings” as if the energy is in equipotentials about the earth that are disturbed by this that and the other, do not sit well with me. I intuit double countings and holes, but feel too old to lift up my sleeves and dig into it.
Dr. Svalgaard, thank you so much for your contributions on this blog. You continually point out the difference between some very interesting theories and some very interesting studies (even when it is clear they aren’t very interesting to you) and actual settled SCIENCE. Science, our knowledge, and our critical thinking skills are better as a result. I only hope something in these interchanges benefits you even partly as much.
Tolz (23): Thanks for the kind words. It is always beneficial to try to explain one’s science to others.
I have not been following this thread in detail, but my less than comprehensive view of the solar forcing issues in modern climate science is that those who are skeptical of the degree of influence of GHG on climate have sometimes, in my view, tried too hard to get a fit of temperature changes with some aspect of potential solar influences. Some of those attempts have been as sloppy from my layperson’s perspective as some of those that deal with the more conventional influences of GHGs on climate.
What is exciting about Leif S’s findings to me is that without the more direct effects of solar irradiance we need to look at climate influences in a whole different light with some amount of deference that we have a lot to learn in these areas of natural forcing or climate cycles- as well as GHG forcing – or come up with a hockey stick even straighter and more level than the one MM has proposed and defended.
I would be curious if anyone here can summarize the extended implications of what Leif has shown here as very minor variations in the historical solar irradiance.
# 22
Bravo Anna!!! I stand with you. Amplitude of changes in solar irradiance is what matters, not sunspots number or output energy levels from the Sun incoming to Earth. If I have a pot with lentils (and water, of course) over a stove, there will be different temperatures at different times as of the fire is ignited. The temperature of the lentils soup won’t be the same if we change the intensity of the flame; it will be higher when the flame is more intense and the heating up will be faster. We changed the amplitude of the energy received by the lentils soup. OTOH, we could maintain the flame intensity in a quasi-stable state, but the temperature of the lentils pot will be higher as time runs, until reaching the temperature of change of phase. That’s what happens with Earth and Solar energy conections. The climate on Earth is affected, not by the intensity of solar irradiance, but for the amplitude of the fluctuations of solar irradiance. I mean, it will never be the same if the change goes from 1364.5 W/m^2 to 1365 W/m^2 that if that change goes from 1363.5 W/m^2 to 1364.5 W/m^2. No matter if the peak is lower than the other peaks.
Steve: Nasif, this sounds like a personal theory. Please connect this to literature cited by IPCC or hold your peace. Thx,
#14 Steve : “I, for one, am not cheering for any side, though people often misunderstand this.”
We’ve seen time and time again new folks showing up here just don’t get it. While my opinion is that you are actually more of a warmista than not, it’s quite clear to me (and should be to everyone) that any policy decisions you would make would be based on the accepted science, and that you are only interested in the literature the IPCC relies upon. It must be very frustrating to constantly be accused of being a denialist, when people should take you at your word since in my opinion, you belong to the group of the most upright participants involved. Especially given the rather perplexing behavior of those who are not so seemingly forthcoming.
On the other hand, my saying that probably will open me up to accusations of being a cheerleader denialist environment hating scumbag, a McIntyre appologist, in the pay of big oil, a neocon, etc etc etc and the like.
To which I say: “Yeah, and so? You don’t like Liechtenstein, get out.”
A few questions Leif, I was reading yesterday that during the Manhattan project the spontaneous decay of U235 was measured in California and then in New Mexico. They found that it was higher in New Mexico, due to the higher altitude, allowing more neutrons from solar radiation to begin a chain reaction.
I believe that neutrons have a relatively short half-life (fifteen minutes), and the time to earth is 5 minutes at light speed. So only the most energetic neutrons will ever make it to Earth. This difference in the time to Earth vs. half-life means that atmospheric neutron density could change quite a lot, as there is a cut off.
1)Just how does neutron influx into the Earth atmosphere vary with the presence of solar storms? (less than or more than 1, 2 or more orders of magnitude?)
2)Is there any correlation between the solar cycle and ‘fast’ neutron influx into the atmosphere?
3)Finally, how good are neutrons at making tracks in a cloud chamber?
Steve,
This article may be of interest since it directly questions the failure of the IPCC to address the question of solar irradiance:
Clip:
“In Stephen Wilde’s sixth and exclusive article for CO2Sceptics.Com he considers that the IPCC have failed to carry out any risk analysis for the potential for global cooling instead of global warming and that a repeat of the Little Ice Age a mere 400 years ago would cause mass starvation worldwide….
…The influence of the sun has been discounted in the climate models as a contributor to the warming observed between 1975 and 1998. Those who support the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW), now known as anthropogenic climate change so that recent cooling can be included in their scenario, always deny that the sun has anything to do with recent global temperature movements.
The reason given is that Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) varied so little over that period that it cannot explain the warming that was observed. I don’t yet accept that TSI tells the whole story because it is ill defined and speculative as regards it’s representation of all the different ways the sun could affect the Earth via the entire available range of physical processes.
Despite the limitations of TSI as an indicator of solar influence I think there are conclusions we can draw from the records we do have. Oddly, I have not seen them discussed properly anywhere else, especially not by AGW enthusiasts. ”
Link to full article here
Steve: This is exactly the sort of article that I don’t want discussed here. IPCC didn’t rely on this article.
Sorry, Steve, I misunderstood.
I’ll keep quiet!
Steve: Feel free to participate. It’;s just that the solar thread seems to attract people with their own personal theories and we get precious little discussion of the details of the IPCC papers. If you want to make observations on these papers, positive or negative, feel free to do so. I just want to focus people on the mainstream papers.
#20 Thanks Leif
#18 Steve Re “I ask people to discuss studies relied upon by IPCC”. Will do. Apologies for jumping in w/o catching that. (Thanks for posting your Ohio 2008 presentation. Very informative.)
# 14, Steve M:
“Personally, I think that the assumption that all “forcings” in wm-2 are equal is one that needs to be argued, rather than assumed. The entropy of solar radiation is completely different than back-radiated infrared and perhaps its forcing properties are different. Or maybe they aren’t. But it’s an issue that I’d like to see discussed in more detail.”
Back in April 2006 Willis Eschenbach was discussung ideas related to your comment right here on climateaudit. He proposed an analogue for the Greenhouse effect and a simple explanation of the expectation that a change in solar forcing is twice as efficacious as an equivalent change (in watts/m2) in greenhouse gas forcing in terms of its effect on surface temperature. This is his “spherical iron greenhouse analogy”.
The “iron greenhouse” or “shell” is clearly a pet theory of Willis’s and obviously has not been relied upon by the IPCC. Nevertheless it is clear that others besides Steve M have been thinking along the lines that not all forcings are equal.
anna v: If you have not had a look at Willis E’s interactive discussion on relative efficacy it is well worth taking the time to track it down.
Like Steve M I am still waiting for a really good engineering quality exposition on the warming effect of CO2. Nobody seems to be able to produce one, and if it existed no doubt those of a more alarmist bent would proudly produce it in order to rebut some of the doubts expressed by visiters to climateaudit. Until I see such, along with the ensuing audit (here and elsewhere) I will remain somewhat underwhelmed by claims of large climate sensitivity to the increasing concentration CO2 in the atmosphere.
Rob R
SteveM (17): Tobis does not need to provide caveats for the A&H paper, because no caveats are necessary. The paper is not an “engineering quality derivation” but its conclusions do not rest on Lean 2000 or any other study of solar activity. They looked at 5 potential candidates for indepedent, or semi-independent derivations of climate sensitivity, and the MM studies didn’t make the cut. If MM simulations using obsolete solar reconstructions provide results consistent with other findings, then that means that problems remain with the proposed mechanism(s).
Regarding the “engineering quality derivation”, could you define (again) what that means for the benefit of this thread. I think the M&W methods and calculations from 1967 are still largely consistent with what is known about greenhouse warming today, and it is simple enough that it can be “easily” described.
#33. Tobis presented this paper as his candidate for an “engineering quality” derivation. As you say, the paper is what it is, which is most certainly not a physics-based A-to-B derivation of climate sensitivity.
I’m not entirely sure how I would define an “engineering quality” derivation in this context, other than short articles in Nature don’t look the least bit like any engineering studies that I’ve seen in the mining business. Such studies tend to be hundreds of pages long; with each parameter and figure carefully derived, typically in the 4 corners of the study or its appendices.
Probably an “engineering quality” study would start with a detailed discussion of the infrared spectrum with one section on CO2, one on water vapor, one on overlaps. If you examine all 4 IPCC reports, there is NO discussion whatever of the infrared spectrum, other than an aside in AR2. The “reason” is presumably that this is in textbooks, but the IPCC reports do not specifically approve the commentary in any particular textbook. The discussion should be so comprehensive that you would be able to point anyone raising the issue of “saturation” to the relevant discussion in IPCC.
Given the focus on GCMs, I would envisage a very long discussion of water vapor feedbacks and how each set of parameterizations was calculated and sensitivities for each parameterization.
A very long discussion of clouds and every paramterization and issue associated with them.
A discussion of numerical processing issues as they affect GCMs.
I would envisage far less attention to giving a citation to every climate paper written in the past 5 years and far more attention to providing a comprehensive document.
One excuse for the present sort of document is that it’s done by volunteers. Well, if that was an obstacle to an effective study, I’d insist on people spending full time on it and making appropriate arrangements. It would cost millions of dollars to do a proper study, but so what?
I’d have a majority of the “commission” constituted of people with no dog in the race, but would ensure that the ablest possible climate scientists were on hand to advise them. “Engineering quality”, among other things, requires independence and this is one thing that studies to date have not achieved.
These are just quick thoughts and not a final recipe.
14 (Leif)
This is my interest in CME’s and solar flares. The IPCC took off on a presentation by Lean and Wang in 2005 on the variation of TSI.
Mainly CME’s can transport energy to the surface through electro-jets that start at the poles and radiate to the equatorial regions. These effect every type of conductive networks (i.e. power lines and plumbing. Not to mention the heating of the ionosphere and stratosphere from these events. Also high energy particals maybe effect cirrus cloud formation.
Steve M touched on solar climate connection here.
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1079
From Joe D’Aleo, Ian D. Clark, Richard Willson, Olavi Kärner
“Wang and Lean (2005) used a solar reconstruction model that simulated the eruption, transport and accumulation of magnetic flux during the past 300 years using a flux transport model with variable meridional flow. They suggested a radically different picture of the long term variation of solar output, most notably an increase since 1700 of only 27% of the lower end of the previously-estimated range (0.037%). In the AR4 the IPCC has embraced this finding to support its claims that there is only a small solar influence on recent climate change. This result contrasts sharply with other estimates mentioned above, as well as Lockwood and Stamper (1999) which showed how the total magnetic flux leaving the sun has increased by a factor of 2.3 since 1901. Moreover, as the AR4 itself states (Ch 2), long-term trends in geomagnetic activity and cosmogenic isotopes, together with the range of variability in Sun-like stars (Baliunas and Jastrow, 1990) suggested that the Sun is capable of a broader range of activity than witnessed during recent solar cycles.”
Steve
On your seeking engineering quality with supporting derivations and documentation, are the following publications a clue to to the level of quality and detail you are seeking?
Ferenc M. Miskolczi prepared a detailed quantitative line by line transmittance absorbance code. (0.6 cm^-1 resolution, 5 significant figure accuracy.) He then published a 220 page report on it. He later intercompared it against other codes.
F.M. Miskolczi et al.: High-resolution atmospheric radiance-transmittance code (HARTCODE). In: Meteorology and Environmental Sciences Proc. of the Course on Physical Climatology and Meteorology for Environmental Application. World Scientific Publishing Co. Inc., Singapore, 1990.
Kratz-Mlynczak-Mertens-Brindley-Gordley-Torres-Miskolczi-Turner: An inter-comparison of far-infrared line-by-line radiative transfer models. Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy & Radiative Transfer No. 90, 2005.
Rizzi-Matricardi-Miskolczi: Simulation of uplooking and downlooking high-resolution radiance spectra with two different radiative transfer models. Applied Optics, Vol. 41. No. 6, 2002.
Miskolczi then used this quantitative code to develop his greenhouse theory which he published in the following two papers:
F.M. Miskolczi and M.G. Mlynczak: The greenhouse effect and the spectral decomposition of the clear-sky terrestrial radiation. Idojaras – Quarterly Journal of the Hungarian Meteorological Service, Vol.108, No. 4. 2004.
F.M. Miskolczi: Greenhouse effect in semi-transparent planetary atmospheres. Idojaras – Quarterly Journal of the Hungarian Meteorological Service, Vol. 111. No. 1. 2007
(See presentations by Miskolczi and then by Zagoni
at the 2008 Intl. Conf. Climate Change March 2-4, NY, NY.
and review with links by Zagoni at
Developments in Greenhouse Theory)
Steve: None of these are relied on by IPCC. David Stockwell has discussed them and I urge readers interested in these papers to visit his blog.
28 (Doc): The neutrons do not come from the Sun, but are generated by cosmic rays smashing into our atmosphere. The modern cosmic ray detector is even called a ‘neutron monitor’.
33 (cce):
It happens very often that simulations and models are tuned and tweaked until they give results agreeing with other findings. Then people stop and declare victory and can now publish without too much hassle from reviewers. Science is a vast web of interlocking and supporting threads and pieces. Sometimes these can interlock ‘too well’ preventing progress.
Could we say Maunder Minimum instead of MM which, on this blog, may be construed as having another meaning.
35 (JimA): The energy input from CMEs and Flares is on the average 25 GigaWatts per hemisphere. On rare occasions that can increase by more than an order of magnitude. Try to calculate how many Watt per square meter that is and compare with what we get from Sun [the TSI]. Then report back to us what numbers you get.
Wang and Lean (2005) were on the right track. Later studies [Premimger; Kriviva; Svalgaard] indicate an even smaller variation. The cited counter examples used against W&L have all fallen by the wayside since.
36 (Steve) You ask for an engineering quality explanation for the CO2 Greenhouse Effect, but also want to limit discussion to papers relied upon by the IPCC. These two sets do not overlap.
=======================================
Steve
Per your comments in #34 (pithly summarized by Kim #40), it did not appear that the IPCC reports were of your “engineering quality”. You said:”I would envisage a very long discussion of water vapor feedbacks and how each set of parameterizations was calculated and sensitivities for each parameterization.”
F.M. Miskolczi (1990) appears to delve into such “a very long discussion”. So back to my query:
Is Miskolczi (1990 – 2002 of the level of “engineering quality” that you are looking for(and which IPCC should be emulating)?
(I think his 2004-2007 papers could use another editorial pass by a native English speaking technical editor.)
In terms of “Climate Audit”, Miskolczi (2007) discovered the gross 90 year old approximation of an opaque “semi-infinite” atmosphere and the associated major errors (including no energy conservation etc.) that all modern greenhouse models still have.
(David Stockton in his 4th blog on Radiative Equilibrium notes that the classical semi-infinite model: “gives a very high estimate for surface temperature of 36C some 20C higher than the actual global average temperature”, and “The temperature of the surface is discontinuous with the atmosphere.”
By comparison, Miskolczi’s first order approximation (opaque atmosphere) and overall energy balance equation, local thermal equilibrium, etc. “gives a greenhouse effect of 1.5^0.25 or 110.6% of black body temperature, or a global average of 9C, much closer to the accepted value of 15C. (M adjusts this further with other aspects of the theory)” – including atmospheric transmission etc.)
Steve: No, it’s just another article. And it’s not one that’s used by IPCC.
14(SteveM):
I suspect the first step on the path to an engineering value is going to be in the scientific realm and that will be the falsification of these over reaching super sensitivity multi degree values for a co2 doubling.
It is obvious that all W/m^2 are not the same. A change in ghg forcing results in simplified terms as changing the emissivity of stefan’s law as well as changing the absorption. It’s going to be linear. This doesn’t happen if you change the total solar flux inbound. Hence the two are not quite the same and it would seem that the solar flux inbound values are going to have a larger effect as the same amount of outbound can be radiated outward with more efficiency when GHGs are increased but not when TSI happens.
The other factor of great interest is the serious variability of albedo – which essentially corresponds to a change in TSI. As Leif pointed out some time back, Palle ^ Goode have analyzed this and found that over 20 yrs albedo varied by 10% during multiyear time frames which amounts to almost 11 Watts/m^2. Almost all – if not all – of this is due to clouds and particulates and aerosols.
All in all, theres around 160 W/m^2 of GHG action in the atmosphere. CO2 is good for somewhere between 9 & 25 % total. Also, there are about a half dozen identical effect doublings and and another half dozen with over 1/2 the basic radiative effects. This ought to be enough to call into question just how much a doulbing could have because anything more than a ‘fair share of that 160 w/m^2 means that some other change in the total ghg forcing has to have had less impact for the same power. Since a body has to shed 238 W/m^2 avg if it has a 0.3 albedo when located at Earth’s orbit, one has the nominal warming to date – all forcings currently in effect of right at 33k. If you ascribe 3 K per doubling – there’s 5 that happened with nom inally the same w/m^2 already – that’s 15 K just for those. There’s another 6 with around 1/2 to 2/3 of the w/m^2 forcing and that total has to amount to around 10-25 % of the whole ghg forcing.
There’s just not enough warming to accomodate all this hot sensitivity without assuming seriously different effects from identical input changes to the system.
sorry it’s not an engineering solution per se but it should be a scientific falsification of the preseumptionor theory that it is sensitive. Also the lack of proper albedo variations preclude any theory that assume co2 must be responsible for changes in observed T is falsified so most of these high sensitivity claims falsely assume albedo is constant when it has been observed to vary substantially – much more so than the variation in co2 has in a century but is unknown outside of the last 22 years and even that is reconstructed. That’s almost 11 W/m^2 versus less than 1.7 w/m^2 for co2.
OK, lets talk IPCC talk
Have a look at the figure for the “energy budget” in the published by them FAQ 1.1 fig 1
http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/ar4-wg1.htm
By holes I mean that I do not see the energy stored from cumulative TSI over time, and its release in the time slice pictured. I mean , PDO, ENSO and whatever names the large air current circulations have. Oceans’ heat capacity?
From the accompanying writeup
A hole: The average implied here is a year. The heat capacity of the earth is decades, viz the PDO. So no, there is no must. It could balance it by absorbing it and retaining it. There is need for numbers from measurements and accurate observations.
Does anybody know whether the watts/metersquare radiated back to space from the earth have been measured by satellite? I would be grateful for a link.
Anna,
I’m not using 1 yr. as a baseline for the balance period nor am I assuming it ever reaches a state of equilibrium and I doubt that K&T 1997 makes those assumptions either despite their simplified presentation. Like the Fig. 1.1 cartoon from K&T 1997, I’m not including bioloical and nonbiological nonthermal absorption as it’s going to be fairly small relatively speaking.
Also, this stuff about massive heat sinks is a bit overblown. The limitations are conductive heat flow compared to the heat flow amounts required in radiative. Air conduction is a reat heat insulator as it requires convection to get decent amounts. Dirt, rock and even water without convection are both fair insulators as well. That means Earth’s inner area is still almost hotter than the surface of the sun despite billions of years of cooling down and the fact that natural geothermal heat conduction contributes almost nothing despite over 5000K temperature difference over only a few km.
Actually, the Kielh & Trenberth 1997 paper (which can be found on the web) mentions some of the satellite measurements (such as ERBE) that have studied the outbound LWR. I’ve managed to get a few years of data off the web showing LWR and it’s quite interesting. Emissions occur at higher rates during July than January despite Earth receiving more energy in January and this continues on for years until it starts dipping over the last few while the January plot increases output. Usually these are seen as color grid maps and are done by grid square. One can find the data and even download text data. Part of the problem is working out the usual details of reducing it to something meaningful – like one value. I believe NOAA has a website with all sorts of different types of data sets.
NOAA
NASA
Note that these default to map pictures but have an option for text data values.
An interesting thing to view is the modtran3 calculator from U of Chicago. It indicates that in clear skies that there is 260W/m^2 radiated out for a 1976 std atm model with our expected 299.2 K surface. That’s over 20W/m^2 too much for a balance, suggesting that clouds must be present to block outgoing energy as well as incoming energy.
I think part of the problem is that these things tend to not validate the GCM video games and the extremist viewpoints so one doesn’t find them used very often. Another part of the problem is that data of the accuracy necesssary has yet to be collected so there are no historical records nor contemporary ones either. Hence one is stuck with what is available or forced to concoct data series based on guesses and assumptions as well as on noise and information.
Collected data is spotty or limited in availability for time frames. Also, there is no standard form in how the spacial data is broken down – # of grid squares, size of each. When I did my balance graph, I could only find direct albedo measurements for 5 years or so. Beyond that, it’s reconstructed and there is not much of the reconstruction information either.
Since all the data is somewhat questionable, any result can and will be questioned by whomever is impacted the worst.
cba says:
July 1st, 2008 at 6:39 am 44
What are all these values of purported energy balance then, if not averages? Is it logical that they are instantaneous? i.e. average energy over a second?
We are being pounded on the head with so many watts/metersquare here and so many watts/metersquare there; if these are not mathematically well defined values, what are we talking about?
Again I stress that radiation is not a conserved quantity. Nor is power conserved. It is energy that is conserved. IMO once radiation hits volumes, it should be watts/metercubed that should be used in calculations and the consequent transformations into kinetic, thermal etc energy.
Thank you for the links and references, I will try to see if I can make sense out of things, though I doubt I will be able to untangle the knots.
I keep being amazed how with all the panoply of technology and computer facilities we are not getting any continuous in time CO2 maps over the whole world, and now any continuous outgoing radiation maps . The whole thesis of IPCC rests on these measurements, and these are not shown clearly for everybody to see and assimilate.
This puzzle is like sand.
We know there’s a certain number of grains of sand on the planet, the problem is counting them….
Dr. Svalgaard: Thanks for your response.
I am a retired litigator. Much of my career was spent dealing with the application of regulatory and environmental laws and rules to land use matters, primarily in forest management. I dealt with economists and scientists and engineers from several disciplines.
Litigators are perpetual students. Litigators must be open minded and interested in new information that may affect their analysis or determinations in order to succeed. Litigation involving complex technical and scientific subjects requires lawyers to learn the subject matter sufficiently to be able to present evidence and expert opinions in a way that uninformed judges, juries, and regulators can comprehend. Litigators must also learn enough about a subject to cross-examine opposing experts.
One observation that I believe could help everyone involved in climate science communicate better is to differentiate between climate and weather. As I understand it, global climate is a mathematical construct of regional weather compiled over a lengthy period like 30 years. Weather events are rarely directly impacted by climate.
Climate science is my avocation now. Otherwise, I would be bored to death. If you can find time in some forum to critique the Landscheidt paper I will be eternally grateful and open minded.
Sorry for the long winded plea, but I don’t know how to reach you by e-mail directly.
47 (Lenihan): As Landscheidt is pseudoscience and was not [and, I’m sure, will not be for the next] used by IPCC for their Assessment Report, this forum is not appropriate. On the other hand, this question comes up again and again [and will certainly be even more frequent as the coming low solar activity is ‘proving Landscheidt correct’ as some claim] it might be a worthwhile thing to write a critique of the paper, possibly to put on my [or somebody else’s] website as a rebuttal. My email address is no secret [can be derived from mt name]: leif@leif.org.
40 (Leif)
Once again I thank you for your time. I realize that one standard CME is a small number of 25 gigawatts over like 4000 sq/k. which is about .0005w/m2. But it is the accumulation of events and its effect on the atmosphere. .00005 x 100+ events in a year with each event has resonance time of at least 3 months or much more with big events. A single volcano can change the global temperature by about 2 degrees C or so for years but in energy output is fairly small compared to CME’s and flares. There has not been a lot of study on this and is discounted by the IPCC and many CME/flare papers as you have noted contradict themselves even in peer review. Even the IPCC (Ch 2) says that the sun may have the ability to vary much more than we are currently seeing. Could it be that this variability is limited when the sun is in a high activity state and then switches to a lower state at a much reduced TSI say 2 or 3 w/m2 lower than the current average. I know you are considered on the edge with your TSI and other reconstructions, this is good since if we all sat on the fence then nothing is accomplished.
49 (JimA): You have a different number of zeroes in your wattage numbers [I know there are many zeroes, that’s the point]. I don’t know what you mean by ‘resonance’ time, but it hardly matters because there is not enough energy to make an impact that way. About the Sun varying a lot more than it does, I don’t think so at this stage of its evolution. When the Sun was young, its activity was hundreds times higher than today and billions of years from now, almost all activity will be lost. I don’t see any way the long-term average TSI can be reduced by 3 W/m2, as activity can’t go much lower than it is right now, but, then, there is much we still don’t know about the Sun. What we should not do is to say “we need a 3 W/m2 change for things to come out right, so there must be some unknown cause that helps us maintain the illusion that we know what is going on”.
ana, 22:
There are some interesting comments on these matters on the bulletin board.
40, kim: Exactly.
Anna,
Sorry for any confusion. When I said not a year, I meant more like multiyear or long term average not just some short term 12 month average or less.
As you point out, power is energy per time unit. Energy is conserved in the sum total of all forms. Energy density is not that meaningful though in this case. You’ve got surface so there’s surface areas, lambertian disks defining the total power hitting Earth from the sun. and outbound radiation occurring from what is essentially a sphere. Energy densityis a problem because once in a solid surface, conduction becomes the norm and the limitation.
Over the long run, however long that might be, there will be a conservation of energy and temperatures are going to be defined by the radiation occurring. I’m not sure what to suggest to perhaps make the learning curve simpler or more straightforward. It’s a jumbled mess and as near as I can tell, real data tends to be quite detrimental to the IPCC and so is considered deffective or undesirable or whatever. Welcome to the world of video games and cartoons where the correlation is assumed to be causation.
14 (Steve M): Well, if climate was more sensitive to shortwave forcing, I would think it would show up in climate response to volcanic forcing. But I see no evidence for this. The well recognized .1 degree Celsius solar cycle signal certainly appears to be inconsistent with the orthodox estimates of climate sensitivity to volcanic forcing, and even more so with lower estimates. Either that signal is not real, or their is some amplifing mechanism (which must not be named! ;)).
(If you require a reason why the .1 degree C signal appears to be inconsistent with climate model estimates which are claimed to be supported by volcano data, slide 19 here shows the results obtained from models employed by North, Wigley, and Foukal. Wigley argues that climate response to volcanic eruptions supports model estimates.)
53 (Doc): No neutrons from the Sun that I know of.
50 (Leif)
I used that number due to the variety of TSI reconstructs there are out there. I know yours and Lean’s. But other don’t agree exactly. What I here you saying is that old reconstruction where made to fit the past so that they could explain the climate, is that correct or did they do it independent of climate, then as the data got better it was refined? My issue is that we have pretty good numbers now but depend on proxy for the past but since we have not gone through a modern grant minimum we can’t say for sure that the TSI will not vary that much. Why does the IPCC in Ch. 2 say it may vary like simular stars like Baliunas and Jastrow? Why would they even put that in there unless they need to cover all bases.
55 (JimA): Yes, the old reconstructions were influenced by the need to explain the LIA. But, worse, climate people still select to use one the older reconstructions for the same reason. The ‘sun-like’ star argument suffer from the realization that many of the stars that were thought to be like the Sun turn out to be slightly more evolved [i.e. older] and therefore have somewhat lower activity levels.
Leif, I found this
http://sprg.ssl.berkeley.edu/~tohban/nuggets/?page=article&article_id=33
Solar neutrons do appear to hit the atmosphere. Their velocity would change their profile, slow ones would become protons hitting the poles, but faster ones would hit the atmosphere. They could also generate 14C from 14N.
So the 14C formation rate may not be tied directly to extra-solar cosmic rays, also by to a stormy sun?
# 55
Jim Arndt,
Correlate amplitudes of TSI with change of temperature and you’ll find how all reconstructions on TSI fit with fluctuations of temperature.
BTW, it is not my personal theory, as Dr. Steve McIntyre wrote. It is just something which I found when comparing databases. An observation is not a personal theory.
57 (Doc): There may also be neutrons arriving from other high-energy events elsewhere where particles are accelerated to high-enough energies. But surviving neutrons from such events and solar flares are extremely rare and the resulting flux is negligible compared to the ordinary secondary neutrons produced by cosmic rays. And the 14C formation rate is therefore not changed appreciable by these very rare events, and what I meant by ‘no neutrons from the Sun’ was that the Sun is not a source of neutrons that we need to take into account. The solar storms produce a vastly larger number of relativistic protons [which in turn produce neutrons the same way as ordinary cosmic rays do] and these can as ordinary cosmic rays produce 14C, so the 14C rate is also influenced by solar storms, but not appreciably by the neutrons. It is the protons that do the trick. So, ‘solar cosmic rays’ [which also produce 14C] are predominantly protons. So, your last statement was correct, but not because of primary neutrons.
57 (Doc): To elaborate on the 14C production related to ‘solar storms’. A solar storm’s main effect on the cosmic ray flux at Earth [and hence the 14C production] is a decrease in the flux [known as a Forbush Decrease after Scott Forbush who first observed and identified the phenomenon]. This is because the blast wave from the flare compresses and messes up the interplanetary magnetic field thus scattering galactic cosmic rays away. For very large storms the increase of the flux due to the solar particles themselves becomes detectable, but the overall effect is still a decrease of 14C formation.
28 (Doc): And coming back to your original questions. The neutrons mentioned in connection with the Manhattan project were [almost certainly] not solar neutrons, but the ordinary secondary neutrons produced by cosmic rays. And lastly: Neutrons [not being charged] are not well observed with Cloud Chambers but one can observe the ‘recoil’ of whatever other charged particles there are flying around in the chamber. This was how Chadwick discovered the neutron [predicted to exist by Rutherford many years before] in 1932.
cba 52
July 1st, 2008 at 3:35 pm
I managed to get some plots from the
NASA link you supplied above.
Impossible to make sense as is, the info is esoteric.
For example, how are these measurements made?
I checked July 2004. Seems there is a blackout from NASA data after these dates, for CO2 too.
It nevertheless is very interesting to see visually that there is no uniformity in long wave or short wave radiation, either incoming or outgoing. Numbers play from 0 to 620 watts/m2. Of course I did not expect one, but the IPCC models assume one since they are working with averages in watts/m2.
For fun, I took daily for July 1st 2004 at the parallel on the top of australia,(winter). The swaths follow the sea
temperature swaths .
LW incoming 400 SW incoming 220
LW out 460 SW out 20
SW Par 100
Though I cannot guess what PAR stands for I suppose it is some sort of outgoing.
In sum total on that parallel roughly 620 watts come in and 580 go out, and this is over oceans with continuous tidal movements supplying natural convection, let alone winds etc.
The images are similar on a monthly basis, within color code and eye errors ( +?_ 10 watts/m2).
Integrating the whole to check IPCC assumptions would be work for six months for me 🙂 .
Anna,
If making sense is a goal, you might try integrating (sum) some of them over the planet to create that single number. I think it’s best to use the oblate spheroid description of Earth and then work out the contribution by latitude over all latitudes. I did this using Excel spreadsheet and some of the data files that I created.
If you try to deal with the raw data files stored in these repositories rather than processed text data you can get instead of the colored maps it’s a whole new level of effort and learning curve involved as they compact the data into 16 bit integers and you have to scale them again.
Searching for exact details as to what they are can be another thing. Some of these are the same data located in multiple places and there’s a bit here and a bit there that actually describe some of what it is. Again, it’s probably a whole new effort to get a good handle on exactly what it is. Also, the same data located in multiple places may cover different years in these different places.
Part of what I gave you the address for seems to be decoder web pages that decode the stored archives. More details are probably available higher up in that web page’s hierarchy . Since I’ve only done a little bit with this stuff – mostly enough to see what’s involved, I cant help you a significant amount with a lot of specific details. Information is out there and most of it appears like noise. Filtering it out is difficult.
I did succeed in creating 5 to 7 yrs of energy budget – as single Earth averaged numbers for two months of the year. Doing so for all 12 months is 6x the amount of downloads. Reducing things down to one, two or three numbers brings those maps down to something that makes a little sense.
One thing that is important is that one is dealing with one number that is uniform – the radiation output is always emitted. It may be more energy output during day than night but or more output in january than july but it is uniform. Incoming solar is not, it depends upon time of day, time of year, lattitude, even before one considers actual conditions of cloudy etc. One must compare apples to apples to make sense of it so it is common to take this solar incoming and average it. The Earth is pretty much going to have the same amount of incoming eneergy at any point in time (Lambertian disk) spread out over what is really a hemisphere – meaning that power rates per m^2 vary by time of day as well as lattitude and time of year.
I think you’ll find over long enough times that the averages are going to show that the they are very much along the lines of the simple calculations. Also, variations due to weather such as clouds throws so much uncertainty in that taking small areas and trying to GCM an answer is going to result in error which will compound over iterations. After all, if a cloud forms in the morning over your house, the total energy received that day will differ, depending on whether it formed at 9am or 10am and stayed the rest of the day.
CBA 6:04 63
I think I will pass delving into the details.
This caught my attention:
Are you saying that all that fuss of forcings are from simple calculations, and nobody officially has calculated from these very expensive but available data to check the numbers?
snip – please resist the temptation to vent,
Anna,
I am not saying that nobody officially has calculated from these data to check the numbers. I have no idea whether or how they’ve been used. It would seem the warming proponents have tossed all their eggs into their GCM basket.
I doubt that any data has the accuracy necessary to actually determine anything concerning the GW flap.
Steve M,
I believe Syd Levitus was a lead IPCC Author and that the IPCC findings relied to some extent on his papers:
1 Warming of the World Ocean. Levitus et al, Science vol 287 2000
2 Anthropogenic warming of Earth’s Climate System. Levitus et al,
Science v 292 2001
I don’t know whether it’s common knowledge or old news, but it seems Levitus et al may have overestimated ocean heat retension by a factors of 25%, according to this old thread I found on the sci.geo.oceanography
Has anyone else here used the data presented in these papers? A
colleague and I have, but we cannot reproduce the net heat gain of
18.2 x 10^22 J in the worlds’ oceans for the period 1955-1996 which
was mentioned in [2].
According to [2], this number comes from a straight line fit to the
5-year averaged ocean data from 1957.5 to 1994.5 (the year index
refers to the mid-point of the 5 year averages), extrapolated out to
cover the original 41 years 1955-1996. Ie a trend of 0.44 x 10^22 J
per year. The data are presented in Fig 4 of [1], and available from
the authors.
We get a much lower answer of 13.5 x 10^22 J, ie 0.33 x 10^22 J per
year. It’s only a least squares fit, so I don’t see what we could have
done wrong. But our number is a long way off the published value, and
also a long way short of the model result (which was 19.7 x 10^22 J).
James
> Have you contacted the authors
Yes, I got the data from one of them in the first place, and he
explained how they had calculated the figure (the description in the
paper isn’t brilliant). But as soon as I pointed out the error, he
stopped replying.
You can see the exchange here:
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.geo.oceanography/browse_thread/thread/a59a3509ecef9344/34d38d81f1734eaf?hl=en&lnk=st&q=#34d38d81f1734eaf
Apologies to Leif that this is not directly about solar issues, but I didn’t know where was the right place to put it, and I thought it may have some relevance to those trying to correlate solar insolation to oceanic heat uptake.
CBA
As an experimental physicist, I believe in the value of data. Going back to solar insolation, from the NASA site you provided, it is evident that one can get an average per year/month/day of total incoming (sun) and outgoing energies. It is evident then that one could have albedo versus year/month/day , as a measurement.
Measurements come with errors, systematic and statistical so saying
defeats the purpose of any auditing and turns the IPCC reports to nonsense. Too many people have worked on them to be nonsense, the problem is “what sense”?.
Are we to accept the IPCC models because they took temperature curves and turned them into black body outputs, when the data is there to check? and recheck?
Stroller, 66
Curiouser and curiouser.
I see this is back in 2002.
Did you publish as you were advised in the link you provided?
Anna,
As far as I can tell, IPCC is strictly a political entity. I do not know if anyoone involved with them and with the AGW activities have ever bothered to convert data to a simple value to compare or not. I suppose Keihl and Trenberth did back in 1997 as they took various data sets and compared them to their own simplified model in order to create their cute little cartoon which was probably the first and only attempt at even ordering and displaying the various factors involved. Welcome to the wonderful world of politicized science.
[Steve: I disagree with this sort of exaggerated statement and wish people would stop going a bridge too far. IPCC is not “just a political entity”. While I may disagree with its work in areas that I’m involved, it has serious people who are not “just politicial”. So please stop this sort of venting.]
My comment on resolution and accuracy is that trying to measure 0.1 deg by averaging 1.0 deg resolution data which has a std deviation of 2.7 degrees doesnt get one very far. Note these are unrelated to any real example and are numbers simply put out for their obvious situation. Things even get worse, especially when some nitwitt (according to some – the premier climatologist) keeps manipulating the datasets to reduce the temperatures of the past century while leaving unchanged the actual readings which are now reading high due to changes in the immediate surroundings of the stations. Steve M. has the story on one in his main column from around Feb. 14 2008 on this site.
IMHO, it doesn’t take much to see the problems with what is being proclaimed. We’re orbiting the sun on a ball that is rotating and getting a fair amount of uniformity in illumination over the time frames of interest. It has around 0.3 albedo. That gives us an average energy per unit time per unit area input of around 239 W/m^2. We have an average radiating surface T of about 288.2K and a surface emissivity of around 0.98 which gives us around 390 W/m^2 going out. There’s about 160 W/m^2 of absorbed energy in the atmosphere – which at any location has an absorption curve over wavelength based on its components, T, & p. Doubling the concentration of co2 results in around 3w/m^2 increase in absorption (which also raises the emissivity of the air).
Since a BB with 0.98 emissivity for emission and an albedo of 0.3 for absorption wavelengths results in a T of 33 K less than our current avg. 288.2 (255k), one sees that all contributions of all ghgs and atmospheric factors including all feedbacks in operation contribute 33k increase in T over not being there at all, one is faced with the total contribution of this 160 W/m^2 atmospheric absorption amounting to 33k and in a linear world, contributing to a total of around 0.2K per W/m^2. That amounts to a total of around 0.6k to 0.8k rise for a co2 doubling. This is below the IPCC’s minimum range. In fact, its less than 10% of the IPCC’s preferred value of around 3 to 5 K for a co2 doubling.
In this situation of the atmosphere, actual co2 absorption offers similar W/m^2 amounts for the last 5 doublings and perhaps 50% or more of that absorbed power for 6 more before that, all other parameters held constant. It’s also responsible for a total of around 30-40W/m^2 out of the current 150-160W/m^2. To attribute 3 to 5 K rise out of the total 33k means that there is a great disparity in effect of a w/m^2 – which the IPCC assumes to be a constant. Also, we run out of warming that has occurred very quickly as there’s only 33k total and 25% of the power absorption has to be divided between quite a few doublings of similar effect.
Each w/m^2 is not likely to have the same effect, but they should be somewhat consistant. And, it would seem that the average is in the ballpark of what BB theory would suggest. Remember the 33k is actual with all feedbacks in place. The net warming would appear to be less than BB rates because the net feedbacks are actually negative – reducing the effect, not positive – sending 0.3 k warming due to co2 absorption into 6 K of feedback increase (which one would epect to raise it to 60 K etc etc etc).
#66
I don’t remember where these came from
but 1955 seems to be a bad starting point, like 1998 in the cooling debate.
#68 (Anna)
I’m not the author, I was just highlighting it because it seemed relevant. The blockquote tags failed on me for some reason, probably pilot error. 🙂
I would be interested to know if the 25% inflated figure of 0.44×10^22J/Yr is still lurking in the model parameters used by the warmista though. Might this go some way to explaining the large T increases the models forecast?
72 (Oliver): The Standard Solar Model has been amply confirmed by neutrino measurements [with oscillations] and by helioseismology. There does not seem to be a need for alternative explanations. And it is not clear to me that such will bring something relevant to the discussion of the Sun’s influence on climate.
Leif
I thought that the discrepancy between the modeled numbers of neutrinos and the experimental evidence was the impetus for some of the research shown in 72. We should never be dogmatic about any particular science, especially when experimental evidence contradicts what we think we know.
By the way, any bets on the length of this spotless period? I cheated and looked at Stereo behind and unless an interesting CY-24 spot pops up I would bet 30 days plus.
74 (Dennis): The ‘neutrino-problem’ turned out to be a problem with the neutrinos [they turned out to have mass], not with the Sun. I’m not of a dogmatic nature, au contraire, I have some very non-mainstream ideas about the Sun, but the neutrino observations are a very strong vindication of what we thought we knew. My personal opinion of the Iron-Sun is that it belongs to the same category as a Moon made of Green Cheese. But this blog is not a good place to debate such fringe speculations.
Spotless length? I have no idea. Without being too dogmatic, for all I know, a monster SC24-spot might begin to assemble tomorrow. [I don’t think so, but that reason is weak]
Well yea, I have to agree with you on that one. Had not followed the neutrino issue of late.
I cheated on my sunspot prediction by looking at the stereo behind data and the general paucity of the CY-24 sunspots so far. (agreed, pretty weak but fun to watch).
#72 on. This blog is about climate. Please discuss solar fundamentals elsewhere. Sorry about this.
76 (Oliver):
There may still be some work to be done, but it was my take that [from physicsworld.com]:
Physicists working on the MiniBooNE experiment at Fermilab in the US have shown that, as thought, nature contains just three types of neutrino. This result contradicts a puzzling finding obtained by a similar experiment at the Los Alamos laboratory in 1995, which pointed to the existence of a fourth type of neutrino, and is therefore good news for the Standard Model of particle physics.
The seismic work does say something about the chemical composition, namely about the density and the molecular weight [that enters into the theory of the constitution of stars] and I don’t see any discrepancies so far.
But, finally, this is a bit Off Topic as it is not clear to me how this impacts climatic change. So, I suggest to take the discussion elsewhere.
Re: 72 on. Let’s see, Oliver Manuel appears to give Leif a lesson on the sun’s nuclear physics, but the discussion is somehow not germane to climate? What could be more significant about the sun’s influence on climate than basic concepts of the “correct solar model”? Are the nuclear reactions which drive the sun’s energy ‘settled science’? I must be missing something here.
80 (Joe): Your use of ‘settled science’ is disingenuous. The nuclear reactions are well-understood [in the usual science meaning] and have made predictions that have been spectacularly confirmed by both the neutrino measurements and by helioseismology. The strength of a scientific theory is determined by how well its predictions fare. And the Standard Solar Model has performed very well. Not only do we have the Sun to test the theory on but the stellar constitution theory is also supported by how well it explains the stars. What you are missing is basic understanding of how the theory works. That is OK as not everybody can be versed in everything, but just because you are missing something does not mean that something is amiss.
#80. Regardless of whether it’s settled or not, this is a climate blog. THere’s a lot of centrifugal force in these solar things and I don’t want to discuss nuclear reactions here, OK? Feel free to discuss them some other place.
One of your better turns of phrase.
I remember reading a discussion here a year or so ago on the effect of the sun’s movement around the barycentre of the solar system, which is displaced from the geometric solar centre largely by the effect of the mass of the Jovian planets. The upshot of the discussion was that the effect was insignificant Bless my soul, here is a link that appeared today on the website of the Australian Broadcasting Commission:
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2008/07/02/2292281.htm
#84(Cornish)
That’s a seriously sloppy piece of reporting. Mind you, Ian Wilson’s paper is pretty sloppy science too. There is however a better theory of the causative principle behind the effect put forward by Ray Tomes. With deference to Steve’s wishes I won’t enlarge here, but a link to Ray’s work can be found on our BB discussion here:
http://www.climateaudit.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=325&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&start=30
(Leif):
I’ve posted a graph over on Unthreaded #35 from my latest efforts at a 1-d radiative model. It was posted late July 6 and is #416. The graph is an attempt to ascertain power absorption by altitude (clear sky) for an energy budget. It graphs a deficit energy where + power is required to meet the energy balance of a layer. There is a huge anomoly peaking around 57km that runs from around 40km – 60km that indicates it is much warmer and radiating out more than it is absorbing in power from radiative power between 200nm and 65.5 microns. The deficit appears to be around 4.5 W/m^2 peak which seems huge to me.
Do you have any ideas of what might be causing this (assuming it is a real effect)? Or possibly, what the problem might possibly be (assuming it is not a real effect)? Offhand, it seems too large and extended to be a simple glitch or data problem and I think the input data and model design and assumptions are not that bad at that altitude to artificially create such a monstrous problem or that LTE is not valid there.
OOPs!
(Leif):
that was me in the last post – not sure where that 99 came from
cba
Leif
Here is the cycle for a weak cycle, close in smoothed sunspot number to your prediction for Solar Cycle 24. Do you, in your professional opinion, think that the shape of the cycle will be similar to cycle 1 shown here, or more like recent cycles with a rapid uptick and extended fall off?
Well heck, the image did not post.
Here is a link to it.
http://www.dxlc.com/solar/cycl1.html
99, you are not supposed to reveal your identity!
86 (99): I/m not really qualified [meaning, I have not takne the trouble of investigating this myself] to answer your question.
90 (Dennis): This is hard to say. First, the sunspot numbers were not well measured back then so if this behavior is real is hard to say. Second, other cycles [e.g. 5] show a similar run. There are some expectation that the decay always follows the same kind of curve and the difference between cycles are in the rise. I would not be surprised in cycle 24 will have a much more symmetrical shape [a la #5].
This paper may have been linked before, but it shows a very, very definite relationship between solar activity and hydrologic cycles in Africa.
These people say of their work:
If only they had stuck to that. But they go on producing correlograms, claiming statistical significance etc. In particular, they get a big 21-year cycle out of their sunspot data, which they connect to a peak in the correlogram of the Vaal river data. This is dodgy anyway – if they want to show correlation, they should cross-correlate.
But where did they get that 21-year peak in the sunspot data? By the device of counting every second cycle as negative sunspots (Fig 1), before doing the correlogram. Total artifice.
Pliny: I don’t get your point. Does the data point to a solar influence or not, in your opinion?
No, it doesn’t point to solar influence. All they have shown in Fig 1 is a correlogram showing a peak in the Vaal data at 21 years just exceeding 95% confidence. Well, the first thing to say is that such a peak in a 20+ year correlogram is not surprising. But then they show a spurious correlogram of sunspot data with a big peak at 21 years and say See!
But a proper correlogram of sunspot data will have a big peak at about 11 years and less signal at 21 years. What they have done, by inverting every second period, is to multiply, quite arbitrarily, with a 21-year square wave. That is what is correlating with their data. And it has no natural basis at all.
In words, you could say they show that the Vaal signal correlates with a temperature signal which alternates warming and cooling in each cycle. But we have every reason to believe that the sunspot effect is always of warming in mid-cycle. Every second cycle goes the wrong way.
96 (Pliny): I basically agree with your assessment. This paper is junk. The mechanism [page 12] is bogus [the barycenter rears its head again]. Look at figure 10 that shows the TSI at four points during the year:
What is actually observed [black curve] is seen here:
Alexander’s TSI-values are shown as the red dots.
Folks, how can you look at Table 2 and not see a true 10 and 21 year cycle?
Re #98
If you’re referring to the SA Hydrological paper you forgot to add the 😉 .
#98
Yes, its still there.
#99
😉
98 (jae): Several things wrong with Figure 2:
1) many lines, but since there are all from the same region (SA), they are not independent and do not when they agree add to the statistical significance
2) in year 1 there are all high, and in year 20 they are all low. Since this is a periodic phenomenon, the curves should end where they start like ‘J’ and ‘N’
3) the correspondence [at point K] is caused by just a couple of outliers, while the bulk of the data points are near the bottom.
So, no, the picture is not clear or convincing.
98 (jae): Alexander himself says this:
The statistically significant cyclicity in
the sunspot data is no longer present in the
correlogram of the annual flows in the Vaal
River, where the residual coefficients indicate
random noise. The only, but very important,
residual serial correlation, is the statistically
significant 21-year periodicity. This is identified
at (H) in the bottom panel of the figure.
This relationship exists despite the long
and complex energy path starting at the sun
and ending in the river flow that enters Vaal
Dam. The only residual energy is the potential
energy, which is a function of the elevation
of the water mass above sea-level. This
residual energy has its origin in solar activity;
I don’t buy that the elevation of the water has its origin in solar activity. Possibly the statement is just muddled and he doesn’t mean what he says, but it does not bode well for the credibility of the paper. Not to speak about the other muddles: the barycenter [junk] and the predicted TSI [not observed]. I don’t think the IPCC would consider this paper worthy of inclusion in their next Assessment Report.
OK, OK, I’m throwing that paper in the recycle bin.
#103 I’m sure you’ll find another.
104: yeah, have to keep looking. As AE said, God doesn’t play dice. 🙂
Just noting that solar flux just hit the lowest level ever recorded (in over 50 years) at 64.2
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/07/16/sun-in-deep-slumber-107-solar-flux-hits-record-low-value/
# 103
Jae,
Why? It contains evidence. 🙂
And just noting that the global average temperature appears to be declining (hope this isn’t so).
From a novice’s perspective this is all very impressive stuff. For the most part the dialogue is civil, but I do sense a bit of one-upmanship which indicates that maybe there’s a bit too much education and not enough maturation. But I guess that’s what makes us all human in the end.
My question to anyone who declares themselves to be an expect would be how long is too long in terms of continued low solar activity? In other words, what month are we looking at that if Minimal Solar activity still rules the day there will be general concensus that there is something ‘different’ about the Sun as it is not acting ‘normally?
Thanks.
109 (Dave)
There is nothing abnormal (or unprecedented) in some solar cycles being longer than others. Yet the current Cycle 23 at 12 years is certainly the longest for well over 100 years, and may end up being the longest for 200 years.
Following data is from Lassen, though I have seen others give the last minimum as 1996.5 and not 1996.8.
But the posting hit the spam filter, so I’ve removed the data to retry.
Speaking of sunspot numbers, Leif do you know why NOAAs DSD file is 6 days out of date? I am sure I saw a more up to date version a couple of days ago, when the present run of spotless days was 22 or so.
Rich.
#109
I don’t think there’s a simple answer to the question. If you look at the evolution of spotless days here and especially this chart:
you’ll see that the evolution of spotless days and the transition from one solar cycle to another tend to follow one of two patterns, depending on whether the cycle is “weak” or “strong.” The way SC23 is dragging on makes it more like SC10-15 than SC16-23. Now if you look carefully, you’ll see that the green line for SC24 is still within the pink dotted line for the standard deviation of the newer cycles SC16-23, but it is already well past the point, since the first spotless day, when those cycles would have reached minimum. All in all, it is looking like SC24 will turn out more like SC10-15 than SC16-23.
Why does that matter? Well, there has been much more total solar activity associated with the recent cycles than with the earlier cycles. Here’s a 385 month moving average of SSN’s:
It reveals, among other things, the so-called Gleissberg cycle. Is SC24 the beginning of a downturn that would take us back to where we were at the end of the 20th century, or even lower, to the Dalton Minimum of the early 19th century? While the current evolution of spotless days may not be unusual in the strictest sense, it is unusual in relation to recent solar cycles, and more like the kind of cycles that would put us on the road to the trough of a Gleissberg cycle.
109 (Basil_: Janssen’s graph is highly misleading [while statistically correct]. A better way of showing the same thing is NOT to show the average of several cycles [which suppresses the variability], b ut simply to show each cycle separately:
The bottom panel is the one corresponding to Janssen’s. If you count since the 10th spotless dat, the noise goes down a bit, but it is still hard to draw any conclusions.
Rich:
Thanks for the response, much appreciated. Here’s another question from a curious mind: If there is a strong correlation between low Solar activity and a cool earth, what would we expect to see from the Sun and how would this compare to what we are seeing now? This question as usual is open to the floor.
#112
Leif,
I think “misleading” is too strong. He gives weight to the variability by showing the standard deviation lines. Well, at least for the “red” series. He didn’t do it for the “blue” series, and I imagine that if he did, there would be considerable overlap to where one might not be able to say that SC24 is statistically different than either group (yet).
It seems to me the point is the same either way: as time passes, SC24 is looking more like the blue group than the red group. That’s a conclusion I feel comfortable drawing from what I’m looking at, while realizing that there’s a chance it might not turn out that way. But the odds are against it not turning out that way. Looking at your graph tracking since the 10th spotless day, I see one red line that SC24 could still turn out like, whereas it could easily turn out like any of the blue ones. If I’m counting correctly, that gives 7 to 1 odds in favor of blue. I’ll take those odds. 🙂
#113
Dave, see my #111. Basically, if there is a connection, we first have to see a return to weaker cycles like we see in the other troughs of the Gleissberg cycle, and we’ll have to see significant temperature moderation (cooling). As to what we are seeing now with SC24, it looks like it could be a start of a slide to a Gleissberg minimum, but we will not know that until many of us are long gone. I.e., at least 3 weak solar cycles, I should think. And as I’m in my 60’s, I doubt I shall live long enough to see it (thought it would be nice to).
114 (Basil): The misleading part is that Janssen leads the reader to think there are two rather distinct animals [the blue and the red] and that cycle 24 is blue. He has later put on standard deviations which helps a bit, but not enough. As time goes by, of course, cycle 24 will eventually turn from green to blue. When Jan first showed this graph there were no standard deviation lines plotted and the green was closely following the blue. Now, look carefully at the green curve. It started out outside the red error band, but has now moved into the red error band [while all the time being within the blue band], so one could say the evolution has been towards more red than blue ! But all this is really nonsense because the spread is so large [see my curves] and the number of cases so small that you can’t say anything meaningful.
My understanding is that the current explanation for the large temperature rise in the early part of the 20th century is primarily based on the presumption of a concomitant rise in TSI. If we now have evidence that this did not occur it seems to me that this would have a significant impact on the current GCM models.
I just finished reading this thread (all 8 sections) and do not recall this being discussed.
Am I misunderstanding the current explanation?
Are the modelers aware of this new evidence?
Have they taken it into account at all or pushed back on it?
If they adjust their models to take this into account how could they then account for the rise in temperature?
117 (Richard): Thanks for taking the trouble to read all 8 parts.
The modelers have not taken that into account. Rather the opposite. There was a recent discussion of a James Hansen paper [2007] where he still used Lean’s old obsolete TSI-reconstruction.
92 (Leif) Follow up.
I know that you have expounded on this before but I want to drill into it a bit. It is your exposition (that I have no real reason to doubt), that sunspot numbers were not that well tracked 200-300 years ago. In looking at the recent sunspot data where there has been only tiny single sunspots (except for in mid may when there were three for for a few days), it is not outside of the bounds of your exposition that an observer, using the tools and considering the cloud cover in Europe and the eastern USA, would have missed them. This would have led our postulated observer to exclaim that we have gone about 60 days with no sunspots (back to May 19). This observer would think that we had entered a Maunder minimum or at least a deep minimum.
Is this close to your reasoning for older cycles?
Leif: The Lean (2000) TSI-reconstruction as you have discovered has a difference between the Maunder Minimum and Now that is much too large. Even Judith Lean now agrees that the variation is much smaller, if any.
Sorry for not following closely discussion and maybe “discovering” things already agreed upon. But, let me try construct “big picture” here: we previously thought solar variations were large between Maunder Minimum and recent period and by that variations we can explain most of the temperature variations in the same period. Now we know or think that probably there wasn’t any variation, so we don’t have any idea about what caused temperature rise 1750-1950 of almost 1 degree C. But, it must be some natural factor other than Sun. Am I correct?
#120. I think that’s the puzzle that Leif is interested in, rather than endlessly and IMO far too patiently dealing with reader speculations on solar activity – speculations that I try unsuccessfully to discourage.
Perhaps the sensitivity to solar variations can differ from sensitivity to CO2 forcing and the sensitivity is much higher than previously thought. Or the LIA was very localized. Or some combination of the above.
>> Perhaps the sensitivity to solar variations can differ from sensitivity to CO2 forcing and the sensitivity is much higher than previously thought.
There is no relation between the two. Would you expect your cars mpg sensitivity to aerodynamic design to be the same as the sensitivity to cargo weight or fuel octane?
In your language: temp = function(solar in, radiation out, pressure, transport, many other variables)
sensitivity: Delta Temp = f(Delta-solar) is not the same function as Delta Temp = f(dC02).
#121 –
More likely that some unmeasured or unappreciated aspect of solar output is varying and that sensitivity is being calculated on the wrong variable.
Re #120 & #121
As I recall vulcanism and solar variation were originally proposed as explanations for the LIA, with the reconstructions such as Lean’s showing a significant drop in TSI during the Maunder Minimum the solar variation won favour as the explanation. Now that the prevailing opinion favours a reconstruction with a much less significant drop in TSI the other explanations such as vulcanism must be reconsidered, H H Lamb advanced this as a possibility as I recall, we certainly know that Tambora led to the ‘year without a summer’. Something that is often missed is that Lean is a co-author of Wang et al. which indicates that she now supports a lesser variability in TSI.
#121
Okay, I hope this is more on topic. Here is a plot of Leif’s TSI reconstruction, also shown with a 33 year moving average:
In broad form, the moving average matches the plot of a moving average of SSN’s I posted in #111 (which just reflects, I presume, how the TSI reconstruction is derived from SSN’s). Unlike the older TSI reconstruction, with this one there is not an obvious overall upward trend in TSI over centennial timescales. So I guess a “role for solar forcing skeptic” might say TSI is not any higher now than it was in the mid 19th century, and is even a little lower than it was in the late 18th century, so how can the long warming since the LIA be attributed to TSI?
Well, the previous peaks in TSI didn’t last the way the current “peak” has; the latter is really a plateau that has carried on now for half a century. Now I see the possibility for multiple factors accounting for decadal, multidecadal, and century scale temperature changes since the LIA. One of these is the accumulation of solar energy over time in the Earth’s oceans, so that even if total TSI has not been higher in the last half century than at earlier times, it has stayed at that higher level for a longer period of time, thus gradually nudging the Earth toward higher surface temperatures. Is that not at all possible?
>> One of these is the accumulation of solar energy over time in the Earth’s oceans, so that even if total TSI has not been higher in the last half century than at earlier times, it has stayed at that higher level for a longer period of time, thus gradually nudging the Earth toward higher surface temperatures. Is that not at all possible?
Not only is it possible, it is for sure. You have hit the nail on the head. Just like the air temperature coming from our house furnace is always the same, yet we can set a whole range of temperatures on our thermostat. It is the time that it’s on that is equally important. I have previously presented this way back in like Svalgaard #2 or something, and no one can dispute this basic engineering fact.
In my previously analysis, I showed that the elevated TSI levels associated with solar maximum accumulate to be the equvalent energy of a full extra day of sunshine once every 11 years. It’s like one day every 11 years, the sun does not set. Solar minumum is like once every 11 years, the sun does not rise. I then did an energy analysis that showed this extra energy would result in a temp rise of .9 deg C. Data shows a max of .78 deg C. There is no mystery.
125 (Basil): When plotting a smoothed value it is not correct to plot the value at the end of the smoothing window [I know that Excel does that – but it is still wrong]. To make Excel do it correctly you need to calculate the AVERAGE in a separate column [not use the Moving Average Trendline]. Try to calculate an 11-year average instead of the 22-year average, to capture the fact that TSI in cycle 23 was a bit lower. The ‘plateau’ has ended.
(Steve):
the notion that CO2 effects are not the same sensitivity as that of TSI sensitivity should be obvious. If you change TSI by 1W/m^2, the atmosphere is unchanged in how it emits and absorbs. If you change CO2 by 1W/m^2 in absorption, you have just changed the emissivity of the atmosphere too so that a section of atmosphere will radiate more power while at the same temperature as it was before the increase. So for a CO2 forcing increase, emissivity changes and more energy is radiated even at the same temperature while for a solar TSI increase, there is no corresponding increase in the atmospheric emissivity. Hence solar forcing must have a slightly different effect, one that would appear to be greater.
Re 121
The LIA was not localized. I’m rather interested in glaciers and have visited quite a few in both hemisphere. You always find an almost, but not quite, fresh end moraine some distance from the glacier and there is almost never any other Holocene end moraine outside that one (I’ve never actually seen one, but I know from the literature that there are a very few places in the world where there are mid-Holocene moraines).
Ergo: Glaciers were larger almost everywhere one or two centuries ago, and almost everywhere they have never been larger than that since the last glaciation.
#127
Leif,
I do my plotting in gretl (a stat program specializing in econometric and time series analysis), not Excel. I have the option of centering or not centering moving averages. With a series like this, I think non-centered is better than centered:
Centering builds in a lag that isn’t really there, and actually doesn’t “center” the series as well as the non-centered one does! Of course, my personal preference would be to use Hodrick-Prescott smoothing (but ignore the sharp drop at the end):
Again, notice that it more properly centers the smoothing than the “centered” moving average.
Then there is the matter of 11 year smoothing, versus a longer period. Eleven is fine if the purpose is simply to suppress the 11 year cycle and track how it moves in time. But Earth’s temperature has persistence (“memory”) that may imply a lagged and cumulative influence beyond the 11 year period of the solar cycle. That’s why I used 33 years in my original moving average. That more closely matches the historical “climatological normal” used to track changes in climate. With 30 (or 33) years, we’re tracking broad changes in long-lived oceanic oscillations, periodic “regime shifts” etc. But even looking at the charts showing declining smoothed TSI over the last two solar cycles, might we not just now being seeing the result of this in moderating global temperature? What do we really know about the “lag structure” of TSI versus terrestrial temperature when “filtered” through ocean dynamics and oscillations?
130 (Basil):
You must mean non-centering builds in a lag as is obvious from your graph and from common sense. The longer the window (11-22-33, etc) the more think you have plateaus. Like your plateau in the last half of 20th century is really two humps.
And I also like a better smoothing [a la Hodrick-Prescott] instead of just moving average, but I think you have this backwards:
It looks like H-P matches your blue [centered] curve better than the red [in your top plot]. Please check this.
126 Gunnar
I remember your post about the length of time “on”, and I felt at the time you had made an excellent point.
128 cba
I don’t think that that is the sensitivity that they are talking about. Their point is usually that, if CO2 raises temperature by dT, then you get a given increase dH in water-vapor to provide “positive feedback”. If the sun raises it by dT then you again get the same dH.
I don’t agree with that argument, but that is what it is. I think that (a) that feedback may actually be negative, (b) there are more local effects from the sun which are positive, eg. local heating at the edges of the glaciers which can change albedo.
Just in case anyone wonders what an HP smooth would look like with extreme smoothing, to sort of match what I got using a 33 year moving average, it looks like this:
The “plateau” of “high” TSI in the second half of the 20 century is there. If the dips in the early 19th and 20th centuries are manifestations of a Gleissberg cycle, then we’re due for a downturn, and when it comes the length of this Gleissberg cycle will certainly be longer than 80 years (we’re at ~100 yrs and counting). As Leif knows, there’s a casual correspondence between low solar activity and lower temperatures around the beginning of the last three centuries. Could some of the warming of the late 20th century simply be the result of a longer period of persistence in higher than average TSI, i.e. more of the energy from it (heat) being “trapped” in the oceans and gradually warming up the earth over time? I’m just asking.
Basil and Gunnar: most intriguing!
#131
Leif,
When I did those charts, it was so early in the morning I probably couldn’t see straight. 🙂 (Literally, these old eyes don’t focus very well in the morning until I’ve had a couple of cups of coffee, and an hour or so has passed.) And the lines are such that it looks like one is “seeing double.”
Still, I think I know what I’m seeing, even if I’m having trouble saying it correctly. Look at the first chart, with the blue centered and the red non centered 11 yr moving averages. Then look over at the next to last cycle; there you’ll see the red line peaking during the cycle, and the blue line troughing. I want the lines to up when the gray lines go up, and down when the gray lines go down. I see that more with the red series than the blue series. In fact, I frequently see the blue series peaking in between the peaks of the gray series.
But on the whole, I think you are right, that the centered series more closely tracks the HP smoothing, even if at times it doesn’t get it right. Here’s the proof that your eyes are better than mine:
Still, you can see plenty of times where the blue line (centered ma) lags the red line (HP smoothing) and peaks during the following trough.
Basil, enough plots for a while. A lot of plots bog down the server. Your point about smoothing has been made. I don’t think that it’s unreasonable to note that averaged values in the 20th century have been high – but the point’s on the table.
If I weren’t a rational person I would be worried about all those troughs in the smoothed graphs matching some well known events.
Basil #133, I (and others) have asked a similar question:
121 (Steve M)
Careful now Steve, no personal speculations on this thread 🙂
Personally, I don’t buy this huge sensitivity to vanilla TSI. I think the almost no-brainer solution is modulation of albedo by some component of solar activity, which is of course confounded with TSI, so it may look like high sensitivity to TSI. The problem is that this is very hard to prove, but I hope that experimental observation of albedo will help with that. Also, Erl Happ has been doing amazing and just a bit incomprehensible things in this direction.
I do not wish to open up debate on this here (other than cries of “hear, hear”) as it has already had a good going over. I’m just looking forward to more (even some) real hard evidence for this spekyewlayshun.
Rich.
Since this is my 3rd note on this Blod, if consider myself to be a part of the gang, although if anyone gave me a quiz I would fail Solar Science 101 miserably. I do however enjoy reading the threads immensely, as it is obvious that many of you are highly skilled in articulating your point of view and highly skilled at countering other points of view as well for which i give due credit.
Another question has come to mind:
How long does the Sun have to stay in Solar minimum before it become ‘too long’ and that alarm bells start ringing because there is something ‘different’, ‘abnormal, ‘wrong’ or ‘disturbing, with the Sun because Solar Cycle 24 just has’nt started?. In sort, what is the month in which the ‘point of no return’ for when the start of Solar cycle 24 is to begin before people realize things just aint normal? Once again this question is open to all comers.
140 (Dave): It all hinges on what one would think as ‘unusual’. In the past, the Sun has gone for years without spots. I would say that such large ‘swinga’ is the normal state of affairs. The interesting [and unknown] thing is what these ‘swings’ do to the climate, if anything. It is quite possible that the Sun is entering a state of great calm and it will be interesting to see what happens to the climate. One thing to bear in mind is that for both the climate and the Sun, a couple of years of ‘abnormal’ behavior doesn’t mean much.
#141, Leif
How often do we have periods of “years without spots?”
When we talk about “normal” or “unusual,” what’s wrong with trying to be as “statistically precise” as we can? Obviously, if the Sun can go years without spots, that’s “normal” in terms of “within the bounds of what’s possible given the physical processes at work,” but I don’t think that’s what Dave is asking.
Dave,
I just took a look at a periodogram of sunspot data for 1750:01 to 2008:06. The strongest peak is at 10.98, or right at 11 years. On either side of that are peaks at 10.03 years, and 11.85 years. The latter is the lowest of the three. Looking at the data this way, we might say there are three modes of “normal” behavior, with the dominant mode being ~11 years, and a shorter and longer mode at ~10 and ~12 years, respectively. So anything much longer than 12 years, or shorter than 10, qualifies as “unusual” (IMHO). However, this doesn’t tell us anything about the temporal distribution of these “norms,” and when I lop off the last 50 or 100 years, the peak at 12 years all but disappears: it is still there, but much less pronounced. So while a 12 year cycle is “normal,” it has been a while since these were “normal.”
But as Leif says, a year or two of unusual activity isn’t likely to amount to much, if the interest is in what impact any of this has on climate. For the current long cycle — we’re at 12 years and counting — to have enough impact on climate to convince skeptics of a Sun-climate connection, it will probably have to be followed by 2-3 more long, weak, cycles. If the next few cycles generate a Dalton Minimum (and I’m not predicting that), and if global temperatures substantially moderate, then we will all be believers in a Sun-climate connection. But of course no one will be around to gloat. Still, a long cycle like this is unusual enough, within the time frame of the last century or so, and some of us might live to see the next one as well. So we’ll have plenty to speculate about for many years.
But not on CA. No speculations, please. 🙂
Pat,
albedo is primarily clouds which are subject to many factors, undoubtedly also to h2o vapor content of the air. All surface albedo amounts to a small fraction of the total (something like around 0.04 out of the total 0.3 albedo, the balance being clouds and atmospheric gunk). This is why h2o vapor content is going to turn out to have a net negative feedback rather than a positive one. Also, the variety of clouds and effects caused by them are far more complex than the net result and so are the mechanism of forming and everything else associated with them. It’s also dramatically variable, unlike actual TSI, yet the net effect energy wise should be quite similar.
121, maybe there is a place to consider Svensmark-Shaviv’s cosmic rays mechanism as supplement of direct Sun effect. Maybe direct effect of TSI change is quite small (and we don’t need greater sensitivity to explain temperature changes), but indirect effect of Cosmic rays on cloud formation could be substantially larger. I think Shaviv hypothesizes that solar effect through cosmic rays is twice larger than direct effect of SI.
Basil,
When you see a triplet in a frequency domain graph like 10.03 – 11.00 – 11.85, doesn’t that imply a possible coupling with another frequency? Is there another triplet somewhere else in the plot? It’s been a while so I’m not sure if my thinking is correct, but I would look in the region of higher orders of 11 but with small differences because if the triplet represents sum and difference, the difference is pretty small.
142 (Basil and Dave): Every hundred years or so [for the past several such periods, at least] there has been a period of low solar activity [e.g. no spots in 1711-1712, none in 1810, and 1913 having lower activity than 2008]. Something that recurs that regularly [1711, 1810, 1913, 2008] is not unusual [perhaps to the contrary, even anticipated] in the grand scheme of things. Nothing is ‘wrong’ with the Sun. What is interesting is that we get to observe with modern instruments one of these ‘low activity’ periods. This raises the possibility that we may learn more about what causes these and how they relate to the Earth [climate, geomagnetic activity, etc].
About your ‘modes’: suppose you have a sine wave whose amplitude is modulated sinusoidally with time [and that is close to what the solar cycle looks like: 11 years modulated by 100 year-cycle]:
x(t) = (1 + A sin(F*t) + B cos(F*t)) * sin(f*t) =
sin(f*t) + (A/2)[cos({f-F}*t) – cos({f+F}*t)] + (B/2)[sin({f-F}*t) + sin({f+F}*t)]
then this produces sidelobes at f-F and f+F, so you think you have three modes at f-F, f, f+F, leading to fruitless speculation of what is normal. On top of this, you still have noise and even random variations of f and F, but these only broaden the peaks.
125,126,144 (Basil,Gunnar,Ivan): The seems to be two schools of ‘thought’ here: TSI with storage in the oceans [and a long time constant] and cosmic rays with direct effect on the clouds [and the albedo] with no time constant. Both groups asks ‘isn’t is possible that …’, and seems to agree that the Sun is a major driver of climate. To convince me they must explain how at the same time a long delay and no delay are at play. Or, one of them must yield to the other. And I don’t want to hear: ‘but isn’t it possible that they both are at work in their own mysterious ways and we should keep and open mind, etc…’
Leif,
The problem is that the sidebands are +/- ~1. I don’t see how you get that from 100 modulating 11. The sidebands from that should be 111 and 89 (with inverted phase) if I did my sums correctly. Higher orders are at even higher frequencies (211 and 189 for second order again with the lower frequency inverted in phase). On the other hand, you could get that from 1 (or more precisely 0.9) modulating 11.
147 Leif
Both mechanisms do probably co-exist. Physics is full of effects to which several mechanisms contribute (think of atmospheric thermal-energy transfer: water-vapor and Co2 radiation, natural-convection, latent-heat of state transformations — there are 5 right there).
The issue is what are the relative strengths of the cosmic-ray mechanism and the ocean-warming process — which one is the larger. It is possible that they are of comparable magnitude, but perhaps not so likely.
Leif, since we have been over this before, i’m quite surprised you say this. Did you learn about the cosmic ray theory from Lockwood and Fröhlich 😉
http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/07/nir-shaviv-why-is-lockwood-and-frohlich.html
Nir Shaviv has explained to you himself in the comments of this very blog that storage in the oceans is a part of his theory.
But anyway, I don’t even think you need to be able to account for the exact mechanism (eg cosmic rays) to expect that solar activity if fixed at either its max or min (or just lower or higher on average) over an extended period (decades) will have an effect surpassing the 0,1C effect (that you have said you don’t want to “quibble with”) of the sun going from min to max over a solar half-cycle. You just have to assume also that there is a non-zero time-constant related to the solar-cycle induced forcing (however it works). Am I completely wrong here?
Leif,
what is your hypothesis (if you have one)? What are you think about AGW? Do you think AGW is also school of “thought”, having in mind IPCC “attribution” fiasco and mess with alleged aerosol “cancellation” of two third of greenhouse warming in last 50 years?
Steve: Please do not post such generalized questions. One of the things that I try to do on this blog is deal with particulars and details. While there’s a big issue at the end of the day, how can anyone answer something like this in the context of a blog post? So please save your powder and deal in deails and specifics. Thx, Steve
Lief {#147):
So your contention is with a black-box mechanism? Obviously processes operating on different time scales interact. This is such a basic fact that I wonder why “at the same time” is such a stumbling block.
(Many): I don’t see the various proponents for the various theories say “my theory account for 20% [or whatever] of what we might ascribe to the varying Sun”. As is usual, they all claim that ‘this is it!’. My own thoughts are that many of these mechanisms may be at work [some with minuscule, but real, contributions], but that none is dominant. The situation is similar to the century-long debate [still going on] about the cause of the so-called ‘semiannual’ variation of geomagnetic activity. At least 4 mechanisms have been proposed [all discussed before in this blog] and the proponents all want to claim that their’s is the sole one. It now seems that the variation consists of a little bit of each [albeit with one accounting for some 70% on average], so everybody can have a piece of the cake [not that are content with that – for most it is still all or nothing].
>> To convince me they must explain how at the same time a long delay and no delay are at play.
Are you joking? Take a course in system dynamics. It’s like asking how does the sun warm up a single day, yet prolonged exposure cause summer?
154 (Oliver): for your theory it is not progress, unless you admit to the possibility that there is only a fifth of a neutron star as the center of the Sun, or that the Big Bang only occurred halfways. Your stuff is, as far as I can see, in the ‘all or nothing category’. Here is not the place to make further arguments.
Gunnar: I was not clear; so I’ll try again. If A claims that his mechanism explains everything with delay D > 0, and B claims that his mechanism explains everything with delay 0, then either A or B or both are wrong. If A and B admit that their respective mechanisms only explain a fraction of the whole thing, then they can co-exist. But show me where Svensmark says that his mechanism only explains X% of the total solar effect…
126 (Gunnar): If, as you say, there is no mystery and your calculation based on one more sunny day per cycle explains the temperature changes, then you don’t leave much room for the cosmic ray effect, as far as I can see. So, what is it: Gunnar 100%, Svensmark 0%, or Gunnar 50%, Svensmark 50%, or Gunnar 0% or Svensmark 100%? Others are encouraged to join in. What are the relative contributions of the various mechanisms being peddled? This would seem to be crucial for debating the various correlations.
(Leif):
I think there is yet something else being ignored here. When you’re dealing with power flow in or out of something like a massive ocean heat sink, there is a constraint of power flow between them. If it’s going to take 100 yrs for the ocean to heat up to catch up with the atmosphere/surface, then the flow rate out is going to be slow as well. In this case slow is relative to other processes involved (such as radiative and convective in the atmosphere).
Since my explaination here is quite deficient – think of it as charging and discharging a battery through a very high resistance. It will take a long time to charge and a long time to discharge and the current contribution through that high resistance will be limit compared to the currents going on in the rest of the circuit. Consequently, the battery will not significantly contribute to any results of that overall circuit.
A comparable heat flow example is Earth’s core. It’s evidently as hot as the sun and it is just a few miles away yet on average, its contribution to the surface budget is virtually nil under today’s normal conditions. It too is massive, far more than the ocean’s mass.
The ocean is an excellent IR radiator (and below – absorber). It creates what some refer to as a skin – indicating the differential T caused by loss of energy to the air at the top due to radiative, conductive to the air, and evaportive of h2o. It’s a skin because the heat flow beneath there is far less in energy transfer per time.
>> This would seem to be crucial for debating the various correlations.
No, it doesn’t seem crucial at all. It’s barely interesting. A good scientist starts with an unexplained phenomena, and then proceeds to measurement data and then to a plausible hypothesis. The current variation in the temperature record is not unexpained. It’s WITHIN the range expected from the 11 year solar cycle alone.
A bad scientist starts with already explained phenomena and comes up with less supported and more complicated explanations. Shall we explain winter as possibly being caused by so many birds flying south? Or maybe winter is caused by so many Canadians making ice to play hockey, that it cools the northern areas, triggering a cascade effect.
>> then either A or B or both are wrong
Hardly good logic. The ideas are quite compatible. The Svensmark effect only serves to make the solar maximum stronger, and the solar minimum weaker. So, the only effect of that is to trigger the quite uninteresting question “why is the real temperature variation so little?”.
There are many quite plausible answers to this:
1) we only have 29 years of accurate data
2) there are extremely long time lags associated with ocean currents storing extra heat in pulses
3) there are extremely long time lags associated crust temperature dynamics
4) there are many effects which serve to minimize temperature extremes
5) more work is done
6) wave cancellation is typical
and many more…
159 (Gunnar):
You have this backwards. In order to have an unexplained phenomena you must already some data [an observation], data only makes sense in a framework of a hypothesis [you have to expect something else to have a phenomenon], and then at the end of this process you may notice that some of the data is not explained by your hypothesis, and at that point you have an unexplained phenomenon. But let that slide, maybe I’m just not in your ‘good scientist’ category.
Now, this is the more interesting statement. What, exactly, is the range expected from the 11 year solar cycle alone? Let’s start with the 0.07% 11-year solar cycle variation of 1 W/m2. What is the expected temperature variation from that? [the contribution from TSI has already been discussed in this blog, but is tiny] and is that the ‘current variation in the temperature record’? How is the LIA and MWP explained by that 11-year variation alone, if at all [and they must be because as you say “The current variation in the temperature record is not unexplained”]?
including the most obvious one: there is no significant effect to worry about [if it is marginal and barely detectable, then we can discount it in societal terms – except as a scientific curiosity].
I guess you missed my point about the mixture [compatible?] of causes, each, in itself tiny. For those any combination of delays would work. My problem comes when someone asserts that his/hers particular mechanism is the one. I’m perfectly happy and ready to accept that solar parameter A has a +0.001K effect, B has a -0.002K effect, C has a +0.003K effect [in antiphase with A], and so on.
#153 Leif,
I’m not making any such claim. What I am claiming is that I see evidence for a larger role for natural climate variability in explaining global and regional temperature trends than current climate science, especially as represented by the IPCC, appears to acknowledge. Just as surely as some of this natural climate variability is internally generated by the Earth’s own dynamics, some of it is generated by the varying Sun. And if we can avoid a misanthropic presumption that there is something unnatural about our own presence upon the Earth, then I would even contend that some of the natural climate variability is anthropogenic, so long as we understand this in the broad sense of including the human impact on environment of such things as changing land use cover, urban heat island effects, and so forth. How much of the impact on climate to attribute to these various factors is unsettled. Measuring and quantifying the impacts from all of these various sources is legitimate scientific endeavor.
See, you agree. I knew you’d come around eventually. 🙂 Kidding aside, I realize that some who engage you here and elsewhere do perhaps make stronger claims, and maybe even claims that are not within the realm of reasonableness or possibility. But don’t impute that notion to everyone who thinks that the Sun is a more important “forcing agent” than the climate science consensus embodied in the IPCC is willing to acknowledge. While it is fair to ask of such how much they believe their theory explains things, “I don’t know, but I think it deserves more attention than it is getting by those who claim the science is settled” is a fair response.
161 (Basil):
I have never said anything about the agreeing or disagreeing with IPCC and AGW and assuming [even asserting] otherwise is a major mistake to make. All I’m saying [and it has taken 3000+ posts to try to get it across and still with no success] is that a few years ago most scientists [climate people included] believed that the Sun varied a certain amount, and that this amount was in the ball park to explain what AGW could not – LIA and MWP and such]. I then asked to consider the possibility of a solar variation an order of magnitude smaller and what that would do to the [seeming] consensus that solar influence was understood and accounted for. From my limited perspective, in order to maintain that the Sun was still responsible for whatever it was assumed to be responsible for, the climate’s sensitivity to solar variations must be a lot larger than previously assumed, and I was simply seeking advice as to how to understand this. Was it reasonable to assume such sensitivity? Alas, no answers [or even attempts] have been forthcoming. It seems that people are more interested in pushing their own ideas and peddling their own pet theories than seriously looking at my question. I should not have been surprised at this, of course, this is human nature. On the other hand, hope is part of human nature too.
163: Alas, I guess this comment is just what I described in #162
161 (Basil):
The consensus was based on the obsolete idea of a significantly varying Sun and and with that rather large variability, the IPCC admit a certain [small and uncertain] forcing. If you think that the solar effect is larger than what the IPCC would admit in spite of the Sun varying an order of magnitude less, you must agree to an even larger climate sensitivity to solar changes, and that is my question: where does that hyper-sensitivity come from?
148 (DeWitt): Instead of a prolonged discussion, I’ll just refer to: star-www.st-and.ac.uk/~kdh1/ada/lectures/ada17.ppt
http://star-www.st-and.ac.uk/~kdh1/ada/lectures/ada17.ppt
# 159 to # 167
Take any reconstruction of TSI, calculate the amplitudes for every reconstruction; plot the deviations from median and… voilà! All databases are the same thing… (Please, take 1366 W/m^2 as the standard).
162 (Leif) Let’s hope this explanation helps. I think it may turn out that the small range in TSI is still adequate to power the apparently larger swings in climaate without the requirement of hypersensitivity. Somehow, the hypersensitivity is being dampened, perhaps as shown recently in Spencer, by the short term feedbacks among water vapor, temperature, and CO2 and also perhaps by somethings longer term in the ocean oscillations, perhaps even responses from the biosphere.
====================================
Leif,
I do not pretend to have answer to your question from 162, but let us quickly overview what we know about climate in past 1000 years. There were at least two distinct, well documented and global climate events, MWP with temperatures similar and probably event higher than today’s, and LIA with much lower temperatures. Whatever caused those strong natural climate variability, that cannot be humans, ok? We thought previously that variations of TSI can account for most of that variability, but now we are certain that TSI variations were much smaller than previously thought.
But, why do we not consider possibility of some indirect effect of TSI changes, eg through cosmic rays or CO2? Strategy of AGW crowd of salvation CO2/temperature link, vis a vis apparent time lag of rise in CO2 concentrations behind temperature on the time scale of interglacials is to point to CO2 feedback: Sun initiates warming, and than CO2 feedback takes over. Why is impossible that on the shorter time scales small initial variations of TSI induces larger feedback from ocean-released CO2 and secondary effect of cosmic rays?
>> What, exactly, is the range expected from the 11 year solar cycle alone? Let’s start with the 0.07% 11-year solar cycle variation of 1 W/m2. What is the expected temperature variation from that? [the contribution from TSI has already been discussed in this blog, but is tiny]
Not sure what calculations you did. Many people, devoid of thermo knowledge, have a simplistic and incorrect physical model which imagines that Temp is directly proportional to TSI, so that a .07% variation in TSI can only cause a .07% variation in temp.
In reality, temperature is a thermodynamic (science of temperature) state variable and generally represents energy level. The incorrect physical model that I just mentioned would cause one to conclude that the temperature of a house should be directly proportional to the air temp coming from the furnace. Since that is constant, the house temp should be constant. This is completely wrong.
Let’s do a napkin calculation of what a .1% increase in TSI might do, considering the thermodynamic system:
Atmos = 5.1 x 10^18 kg
Ocean = 1.4 x 10^21 kg
Crust = 2.3 x 10^22 kg
Energy in Atmosphere = Mass x Specfic heat * temp = 1.49E+24 J (0.02%)
Energy in Ocean = 1.72E+27 J (24.10%)
Energy in Crust = 5.39E+27 J (75.67%)
The Daily Solar Energy on Earth is 1.74E+17 Watts. For a whole day, this is 1.50E+25 J. This is 0.21% of the total in the Atmos/Ocean/Crust (aoc). It’s also interesting that the daily solar input is large compared to the total atmospheric energy. Yet most people concentrate only the thin atmosphere, as if that was the whole system.
The high part of the solar cycle seems to last about 4 years (eg 98-02). The earth receives .1% more energy continuously for 4 years.
The extra solar energy input = 0.001 * Daily Solar Energy * 365 * 4 = 2.19E+25 (EsolarMax)
Total new energy = ENERGYaoc + EsolarMax = 7.13E+27
Dividing the energy level by mass and specific heat yields the new equilibrium Temp = 293.904530.
That’s an anomoly of .9 deg C. Data shows a max of .78 deg C.
171 (Gunnar):
So there should be a cyclic change of 0.9K from solar minimum to solar maximum and then back to solar minimum?
Re #171
So according to your calculation the input energy goes up and there is no corresponding increase in energy output?
Your calculation shows an increase of 0.9 = 0.3% so over those 4 years the radiative loses would have increased by about 1.2%!
I think you’re missing something, don’t you?
>> So there should be a cyclic change of 0.9K from solar minimum to solar maximum and then back to solar minimum?
No, as I said, there are many reasons why the actual range is less. I’m showing that empirical measurements are within the expected range. The science that I’m presenting is so basic, that it can’t be wrong. You cannot undermine it by trying to switch the discussion from a steady state calculation to one about temporal dynamics.
Since AGWers have not presented a coherent scientific hypothesis, but instead start with the premise “it’s abnormally hot, therefore”, the natural response is to check the assertion. It’s not abnormal, based on the solar cycle alone. It makes the whole question of AGW by means of fantastical means such as C02 moot.
>> So according to your calculation the input energy goes up and there is no corresponding increase in energy output?
No, never said that. That would be yet another thing that would REDUCE the variation from .9 deg C. Still, the measured temp variation is within the normal range. There is no physical law that says that radiation output must increase as the input increases. Jupiter is in a constant state of radiative inbalance.
>> Your calculation shows an increase of 0.9 = 0.3% so over those 4 years the radiative loses would have increased by about 1.2%!
No, I think it’s you that has missed something. You assume that the effective altitude of outbound radiation is sea level! The radiation out is completely dependent on the temperature of the atmosphere at the altitude where it thins out enough that radiation dominates. Just because the sea level temp goes up, it doesn’t mean that the air at high altitudes goes up the same amount, or at all.
Also, as I believe Tom Vonk has pointed out many times, I don’t think you can use the equation you just used to calculate that. I doubt it’s valid for thin air. Even if it is, it doesn’t change the basic logic of my argument.
Well, if there’s anything that’s really heating up its this conversation but I’ll let you guys debate by how much, how long it might last and what the actual causes are of ‘verbal’ heating. Dont get me wrong – the debate isnt ‘nasty’. Rather its a display of the wealth of knowledge that is being presented on this blog and done so in a very passionate way.
I’m going to state a question I posed earlier in a more direct way:
“If in a year from now in July of 2009 solar Activity is as low then as it is now and the start of Solar Cycle 24 is still nowhere in sight, what are the implications for in terms of climatic impact and why? Will we be looking at another Dalton minimum? Maunder Minimum, or can it be called a ‘Dave Minimum’ because I posed this question and I am mostly performing at ‘Minimum’ anyway?” Again, this question is open to all.
174 (Gunnar):
I asked that the wrong way: perhaps I should have asked “So there should be a cyclic change of 0.78K from solar minimum to solar maximum and then back to solar minimum?”
174 Gunnar
You have a good point, I think.
No, indeed. The upper troposphere has been cooling while CO2 has been increasing, over the last 20 years or so.
Re #174
Well the measured temperature variation is within the range you calculated by neglecting energy loss, since you have no idea of how much that energy loss amounts to you are in to position to make that statement.
There is such a physical law for a body that solely heated by radiation as the Earth is, Jupiter has an internal source of heat that is comparable with the solar input.
No, the surface emission would go up according to your calculation, without any change to the atmosphere why would that not lead to a concomitant increase at the top of the atmosphere? If Vonk says that the surface does not act as a blackbody he’s wrong but I doubt whether he’s said that. Your argument is illogical, since it proposes that you can increase the input and heat up the surface without changing the heat loss.
171 (Gunnar): dragging in the crust [to what depth?] and calculating the temperature change for the combined atmosphere, ocean, crust is total voodoo. Your ideas are not even wrong. This is pseudo science of the worst kind. I have asked for serious inquiry into this, but your stuff ain’t.
175 (Dave):
If a year from now solar activity is still low, another Dalton [even Maunder] minimum is quite possible. Whether it will have any climate impact, I don’t know. Matters may be muddied by the recent shift to a PDO cold mode, that may cool the Earth off anyway and some might blame that on the Sun, even if it isn’t.
>> perhaps I should have asked “So there should be
The point is that it’s possible. The fact that it’s possible makes the empirical data normal.
>> Well the measured temperature variation is within the range you calculated by neglecting energy loss, since you have no idea of how much that energy loss amounts to you are in to position to make that statement.
My calculation is quite conservative in the variation of the 11 yr solar cycle. If we add to that the iris effect of Svensmark, time lag moving heat into ocean and land, ENSO effects, rogue wave like wave addition, etc, the range is most probably +/- 1.5. You don’t know that the change in energy loss is significant, and without that, you’re just speculating that the temperature variation is abnormal. Wild speculation is hardly the foundation we want to establish policy on.
>> There is such a physical law for a body that solely heated by radiation as the Earth is, Jupiter has an internal source of heat that is comparable with the solar input.
No, there is no physical law for radiative balance. I guess you missed the earth science course that explained that earth has a molten core. That’s a heat source for those of you in Rio Linda.
>> dragging in the crust [to what depth?]
I’m including the ocean and crust, because they are inarguably part of the thermodynamic system. If I didn’t, the temp rise would be high, undermining your argument even further. If we considered only the atmosphere, one day of sun energy would double the energy level, resulting in about 600 deg K.
>> and calculating the temperature change for the combined atmosphere, ocean, crust is total voodoo.
So, now the specific heat equation Q = mcT is voodoo? Wow, you’re really desperate for your pet theory.
>> Your ideas are not even wrong. This is pseudo science of the worst kind. I have asked for serious inquiry into this, but your stuff ain’t.
Like before, you quickly move into the “argument by ridicule” stage.
180 (Leif):
Do we really know the PDO is totally internal and not impacted or influenced by the solar cycle? After all, there are some things like orbital resonances which are not strong enough to have serious effects of substantial changes yet manage to syncrhonize an orbit, correcting for minor pertubations that have occurred.
Re #181
Wow a heat source of 0.09 W/m2 compared with solar ~240 W/m2, that really makes a difference!
Because you’re ignoring the heat loss!
No ignoring heat loss and assuming that in the space of 4 years all the excess heat is shared out through the whole crust and ocean depths, is what makes it voodoo.
You’re ridiculing your argument all by your self.
#180, Leif
#182, cba
Or, the PDO has shifted to a cool phase in response to the decline in solar activity that has been going on now for a couple of decades (see charts in #130 and #133).
182,184 (cba,Basil): I don’t think we know what causes PDO [or rather, I don’t know; there are lots of people that say they do]. I’m sure [as I said] the matter will be muddy if the Sun goes low.
>> Wow a heat source of 0.09 W/m2 compared with solar ~240 W/m2, that really makes a difference!
You’re confusing the energy of a mass with heat flow. The energy of the molten core is enormous. There is very little heat flow because the system is very close to equilibrium.
>> Because you’re ignoring the heat loss!
No, I’m not. There can’t be any extra heat loss until the temperature has gone up. You seem to be using circular reasoning to conclude that the temperature of earth is defined to be constant, and only man can change that. It’s not true. Things are always heating up and cooling off. The fact that a hotter earth would result in more heat bleeding off doesn’t change the fact that it got hot in the first place.
>> the space of 4 years all the excess heat is shared out through the whole crust and ocean depths, is what makes it voodoo
Hardly. First of all, the energy was input directly into the ocean and land. I thought this went without saying, or do you believe in the AGW fiction that the sun may only heat the atmosphere, and it’s the air that heats the ocean and land? In reality the mass difference means that the air is driven by land and ocean temperatures, not the other way around. I guess you’re not a sailor.
Second, it doesn’t have to happen in 4 years. Each solar maximum is a pulse of extra energy going into the earth system. The consequences of this energy input are committed in AGW speak. It flows through ocean currents and makes itself felt sooner or later.
Sam U inspired: An analogy of this argument would be: We’re sitting on the beach with regular waves. We sit there long enough so that we have to move back because of a rising tide. You come up with the hypothesis that man is causing these big waves by driving too many heavy freighters through the ocean. I say, No, this is just the tide. You say “no, the wave is so big, it’s an abnormal unnatural wave”. I say “it’s natural”. You say “what could possibly cause this naturally?”. I answer “the moon”. You say “Ridiculous voodoo idea, there is no moon out, and the moon doesn’t go around the earth every 6 hours”. I back away slowly, and “yea, alright buddy, whatever you say”.
I think I have read enough now to know that this is a blog to use science to bat each other over the head with. As I said before, too much education not enough maturation. May we enjoy sunny days for the pleasure it gives and the life that it maintains. Take care felas, it’s been fun.
David McCaig,
Victoria,B.C.
Canada.
#180
::chuckle::
This is one of the reasons I’ve grown so fond of Leif, if I’m allowed to say so. If anyone can herd cats, it’s Leif. All he’s asking for is a bit of mental discipline and thinking things through. He tweeks and prods and pokes. Reminds me of one of the best teachers I ever had, music teacher from Denmark, who had little patience for those students who only wanted to learn how to put the music in their head down on paper.
The process of music (and science) is broader and richer and involves more work than that even though the spirit and effort and enthusiasm are encouraged and appreciated.
Okay, guess I should finish reading all the threads–only five of them all the way through so far. 🙂
Re#186
I’m afraid Gunnar it’s you who’s confused.
In particular you seem to have a total misunderstanding about the mechanism of AGW:
The basis of GW is that the earth’s surface (both land and sea) is heated by solar radiation, the heated surface then loses heat to its surroundings, the predominant mechanism being radiation in the IR. Some of that radiation is absorbed by the atmosphere and the remainder radiates into space, a proportion of the absorbed radiation is recycled back towards earth causing the Greenhouse effect.
The rest is just nonsense I’m afraid and the tidal analogy doesn’t help at all.
Leif,
What about chaotic behavior? If the climate does indeed behave chaotically, then it varies on all time scales. Is it really possible to assign a cause to a particular variation? For example, it is possible for the global average temperature to change if the heat flow from the equator to the poles changes even though there is no change in forcing. Does this change, which may appear to have regular cycles on a short time scale, have to be driven by something specific, or is the whole thing just too complicated? If it is, then it may not even be possible to predict, even in broad terms, the outcome of a perturbation such as doubling CO2 because the ranges of possible trajectories for the perturbed and unperturbed climate overlap too much.
My impression of the results of model calculations is that the ‘natural’ variability in the models has been constrained to a value much smaller than the true variability, which seriously limits their validity. This also relates, I think, to your point that the modelers have ignored the implications of variations in TSI of an order of magnitude less than previously thought.
By the way, your link on modulation wasn’t any more informative than what I had already found. If you don’t want to go into more detail than that here, it’s fine with me.
190 (DeWitt): The climate system is not ‘completely’ chaotic, I think. It is possible to force the system in a deterministic way if the forcing is large enough, e.g. the orbital changes that seem to drive glaciations. I’m sure the AGW people would maintain that the CO2 forcing belongs in that category as well. But the system is complicated, indeed. I have some confidence that when the forcings are better known we night be able to see some patterns. One of the problems with the solar forcing is that we don’t have good long-term [millennia and more] data on solar parameters. Once we get data from ice cores from Mars and boreholes on the Moon, we might be able to sort things out.
On the sidelobes: I think we agree that sidelobes occur and that should be enough.
# 171
Gunnar,
Indeed, and sometimes Temperature is inversely proportional to Solar Irradiance. However, we have not found zero correlations. Negative correlations may occur by more evaporation from oceans, higher albedo, etc., but there is always a correlation.
Leif, I have a query in relation to the solar wind and geomagnetic activity. Since cycle 20 the amplitude in the variation of the aa index has increased with each cycle. Is there a relationship between the solar wind and sunspot activity such that as sunspot activity declines the strength of the solar wind from the polar regions increases and what might otherwise be minor disturbances in the Earths magnetosphere/thermosphere become major because of an interaction effect. I posit a complementary relationship such that a given drift to southward Bz is more effective in disturbing the magnetosphere at solar minimum and perhaps also in solar cycles of low sunspot activity.
In this respect could I point to a paper at http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2005AGUFMGP24A..07G which suggests a a connection between enhanced secular variation of the geomagnetic field and climate change over decadal to centennial time scales, suggesting a relationship between the occurrence of grand minima and rising intensity peaks in geomagnetic activity.
Secondly, any thoughts on how this change in geomagnetic activity relates to the weakening polar magnetic field on the sun?
193 (Erl):
The influence of the solar wind on geomagnetic activity [GA] is well understood. I can refer you to http://www.leif.org/research/Physics-based%20Long-term%20Geomagnetic%20Indices.pdf and http://www.leif.org/research/Seminar-LMSAL.pdf
The bottom line is that GA depends on the product of the Interplanetary Magnetic Field B [more precisely its southward component Bz – which on the average, e.g. over a solar rotation or a year, is some fixed fraction of B] and of the square of the solar wind speed V, thus GA = kBV^2. There is also a weak [one-third power] dependence on solar wind density, n, which can be ignored in a first approximation. Both B, V, and n are known [or reliably estimated] for the past ~150 years covering many solar cycles. Based on that data we can construct the average solar cycle variation of those solar wind parameters:
I have plotted several such average cycles side by side to give you an impression of what the variation is. In reality, B increases with the sunspot number so is modulated by the cycle strength. This does not seem to be the case with V, which generally has its cycle maximum approaching solar minimum.
So, since Bz follows B which follows sunspot number R, GA will also follow R, and will be lower in lower cycles, not higher. Because V is highest approaching minimum, GA will also tend to have a [secondary] maximum approaching minimum [particularly large in 1930, 1952, 1974, 1994 – it is not a coincidence that these are ~22 years apart as we have discussed in earlier posts on this blog – but generally in every cycle; even right now – the solar wind speed has been high throughout 2008]. It is only with the advent of good really long-term data that this general pattern becomes clear. Looking at a single cycle or two [wiggle-matching] is not fruitful as there is considerable random variation on top of the general picture.
I don’t see how that follows. My opinion on the paper is low. The paper has been discussed [and debunked as it should] at RealClimate.
The polar field has very little influence on B at Earth. At every solar minimum B falls to almost the same value [~4 nT], irrespective of the solar cycle strength and their polar fields. If there is residual sunspot activity at minimum [which is often the case], those spots and their magnetic field bump up B by ~1 nT, but apart from that, the polar fields don’t really influence B and hence not GA.
194 (Leif)
In light of the fact that the magnetic field in the earth’s core is diminishing and has been more recently reported to be changing fast – http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/06/080630-earth-core.html – due to rapid changes in the motion of the earth’s core fluids http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2008/07/09/Earths_core_fluid_affects_magnetic_field/UPI-91391215615162/
perhaps we need to re-examine any coupling of the fluid core’s internal electrical currents to variations in the sun’s magnetic field which may be influenced by variations in the earth’s orbit.
In that regard, I would appreciate your comments on the following papers and/or direct me to papers that discuss potential driving forces or processes related to geomagnetic field weakening and/or reversals and its potential impacts on climate change. Thanks.
Does the earth’s magnetic field influence climate?
Fluteau, F.; Courtillot, V.; Gallet, Y.; Le Mouel, J.; Genevey, A.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2006AGUFMGP51B..02F
Abstract
Much of the observed increase in global surface temperature over the past 150 years occurred prior to the 1940’s and after the 1980’s. The main agents which are invoked are solar variability, changes in atmospheric greenhouse gas content or sulfur, due to natural or anthropogenic action, or internal variability of the coupled ocean-atmosphere system. Magnetism has seldom been invoked, and evidence for connections between climate and magnetic field variations have received little attention. We review evidence for such connections, starting with suggested correlations, on three time scales: recent secular variation (10-100 years), historical and archeomagnetic change (100-5000 years) and excursions and reversals (1000-1 million years). We attempt to suggest which mechanisms could account for observed correlations. Evidence for correlations in field intensity changes, excursions and reversals, which invoke Milankovic forcing in the core, either directly or through changes in ice distribution and moments of inertia of the Earth, is still tenuous. Correlation between decadal changes in amplitude of geomagnetic variations of external origin, solar irradiance and global temperature is stronger. The correlation applies until the 1980’s, suggesting that solar irradiance is the prime forcing function of climate until then, when the correlation breaks and anomalous warming may emerge from the signal. Indeed, only solar flux of energy and particles can jointly explain parallel variations in temperature and external magnetic field. The most intriguing feature may be recently proposed archeomagnetic jerks (see abstract by Gallet et al). These seem to correlate with significant climatic events. A proposed mechanism involves tilt of the dipole to low latitudes, resulting in enhanced cosmic-ray induced nucleation of clouds. Intense data acquisition over a broad range of durations is required to further probe these indications that the Earth’s and Sun’s magnetic fields may have significant bearing on climate change at various time scales.
Are there connections between the Earth’s magnetic field and climate?
Vincent Courtillota, , , Yves Galleta, Jean-Louis Le Mouëla, Frédéric Fluteaua and Agnès Geneveyb
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V61-4MM8BMG-1&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=5b8527eb39f6019b8473ccfc5188ffec
Abstract
Understanding climate change is an active topic of research. Much of the observed increase in global surface temperature over the past 150 years occurred prior to the 1940s and after the 1980s. The main causes invoked are solar variability, changes in atmospheric greenhouse gas content or sulfur due to natural or anthropogenic action, or internal variability of the coupled ocean–atmosphere system. Magnetism has seldom been invoked, and evidence for connections between climate and magnetic field variations have received little attention. We review evidence for correlations which could suggest such (causal or non-causal) connections at various time scales (recent secular variation 10–100 yr, historical and archeomagnetic change 100–5000 yr, and excursions and reversals 103–106 yr), and attempt to suggest mechanisms. Evidence for correlations, which invoke Milankovic forcing in the core, either directly or through changes in ice distribution and moments of inertia of the Earth, is still tenuous. Correlation between decadal changes in amplitude of geomagnetic variations of external origin, solar irradiance and global temperature is stronger. It suggests that solar irradiance could have been a major forcing function of climate until the mid-1980s, when “anomalous” warming becomes apparent. The most intriguing feature may be the recently proposed archeomagnetic jerks, i.e. fairly abrupt ( 100 yr long) geomagnetic field variations found at irregular intervals over the past few millennia, using the archeological record from Europe to the Middle East. These seem to correlate with significant climatic events in the eastern North Atlantic region. A proposed mechanism involves variations in the geometry of the geomagnetic field (f.i. tilt of the dipole to lower latitudes), resulting in enhanced cosmic-ray induced nucleation of clouds. No forcing factor, be it changes in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere or changes in cosmic ray flux modulated by solar activity and geomagnetism, or possibly other factors, can at present be neglected or shown to be the overwhelming single driver of climate change in past centuries. Intensive data acquisition is required to further probe indications that the Earth’s and Sun’s magnetic fields may have significant bearing on climate change at certain time scales.
195 (Suzanne)
Also see: Luis Eduardo Antunes Vieira – Climate Change – The Inti Effect
Excerpt: Evolution of the Southern Hemisphere Magnetic Anomaly (SHMA) from 1900 to 2000.
“These observations are consistent with the physical mechanism suggested by Vieira and Da Silva [2006a] for the coupling of the solar/magnetospheric/ionospheric processes in the SHMA and the atmosphere through lower mesosphere and upper stratosphere ozone depletion and consequently changes in the radiative fluxes and atmospheric circulation.”
http://vieira-le.sites.uol.com.br/
195-196 (Suzanne): My opinion can be best summarized by quoting the last sentence in both the papers:
The whole thing looks [to use another word from the abstracts] too tenuous to me.
195 (Suzanne): Courtillot’s ideas have been discussed at length at RealClimate: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/12/les-chevaliers-de-l%E2%80%99ordre-de-la-terre-plate-part-ii-courtillots-geomagnetic-excursion/langswitch_lang/po
Although one has to take the RealClimate bias into account, I agree with much of the commentary that is directed at the Courtillot paper.
Steve: Also see my posts 2522, 2525, 2531 and 2532 which touch on this topic, not to defend anything solar or magnetic about which I have no comment, but to observe the potential impact of applying the statistical standards advocated against Courtillot to Mann et al and also to observe how much of thie Courtillot schmozzle originated out of abysmal archival policies in the field and were simply a pox on all their houses. Pierrehumbert comes across as far too angry in these posts for someone that’s supposed to be eminent in his field.
197 and 198 (Leif)
O.K., thanks Leif, much appreciated.
(198) Steve, thanks as well.
194 (Leif)
What do you make of this? http://i249.photobucket.com/albums/gg220/erlandlong/thebigclimateshiftsofthe20thC2.jpg
200 (Erl): Before we go on, you should correct the aa-index by adding 3 nT to every value before 1957. Then either update the plot or link to a new one.
201 (Lief)
3nT added to aa index prior to 1957 as requested,added data back to 1868 and and new plot here: http://i249.photobucket.com/albums/gg220/erlandlong/Surfacetemperatureschangeglobe.jpg
Hello, I believe this is relevant to the discussion, sorry if it is not.
Here’s a link to recent trends in global stratospheric temperatures (as measured by the NOAA satellite at 36,000 metres). Check the boxes for the last 10 years then click “Redraw Graph” to get the full dataset.
I have provided this because I understand that stratospheric temperatures are primarily determined by absorption of solar radiation by ozone.
(Sorry being a layman my nearest source is Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratosphere) “…The stratosphere is layered in temperature because it is heated from above by absorption of ultraviolet radiation from the Sun…..The heating is caused by an ozone layer that absorbs solar ultraviolet radiation, heating the upper layers of the stratosphere.)
The warmest year was 2002, and the coldest is almost certainly looking like 2008 on current trends.
My question is, firstly, could this provide an interesting correlation with the solar cycle, and, secondly, why does 2008 appear to have dropped off the bottom of the graph?
Might have helped to add the link!
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps+010
203 (Chris): You can see two things. 1st: there is an annual variation because the distance to the Sun varies through the year (furthest away on July). 2nd: [as you point out] there is a solar cycle effect because there is more ultraviolet radiation at solar maximum, and in 2008 we are in a deep minimum. Had data for 1996 been available on the plot, it would also have been low.
202 (Erl): Finding correlations between the aa-index and just about anything is a favorite pastime of many. To interpret such correlation one needs to know what aa is a measure of. For short-term correlations it is enough to note that [as explained in #194] that aa = k*B*V^2. For intervals longer than several solar cycles a different aspect comes into play, namely that of the constancy [or lack thereof] of our measuring device – the Earth’s magnetic field. GA is a measure of the interaction between two fields, the sun’s and the Earth’s. The Earth’s field has decreased 10% since 1868. There is some debate over how that influences GA, but my own opinion is that GA goes up when ME [the Earth’s magnetic moment] goes down, so at least a part [and maybe all] of the increase in aa since 1868 may be due to this decrease of the Earth’s magnetic field [ME]. Now, aa is roughly correlated with solar activity in general, so a seeming correlation of aa with anything may also reflect a correlation with solar activity in general, so it is hard to separate those things without further analysis. It is like noting that bigger feet increases childrens reading ability [because of the indisputable fact that reading ability is correlated with shoe size].
You have circled 1998 on the delta T curve. It seems that dT is a predictor of aa 5 years later, judging from the peak in aa in 2003. Same thing in 1879 and 1884, and in 1989 and 1994, etc. But all that is unquantified wiggle matching and as such has no place in a serious discussion.
Eyeballing trends [e.g. the opposing trends of aa and dT during cycles 17-19] does not seem a useful thing either.
On the whole, I would say that there are well-established ways of comparing and quantifying two time series and those do not support [IMHO] any relation between aa and dT. For all its faults, the IPCC and their merry band of experts have it right by not considering GA a serious player in climate.
Leif: thanks for clarifying those two points for me. I had assumed the 1st but it is good to have it confirmed. As for the 2nd, if it is true, then it is interesting to see a significant and measurable short term effect of solar variation on atmospheric temperature (I assume there may be too much “noise” for this at the surface).
I am also interested in the possible effects of lower stratospheric temperatures on the rest of the atmosphere. I don’t want to go too far off-topic though, so I’ll just simply quote the recent text that I was looking at for a different reason but happened to alert me to the possibility:
Click to access antarctica_and_climate_change_2008.pdf
“…As stratospheric ozone amounts have fallen, temperatures above the continent have also dropped. This creates a bigger temperature difference between the tropics and the Antarctic which affects global weather patterns…”
207 (Chris): The lower atmosphere is heated from below and the stratosphere from above. This been discussed ad nauseam in this blog. It has not been established that changes in the stratospheric ozone has any effect on ground-level temperatures [although you’ll find many claims of this]. Your quote As stratospheric ozone amounts have fallen, temperatures above the continent have also dropped has this little word ‘also’ suggesting no or little relation except coincidence in timing. If a causal relation was suggested I would have expected the quote to have read: As stratospheric ozone amounts have fallen, temperatures above the continent have dropped. But maybe we should not imbue journalists with such precision in thought and expression.
208 (Leif):
Click to access 2004_Shindell_Schmidt.pdf
203, 204 (Chris)
Your data shows the annual cycle. The main interest is in what happens over longer time periods.
Might I recommend a site where you can download a multi year temperature series according to chosen latitude? This is at: http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/Timeseries/timeseries1.pl It is the source for the data that I refer to below (several graphs).
It appears to me that the Wikipedia article on the stratosphere is somewhat deficient. Ozone is a result of heating of the atmosphere by short wave radiation. Once it is present it helps to absorb more short wave radiation. While short wave radiation is the major source of the energy for stratospheric heating there are other sources that complicate the issue. Ozone also responds to outgoing long wave radiation, mostly in the lower layers of the stratosphere. If there is high altitude cloud in the troposphere establishing good albedo warm oceans can lose a lot of heat via long wave radiation and it is not being replaced as it is lost. A precipitation event due to surface cooling releases heat from the atmosphere itself. The resulting warming signal from outgoing radiation is most apparent at 150hPa and 100hPa in the tropics. So, we get the paradox of a cooling ocean and boosted outgoing long wave radiation as the system loses energy and a warmer tropopause and lower stratosphere when ultraviolet radiation (and 200hPa temperature)is actually low.
The presence of aerosols of volcanic origin results in marked increase in stratospheric temperatures from the tropopause upwards.
In my view (a lone voice in the wilderness) the clearest signal of solar origin, (relating to short term changes in UV intensity) is found at 200hPa where there is enough moisture to scrub out aerosols of volcanic origin. You will notice that the amplitude of short term variation at 200hPa is much greater than at the surface and the two are clearly aligned. There is no volcanic signal at 200hPa like there is at 70hPa. Between 200hPa and 100hPa which is about the level of the tropopause near the equator, the temperature signal is increasingly affected by the ozone reaction to outgoing long wave radiation. In the lower stratosphere the volcanic aerosol content is a critical factor in determining atmospheric temperature.
Unfortunately, due to these factors you will not see a clear signal from the solar cycle in the lower or middle stratosphere. Even at 10hPa (30km) there is no clear cyclical signal as you can see here:http://i249.photobucket.com/albums/gg220/erlandlong/Atmosphericheating.jpg
However, if we had upper atmosphere data going back before 1948 I think we might see a solar wind signature to match up with indices like the aa index of geomagnetic activity and it would appear at 10hPa and even 200hPa. Theoretically, (again as a lone voice in the wilderness) this would reflect a compression of the magnetosphere and some displacement of day side atmosphere to the night side with a resulting deeper penetration of energizing ultraviolet, warming at 200hPa and a loss of albedo in the tropics at that level under high pressure from the solar wind.
So, I see the Earth as a big ball with a tenuous atmosphere that reacts like any other travelling object when stuff gets in the way. In the case of the outer atmosphere the dynamics are influenced by the fact that interacting particles respond in a way that depends upon their magnetic polarities but that is really just a side issue.
206 (Leif) Thanks for the detailed response.
Yes I can see that the Earths magnetic field has an impact on the aa index. But, I expect that the aa index will dive strongly with cycle 24. And if tropical and high latitude temperatures fall at the same time perhaps you may alter your opinion.
No, this is not where I am at. If there is to be an effect, there should be no lag at all. We are dealing with the speed of light and the response of cloud to a change in air temperature. No lags necessary. My explanation for the peak temperature in 1997-1998 lies in changes in 200hPa temperature affecting upper atmospheric cirrus cloud and changing humidity and cloud relations that allowed constant oceanic warming between 1976 and 1997 after a period of solid cooling and precipitation during solar cycle 20 (happened to be much affected by volcanoes as well as low solar activity) as you will see here. http://i249.photobucket.com/albums/gg220/erlandlong/200hPaandhumidity-1.jpg
Notice in particular the collapse in relative humidity at 925hPa.
Notice also the collapse of the correlation between 200hPa temperature and specific humidity at 850hPa with the commencement of solar cycle 21 in 1976 here: http://i249.photobucket.com/albums/gg220/erlandlong/Corr200hPaSHSST.jpg
The correlation is good when 200hPa temperature is low. It falls away smartly when 200hPa temperatures blow out.
The key to the climate response to solar activity lies in change in humidity and cloud cover.
I do not share your confidence in the opinion of the ‘merry band’. I dislike the tone of their discourse.
209 (cce):
From the paper you quoted:
As always, there is the issue of where. At some point the stratospheric influence dims and stops. GW is a surface phenomenon, otherwise it is of little concern. Antarctica is at rather high elevation and the ‘where’ becomes an issue. I’m sure Chris was referring to global temperatures, at least his plot was.
210 (Erl): First, mind Steve’s prohibition of ‘lone voices’, then
Why should I? The expected drop in temperature may have more to do with the PDO entering a cold phase than with aa.
And I was tongue-in-cheek with the 5 year lag, just trying to show how silly the wiggle-matching is [dT driving aa].
In general, you cannot [without a detailed and physically plausible mechanism] conclude anything from isolated cases, like 1997-1998 or cycle 20.
210 (Erl):
This is an chicken-egg problem. I would say that a change of humidity/cloud cover could be the result of climate change, rather than the cause. If the Earth [the oceans] warm up I would expect more humidity and more cloud cover, which then in turn would throttle back the warming, so we have a nice negative feedback loop that keeps things were they should be. Such loops usually have oscillations about the average as we observe. But this particular section of the blog is not devoted to personal speculations, so I’ll let my [naive] opinion rest here.
Erl & Leif: Thanks for the detailed responses. It’s a fascinating debate: I’m out of my depth for now but will read up on what you say with interest. Good to know that my observations had some relevance.
http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/Timeseries/timeseries.pl?ntype=1&var=Air+Temperature&level=3000&lat1=23.5&lat2=-23.5&lon1=0&lon2=360&iseas=1&mon1=0&mon2=11&iarea=0&typeout=2&Submit=Create+Timeseries
yields this interesting graph:
Air temperature at the tropical tropopause. Where is the solar signal? if any? I see none.
#214 Leif,
El Chichon and Pinatubo?
#214,
Wow, volcano eruption prediction! Note that the temperature starts rising before the eruptions of El Chichon in 1982 and Pinatubo in 1991. It doesn’t give me much confidence in NCEP reanalysis. Somehow they’ve managed to put in a time constant that’s much larger than the real world.
(DeWitt — something about your web browser settings is causing you grief with respect to posting comments…they get spanked as spam! It has something to do with Javascript — either you have JS disabled or you are using an unusual browser. It says your browser has “faked” a JS security response… I hope you can find something to tweak!)
MrPete,
I’ve updated to Firefox 3.0 to see if that helps. For some reason this computer has always had problems with Javascript, even when I do a clean reinstall of the OS. Probably an interaction with some program I’ve installed. We’ll see if this helps. Apparently the spam catcher problem doesn’t happen all the time, which will make it even harder to trace.
DeWitt Payne at #190
I post very infrequently on these Svalgaard threads, but these are topics that really interest me. I also agreed with the spirit of a DeWitt Payne post where you admonished posters for forcing the solar forcing when there are so many apparent weak links in the GHG AGW theories to discuss and think about– with feedback I assume.
I have asked this before, DeWitt, and this may not be the place to ask again, but you seem to have a good grasp of the factors involved in GHG radiation/heat balances on which Steve M has continued to ask for an exposition and I have wondered if you could provide, not necessarily an exposition, but your thoughts on the basic mechanisms involved — and all in one place.
If Leif would be so kind as to allow a somewhat OT to this thread reply:
Kenneth Fritsch,
I think I have the beginnings of a grasp on clear sky radiative transfer and how it is modified by changing concentrations of constituents that can absorb and emit EM radiation. Physical meteorology plays a large part as well by acting as a constraint on the vertical temperature profile. It was not easy to put what little I know together and I don’t think I’m very good at explaining what I know, based on the responses I get to some of my posts. That being said, the process has, I think, improved my understanding even if it didn’t help anyone else.
I still think the best way to learn about something is to get your hands dirty. In this case, get textbooks on radiative transfer and physical meteorology and work through them. I don’t think you have to work every problem in the book, although that certainly wouldn’t hurt, but you do have to have a reasonable understanding of both subjects before you can ask intelligent questions. If you haven’t had a course in thermodynamics, you need that as well. Of course, that also implies that you’ve had at least one year, preferably two, of undergraduate physics as well as calculus and differential equations courses. For thermo, a physical chemistry course is, IMO, actually better because physicists like the constant volume partial differential equations which aren’t easily applicable to the situation compared to the constant pressure partial differential equations used by chemists.
Phil has stated that it’s all in the textbooks and has been chastised for not supplying specific references. I sympathize with him because I don’t think you can. It’s in the textbooks, but not all in one place or even just a few places. It’s little pieces scattered here and there, which you can’t really comprehend without all the rest of it. As I’ve said before, I think this is a potentially lucrative opportunity for someone with both a better understanding of the subject and much better writing skills than I. Too bad Isaac Asimov isn’t around anymore
214 (Lief) Your graph, which I presume relates to 100hPa level shows the reaction of ozone to an increase in long wave radiation following the climate shift of 1978. (That was the start of the vigorous solar cycle 21, a big jump in solar wind strength and a big El Nino at the start of the solar cycle. Check http://i249.photobucket.com/albums/gg220/erlandlong/200hPaandhumidity-1.jpg and http://i249.photobucket.com/albums/gg220/erlandlong/Corr200hPaSHSST.jpg) Ocean warming followed the reduction in cirrus density following an unprecedented jump in temperature at 200hPa, more radiation reached the surface, the relative humidity at 925Hpa fell and with it low level cloud cover. So, the ocean heated strongly and outgoing long wave radiation increased with it. If there were a greenhouse effect local temperatures back towards the surface would move in sympathy with those at 100hPa. You can see it that 150hPa and much less at 200hPa. At 200hPa the temperature marches to an entirely different drum to the one driving temperatures at 100hPa and above. The move at 150hPa is probably an ozone excitation factor, just the same as at 100hPa. So:
1. Too bad no appreciable greenhouse effect.
2. Temperatures in the stratosphere are driven by aerosol and ozone heating as well as UV but the latter stimulus is lost in the wash of competing forces.
3. Temperatures at 70hPa reflect the same forces as at 100hPa but with a clear aerosol (volcano) bias. At 30hPa the OLR heating ozone effect is gone, testimony to the free passage of OLR at the atmospheric densities found at this level.
4 Strong temperature peaks in the stratosphere do not appear in the relatively clean (and ozone deficient) air at 200hPa. 200hPa are UV peaks. How do I know? Under a regime of low solar pressure they correlate perfectly with near surface specific humidity. Under high solar pressure producing strong peaks at 200hPa the correlation falters, and under sufficient pressure the cloud recovery is so poor that the correlation is lost entirely. That was the case for much of the period 1978 to 1998.
Temperature data at the appropriate levels from Latitude 10°S to 20°S where albedo is lowest and outgoing radiation is highest is shown here: http://i249.photobucket.com/albums/gg220/erlandlong/minus10-minus20Temp.jpg
The absolutely comforting thing is that the peak at 100hPa is now gone and 200hPa temperatures are currently as low as they have been since 1948. Here in Western Australia where rainfall has been decreasing for 100 years we are having a very wet winter and a lot of farmers have very good grain crops. In reality our rainfall follows the pattern of warming and cooling in the tropics.
214 (Leif):
I agree that there is no solar signal decernible in the graph. However, it easily shows the PDO signal changing in the late 70’s and again in the early 2000’s.
Tom
Leif. Going back to 1948! Someone came across this article here which is from a discussion at that time at the Royal Meteorological Society.
Fred Hoyle made a few statements regarding Interstellar Gas Clouds and the UV output of The Sun.
Was this just a quaint theory at the time? I’ve extracted the relevant passages below for you anyway! Anything to say!?
Mr Hoyle, pointing out that the earth’s mean temperature depends upon its distance from the sun and the sun’s radiation, said that, according to astronomical theory, if the sun were left to itself it would very slowly increase in brightness while there was no evidence of any significant change in the distance of the earth from the sun in the last 10 millions years.
However, the sun was not left to itself because there was a very great deal of interstellar gas aggregated locally into “clouds”. As the sun passed through a cloud it would capture some of the gas which would have the effect of appreciably increasing its ultra-violet radiation. This theory, due to Hoyle and Lyttleton, had been recently confirmed by observations of the spectra of dwarf stars in regions known to contain the necessary “clouds”. The solar ultra-violet radiation is absorbed in the upper layers of the atmosphere and Mr Hoyle suggested that a substantial increase in its intensity, such as would occur when the sun passes through a cloud of interstellar gas, would produce a profound disturbance in the state of the atmosphere which might well be connected with the long-period changes in climate over millions of years.
Could Hoyle’s theory explain short-period variations? Mr Hoyle said it could if there were local variations in the gas clouds.
223(Pete) Myself.
Sorry, the entire article is split into 4 image sections. Here are the other 3:
Part B
Part C
Part D
223 (Pete): Hoyle’s theory is invalidated by the solar wind that ‘cleans’ the solar system of interstellar gas.
Leif, is there any “solar” theory of climate changes which is by your judgment more plausible than others?
i.e. – all proposed or discussed until now here at CA.
226 (Ivan):
The short answer is ‘none’. A more gentle answer might be along these lines:
There is no doubt that the various solar ’emanations’ all to some extent influence the climate, but as far as I can see, none of them do that in any significant manner. So, there might well be many teeny tiny contributions [some of opposite signs even] from many things solar, but none of them [and not even their total effect] seems to be significant. As you know there are thousands of papers claiming solar effects. Here are some of the latest:
JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 113, D14122, doi:10.1029/2007JD009336, 2008
Role of ozone in the solar cycle modulation of the North Atlantic Oscillation
Yuhji Kuroda
Climate Research Department, Meteorological Research Institute, Tsukuba, Japan
Koji Yamazaki
Kiyotaka Shibata
Abstract
The effect of ozone on the 11-year solar cycle modulation of the winter-mean North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) is examined through analyses of observed meteorological and ozone data from 1978 to 2000. It is found that a significant ozone anomaly associated with the winter NAO is created in winter in high solar (HS) years only and the anomaly persists from spring to summer, creating a large temperature anomaly in the lower stratosphere through radiative heating. Such a temperature anomaly in the stratosphere creates anomalous temperature of opposite sign at lower heights and anomalous zonal wind in the polar area of the troposphere in summer. The associated surface signal is very similar to the summer Arctic Oscillation (Summer-AO). The mechanism for the formation of the Summer-AO is also discussed.
But there are also voices of reason:
REVIEWS OF GEOPHYSICS, VOL. 46, RG3002, doi:10.1029/2007RG000236, 2008
Overview of the temperature response in the mesosphere and lower thermosphere to solar activity
G. Beig
Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, India
J. Scheer
M. G. Mlynczak
P. Keckhut
Abstract
The natural variability in the terrestrial mesosphere needs to be known to correctly quantify global change. The response of the thermal structure to solar activity variations is an important factor. Some of the earlier studies highly overestimated the mesospheric solar response. Modeling of the mesospheric temperature response to solar activity has evolved in recent years, and measurement techniques as well as the amount of data have improved. Recent investigations revealed much smaller solar signatures and in some cases revealed no significant solar signal at all. However, not much effort has been made to synthesize the results available so far. This article presents an overview of the energy budget of the mesosphere and lower thermosphere and an up-to-date status of solar response in temperature structure based on recently available observational data. An objective evaluation of the data sets is attempted, and important factors of uncertainty are discussed.
211 (Leif)
Ah but the PDO is of course entering a cold phase because the Sun is weakening and producing a long cycle 🙂 It has mainly been people tracking the evolution of Cycle 23 who have predicted global cooling on the basis of its being long, and it is cooling unless there’s a remarkable turnaround in the next year or two. You may of course be right that the Sun is nearly irrelevant to climate, but it seems to me that it is a more primary cause than an oceanic oscillation which hasn’t been measured long enough to know if it is even a proper oscillation (there were discussions on this a few months ago). Chickens and eggs could survive without the PDO but not without the Sun! (OK, I know you’ll say the Sun is a constant good so again irrelevant etc.)
Now a point for Erl. When I wanted to understand how CO2 and solar cycle length might play together in climate, I built a linear model from them and achieved an R^2 of 0.9. If you believe the aa index is vital to tropical temperatures, why don’t you try to build a linear model similarly? It would be a very good way of assessing the statistical strength of your assertions, admitting as always that correlation is not necessarily causation. The R language is very convenient for doing this sort of thing.
Rich.
229 (Rich): You are conveniently forgetting that cycle 20 was also very long and yet when it ended in 1976 the GW took off.
230 (Leif) The PDO flipped to a warming phase then, too. I still think the answer is going to be in how the Pacific Ocean absorbs and stores heat from the sun. I know the PDO is recently characterized, but it strikes me that it is approximately three solar cycles long. If something about the sun alternates cycles, such that one cycle puts more energy into the earth than the other, then alternating PDO’s would have alternating cool and warm phases as we see. Lo and behold, the shape of the cosmic ray peak at maximum alternates solar cycles from peaked to flattened. I know you have pooh-poohed this idea before, but it is a simple mechanism.
==========================================
Steve: snip – I’ve asked that Landscheit not be discussed here
kim,
Chaos. Butterflies. Things that look cyclic aren’t necessarily. It also makes looking for causal relationships based on correlations very difficult, especially when it might well be a combination of things. Even worse, it might not even be the same combination of things every time.
Steve: I try to focus on studies relied upon by IPCC and discourage the discussion of idiosyncratic theories.
231 (kim):
No, it is only a mechanism if you explain how it works in some detail.
Leif, you left in cold water both camps 🙂 : Sun worshipers loosed their favorite narrative “it’s the Sun stupid”, correlations, Maunder minimum equals Little Ice Age etc. On the other hand AGW believers loosed THEIR favorite narrative – “it was Sun since Big Bang until 1977, but then suddenly human CO2 took over”…If Sun never drove climate, i.e. TSI/temperature correlation never existed it is completely useless to prove that that correlation doesn’t exist now, or from 1977 onwards.
Maybe only Roy Spencer escapes the problem – he assume basically that no external “forcing” (solar or greenhouse) is needed to explain most of the temperature changes in last century, but only chaotic internal variability of the climate system.
But there is one more thing. If I correctly understood, you think that no SINGLE solar mechanism can satisfactorily explain temperature changes, but combination of two or more solar effect (say, TSI small variations and variations of CR flux) can?
Steve M, 234, I am affraid your explanation for refusing to discuss some stuff is inconsistent (I think it would be better to simple say “this is my blog”, then to give that “I-examine-only-consensus-views” excuse). You initiated lengthy discussion about Loehle reconstruction here at CA. Fraternity at Wikipedia doesn’t allow even to notice that reconstruction in the main article on MWP, because E&E is not “reliable source” !? I bet they will certainly mark Loehle paper as idiosyncratic (an even worse than that, be sure 🙂 ) What kind of “consensus view” represents Loehle to qualify for auditing here?
Steve: The rule has also been related to my ability to moderate discussion. I am intimately familiar with proxies; Loehle was a discussion of proxies, which has been my specialty and thus I was in a position to analyze it. I guess in that sense it’s a bit of an exception, I guess, but only because it was in my direct area of expertise. It’s hard enough retaining a scientific focus. I don’t want the bandwidth here occupied with everyone’s pet theories and, as an editorial decision, I’ve tried to develop an editorial policy to exclude them.
236 (Ivan):
228 (Leif):
#234
Fair enough. BTW Congratulations on your’s and Ross’s work on the MBH98. I have been following the AGW stuff 10 years and its great to see cracks appear in the IPCC fortress. I only found this site a few days ago.
Along comes another alignment, up goes the magnetic activity and the solar wind, I go outside, the sun is no brighter, but boy is is it hotter. I look on wunderground.com, same thing everywhere, strange eh?
229 (Rich)
Rich the aa index conveniently represents the strength of the solar wind but this is one of two variables responsible for the interplay of short wave radiation with Earths thin atmosphere. The other is sunspot activity. Manifestly temperatures in cloud bearing layers in the upper troposphere over the tropics are affected. Apart from the thin band of dense cloud at the inter-tropical convergence, albedo in the tropics is slight and it is due entirely to this almost transparent band of light cirrus at high altitude. The coming and going of this cloud layer obviously relates to the temperature of the air there.
An arbitrary index constructed by adding 10% of the annual sunspot number to the value of the aa index of geomagnetic activity comes close to capturing much of the variation in 200hPa temperatures since 1948. Now, correlation is not causation but I would be pretty happy with this particular relationship.
In quiet times there is a near perfect correlation between temperatures at 200hPa and sea surface and specific humidity at 850hPa in that part of the tropics where albedo is least and radiation greatest (10°S to 20°S). Specific humidity relates broadly to sea surface temperature. If 200hPa temperatures do not gyrate outside of a certain range, the cloud comes and goes, the ocean cools and warms and not much happens in terms of long term temperature trend.
But there are complications. Neither sunspot activity or the solar wind are given to variation within the range that would produce fairly stable temperatures. Other things come into the picture too. During solar cycle 20 the stratosphere was much affected by volcanic activity and large gyrations in the solar wind. A succession of ever deeper La Nina events drove sea surface temperatures in the tropics very much lower. The atmosphere was heavily dried out. Relative Humidity fell away. Along comes the relatively massive increase in sunspot activity of cycle 21 and a big jump in the pressure of the solar wind and the massive El Nino of 1978. Upper atmosphere cloud in the tropics evaporated and stayed that way until 1997. That was what solar cycle 21 and 22 were about, a heavy increase in the temperature of the tropical oceans (surface temperatures in the tropics up less than a degree but and about a four degree increase in winter temperatures at the surface polewards of 70°Latitude in both hemispheres). The lack of warmth in the ocean at the beginning played its part in this scenario.
It appears that the same thing occurred in solar cycles 16 and 17.
Australian rainfall has increased since 1900 as the ocean has warmed and with it specific humidity. But, when we have an episode of short term tropical cooling, rainfall jumps and this is the situation at the moment. Very cold temperatures and lots of rain. But when tropical temperatures are driven upwards in a sustained fashion rainfall increases with temperature. These are two very different regimes. You can see them in this graph:http://i249.photobucket.com/albums/gg220/erlandlong/Australianrainfall.jpg
When we have the sort of climate data that we have today over 20 solar cycles rather than four or five we will have a better idea of what it is all about. Meanwhile we can guess a bit. With the residual heat built up in the ocean and the current fall in 200hPa temperature to the point where it has never been lower, many places in southern Australia should set their all time rainfall records this winter. A good start has been made already.
The following Figure compares solar irradiance (TSI) and surface temperatures. The TSI curves are reconstructions by myself [using my corrected sunspot numbers] and by Dora Preminger [using sunspot areas] Temperatures are Central England Temperature (CET) and HADCRU anomalies added to the average of CET where they overlap. Eleven-year running averages are used for all plots. The top panel is typical of the cherry-picking one often sees [although I would be suspicious of temperature apparently preceding TSI by about 10 years] and seems to show a solar background effect [both sets of curves rising and falling together, sort of]:
The bottom panel expands the time frame to 1700-present and shows quite a different picture. Any comments?
Re Leif 242:
Why is it that your global temp doesn’t show a downturn like the ones shown here?
re 243 Patrick M.:
and here
(197) Leif:
Leif, I apologize if this has been discussed already (and if it has been discussed, please ignore it).
With the earth’s decreasing magnetic field, the earth is subjected to increased amounts of solar radiation. Could this induce some warming of the earth?
Mark
link
244 (Patrick): because my curves are simply 11-yr running averages so the last 5 years don’t have any data points. I don’t try to ‘invent’ data for the last 5 years.
245 (MarkT): the Earth’s magnetic field does not influence the amount of solar irradiance received at all. There is a small increase of geomagnetic activity [GA] as a result, but as GA has not been shown to have any measurable effect, a small change in GA will not have any effect either.
#242
A certain amount of inconvenient divergence there.
Seems the unresolved issue is clouds (or lack of) blocking solar, not changes in incoming solar. How bout them clouds?
Good policy. In contrast to …
Leif, you were a co-author on:
Wilcox, J. M., et al. (1979), Inter-Planetary Magnetic-Field Polarity and the Size of Low-Pressure Troughs near 180-Degrees-W Longitude, Science, 204, 60-62
which showed significant circulation responses to solar magnetic variations on daily time scales. Have these findings withstood the test of time? Do you have any thoughts on possible mechanisms?
259 (bender):
This was for the temperature. Now, for the sunspots and TSI, I am in the prediction business, so I have extended the TSI curve with my [low] predicted cycle 24 values. I consider that somewhat legit, given my prediction track record and the Sun’s cooperation [so far] with my SC24 prediction.
250 (Jesper): The effect went away when more [newer] data became available [this has somewhat tainted my attitude towards the solar connection 🙂 ] as solar effects are wont to do. According to Brian Tinsley [google him and ‘wilcox effect’]] the effect has come back – actually comes and goes, seemingly depending on the amount of aerosols aloft. I have not followed that up in any detail. Brian is a careful worker.
248 (bender):
kind of along the lines of what Lockwood and Froehlich have been saying lately.
242 (Leif) Your graph shows a big departure of temperature trends (by either measure) from TSI from 1978 or thereabouts. Temperature is not following TSI. That should be the death knell for that particular hypothesis.
Here is a different way of looking at changing temperature. Using http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/Timeseries/timeseries1.pl, we have surface temperatures for specified bands of latitude between the North and the South Pole. I compare the earliest with the latest decade. http://i249.photobucket.com/albums/gg220/erlandlong/Surfacetemperaturesglobe.jpg
For a start notice the small proportion of the total that will support plant growth with an average temperature greater than 15°C all year round. That limits the productivity of the farm.There is that big seasonal swing in the northern hemisphere and a lot of the southern hemisphere is just too cold all the time.
Lo and behold:
• Very little warming in the most populous zones of the northern hemisphere. Cleaning up the air in Western Europe has reduced haze and increased penetration of solar radiation to the point where that alone should cause a rise in temperature. But it is not happening when we look at that latitude band in its entirety.
• More warming at 0°-20° latitude in summer in both hemispheres than at 20°-50° latitude.
• Strong warming in winter in both hemispheres pole-wards of 50° latitude. A warmer ocean perhaps?
• At 20°-50° latitude in respective summers the warming is greater in the Southern hemisphere than the Northern.
• Cooling in the high latitudes of the southern hemisphere in summer. Looks like the animals that like cold will have a secure habitat there for a while yet.
We should always look at the patients spots before making the diagnosis. There are the spots. What’s the diagnosis?
I think we can rule out the greenhouse hypothesis first up. Any disagreement on that?
#242
I’ve seen that divergence since ~1990 also. Much of the warming that has taken place in recent years has been largely in the NH over land. So it may well be that there is a solar climate correlation more generally that breaks down in recent years because of the presence of exogenous factors, not because the preexisting relationship was never there, or has vanished. I.e., no one should be saying that warming is only related to solar activity, just as no one should be saying that is related only to AGW. I think some of the warming over land in recent years is “real” (I can see it in the satellite data) and some of it owes to measurement issues (in the surface record). Some of may be UHI, land use cover changes, and similar anthropogenic regional influences that have accelerated in recent years, masking the solar fingerprint. 😉
(245) Leif;
Leif, thanks for your response. However, I’m still missing something here and I apologize (I’m not a scientist). The magnetic shield is decreasing which means the earth is receiving more solar radiation ( this according to that NPR link I posted in my earlier post). How can there be no warming if the earth is receiving more solar radiation?
Mark
256 (MarkT): Your confusion comes from the word ‘radiation’. The correct usage is that radiation means electromagnetic [and possibly gravitational] waves. For historical reasons, cosmic rays or radiation is also called radiation [people 100 years ago thought they were], even if they are not. They are high-energy particles [mostly protons]. And, yes, more cosmic rays are reaching the Earth’s surface at lower latitudes with a weaker field. According to the cosmic ray enthusiasts that should mean more clouds and cooling as the Earth’s magnetic field weakens and lets in more cosmic ‘radiation’. Sort of the opposite of what is observed if yoy believe in GW.
257 (Leif);
Leif, got it. Thank you.
Mark
255 (Basil):
So, solar climate correlation is there, except when it is not …
The PMOD folks updated all of their TSI data to about mid-July at the end of last week.
TSI still declining down to about 1,365.1 W/m2 now (0.3 or 0.4 below the lowest levels of the last two cycles.
Perhaps Leif can tell us what else the update tells us.
ftp://ftp.pmodwrc.ch/pub/data/irradiance/composite/DataPlots/org_comp2_d41_61_0807_vg.pdf
ftp://ftp.pmodwrc.ch/pub/data/irradiance/composite/DataPlots/
260 (JohnL): I have great respect for Claus Froehlich, but I’m not sure that the PMOD calibration is correct [I also do not know if it is wrong]. For my own work, I take the average of all TSI series [with 4.7 W/m2 added to SORCE] as long as the experimenters are quarreling about who is right. Various people (Foukal, Lean, DeWitte, …) have modeled TSI using other solar parameters [sunspot numbers, MgII, …] as input. These models were quite good up to a couple of years ago, but now doesn’t fit as well anymore, especially for PMOD. Does this mean that PMOD has strayed or that the models were not so good after all? At this point we don’t know. Froehlich thinks that TSI somehow is linked to the magnitude of the interplanetary magnetic field [IMF B]. See:
ftp://ftp.pmodwrc.ch/pub/Claus/SORCE_Feb2008/SORCE2008_cf.ppt
ftp://ftp.pmodwrc.ch/pub/Claus/AGU_SPD2008/AGU_SPD2008_cf.ppt
If correct, he suggests that IMF B during the Maunder Minimum was 10 times smaller than now and that therefore also TSI was correspondingly lower [explaining the LIA]. This is not at all clear, and I think he is wrong on that [obviously 🙂 ], but this is an ‘unsettled’ question as of now. The simplest explanation is that the PMOD calibration is off.
The SORCE TSI data is continuing to decline as well (maybe a little less than the PMOD composite). Might have to wait till the current cycle bottoms out in a few days to see how much it continues to match PMOD.
http://lasp.colorado.edu/cgi-bin/ion-p?ION__E1=PLOT%3Aplot_tsi_data.ion&ION__E2=PRINT%3Aprint_tsi_data.ion&ION__E3=BOTH%3Aplot_and_print_tsi_data.ion&START_DATE=1640&STOP_DATE=2050&TIME_SPAN=6&PLOT=Plot+Data
261 (Leif): For best viewing of the Powerpoint presentations press F5 to go to ‘Slide show’ mode.
262 (JohnL):
I have great confidence in the calibration of TIM (SORCE, LASCO) as it is done by comparison with a set of unvarying stars and can be checked five hundred years from now [was so designed]! Here is the difference between PMOD and TIM as a function of time since the start of the mission:
I see a steady decline of PMOD by 0.0186 W/m2 per year with some ‘gruesome’ excursions, especially the last few months. Take your pick who you will trust.
#259 Leif
Cute, but it is not what I was saying. There is such a thing as “multiple regression” you know. Why must a correlation between sun and climate be always and only visible in a plotted univariate relationship to be considered valid? Not even the AGW hypothesis requires this standard of “proof.” I.e., I can imagine a strong AGW proponent saying “yes, there is a sun-climate connection, but it is now being dwarfed by the onset of fossil fuel induced AGW.” You yourself have said, more or less, that there are lots of little things that might be going on here, none of which dominate. A priori, there is no reason why at some points in time some of the little things dominate over other little things, and at other points in time things change. That’s pretty much a working definition of “messy,” don’t you think?
With enough averaging (implying a long enough “time constant”) it is pretty easy to show a significant correlation between sun and climate. It is conceded, I think, that there are some corresponding episodes of low solar activity and lower temperatures, at least on some time scales. If at other times, or on other time scales, the climate warms while solar activity declines, it doesn’t necessarily disprove the connection that seems evident at other times or on other time scales.
I sense a bit of an inconsistency here. On the one hand, you’re the first person to insist that the sun is messy, the data noisy, and that lots of little things may be going on, none of which dominate (and which may change over time). On the other hand, you want anyone who thinks there is a sun-climate connection to present you with evidence that is not messy, noisy, time varying, or multivariate. I imagine this is a reasonable expectation of those who, to you, seem to be saying that their theory is “the one.” But not everyone who sees evidence for a sun-climate relationship is doing that. I think the basic difference here is that you are agnostic about a sun-climate connection, at least on anything less than millennial time scales. Others are not. And that is not (necessarily) because they’ve bought into simplistic theories of a sun-climate relationship.
265 (Basil): Indeed, but you miss my point, which is that how do you know when and if what you see is due to the Sun? Just because for a while the curves track does not mean that there is no other parameter that also just happens to behave that way that is the culprit, and that it is that one and not the Sun. You are not allowed to [like Erl] cherry pick what happens to match what you would like. Unless you have a reason for a claimed association you cannot say that something is established. And the ‘what else?’ argument is really not valid.
264 (Leif): You might see an annual signal, where the difference is largest around December-January and smallest June-July. There can be many reasons for this, e.g. that the angle with which the radiation strikes the instrument changes a bit, or a different response to the varying distance [gives a 90 W/m2 difference], or whatever. I’ll not try to be an instant expert on this, but such annual cycles are clearly instrumental [or data reduction related]. Rest assured that everybody involved with this is thinking hard about this, as well as to why there is a 4+ W/m2 difference in the first place. We’ll just have to await what they come up with [if anything].
231 (Leif)
Leif, no I’m not – my model allows for CO2 warming at a sensitivity of 1.4C, and predicts a warming from Cycle 20 to Cycle 21 of about 0.06C compared with the observed 0.09C. But Cycle 20 was a mere 11.6 years long, whereas Cycle 23 is going to be longer, and if it is say 13 years long that will lead to a net cooling of about 0.2C. I don’t rule out unmodelled non-linearity which would lead to greater cooling, as that did happen in Cycle 14.
Here is a table from my paper on the CA Forum (Data = HadCRUT3 11-year average).
Cycle Cyclen Max.y Data Model L4 Error Model L5 Error
10 11.2 1860 -0.41 -0.37 -0.047 -0.42 0.007
11 11.7 1870 -0.33 -0.45 0.127 -0.42 0.096
12 10.7 1883 -0.28 -0.35 0.074 -0.36 0.081
13 12.1 1894 -0.37 -0.38 0.009 -0.35 -0.017
14 11.9 1907 -0.50 -0.37 -0.127 -0.40 -0.102
15 10.0 1917 -0.37 -0.32 -0.051 -0.32 -0.054
16 10.2 1928 -0.25 -0.22 -0.037 -0.17 -0.078
17 10.4 1937 -0.08 -0.13 0.044 -0.13 0.045
18 10.0 1947 -0.12 -0.11 -0.007 -0.11 -0.006
19 10.7 1957 -0.12 -0.12 0.003 -0.11 -0.008
20 11.6 1968 -0.11 -0.09 -0.017 -0.11 -0.002
21 10.3 1979 -0.02 -0.03 0.007 -0.06 0.033
22 9.7 1989 0.11 0.09 0.021 0.11 0.005
268,229 (rich):
You claimed:
suggesting that a long cycle is at the start of a cold phase, which it was not. What got me was the ‘of course’, which is not warranted, in spite of the smiley.
#269
Assuming you buy into the idea of warm and cold “phases”, many experts say PDO went negative in 2006. In which case it is not “entering” a cold phase; it’s already there. To suggest that the sun put it there is highly speculative, would not fit with the long-term PDO record. No one knows what drives PDO, whether it is externally forced, internal, or a bit of both.
266 (Lief)
Is any expansion on that comment possible? Any comment on #254? Turning a blind eye to the evidence will not advance the discourse.
No, the PDO did not go negative in 2006. Look for yourself here:
http://jisao.washington.edu/pdo/PDO.latest
8 of the 12 months were positive in 2006. Of the 4 negative months, none were below -1.
In 2007, 5 of the first 7 months were positive. Although it should be said they were not that strongly positive, PDO was probably “neutral”.
Starting in September of 2007, we have had 10 straight months of negative PDO values, 6 of which were stronger then -1.00, including the last 3 months.
It is still probably too early to say for sure that it has changed long-term, they thought that it had changed in the late 1990’s, but it did not last. Time will tell.
271,241,229 (Erl):
What I am referring to is:
You see things that seem to appear here and there [‘evidence’] and everywhere with no explanation of why they are absent [e.g. in cycle 18-20] or why they should occur in the first place [how does increased solar wind pressure lead to an El Nino?]. You ignored Rich’s suggestion of a more rigorous statistical treatment [I know that is harder than eye-balling, but such is science].
Scientists [especially me] can be very pigheaded when the normal standards of scientific discourse is not followed. With your ‘approach’ you explain everything [“lo and behold”] in retrospect. If a prediction [if such is made] does not come true, do you go back and identify the explanation that was at fault and why it failed? More likely, you just ‘move on’ because the system ‘failed to respond’ and therefore is not interesting. Except that it are the failures that are of most interest, not the successes, because failures may point the way to improvements.
Like you said in 221:
So, was this a unique event or is it so at the start of every vigorous solar cycle? If the latter, how vigorous does the cycle have to be? Quantify this. Etc.
As per Steve’s admonition it is hard for me to see how any of your speculations may be of interest to a follow up on IPCC or to policy makers. Now, there is other stuff people have been advocating here that also may be on vanishing interest and possibly I have been to ‘lenient’ in allowing discussion. I may disagree a little bit with Steve in the sense that I think it useful to also expose to a wider audience how things should not be done, as long as we don’t get lost in irrelevant detail and try to keep our eye on the real ball. I am guilty of wasting bandwidth on this, I know.
Erl, it is hard to be a lone voice, and some of your stuff is fascinating but a bit incomprehensible and therefore outside of the bounds that have been set for this blog.
#272
No kidding.
If you like, I will dig up some quotes for you suggesting a different interpretation of the exact same data.
But this is not a matter of what some self-appointed authority says. It is a matter of how data are interpreted.
Your authoritative tone is offensive. I did not suggest PDO went negative in 2006. I merely said that there are many experts suggest that it did.
So, yes, time will tell. After the fact. As usual. Which was precisely my point. Good day.
Put it this way. When is it ever NOT “too early” to say?
Never? I rest my case.
274 (bender): your ‘Good day’ didn’t sound too friendly either. Hey, no one has any idea of what to expect wtr to the PDO and even how to interpret its finer details, so we can all cool it a bit, shall we?
Better, I’ll give you an example from your own data. Look at the warm values in the late 1950s. Do those positive values prevent people from saying, after the fact, that PDO “went negative” in the late 1940s (up until 1975)? No. So maybe it DID “go negative” in the late 1990s (as you say some suggested) and the positive values for early 2000s are a brief exursion from an overall persistent negative state. Depends how 2008-2030 shape up. “Time will tell.” Indeed.
I reject your rejection.
#276
Tit for tat. Someone wants to play authority with me, let them stand up to the heat.
Snip if you like. It’s the substance that matters, and I think we can all agree PDO – whatever the heck it is – has zero predictability, and that was precisely my point.
278 (bender): I’m not going to snip, rather to urge you to have some self-discipline and avoid ‘tit for tats’, ‘Good day’, ‘offensive’, the list goes on…
273 (Lief) #254 was about facts, data and interpretation, not what you call ‘speculation’. If you choose to ignore it, while offering the sort of criticisms that you do, never requesting clarification point of what may appear to be a dubious statement, no progress is possible.
#254 is about making a start based on a common understanding of what has happened in the recent past. Its an attempt to get you to face reality.
280 (Erl): From #254:
A beginning like that, turns me off right away [bender might have had a fit with that tone]
This look like ‘the system failed to respond’ to me. What is this evidence of?
Well, wouldn’t one expect the tropics to be warmer? What is this evidence of?
Ain’t much ocean northwards of 50° latitude, compared to SH. What is this evidence of?
Is this evidence of solar climate control?
Is this evidence of solar climate control?
I really don’t want to have a long post with all the answers, unless they are different from what you have posted in the past. And even then, I don’t see this blog as the vehicle for such. Maybe you can more ears at the BB, or on David Archibald’s web-host.
#266 Leif,
Fair enough, to a point. This is indeed the sticking point. With this standard, I could show an exact correspondence over an unlimited period of time between a 22 year period of solar activity and 22 year oscillations in climate, and absent “a reason for [the] claimed association” you could say that it is not “established.” And you would be right. But we’d certainly be justified in looking for a reason:
The jury is still out, and nothing has been “established” as to the exact mechanism involved, but this only means that we don’t understand the sun-climate relationship very well, not that there isn’t one.
282 (Basil):
The exact mechanism is much too strong. I would have preferred to simply omit ‘exact’ to be more in tune with reality. The jury has been out almost 400 years. For me, that is long enough to declare a mistrial. I would also change we don’t understand the sun-climate relationship very well to we don’t understand the sun-climate relationship at all.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I would absolutely love if the were a sun-climate relationship. In the past I have been an author or coauthor of several papers investigating this [even claiming one]. As things stand today, I find that I cannot with my integrity intact support a sun-climate relationship. This standpoint is subject to revision at any time should a compelling case arise.
Leif, I recently saw a comment on another blog that went like this:
The transfer of energy proceeds from warm surface to cool surface. Anywhere near the coast, surface air temperatures follow sea surface temperatures. Ask people in Alaska whether this is the case or not. Water evaporates and cools itself or anything that it is in contact with. Without the heat that is carried from the tropics by ocean water much of the northern hemisphere would be much colder and drier than it is today. Consider the last winter experienced in Canada and China. The next will be even more severe. Doubt this? Then check out sea surface temperature anomalies today, against a year ago.
Are you a swimmer? Why is the surface water in the shallows always warmer than the surface water over the deep, even when the deep is only a matter of metres away?
If you can not see that the pattern of temperature change at http://i249.photobucket.com/albums/gg220/erlandlong/Surfacetemperaturesglobe.jpg
is due to direct solar heating of the tropical oceans and the transfer of warmth by ocean currents rather than down-welling radiation from well mixed anthropogenic gases there is not much I can do.
If you have difficulty acknowledging that the range of temperature fluctuation at 200hPa, which can be several times that at the surface, is due to a solar influence rather than heating of the atmosphere by the Earth is there any point in asking you to consider anything that confronts your orthodoxy?
If you can not see that a fluctuation in temperature at 200hPa is going to affect tropical albedo, already a well acknowledged relationship, not something off the top of my head, there is not much point in putting forward anything that relies upon that relationship?
If you can not conceive that the pressure of the solar wind might shift atmosphere from the dayside to the nightside so establishing a link between geomagnetic effects and atmospheric temperature at 200hPa and at the surface in the tropics, a link that is plainly observable when you graph the two together, then I guess that I have hit the wall.
If you can not conceive that tropical warming events, a world wide phenomena intimately related to the progress of global temperature, can not be due to ‘internal oscillations of the climate system’ but must be associated with the acquisition of extra energy from ‘somewhere else’ we have a problem with logic that is very hard to overcome. Albedo and cloud cover are things that seem to be unapproachable. Why?
I have a flat coated retriever who occasionally decides that she is not going anywhere She sits down will not move. I guess new ideas are simply not on. Its not a problem of my poor expression at all.
These ideas are central to shifting the focus of IPCC panels towards a more realistic assessment of the causes of climate change. We must first describe the change. It is not adequately described by central England temperatures or some global average. Good science begins with accurate observation and careful measurement.
Lief,
I remain grateful in the extreme for your courage, generosity and endurance in hosting this discussion. It’s been a champion effort.
285 (Erl): Nevertheless, you have not made your case convincingly and have hit the wall, regardless of my orthodoxy of stringent approaches.
#284, great post Erl, very well said.
Erl: can you point me to data on temperature trends in the tropics?
288 Jae,
For the broad sweep none better than http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/map/time_plot/
Because the data is presented in annual format you can easily calculate annual averages and that gets you away from the complications involved in the tilt of the Earths axis. Will give you any selected latitude and altitude and lots of variables. Don’t ignore OLR. Over short spans of time it varies with 200hPa temperatures. Over longer time periods it jumps as the Earth cools. That gives the lie to the notion that heating and cooling is due to AGG. the Earth cools when the sun lets it cool.
To see how the Earth behaves differently according to longitude the hovmollers are the way to go at http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/map/time_plot/ You will see that the solar cycle signal presents in lots of variables if you take the time to compare each over the same time period. Unfortunately only five years at a time (at my download speed) before it hits overload. Copy and paste to XL and line them up. Big effort but very worth while.
For an informative vertical section of the tropical atmosphere over time between 10N to 10S look at http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/strat-trop/. A positive temperature anomaly at 200hPa and strong warming at 1hPa seems to be associated with El Nino conditions. However, the current warming at 300 to 500hPa and sustained warm conditions at 1hPa, at at time when the upper atmosphere is usually cool, is possibly due to OLR associated with release of latent heat of condensation, a drying atmosphere and a cooling ocean.
Any problems email me.
289, Erl: Thanks. The first two links are the same.
I found this link and thought it may be of great interest to see the work of Henrik Svensmark, a Danish climate researcher. He has been working for 10 years on a climate heating/cooling theory that agrees well with experimental evidence going back (by indirect geologic and geo-chemical evidence) to 500,000,000 years ago. The theory is is based on the supposition that the climate changes on earth are caused by variations in cloud formations (not the other way around). Further, he has found extensive evidence that the temperature variations on earth very carefully follow solar activity. His correlation to climate change, temperature variations, Global Warming/Cooling, and solar activity over the millennia is tied to the variation in Cosmic Flux hitting our lower atmosphere. What he has found is that if the solar activity is high (magnetic disturbances), this disrupts the cosmic rays hitting the lower atmosphere, thus producing less cloud cover, thus causing more Global Warming. When the solar activity reduces, more cosmic rays hit the lower atmosphere causing ionized gases to form nuclei sites for cloud formation, thus blocking more of the impinging solar radiation, hence reducing Global Warming (Global Cooling).
Svensmark’s data correlates remarkably well with geologic induced temperature measurements (rises and falls of ice ages), with carbon 14 dating (resulting from cosmic ray ionization), and geochemical dating measuring oxygen levels in life forms more than 100 M years ago. What’s further amazing is that the independently measured geologic data showing variations in the earth’s temperature (ice ages and ice melting) correlate with the amount of cosmic rays impinging on the lower atmosphere. Further, the amount of cosmic ray flux from exploding stars that hits our lower atmosphere depends upon what part of the Milky Way Galaxy our solar system occupies as it circles the Milky Way Galaxy during its 250 M year orbit. As the Solar System traverses the spiral known spiral arms, more cosmic ray flux hits the earth (which is modulated by the Sun’s variable magnetic flux) thus causing major climate changes on earth. All this data, i.e., cosmic ray variations resulting from periods when the solar system traversed spiral arms, correlated well with independent geologic temperature data.
Further information on this subject can be found at the following Web Site link.
http://www.global-warming-and-the-climate.com/clouds-and-climate.htm
The base site has a compendium of interesting information. The second movie at the specified link above has a 52 minute Danish TV documentation film (in English after the first 2 minutes), that summarizes the work of Henrik Svensmark, and many others, regarding this theory. The gentleman hosting this website concludes that based on solar activity data, we may actually be heading for a significant Global Cooling over the next 10 to 20+ years, and how this could have a devastating affect on 3rd world countries by reduction in food production (due to Global Cooling). It is well worth the review time to investigate the information on noted link.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&as_qdr=all&q=Svensmark+site:climateaudit.org&start=40&sa=N
291,292 (Steve,jeez): Direct measurements of the albedo shows that it does not follow the cosmic ray flux at all. See, e.g., http://www.iac.es/galeria/epalle/reprints/Palle_etal_EOS_2006.pdf
I was simply pointing out it had been discussed in many places.
294 (jeez): indeed, and therefore we don’t need yet another replication of that discussion here.
Leif,
To be completely fair, if you look at the supporting information for the proposed CLOUD experiment at CERN, it’s not about the total albedo. It’s about specifically clouds below about 3 km altitude. Of course, it’s likely another spurious correlation, but at least there may be some lab data sometime in the not too distant future to support or reject it.
290 (Jae) Apologies. First link should have been http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/Timeseries/timeseries1.pl
The sunspot number for July is out. It is 0.5, the lowest monthly value since June, 1954. Before we make too much of the low solar activity, let’s remember that cycle 19 that followed the minimum in 1954 was the highest ever recorded.
Have there been any cycle 24 spots recently?
299 (BarryW): no cycle 24 spots the last 87 days…
300 (Leif Svalgaard)
Is it unusual to have that quiescent a period after the first spots are seen?
301 (BarryW):
No, check out page 4 of
Click to access Most%20Recent%20IMF,%20SW,%20and%20Solar%20Data.pdf
the second panel shows the transition from cycle 21 to cycle 22, note how long the red line lingered near the bottom [compare to the purple line in the bottom panel].
302(Leif Svalgaard)
Thanks for the responses and your patience.
Leif: Page 4 doesn’t do anything for me. Would you explain it?
304 (jae): Explanation is on page 3. I repeat it here:
Count of active regions with spots for the past few cycles. The count is really a count of days in each full month the region was visible [and no more than 70 degrees from central meridian] and then summed for every region. Yearly smoothed values are also shown as the smoother curves. Different cycles are coded with a different color. The detailed figures show the transitions between cycles. Note that cycle 24 has just barely begun.
#302 Leif,
Yes, the red line lingered near the bottom for a long time, but it was not really a “period of quiescence” like we’re seeing this time because SC 21 was still relatively much stronger than 23 is now. Like you said earlier, and over at Anthony’s, you’ve got to go back to 1954 to find a deeper minimum than we’re in right now. I take well your point of not reading too much into that, but it is still worth noting, and not really quite accurate to compare the current minimum with the transition from 21 to 22.
306 (Basil): I took Barry’s question in #301 to mean ‘quiet cycle 24’. The two cycles progress independent of one another, so I took the question to mean if it was unusual that cycle 24 had not shown anymore activity after its start. And as shown, it is not unusual.
Just a note to say that I have posted to the message board a new topic called ‘Solar Register’ under ‘Surface Data’ where I hope that information re the solar signal in atmospheric data can be notified, discussed, interpreted, explored or even ‘denied’.
307(Leif Svalgaard)
To restate my question, I was asking if the length time where there was no activity for the next cycle after the first spots were seen was normal as opposed to just low activity. Which I think is what you answered. What I was trying to discern was if “false starts” were not uncommon or if cycle 24 was showing some unique characteristics .
#307, 309, Leif,
I looks like you understood Barry’s question correctly. But if SC24 is not unusual in how long it is taking to get up to speed, would it still not be fair to say it waited a little longer than usual to get started at all? I don’t have charts like your page 4 for all the other cycles. Is it common for longer than average cycles to get as deep as 23 is getting before 24 takes off in ernest? I think we are really back to the question of reds versus blues in the plotting of spotless days and solar cycle transitions. Spotless days come from a lack of spots from both cycles during a transition. In terms of your “months since the 10th spotless day” chart, this transition is above the median. It could still turn red, but the odds are against it.
Given that we have to go back to 1954 to find a solar cycle minimum that is this deep, and the above average (median) number of spotless days in this transition, it seems to me that we’re watching something first hand that few of us living have had a chance to experience personally, which makes it kind of exciting, don’t you think? We were both around in 1954, but I was too excited about building my first transistor radio around that time to be paying any attention to the Sun. So don’t spoil the fun by making this transition seem so ordinary. 🙂 I’ll be the first to concede that we don’t know what is going to happen. But if SC24 turns out to be the first of a Dalton style minimum, and if we enter a period of arrested temperature growth, I think a lot of people will be going back to the drawing boards.
310 (Basil):
‘Common’ is a bit vague as we only have 24 well-observed cycles, but as cycle 5 petered out, the year 1810 did not have a single spot before the anemic cycle 6 finally started up. And during the Maunder minimum there were several such situations, so it has happened several times before within the historical record.
Now, I agree that the current transition is exciting. Whether we have to go back to the drawing board, I’m not so sure about. I [for example] have predicted a small cycle 24. Some dynamo models [ http://arxiv.org/abs/0707.2258 ] have predicted a weak 24, and Schatten and Tobiska even ventured that a Maunder-type minimum may be in the works [ http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2003SPD….34.0603S ]. If this has anything to do with the temperature is another matter; personally, I don’t think so [or rather, would not vouch for].
311 (Leif)
How fascinating that the solar cycle drama plays out on human time scales! Tantalizing regularity, yet mysterious irregularities. The sun is a large juicy fruit for consumption by the human mind.
312 (Jesper):
It has been described this way: ‘irregular regularity and regular irregularity’ [by Olaf Hjorter, ~1741]
298 Leif
Leif
I have noticed this as well in terms of an extended low value minimum followed by a very high maximum. It does make anyones predictions (yours or Hathaway’s) a very interesting proposition!
Have been looking at your plots of the B field vs solar wind speed. With a rising trend in solar wind speed and B field while at solar minimum, in your opinion is this an indicator of solar minimum with a potential large rise coming or could it be an indicator of what the B field and solar wind speed might look like in an extended minimum or Maunder type minimum condition. Note I am not making a claim or even asking about an upcoming Maunder Minimum but playing off of some of your other papers where you discuss the relationship between what the sun looks like in a MM and its transitory analog of an extended solar minimum like we are having now.
I know what your papers say but it just find the rise in B field and solar wind speed to be interesting within the context of some early drawings from the MM era of the solar corona’s configuration (the clearly defined bi-polar coronal holes and the symmetrical shape of the corona).
314 (Dennis): The behavior of B and V approaching minimum are not really related to each other. High V comes from coronal holes, while high B comes from active regions [i.e. outside of coronal holes]. In the absence of active regions B seems to rather constant, somewhere between 4 and 5 nT – maybe closer to 4 than to 5. So at each minimum B falls to that ‘floor’ value. Right now [for 2008 so far] average B has been 4.43 nT, and last year is was 4.53 nT. During the Maunder minimum I estimate B to have been 4.15 +/- 0.25 nT.
So, the real question becomes: what makes a coronal hole? Two things seem to be needed:
1. significant magnetic flux from an outburst of active regions [e.g. like happened in 2002]
2. subsequent absence of outbreaks for an extended time [~one year] in the flux left behind from the initial outbreak [e.g. like in 2003]. This allows the magnetic field to spread out and ‘open up’ [dragged our be the solar wind]. New active regions with closed B within the hole area would tend to quench the hole, so it is important that they do not occur in significant measure. Active regions along the boundaries of the hole may help to keep the hole alive if the polarities are right.
Because activity is decreasing towards the minimum, condition 2 is often fulfilled [actually may be found at the end of almost every cycle] giving rise to the well-known ‘recurrent high-speed solar streams’. Because the origin of the magnetic flux in the original hole takes place well away from minimum, the flux is old-cycle flux and probably has nothing to do with the next cycle. This makes the use of the high-speed streams a poor [or non-existent] predictor of the next cycle. Geomagnetic activity [GA] is used as a proxy for the high-speed streams [e.g. by Hathaway], so GA is thus also a poor predictor. In fact, it failed rather spectacularly for prediction of cycle 23. Hathaway ‘cheats’ a bit by enlarging the error bar for that prediction so that the actual value for SC23 was just at the bottom of the bar, and thus allowing him to claim success “within the error bar”.
Now, the shape of the corona is the result of a ‘competition’ between the low-latitude solar fields and the polar fields. To first approximation we can set the low-latitude fields to a constant at every minimum because of the ‘floor’ in the IMF at 4-5 nT. This means that the polar field is the only real determining factor. In 1954, the polar fields were very strong [this allowed them to be measured for the first time], but in 2008 the polar fields are the weakest ever measured. We would there expect the minimum corona of 1954 to be very ‘flat’ with extended equatorial streamers [as observed] and the minimum corona of 2008 to be not nearly as ‘flat’ with significant streamers at mid-latitudes [as observed]. This all makes eminent sense, and its observational confirmation is a strong part of the chain of inferences leading to the modern ‘understanding’ of what is going on.
Leif,
The current area trying to form a Spot seems quite low down for a SC24 spot this early in the cycle. Do you think it more likely a “3% reversed” SC23 Spot?
316 (Pete): I think it is SC24, because it is also a bit too high for a SC23 and then we have 97% (SC24) vs. 3% (SC), but it is fading fast and won’t make it, IMO.
Leif (293) – The following excerpt from Can Earth’s Albedo and Surface Temperatures Increase Together? (Eos, Vol. 87, No. 4, 24 January 2006) pages 37, 43 (per your link @ 293 http://www.iac.es/galeria/epalle/reprints/Palle_etal_EOS_2006.pdf) is puzzling me. Would appreciate if you could shed some light or provide answers to my questions in block caps:
The Role of Clouds
In August 2005, ISCCP global cloud data were released covering 2001–2004, and this most up-to-date set serves to clarify the evolution of the albedo.
The data show that the cloud amount increased by 2–3% from 2000 to 2004. WHY?
In particular, the ISCCP cloud amount data show a sinusoidal behavior over the last 20 years (see top panel in Figure 1),
with a decline in all cloud types from the late 1980s through the late 1990s;
(WHAT HAPPENED? WHAT PROCESS DESCRIBES THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ALL CLOUD TYPES?
SUNSPOT CYCLE 22 MINIMUM WAS 1986.8 – MAXIMUM 1989.6 – SUNSPOT CYCLE 23 MINIMUM WAS 1996.4 – MAXIMUM 2002.2. (source: http://www.ips.gov.au/Educational/2/3/2))
the total then began increasing in about 2000. WHY? WHAT HAPPENED TO REVERSE THE DECLINE? THIS IS NOW WITHIN 2 YEARS OF SUNSPOT CYCLE 23 MAX.
However, low clouds continued to decrease post-2000, while middle and high clouds increased. WHY?
WHAT CHANGED IN POST-2000 THAT CAUSED LOW CLOUDS TO DISAPPEAR AND MIDDLE AND HIGH CLOUDS TO INCREASE?
DO SUNSPOT CYCLES PLAY A ROLE IN THE APPEARANCE AND DISAPPEARANCE OF CERTAIN TYPES OF CLOUDS?
The processes described in the article below may (or may not) be associated with disappearing clouds:
‘The sharp fall in cosmic ray intensity that occurs every 11-years is closely related to the rise in the number of sunspots.’
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2683
Thanks!
318 (Suzanne): You ask many important questions and I do not know the answers to them. The one thing that does look clear to me is that the albedo [and the amount of all clouds] does not follow the sunspot cycle. If some type of clouds [e.g. the low ones] has a decadal variation as is claimed, then that is apparently not reflected in the albedo [nice pun hidden here] which to my mind is what influences the climate, so I’m at a loss as to how the purported solar cycle/cloud/albedo would work. In any case, the data series are not long enough to nail down any correlations.
Leif (319), thank you kindly for your response. Very much appreciated. I am confident that one day we will have the answers that continue to remain elusive.
319 (Leif):
I thought it was the lower clouds that had the most albedo effect. Also, I thought CR variations were believed to affect lower clouds the most – despite the apparent fairly poor correlation between Sun, CR, and clouds. Please clarify what I’m missing or apparently misunderstanding here.
321 (cba): Whatever clouds have the most albedo effect, the actually measured [or inferred, for earlier years] total albedo does not follow the cosmic rays, nor the temperature for that matter. You can, of course, always make the ‘standard’ arguments that the effect of the clouds, or the albedo, or the GCRs, or whatever, is not direct, is non-linear, has a long time constant, is subtle [masked by Man-made global warming], etc, etc. To those, my answer would be “go find a hotter place” 🙂
Leif,
Unfortunately, that seems to be the nature of the knotted ball of twine we have been given to try to sort out. Whether it’s all random chaos driven drivel or whether there is actually some clear signals there waiting for extraction from the noise is probably anybody’s guess still.
Leif, this is just a general question and if you’ve already answered it, let me know and I’ll look for it. How come around October 31, ’03, the TSI dropped to almost 1357 w/m2? It looks as if a large object crossed in front of the sun to cause that drop but I’m sure that didn’t happen.
And are those points in the graph actual data point readings?
Thanks,
Mark
link
324 (MarT):
Around that day enormous sunspot groups were on the Sun’s disk. The active regions spawned one of the largest ever magnetic storms [the so-called ‘Halloween’ storm]. And the points are actual readings. Here is what the Sun looked like:
no wonder TSI was way down.
Steve
Sorry that I missed this. Have you yet found anyone who does this? Just wondering as I am about to get some new software up and running that will allow me to at least start this process.
Steve: Nope. I haven’t even encountered a climate scientist that seems to understand the request.
325 (Leif):
Leif, thank you.
Steve 326
I have found the foundational equations and after I get my software, bring it up and crank through some of this I would like to share it with you in the background and then pass it off to Chris Monocton if it passes the smell test. I am using the book “The Quantum Basis of Infrared Radiation by Loudon”, a graduate textbook in the field. Hint: the two critical equations have a temperature dependency.
Steve: In my opinion, the first chapter of an engineering quality report would be an exposition of the infrared radiation calculations, discussing both CO2 and H2) and any other relevant points, plus the handling in GCMs. This just starts you down the road of feedback calculations, lapse rates etc; there are a lot of important topics. Essentially all the chunks of GCM code need to be described 1) in terms of the scientific knowledge underpinning them; and 2) their impact on the calcs and on model sensitivity.
PS: I don’t know yet what the solution set will show but if it completely confirms CO2 based global warming I will share that as well.
Steve
Exactly, I concur. Every time that I see an exposition on the effects begin with a paeon to Arrihenous I cringe and know that fuzzy thinking is likely to ensue. I also don’t think, based upon what I read in Loudon, that using CO2 columns to do studies of CO2 extinction coefficients is particularly useful in trying to look at what actually happens in the real atmosphere with completely different molecular level interactions.
What I want to do is to do the calculations, lay the graphs out, and then provide the information to the community to pick up and then add the many feedbacks that you describe. I don’t get paid for this so there is only so much that I can do. I can lay out the proper starting point which is the equations of the absorption and re-emission of infrared radiation across the bandpass of CO2.
One thing that I have NEVER seen published anywhere is the differing energy spectrum of the different absorption bands of CO2 relative to the incoming intensity of radiation from the solar blackbody. No more here as this is the solar section but I have often wondered if the variability of the solar flux at short wavelengths may have a disproportionate effect due to the orders of magnitude greater energy level of any absorbed photon at 300 nanometers (oxygen) versus (carbon dioxide) at 18,000 nanometers. We do know that over the solar cycle that the atmosphere expands by several times at altitudes above 100 km and short wave radiation variability or ionospheric excitation are pretty much the only solution sets.
Sunspot cycles linked to SOI?
http://sl.farmonline.com.au/news/nationalrural/agribusiness-and-general/general/sunspots-linked-to-soi/1237781.aspx
Here is a link to an article pertaining to the quiescent sun. This story was picked up by one of Canada’s major newspapers, The Financial Post/National Post, a few days ago. There is a link in the article to the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory’s daily data on solar flux density. Perhaps this ranks right up there with watching ice melt? (Or not…)
http://energy.probeinternational.org/climate-change/global-cooling/solar-radio-waves-could-signal-global-cooling
330 (Dennis):
I did a chart similar to what you mention. It’s all wavelengths (200nm-65.5 microns) showing incoming solar along with clear sky emissions in the IR. It’s Hitran calculations for surface and for 40km incoming LW + SW. I don’t like it much as the peak is very narrow and tall versus the radiation from the absorbers in the atm which are short and fat. This one includes all molecules, not just co2.
If you’d like to see it, I can post it, here or somewhere else.
Leif,
I was interested to read the following at http://www.arrl.org/news/stories/2008/08/15/10265/?nc=1
and wondered if you have an insight into the cause behind what is observed? Does it tell us anything about the behaviour of the ionosphere (and perhaps the neutral atmosphere)over the tropics when affected by the solar wind?
The following is from Scott Bidstrup, WA7UZO, and is so interesting that I thought I should include it in its entirety:
“I live in Costa Rica (EK70rc); at this low latitude, propagation is significantly different than in the States. I have been having a lot of fun exploring those differences; I recently downloaded and installed BeaconSee to watch propagation from the NCDXF/IARU beacon network. And I have noticed something you might find to be quite interesting.
“While monitoring the NOAA space weather Web site, I discovered that when a boundary crossing occurs, there seems to be a mode switch in the propagation I see here in Costa Rica. If the Bz component — the z axis of the solar wind interplanetary magnetic field — is strongly positive on 20 and 15 meters, I see fairly strong signals from the 4U1UN beacon in New York and moderately strong signals from the OA4B beacon in Peru. I can also see a weak signal from W6WX and occasionally KH6WO, and from the ZS6 and 5Z4 beacons in the early morning as well.
“When a boundary crossing occurs, it’s like someone throws a switch — over three or four minutes, 4U1UN fades, the W6 and KH6 beacons disappear and OA4B booms in. The bands will get somewhat noisy until the Bz becomes settled in the decidedly negative, at which point the noise will subside and the OA4B beacon will become so strong I can even hear it in the 100 mW mode. But I can hear practically nothing else on the band, and see the 4U1UN beacon only very weakly. When the bands are in this mode, 10 meters is open to South America, but only to stations in an arc across the middle of the continent from Santiago to a range from Buenos Aires to Sao Paulo — no other stations need apply.
“This bimodality seems to be inversely correlated to solar wind speed: The higher the wind speed, the smaller the effect. It seems to be positively correlated with the proton density — the stronger the proton flux, the stronger the signals from South America.”
334 (Earl):
What happens is well-understood and has been known now for about four decades. To find a ‘clean’ example [easier to explain] I went back a couple of solar rotations. Here is an overview of solar, interplanetary, and terrestrial parameters for a 27-day solar rotation: http://hirweb.nict.go.jp/sedoss/solact3/do?d=2008%2c05%2c30 . There is a lot of information in this plot, so I’ll go a bit slow. At the top you can [faintly] see how the sunspots march across the solar disk [the blue dots]. At solar maximum, this looks like a Xmas-tree [you can even see the solar flares – large red dots]: http://hirweb.nict.go.jp/sedoss/solact3/do?d=2000%2C05%2C11 . It is best to open a second browser window to see this. Under the top panels is the X-ray flux [let’s skip that for now]. Thereunder is a colored bar. Blue and pinkish. It shows the polarity of the Interplanetary Magnetic field [IMF]. Generally, you can see that the polarity has a large-scale structure to it: it stays at the same color [blue = into the sun; pink = away from the sun] for several days before abruptly changing to the other polarity. This is called a ‘sector boundary’ and is a sign that the Earth has passed through the ‘Heliospheric Current Sheet’. Or rather that this HCS has overtaken the Earth as it rotates with the Sun. The Earth is the third rock from the Sun: The big planet you can see in the foreground right is Jupiter. This structure extends through the solar system out to about 100 AU [what happens there is a different, but fascinating, story]. On one side of the HCS we are sampling solar wind plasma from one hemisphere of the Sun, one the other side we sample the other hemisphere. The boundary between the hemispheres is a wavy line on a surface in the corona about a million km from the photosphere. You can see a movie of what it looks like here [in a Mercator-like projection with North Pole at the top, South at the bottom and the equator in the middle]: http://www.leif.org/research/WSO-SS.gif> .
The solar wind speed is low along the boundary [this is also where we see the coronal streamers originate from] and high in the middle of the ‘sectors’ away from the boundary. As the solar wind moves out towards to Earth, the higher speed wind in the middle of the sectors plows into the slower wind and ‘scoops’ up the plasma, creating a compression region that migrates to the ‘front’ of the sector and will therefore [at some distance – like at the Earth] be found just after the boundary crossing. You can see that in the orange, red, and green curves, that show the magnetic field strength, solar wind speed , and solar wind density. When these ‘spikes’ hit the Earth, they create geomagnetic activity [strongest at high latitudes, but felt over the entire surface] as shown by the bottom colored bar-chart [the Kp-index]. The yellow curve between the orange and red curves shows the Bz component and you can clearly see how negative Bz correlates with [creates] higher geomagnetic activity, while positive Bz quenches the activity. When you have geomagnetic activity, the ionosphere undergoes the usual changes associated with GA.
Click on ‘Prev’ or ‘Next’ to see other rotations.
335 (Leif): Oops an extra character. Here is the movie: http://www.leif.org/research/WSO-SS.gif
Leif
Would you mind elaborating on:
It would seem, from the phenomena observed in Costa Rica that change in density /location of ionized material is wrought in the region of the Equator.
337 (Erl): What happens for strong Bz is perhaps best described in this paper:
RADIO SCIENCE, VOL. 41, RS6S08, doi:10.1029/2005RS003399, 2006
Variations in the midlatitude and equatorial ionosphere during the October 2003 magnetic storm
T. W. Garner et al., Center for Ionospheric Research, Applied Research Laboratories, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, USA
Abstract
The October 2003 geomagnetic storm (often called the Halloween storm) was one of the largest storms (as measured by Dst) yet recorded. The storm-induced synoptic-scale changes in the ionosphere’s plasma content and density can be viewed through space weather maps created by objective analysis algorithms. For this study, these maps, which specify the electron density in altitude, latitude, and longitude, are created by the ionospheric data assimilation three dimensional (IDA3D), a three-dimensional variation algorithm of the ionospheric electron density. These maps, representing the average conditions in the ionosphere over a 15 min sampling time, show how dramatically the ionosphere changed during the Halloween storm. Following the southward turning of the interplanetary magnetic field, the dayside electron content is significantly reduced in the equatorial ionosphere between ±18° magnetic latitude and is enhanced poleward of this latitude. This is the expected behavior when the equatorial fountain is enhanced by a strong penetration electric field. In addition, the electron content is significantly increased in the dayside midlatitude ionosphere, which corresponds to a storm-enhanced density (SED) plume. Above 40° magnetic latitude, the dayside plasma content is significantly reduced in the regions adjacent to the SED structure, which enhances the electron content gradient. Electron density maps in the altitude–magnetic latitude plane show an increase in the topside electron densities within an SED plume.
337 (Erl): There is also a good explanation of the ionosphere at low latitudes here: http://www.gisdevelopment.net/technology/gps/techgp0035.htm
Leif
Thanks, That’s a big help.
340 (Erl): Glad to help. OT: we just last night enjoyed your excellent Shiraz 2003.
Leif,
I can recommend the Pinot 05 just released. How was the Malbec?
But, on thread, are you aware of any accurate record of ozone concentration between the 500hPa and 100hPa levels in the tropical atmosphere? Just inspecting the temperature data I suspect a significant concentration beginning at the 250hPa level. Back at #214 you produced a graph of 100hPa temperature. The hump between 1978 and 2005 (bracketing the recent warming episode now complete and waiting for the next) could be mainly due to ozone interception of OLR. A smaller hump appears at 150hPa and a yet smaller one at 200hPa with little evidence at 250hPa and below.
I have a graph at http://i249.photobucket.com/albums/gg220/erlandlong/anomaliesintheuppertroposphere.jpg
I guess that a small concentration of ozone would react to OLR and incoming UVA and UVB.
The interest is due to the known relationship between 200hPa temperatures and cirrus cloud cover.
Leif
The benefit of google: http://tes.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/samplePlots.cfm
It’s an interesting frontier where it is cold enough and dry enough for ozone to exist, and yet wet enough for significant cloud formation. The heating signal seems to be just as substantial at 50hPa but much diminished at 30hPa. Perhaps that is a function of diminishing air density? Any thoughts?
343 (Erl):
“If no thought
your mind does visit,
make your speech
not too explicit.”
Piet Hein, Danish Poet
344. Leif,
A worthy caution. Many a slip twixt cup and lip.
Waking thought for the day: Is it possible that ozone content below the tropopause varies in a systematic fashion. What are the implications if it does? The Tes site looks useful.
344 (Erl):
A small amount of ozone is created by thunderstorms, but not in a ‘systematic’ fashion. Since the UV that can be absorbed by ozone and thereby heating it is already absorbed in the stratosphere and since the ozone amount is so minuscule, I don’t think [or rather don’t know of] any implications as far as weather and climate is concerned.
Leif,
Tropospheric ozone is included in MODTRAN for radiative transfer calculations. The nominal value is 28 ppb. The effect is in the IR, though, primarily the 9.6 micrometer band. As you say, the UV is already gone by then. Below the stratosphere, the effect of ozone would be to increase emissivity and thus lower temperature, I think.
cba 333
Please email at wingod@earthblink.net
replace the blink with link.
Thanks
Leif 346
DeWitt Payne 347
Can we agree that there is a stronger fluctuation of temperature with altitude above 250hPa. That which appeared at 100hPa and continued until 1998 was strong.
I know of only two ways that this can occur but you may be able to suggest others. The first is a change in the composition of the atmosphere so that a receptor suddenly appears. Then OLR is capable of exciting the receptor and causing an increase in temperature. If that receptor is ozone it will also be excited by UVB. The combination of these two exciters will raise temperature wherever ozone appears.
The second way in which gas can be heated is via direct excitation by UVC.
And the third way?
346(Leif):
What about the incessant cosmic ray bombardment? The sky is full of primary and secondary particles up there. I would think that more significant than lightning generated o3.
350 (cba):
Significant for what?
Leif,
How long will SOHO be down? CCD Bake out for about a week now.
352 (JimA): about 10 days total is normal. In the meantime go here for coronal emission:
http://stereo-ssc.nascom.nasa.gov/beacon/beacon_secchi.shtml
353 (Leif)
What do you make of this paper. Sounds a little too simple of an explanation. See it is solar but not now, why they have to put the little AGW disclaimer in there just gets me.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/08/080819092017.htm
DeWitt Payne
On the North-South thread you offered a useful analysis of radiation at the surface by latitude against OLR showing heat transfer between the tropics and high latitudes. Is it possible to obtain data for a north-south transect of the Pacific or the Mid Atlantic and compare with a North South transect through the major continents? Failing that, a global analysis? I have been looking but without success.
354 (JimA):
About that paper. It says:
The late Gerald Bond, was a good friend of mine. We have often discussed his 1,500-year cycles, see e.g. page 4 of http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/news/sns/2003/sns_dec_2003.pdf . What is lacking is compelling evidence that there are 1,500-year solar variations, even though there might be such climate variations.
351 (Leif):
Wouldn’t CR flux be more significant for O3 creation than lightning?
357 (cba): Ozone in the troposphere comes from several sources: downward transport from the stratosphere, lightning, cosmic rays, natural radioactivity, biomass burning, and the big whopper: man-made smog. The relative contributions from these sources vary a lot with geographic location [Los Angeles, Houston, …], season, and altitude. I haven’t seen numbers globally/seasonally averaged, but perhaps somebody has such.
Erl,
I have the one graph and nothing else. It might be possible to do what you want if you had the original satellite observations of OLR. I don’t have them and am not at all sure how one would go about getting them.
Any comments on this? A clear Solar fingerprint?
http://news.research.ohiou.edu/news/index.php?item=503
360 (Bob): see #354 and #356. They see the Bond-cycles, but there is no evidence that those are caused by the Sun. [I know the article says so, but without supporting links]
Leif,
I noticed that the TSI has dropped according to PMOD. I think I recall you saying somewhere in this huge thread (somewhere in the 8 pages) that you don’t consider (I’m paraphrasing) pmod’s TSI data to be that accurate. Can you point me to a source that has the latest up to date TSI data and that is a source whose data you trust? I’m looking for a source that has the most recent TSI data.
Thanks,
Mark
Re #358
Leif, try here: Ozone
362 (MarkT): My contention that PMOD is not correct is based on this:
that shows the difference between PMOD and SORCE/TIM, the latter having an excellent real-time calibration based on a number of unvarying stars [which can be verified hundreds of years from now]. You can get the SORCE data here , click on ‘full mission download’ either daily [my preference] of 6-hourly.
You can see that the PMOD data is decreasing [and that the decrease has accelerated during the last few months. SORCE [and the Sun – 10.7, MgII, SSN, IMF, etc] do not show any marked decrease.
363 (Phil.): Thanks for the link to Ozone. The thing that was of interest [badly expressed] was similar plots of the contributions from different sources. Those are much harder [impossible?] to measure. On the other hand, that is not really my interest, but someone was quibbling about where that Ozone came from [cosmic rays, lightning, what do I care :-0 ].
So, for the first time this cycle one can look at the NOAA page with the last 30 days of sunspot numbers and see zilch, nada, an ex-parrot.
Prior to these 30 days there were 3 slightly spotty days and (I think) 25 spotless days before that. It is a shame that the spotless days page is not kept very up to date, as some of the data would now be looking quite interesting.
Funny how Hathaway continues to insist on everything being normal, like an ostrich burying its head.
Rich.
366 (Rich):
Well, according to the spotless days page there has been 25 such intervals of 30 days or longer since 1849, so it cannot be that unusual. It simply shows that the Sun is returning to its state 100 years ago as predicted.
Rich
go to http://www.dxlc.com/solar for a very nice daily update of solar stuff. No politics, just the data.
364 (Leif):
Leif, thank you.
Mark_T
Dennis (368)
Many thanks, Its like like going through the Websters to find the meaning of “is” in getting data MOST of the time. To be or not to be is the question because is is a to be. LOL sorry a little humor.
Jim
Here is another one from the ham radio world with a lot of good solar links.
http://www.solarcycle24.com
Leif 367
This brings up an interesting point. You have forcefully argued here for an undercounting of sunspots prior to the 1950s and the last sustained sunspot dry spell (cycle 18/19 minimum).
The latest 31 day spotless streak was preceeded by one little bitty spot that was only there for three days with an additional 28 days of spotless behavior prior to that. If that one single spot was missed as would possibly have been the case 100-200 years ago, would this not have been recorded as a 62 day spotless period, which would be one of the longest in recent history.
372 (Dennis): The area of that ‘tiny tim’ was 10-20 milliomth of the visible disk. Such small spots were regularly observed 100 years ago, but not 200 years ago, so there would have been an undercount then. In general, I think that one should not blame the instruments back then [~150 years ago], they were up to the task, but the observer might not have counted the spot even if visible, because, at least Wolf deliberately did not count the smallest spots. There was more than a year without any spots in 1810.
#367 Lief,
Can you elaborate? I.e., as predicted where, or by who?
374 (Basil): Here are some pointers:
Click to access Reply%20to%20Lockwood%27s%20IDV%20Comment.pdf
Click to access Cycle%2024%20Smallest%20100%20years.pdf
Click to access Seminar-UCLA-ESS288.pdf
Might be getting our first SC24 spot in a while. We will see if it holds together. East part of the disk in the low north area.
Re 373: (Leif)
More than a year without any spots in 1 year? Maybe centered on 1810?
😉
377 (Patrick): yes, 21 months without a spot, from Oct. 1809 through June 1811.
Here is the Australian government’s latest solar cycle prediction with the minimum advanced by 6 months. (they still are predicting a cycle larger than CY-23)
http://www.ips.gov.au/Solar/1/6
376 Jim
That is a CY-23 plage area, not looking that good for much of a spot, if any.
Leif
Yea right before Napoleon and the French Army almost froze to death.
381 (Dennis):
Leif
That is interesting in at the same time as it was really cold in Europe the northwest passage was open. Will wonders never cease.
🙂
Hope that you are having a sunny day. Question: What say you on the CY-23/24 minimum now? I know it can still be within your error bars but it is getting close.
Leif
Oh and I really did like that last graph on your August 8 update. Interesting scatter in the spotless days though the graph is a bit busy.
383,384 (Dennis): I’m in sunny California now [back at the scene of the crime]. The 23/24 minimum is [as Hathaway says] progressing normally. My prediction was for July 2008 and we’ll know in 6-9 months time if that is close. Minimum is pure guesswork anyway, so I don’t attach much, if any, significance to my ‘prediction’ for that. I wouldn’t be surprised if it drags out even further. What I really tried to predict was that it would not be earlier than July 2008.
The ‘business’ of the graph is actually important because it shows that things are messy and busy.
Worth noting especially in view of the wave length.
GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 30, NO. 23, 2215, doi:10.1029/2003GL018364, 2003
Thermal response of the tropical tropopause region to solar ultraviolet variations
L. L. Hood
Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, USA
Abstract
Correlative and linear regression analyses of National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) temperature data in the tropical lower stratosphere and upper troposphere confirm the existence of a thermal response to solar ultraviolet variations occurring on the time scale of the solar rotation period. The maximum response occurs near the 100 hPa level (approximately 16 km altitude) at a phase lag of 2 ± 2 days with an amplitude of 0.24 ± 0.07 Kelvin for a change in the Mg II core-to-wing ratio of 0.01 (approximately equivalent to a 4% change in solar UV flux at a wavelength near 200 nm). It is suggested that the observed thermal response near the tropical tropopause is caused by changes in upwelling rates induced by the direct effects of solar UV forcing on photochemistry, radiative heating, and dynamics in the upper stratosphere.
Received 7 August 2003; accepted 7 November 2003; published 11 December 2003.
Erl (386)
Amazing. Thanks for the reference. Wonder what that amplitude is over a solar cycle.
Leif (385)
If you happen to be at NASA Ames sometime drop by and say hi! (I have an office here and am working on a project right now).
Erl
An interesting possible correlation would be to look at what the exact height is above the surface of the desaturation point for CO2 absorption. Since the absorption is temperature dependent, there should be an interesting interplay (feedback) between solar variation and CO2 absorption.
Thanks for that link.
387 (Dennis): Sometime next week. Send me an email with coordinates and a good time.
386 (Erl):
But, note that the purported cause is heating in the upper stratosphere, not direct heating in the upper troposphere.
Leif (389)
Would love to see ya, will be gone to Houston for one day on Wednesday but at Ames the rest of this week. send me an email to wingod@earthblink.net (replace blink with link).
Am working on an interesting problem for lunar images. Have you seen who the new director of CSPAR at UAH is that is taking S.T. Wu’s old job? Looks to be a really good guy.
389 Leif,
Well said. But is the author correct in his guess and could the change in temperature at 100hPa not be due to an ozone excitation by UVB or the absorption of infrared by ice. I can not access this paper. Are we dealing with a positive or a negative correlation between UV and temperature at 100hPa?
The importance of all this is that, with moderate temperature variation (not that which occurred between 1978 and 1998) there is a better than +0.9 correlation between temperatures immediately below the tropopause and sea surface temperatures. Certainly this is the case at 200hPa and I guess also at 150hPa.
Now at http://mls.jpl.nasa.gov/joe/Ruzmaikin_2007.pdf we have this:
We see strong ozone and temperature 27-day variations (relative to their mean values) near the bottom of the stratosphere (100hPa is where their analysis starts). The ozone and temperature modes tend to be in-phase in the lower stratosphere and out of phase in the upper stratosphere.
Thinking about this:
1. If the upper stratosphere is to affect the tropopause via ‘upwelling’ effects (weak given density considerations and the lack of convection in the stratosphere due to the temperature inversion there) the convectional effect will be when upper air temperature rises and that is when UV is least. This just doesn’t add up for me. The whole notion of upwelling is unphysical.
2. We know that temperature in the lower stratosphere is in phase with solar activity over long time scales because the stratosphere cools right down to the tropopause in the absence of sunspot and geomagnetic activity. It is never as compact as at solar minimum.
3. We know temperature and ozone is in phase in the lower stratosphere. But, is temperature and UV in phase on the 27 day scale at the tropopause and below. If it is in phase is that due to creation of ozone in situ? We also know from the Hood study that the temperature response to UV is + or -2 days. That suggests creation in situ to me. Transport mechanisms could not produce this degree of focus.
4. 200hPa vertical velocity and temperature is a meteorological parameter of note. Temperature is in phase with vertical velocity and correlates strongly with heat release in the lower troposphere due to precipitation. It correlates with cloud cover generated over a warm ocean like that in the Eastern Pacific during an El Nino. However, it is anti-correlated with cloud cover over the Maritime continent where ocean warms strongly during El Nino events. The strong correlation between 200hPa temperature and sea surface temperature in the tropics tells us that it is anti-correlated with cloud cover generally. A higher temperature at 200hPa, on a global scale within the tropics, means less cloud, less albedo and more energy reaching the surface. The issues discussed here are therefore vital in terms of climate impact.
388 Dennis,
Hi Dennis,
Your comment is appreciated but I do not have the wherewithal to follow it up.
Ozone absorption of long wave infrared is a big factor in temperature of the stratosphere. You can pick it in Hovmoller diagrams due to the seasonal peak in surface temperature in mid year only because ozone content increases abruptly at 100hPa. With CO2 absorption of long wave do not the models predict an abrupt temperature increase above 500hPa due to the relative elimination of other transport mechanisms like latent heat release at lower elevation.
Dennis,
Did you get the graph and was it of any value?
cba 393
Yep thanks, no time right now to do anything with it though.
Does this tickle your fancy? http://ke2yk.wordpress.com/2008/08/25/solar-cycle-24-canceled-ham-radio-operators-furious/
395 (Erl): Perhaps the Sun has decided to cancel cycle 24 🙂 ?
You may remember the Livingston & Penn paper [rejected by Science] that forecast the total disappearance of sunspots by 2015. They based their claim on a decreasing trend of the magnetic field of sunspots since 1992 that, if continued, would render the contrast of sunspots so low that they effectively would become invisible, but still be there just with a slightly lower magnetic field. There was a tiny ‘pore’ on August 22nd, 2008. Bill Livingston tells me that the field measured in that was 1931 Gauss, essentially continuing the downward trend that they had observed and which led them to predict that sunspots would disappear in 2015…
I personally am not convinced by this correlation, but would invite comments:
JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 113, A08226, doi:10.1029/2008JA013052, 2008
Are changes of the geomagnetic field intensity related to changes of the tropical Pacific sea-level pressure during the last 50 years?
Luis Eduardo Antunes Vieira et al.
Abstract
The influence of solar variability into the lower atmospheric regions has been suggested on different atmospheric parameters in different time scales. However, a plausible mechanism to explain these observations remains unclear. Although it is widely accepted that the climate change over the past 50 years is attributed to human influence, we present the case that local climate change in the tropical Pacific may be due to changes in the Earth’s magnetic field strength. The changes in the tropical Pacific circulation have been observed during the last 50 years, and they are attributed to the increase of the global surface temperature. However, a geomagnetic modulation of the net radiative flux in the southern tropical Pacific was recently suggested. Moreover, comparisons of long-term reconstructions of the Northern Hemisphere surface temperature and solar activity proxies indicated that the existence of a geomagnetic signal in climate data would support a direct link between solar variability and their effects on climate. Here we show that in the tropical Pacific the sea-level pressure, which is a component of the Walker circulation, could be related to the magnetospheric, ionospheric, and upper-atmosphere processes which may propagate downward to the lower atmosphere. Furthermore, we show that the changes in sea-level pressure and the Walker circulation are correlated to the westward drift of the magnetic anomaly. We compare the region averaged monthly values of the sea-level pressure in the tropical Pacific with those of the magnetic field intensity near the surface for the last 50 years. We find that the sea-level pressure in the tropical Pacific is increasing as the magnetic field intensity is decreasing. The correlation coefficient of the sea-level pressure 36-month running means versus the magnetic field intensity is 0.96. We anticipate our investigation to be a starting point for a more sophisticated investigation of the coupling between the space weather processes and lower atmosphere and ocean dynamics.
Received 22 January 2008; accepted 9 April 2008; published 26 August 2008.
Only one question, Leif: autorrelation? Were the time series dominated by one or a few trends? Did the authors correct for autocorrelation in the time-series? If they did not – and even if they did not mention this important caveat – then I won’t even read it. [I am sick of spurious time-series correlations being reported as potential causation. I am even more sickened by the number of reviewers that continue to let this problem slip through peer review.]
398 (bender): I have not had time yet to study it in detail, but I will. What bothers me [and you too, I reckon] is this:
One shouldn’t do that on running means. And your point about reviewers is well taken, too.
396 Leif
Be assured, I am not going to forget that paper. A query though: what will happen to UV wave lengths and how will the characteristics of the solar wind change if/when the sunspots disappear? Are the conditions of the moment a good guide as to what to expect? What happens to IMFB?
397 Just a theoretical viewpoint from an armchair theorist. If the magnetic field weakens near the equator it should have consequences for the ring current and the equatorial fountain effect. If the movement of ions towards an equatorial fountain that is located further from the Equator entrains neutrals and episodically thins the equatorial atmosphere over the affected area it will have consequences for the degree of penetration of that atmosphere by ultraviolet radiation and henceforth temperatures at and immediately below the tropopause. That will affect cloud cover. More radiation should then reach the surface heating the sea. Whether a high pressure area is maintained or not will, I guess, depend upon the balance of forces elsewhere. If the reduced cloud cover occurred over land it would produce a low pressure zone. But, there is a standing, relatively cloud free high pressure zone in the eastern Pacific that could be important as a window to allow sea surface warming and its surface area very probably changes over time. It is a source of warm surface waters for El Ninos. It can be seen at http://isccp.giss.nasa.gov/products/browsed2.html
Is this serious? Any comments please
http://www.globalweathercycles.com/
The author, a meteorologist claims to have found a definite link between changes in the moon gravitational pull on earth over 500,000 years is linked to climate change .. by shifting sea/air pressure areas north and south
vhguerrini
400 (Erl): The magnetic cycle would still be there, so little change in UV and IMF B, and in cosmic ray modulation.
The ring current and the fountain effect have nothing to do with each other. Ionospheric conductivity and currents increase as the Earth’s magnetic field decreases. The reason for this is that a magnetic field in the ionosphere acts an obstacle to ions moving freely.
Re: post 401
I’ve been aware of the globalweathercycles idea for a while because a poster on another forum confused it with my ideas about a solar/oceanic connection involving the recently observed oscillations in each ocean.
On balance I decided that it had little merit because any effect from gravitational influences would be tiny in relation to solar and oceanic influences. Just my personal opinion though.
Leif, assuming there are no sunspots for the remainder of August, will the month get a sunspot number of 0.0 or will they assign a small but positive number given there was a tiny tim for a short period of time?
404 (JohmL): We shall know in a few days 🙂 I don’t know if SIDC decides to count the Tiny Tim after all [if they do (it was observed at one of their stations – Catania), it will count as a regular spot]. My guess is that they will declare a sunspot number of zero.
Here’s one for you Leif:
http://arxivblog.com/?p=596
Do nuclear decay rates vary with the distance to the Sun?? wow?
406 (Bob):
or perhaps with the day of the week? The purported mechanism would be neutrinos [do vary with
distance] interfering with the stability of the nuclei. Very long shot, IMHO.
404 (Lang)
If there are no sunspots in August, as is now almost certain, then since the last spot was recorded on July 20th, this spotless period equals the longest spotless period at the start of the present cycle 23: 42 days.
Then it will only require one spotless week in September to put it into the top 4 of spotless periods since 1849 – see the spotless days page. If one were counting “single spot periods” instead of “spotless”, then we would now be up to about 70 days (but I don’t know how that compares with previous such periods, so we can’t make too much of it).
Solarcycle24.com are quoting David Hathaway as saying this long cycle is all quite normal. And given a long enough perspective that is true. But now perhaps he and you all would like to say after me “global cooling is normal”.
Rich.
Re #404 & 405;
We are now completing the month of August with the ISN numbers at zero for all stations except Catania that reported 2 days of “tiny tim” spots that nobody else acknowledged. Even allowing for Catania’s Wolf number summation for the month to be 24 (one day of 11 and one day of 13) if no one else reported these spots among the average of 17-20 reporting stations, the ISN number would still be less than 0.05 which would round to a 0.
Why is this significant? Because it would be the first zero calendar month since 1913.
409 (aurbo): Brussels decided to count the Catania spot, and the official August sunspot number becomes 0.5, so not zero yet.
410 (me): the latest [private email to me from Brussels] is that they may have some kind of ‘error’ in their automated procedure and that the count might be revised in the future.
Folks
First a tip of the hat to Leif (pronounced life) Svalgaard. We had a wonderful visit the other day and i learned many things always a bonus when meeting someone like him!
Here is an interesting article about high altitude clouds. Not making any claims other than thinking that this is something to be watched for its value to the debate.
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/080901-mm-night-shining.html
It’s being reported by Dailytech that the sun had the first spotless month in a century.
http://www.dailytech.com/Sun+Makes+History+First+Spotless+Month+in+a+Century/article12823.htm
413 (Mark),
Just read the last paragraph from the link I posted and it notes that the NOAA noted a half point spot.
414 (Mark_T): http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/08/31/sun-has-first-spotless-calendar-month-since-1913/ has more on this…
Something for Erl:
GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 35, L17803, doi:10.1029/2008GL034859, 2008
Observed and simulated seasonal co-variations of outgoing longwave radiation spectrum and surface temperature
Yi Huang
Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Program, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, USA
V. Ramaswamy
NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, Princeton, New Jersey, USA
Abstract
We analyze the seasonal variations of Outgoing Longwave Radiation (OLR) accompanying the variations in sea surface temperature (SST) from satellite observations and model simulations, focusing on the tropical oceans where the two quantities are strikingly anti-correlated. A spectral perspective of this “super-greenhouse effect” is provided, which demonstrates the roles of water vapor line and continuum absorptions at different altitudes and the influences due to clouds. A model-satellite comparison indicates that the GFDL General Circulation Model can fairly well represent the total-sky radiative response to SST in the water vapor infrared absorption band despite the significant bias in the mean state, but this comprises compensating water vapor- and cloud-related errors. The analysis also reveals that the GCM significantly underestimates the cloud induced radiative responses in the window region which arises from the model bias in the mean cloud forcing in convectively active regions. Thus, spectral decomposition proves essential to understand and assess the OLR-SST relationship and the impacts of water vapor and cloud upon this linkage.
Re: Leif Svalgaard (#416),
“… model bias in the mean cloud forcing in convectively active regions …”
Interesting bit.
416 Leif,
Thanks for the communication and the reference. It’s much appreciated. I remember a vigorous discussion on this topic some Svalgaards ago.
Re:
I am not sure what the researchers imagine is the reason for the anti-correlation between sea surface temperatures and outgoing long wave radiation. I suspect from their mention of a ‘super greenhouse effect’ that they have got the thing entirely out of whack. My understanding is that OLR is driven by the distribution of land and sea between the hemispheres (peaks in July) whereas tropical SST are driven directly by the annual march of the sun (peaks in February-March at 10°S to 20°S where albedo is least and OLR greatest, driven less by Sun over tropic of Capricorn Dec 21st, or perihelion January 3d and more by the coupling with the magnetosphere on March 21st (controversial I know).
The following three graphs show the relations between 200hPa temperature (reflecting solar influence), 100hPa (reflecting reaction of ozone to OLR) and the behaviour of sea surface temperature, specific and relative humidity. Incidentally, precipitation rate at 10°S to 20°S closely follows relative humidity and sea surface temperature (just a bit of useless info). As you can see from the graphs there is a rise and fall in all the data over the period and these are the years of solar cycle 21 where sea surface temperatures rose by half a degree, a temperature plateau maintained over succeeding years but today on the slide. I think that we would see much the same rise and fall in the data that we can see here over solar cycles 22 and 23. That just shows that if you want to see the solar signal in the troposphere you need to know where to look for it.
One thing that I would like to point out is the fits and starts in the temperature data at 200hPa. Its much less smooth than the data at 100hPa but it is obvious that the data at 100hPa (that exhibits a much greater range) also shows the same fits and starts, albeit softened.
Last bit of information. Cirrus density is anti-correlated with 200hPa temperature in the tropics. That explains the generally very good correlation between 200hpa temperature and sea surface temperature, except when 200hPa temperature goes through the roof as it did in cycle 21. Cirrus is the curtain in window that lets the light in. In this instance I have no hesitation in asserting that correlation relates to causation.
Here is the data:
418 (eRL):
But you agree that there is a striking anticorrelation?
An anti correlation could exist because OLR for clear skies is nominally about 265 w/m^2 which is quite a bit more than the 235 balance point. On the other hand, a crude estimate for low level cloud cover suggests an OLR of around 220 w/m^2 which is below the balance point making the balance point a combination of clear + cloudy sky fractions averaging out around 60% cloudy. if the sst is a factor in cloud creation where a larger fraction of cloud cover is formed by the higher sst, then the effect of more cloud cover could swamp the lesser effect of more radiant energy traveling through to the TOA – creating anticorrelation.
If it were that simple though, one wonders why it would not have been determined. After all, Lindzen’s iris effect is based upon changes in upper level cloud cover generally considered responsible for warming the surface. That seems more complicated to the point that would seem to preclude such a simple idea as having been already excluded. That is unless there were assumptions being made about the constant nature of albedo – which Palle & Goode showed to tbe quite variable.
Leif: any ideas on why this simple response mechanism is just off in the weeds?
419,420 (Erl,cba): If there is general agreement that “the two quantities are strikingly anti-correlated”, then that would catch my interest and I would spend time on it [otherwise not]. So, why question [to everyone] is : “is it agreed that such a strikingly correlation exists?” I don’t want a discussion on ‘whether it exists and why not’.
421 Leif
Here we are talking seasonal correlations.
My figures in 418 relate to the zone 10°S to 20°S where albedo is least and radiation is greatest.
You will want to check the relationship out for yourself. In that case the data for the period since 1948 is downloadable at http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/Timeseries/timeseries1.pl
That way you can define the ‘tropics’ as you please.
OLR at 10°S to 20°S peaks in July as does global temperature in the atmosphere.
Between the Equator and 20°south latitude sea surface temperatures peak in February-March and between the Equator and 20°north latitude sea surface temperatures peak in May. North of 20° SST peak in July. As Palle pointed out the increase in SST in mid year in the northern hemisphere is driven by a fall in albedo consequent upon general atmospheric warming due to radiation by land mass in the northern hemisphere.
The anti-correlation between SST and OLR is strongest south of the equator where irradiance is greatest and the ocean most extensive. If the ocean is a competent and bottomless absorber regardless of sea surface temperature (SST in the 0-20°latitude band is greater in the southern hemisphere than the northern only in the months December to February) OLR will always be lower when the most extensive portion of the ocean is best irradiated.
More important from the cloud cover/atmospheric window point of view is the strong positive correlation between 200hPa temperature and sea surface temperature. Less relative humidity in the zone of cirrus formation means less cloud. Less cloud means less albedo.
On seasonal and annual time scales OLR correlates with the Southern Oscillation Index. A rise in the index indicates a cooling tropics and this is accompanied by an increase in outgoing long wave radiation. When the tropics is covered by cloud incoming radiation is absorbed and reflected in the atmosphere before it reaches the surface. It does not get to be absorbed in the ocean. The ocean goes on emitting at probably a very similar rate to that which existed before the cloud cover increased. Result is a net increase in outgoing radiation.
For a pretty comprehensive treatment of the subject and the consequence of tropical heating and cooling episodes you could do worse than read a paper called ‘Warming and Cooling’ that I have attached to a comment (downloadable)on page three on the Blackboard on this blog under ‘Solar Register’ which is in turn under ‘Surface Record’. At 20 pages its long but most space is taken by 30 figures. Just 5000 words.
Greenhouse theory does not get to first base in understanding these phenomena.
Understand these phenomena and you understand how the Earth warms and cools at high latitudes. Between 1948 and 1978 SST and atmospheric temperature fell in the Arctic Circle and rose by a similar amount between 1978 and 2007. A reversal is currently underway.
The big temperature fluctuations occur where radiation exceeds energy gained from insolation. That is everywhere polewards of 40° of latitude.
421 (Leif):
I’m not sure I have access to the article you referred to in 416 that makes the claim about being strikingly anti-correlated so all I’ve got to go on there is the abstract you posted. Being climate science, strikingly (anti)correlated could mean a value that is just above total randomness.
If it actually is strong or at least significants by typical physics standards then it’s probably something interesting that might lead somewhere. I’d like to believe there is something simple enough to easily get a grasp on that is an obvious negative feedback that swamps the simplistic apparent positive feedback that one sees bandied about and incorporated in models.
Leif, A matter of interest: At http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/114028117/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0
The correlation between tropical total ozone and outgoing long-wave radiation
Victoria Williams *, Ralf Toumi
Imperial College, UK
Abstract
Interannual variations in tropical column ozone, as observed by the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer, are analysed for the period 1979-94 using linear regression to extract signals related to the solar cycle, quasi-biennial oscillation, and El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Using time series of outgoing long-wave radiation (OLR) as a proxy for ENSO variations, rather than the widely used Southern Oscillation Index is found to improve the fit to observed ozone. The variability in the ozone and OLR datasets is investigated using empirical orthogonal function analysis. The most strongly correlated OLR and ozone modes exhibit ENSO-like variability.
Leif,
The relationship between sea surface temperature and OLR in the zone 10°S to 20°S is shown in the figure at http://i249.photobucket.com/albums/gg220/erlandlong/SSTandOLR10Sto20S.jpg . It is apparent that the anti-correlation is indeed striking on a seasonal, annual and even multi year basis.
I deduce that the ocean is a sink for energy and that heating and cooling cycles in the tropics and associated changes in outgoing long wave radiation are the very essence of climate change as we have witnessed it since 1948. There is nothing mysterious about the process. The ocean gains energy from the sun when albedo diminishes. The loss in cirrus albedo over South East Asia during El Nino events has been documented. For the ocean generally to absorb energy, more energy must become available. For the ocean to lose energy all that is required is that the source should be cut off. When temperatures at 200hPa fall as they did from mid 2007 cirrus density increases and the ocean cools.
The link between OLR and total column ozone content suggests the mechanism involved. UV increases, ozone increases, warming occurs in the cirrus zone, cloud diminishes, the ocean absorbs energy and as it does so OLR falls.
Leif,
Looking at http://i249.photobucket.com/albums/gg220/erlandlong/NHandSHOLR.jpg that documents outgoing long wave radiation for each hemisphere (NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis data)I would suggest that the increase in OLR in both hemispheres over the years is due to a reduced albedo, an increase in the amount of solar radiation admitted to the Earth system and a consequent increase in OLR. The difference between the hemispheres could be due to differences in albedo and also some transfer of warmth from South to North.
I never see any discussion of albedo loss as a cause for temperature increases. A greenhouse works by trapping heat in the system. In that circumstance OLR would fall. The data suggests a declining greenhouse effect.
423 (Erl):
Being climate science, strikingly (anti)correlated could mean a value that is just above total randomness.
No, a striking correlation may be, say, 0.9. A striking anti-correlation would be -0.9. Just the sign changed. The anti-correlation is a strong as the correlation. ‘Anti’ here does not mean ‘none’, it means ‘equally strong, but in the opposite sense’.
419 Leif
You asked:
Let’s not get hung up on the semantics. Where the sun radiates most strongly in the tropics and albedo is least, sea surface temperatures fall and outgoing long wave radiation goes up and vice versa. The variables are very strongly negatively correlated. The relationship is relentlessly consistent.
What is important is to understand why, and the implications of the relationship for our understanding of how temperatures can rise or fall and where the change is likely to occur. There is very little change in the tropics but a great deal of change at high latitudes where temperature is dependent on supply of energy from the tropics. So, under a regime of tropical warming, winter temperatures rise strongly at high latitudes.
This is the phenomena reflected in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the Atlantic MultiDecadal Oscillation. The latter fell between 1940 and 1978, rose till recent years but is in my view currently on the turn. Latest data from the Pacific suggests a strengthening La Nina. See http://www.eldersweather.com.au/climimage.jsp?i=soi
428 (Erl):
But everything is semantics, the ‘meaning’ of the words. so, semantics is the only thing that counts [provided the syntax is correct].
So, you are saying that when to tropics gets the most solar radiation and absorbs most [low albedo] that the sea surface temperatures fall. I would have thought just the opposite…
Re: Leif Svalgaard (#429)
“So, you are saying that when to tropics gets the most solar radiation and absorbs most [low albedo] that the sea surface temperatures fall. I would have thought just the opposite…”
In order for a body to cool it must emit more energy than it absorbs. There could be a cause relationship where the increased OLR is the mechanism that cools the SST. The question would be become: what causes the increase in OLR? Since the effect is obviously seasonal it mostly caused by the change in solar irradiance and should be easily explained and not particularily “striking”.
429 Leif,
No. Perhaps I explained myself poorly. Let me spell it out again. At 10°S to 20°S latitude (Where irradiance is greatest and cloud albedo least)the seasonal march of the sun causes the sea surface temperature to rise and fall. However, the knee jerk expectation that outgoing long wave radiation will rise when sea surface temperatures rise is incorrect. That is precisely the opposite of what is experienced.
Leif, are you contesting the relationship? Have you an explanation as to why this relationship is so? Is it something that you would rather not discuss?
430 Raven. The phenomena is driven by the radiation of energy from the land masses of the Northern Hemisphere. In mid year when tropical sea surface temperature falls (because of the importance of the Southern Hemisphere in the tropical mix) the sun is over the tropic of Cancer and outgoing long wave radiation is greatest. The Earth reflects, the sea absorbs. OLR is no respecter of latitude. Much of it emanates from where latent heat is released and that is not at the surface.
The interesting thing is that the phenomena is not just seasonal. Whenever the tropics cool, even over several years, OLR increases.
The point is that ENSO involves marked change in the storage of energy in the oceans. ENSO is climate change in action. More heat absorbed in the tropics ultimately results in increased winter warmth at high latitudes. Temperature at high latitudes depends upon storage of energy by the sea. There is no sun to keep the place warm in winter. High latitudes is where climate change manifests most strongly and the change in winter is what it is all about.
431 (Erl):
No, I was simply asking if the ‘striking’ anticorrelation was what most people would agree to. A simple “Yes” or “No” would have been sufficient. As usual, you lose me with too much verbiage and notions about Semantics.
432 (Erl):
,
again, isn’t this th other way: It is the the increased OLR that cools the tropics, not the cooling tropics that increases OLR. Or is that semantics again? The horse pulls the cart, or the cart pushes the horse…
The late afternoon air of a hot tropic day cools off more quickly then the ocean, this relative difference in temperature creates a greater flow of OLR from the ocean daily. Even over several years of slow atmospheric change, the ocean heat content change is slower, and so OLR from the ocean to the stmosphere increases????
Rdiation is proportional to T^4. If SST rises then radiation from the Sea rises. If OLR is inverse to SST then this means the major component of the OLR is not originating from the sea surface and could be atmospheric re-radiation and this is why the SST is falling because it is receiving less solar irradiation.
433 Leif
Short answer: No
Reason: see 425 and figure within and also 418 and the three figures there.
Analogy. Pour water (energy from the sun) into a cup (the ocean) and it stays there. But if you have the cup upside down before you turn on the tap (the upside down cup will hold no water just as the land will not hold heat) then the water will bounce off the cup (energy will be reflected away from the land) just as fast as it is supplied.
In June, the radiant energy is coming not from the cool ocean but the warm land. The land is half a hemisphere away.
430 Leif
When the SOI rises (cooling event) OLR also rises. This applies at any time scale.
Explanation: The cooling event is a product of increased cloud cover in the tropics. The clouds absorb light energy and send it back as OLR. This will cause a net increase in OLR because the rate of OLR from the tropical oceans varies little over time (as the temperature of the tropical oceans varies little over time).
What varies strongly over time is the heat available to latitudes polewards of 40° depending upon the energy transported by the oceans from the tropics.
437 (Erl):
I did not ask that [couldn’t care less at this point]. I asked if there is general agreement that there is a ‘striking anti-correlation between SST and OLR’ ? Is there? and is everybody on the same page on this? I don’t ask “should there be such, or what causes such”. I had expected a 10-word answer [giving some wiggle room], and would have been satisfied by even a 1-word answer.
When NOAA maps are orange and red (their favorite colors)it is because atmosphere is cooler than the sea so heat transfer proceeds from sea to atmosphere.
439 (Adolfo):
It always does, the atmosphere is heated from below. The atmosphere never heats/cools the sea.
437 (Eri):
I wish Roy Spencer would drop in on this discussion. Perhaps he would say that clouds cause the temperature changes by reflecting OLR downward (low OLR, hi temps) or, if absent by allowing OLR to escape (hi OLR, declining surface temps). IIRC, this was the main argument of one of his recent papers, i.e. that clouds cause temperature change, not the other way around. link
437 (Erl):
I thought clouds reflected the sun’s rays at the topside of the clouds, and reflected OLR back to Earth at the underside. But why is it that I don’t get an answer to #438?
438 Leif
Can’t speak for others. Suggest that the thing to do is to look at the data and make up your own mind. If you dont trust my figures I have given you the site address to access the data.
Will be in Hong Kong for a week. Out of action.
The flow of heat from the oceans can be taken as a constant for the moment.
The question is as to what happens to OLR when clouds interpose themselves between the lower levels of the atmosphere and space.
The effect of clouds is to both increase albedo so that incoming insolation is bounced back out to space again AND to bounce OLR back to the surface again before it makes further attempts to escape to space (but clouds do not prevent that escape, merely slowing it slightly).
So if it is cloudy the total OLR consists of
1) A component bounced back to space by the albedo of the clouds
2) A component filtering through the clouds from the lower levels as part of the normal atmospheric radiative flow
3) A component contributed by a flow of energy from the ocean to the atmosphere and thence to space.
If it is not cloudy the total OLR consists of
1) A component from the lower levels of the atmosphere as part of the normal atmospheric radiative flow.
2) A component contributed by the flow of energy from the ocean to the atmosphere and thence to space.
Thus the albedo effect being missing from the cloudless scenario AND solar energy penetrating the ocean surface and being retained it will appear that OLR has decreased whilst at the same time the sun is warming the body of the ocean (not just the surface).
So as Erl says the oceans are warming but OLR is less.When the oceans are cooling then OLR is more
However, when the oceans are warming then heat is being held back from the atmosphere which then cools. When the oceans are cooling the heat energy is being released to the atmosphere which then warms.
I think there is a confusion in this thread between the temperature of the ocean surface and the heat content of the oceans. When the oceans are releasing energy via an El Nino the atmosphere is warming but the body of the oceans is cooling. During a La Nina the body of the oceans is waming but because that energy is being held back from the atmosphere the atmosphere is cooling. In each case the ocean surface temperature becomes the opposite sign of the net temperature effect on the body of the ocean.
So one expects a cooling ocean with increased OLR (El Nino warm surface but cooling ocean) and a warming ocean from decreased OLR (La Nina cool surface but warming ocean).
BUT the two processes involving the OLR effect of cloudiness and the OLR effect of El Nino/La Nina are entirely seperate and that has certain implications beyond the scope of this post.
That’s given me a headache so I’ll stop now and someone can tell me if I’ve made a silly error in the logic.
That´s right..like in the old good days (before the GW´s preach): The sun used to warm the oceans, the water evaporated and formed white and beautiful clouds (as part of the heat transfer from sea to atmosphere)
Clouds absorb the near IR portion of the solar spectrum almost completely. The Visible and UV are scattered by the individual droplets with almost no absorption, which is why clouds appear white from above and you can still get a sunburn on a cloudy day. Some of the scattered light is transmitted as diffuse light through the cloud while most is reflected. The fraction transmitted depends on the microstructure of the cloud and its thickness. In the thermal IR, clouds are effectively black bodies with emissivity/absorptivity near 1. That means the cloud tops radiate a Planck spectrum defined by the temperature of the cloud top and the same for the cloud bottom which, of course, is warmer than the cloud top. Thermal IR is not reflected, it is absorbed and emitted. Kirchhoff’s Law applies here. If there is sufficient convection in the cloud, the cloud top can be much warmer than the surrounding air at that altitude, I think. At low specific humidity, cloud cover lowers radiative loss from the surface at night compared to clear sky.
Worth mentioning that the spotless days page, which is updated infrequently, was updated at the beginning of this month. They are counting the August Tiny Tim which Svalgaard and Wolf would not, so we won’t get our really impressive spotless run recorded. Instead we’ll get 2 runs (need about 3 more days for the one since Tiny Tim to get into their record books). Of course some of us will remember and merge the two periods and add 2.
Cumulative spotless is now zooming way up.
Rich.
DeWitt,
That is an area I haven’t had much time to explore. However, a crude comparison indicated that cloudy skies probably emit around 220 w/m^2 vs 265 w/m^2. If the air is warmer than surrounding, you’d think it would continue to rise until it came into equilibrium T-wise with the surroundings. h2o vapor is lighter weight than average air until it falls out in the form of ice or liquid. From what I have seen of albedo, most everything, including ice and snow tends to decline in the near IR down past the coal sack territory in the far IR. I think too it’s very much a continuum as it’s solid or liquid rather than a gas. It would also appear that clouds do account for at least 0.225 of the total 0.3 nominal albedo for incoming solar.
Leif,
The evidence accumulates. Looks like somebody else is realizing that UV irradiation heats the upper troposphere in the tropics. The phenomenon is related to the frequency and intensity of tropical cyclone activity. Could this paper be any more topical? Ike appears to have an intensity not seen for 100 years.
See http://climaterealist.blogspot.com/2008/09/new-paper-us-hurricane-counts-are.html
446 DeWit Payne
Illuminating and very relevant post. Why don’t you go on to explain why OLR is synchronized with the SOI. When the tropics are cooling (La Nina) there is more cloud in the tropics. That short circuits the heating of the ocean by solar radiation. Result is that much of the incoming radiation is instantly returned to top of atmosphere where the sum of radiation from the Earth and the cloud is greater than is seen when the cloud is not present.
When the cloud is not present the ocean soaks up energy and OLR falls (El Nino). Paradoxical yes. A vital understanding to have under ones belt. Yes. The data is plain. Lets acknowledge it.
The next stage is to admit that all the tropics warms and cools at the same time. After that one should recognize that equator-wards of 40°Lat, more energy is accumulated than is radiated. Then, it is an easy step to understand why the regions polewards of 40°Latitude show strong fluctuations in winter temperature.
Climate change is a piece of cake. The mechanism is plain. Unfortunately, the conventional wisdom that postulates ‘oceanic oscillations’ responsible for temperature change stands in the way of understanding how things work and this bit of primitivism is hard to shift.
444 Stephen
Long winded yes but probably necessary. But it doesn’t clinch the argument and when you get to the following statement you seem to be getting confused:
During an El Nino the oceans gain heat. The ‘body’ (whatever that is) of the ocean is not cooling. It is all warming strongly. In six months it adds a lot of warmth to the oceans polewards of 40° latitude.
441 Pochas
I think he would recognise that low level cloud can hold in heat. I think that he would tell us that latent heat is released strongly at between 1 km and 5 km and that cloud at any level strongly reduces the flux of incoming radiation to the surface.
I think that he would also point out that the atmosphere scrubs heat via contact with and evaporation from the surface. It transports heat via convection. Long wave radiation originates primarily above the 4km Level rather than the surface and it transports heat from the middle troposphere towards space. On the way it is absorbed by ozone producing a strong thermal peak in mid year at the tropopause.
Hi Erl, welcome back from your trip.
I have difficulty with your suggestion that the oceans invariably gain heat during an El Nino. It seems pretty clear to me that during an El Nino heat is being released to the atmosphere.
However despite that the oceans could on occasions still be gaining heat energy during an El Nino but only if the solar input is at a high level and putting in more than the El Nino is releasing.
Likewise one could have a scenario where La Nina is absorbing heat but the oceans are still cooling because solar input is low.
My Hot Water Bottle Effect depends on the balance between solar input and the release or absorption of solar energy by the oceans from time to time.
Clearly cloudiness is relevant because it influences the amount of solar input available to the ocean for absorption purposes and may influence a switch between overall global cooling or warming which is why I find your ideas interesting.
When I refer to the body of the ocean I mean the entire oceanic body at whatever depth. I think it is unwise to limit oneself to consideration of just the near surface layers. For heat release and absorption processes the entire oceanic body is involved and I do feel that the entire body of the oceans must be a larger contributor to global atmospheric changes than just the surface layers whether influenced by variations in cloudiness or not.
For example a substantial upwelling of water from the depths could require much more or very much less additional solar input to reach a particular temperature when it arrives at the surface depending on very small differences in the initial temperature of the upwelling water. After all it requires big inputs or outputs of energy to make small differences to water temperature due to the density of water as compared to density of atmosphere.
Clear ocean water has a photic zone of around 200m – turbid water gets dark within a few metres. La Nina waters are more nutrient rich and support more plankton growth near the surface, El Nino waters are nutrient deficient, and support less plankton growth. During La Nina, ocean heating due to insolation occurs near the surface, whereas during El Nino, the heating is spread much deeper. And some of the energy is absorbed by photosynthetic organisms, and so into the food chain.
The actual temperature difference between El Nino and La Nina surface temperature is just a few degrees, typically up to 4.5 deg C, usually less than 2 deg.
Spectra of OLR clearly define where in the atmosphere the OLR originates by comparison with blackbody spectra. The bright pixels on satellite sensors represent 290K, near surface OLR, below cloudbase, and darker pixels can be identified as equivalent to top of cloud temperatures of 230-220K.
I must agree with Stephen, rather than Erl.
450 Stephen,
451 Chris
Not sure what you are agreeing with in Stephens statements or disagreeing with in mine. However:
The question as to whether sea surface temperatures in the tropics increase or decrease on a global basis during an El Nino event is easy enough to resolve. One can relate sea surface temperatures to the SOI. To resolve the question as to whether OLR increases or decreases during an El Nino event is also easy enough to resolve.
Are these the points at issue? If they are, can we agree on a latitude band. I suggest the Equator to 20°S where the solar effect is greatest and the extent of the land is least. Then I will prepare the data.
Erl,
I think the essence of my point is that you see El Nino as a warming of the ocean whereas I see it as a warm surface giving off heat to atmosphere and thereby cooling the ocean. Rather like perspiration.
You see La Nina as a cooling of the ocean whereas I see it as a cool surface holding heat back from the atmosphere and thereby warming the ocean. Rather like goose pimples.
So if one is talking just about ENSO then El Nino gives increased OLR for a cooling ocean overall and La Nina gives reduced OLR for a warming ocean overall.
However, as I said above that is a seperate mechanism to your cloudiness one which itself influences OLR one way or the other.
What interests me is the likely interplay between the two seperate mechanisms. It seems possible to me that your cloudiness mechanism might be involved in switching the entire globe from warming to cooling or vice versa via a link with the ENSO cycle.
My Hot Water Bottle Effect deals with the way the oceans control atmospheric temperatures rather than any Greenhouse Effect. I have not dealt with the potential ways that a solar input or lack of it could drive the oceans. That is something we really need to know and your ideas may be involved but I do think that at present you may be giving too much power to your mechanism which seems to me to be a link in the chain rather than itself being a main driver of global temperature shifts.
453 Stephen 451 Chris
The tropics are the engine room for temperature change for the globe as a whole. I draw this conclusion from an examination of the diagram at http://i249.photobucket.com/albums/gg220/erlandlong/LowLatandGlobe.jpg
In the operational time period, which is on a scale of months, there is a curious relationship between sea surface temperature and outgoing long wave radiation. We expect a body to give up more radiation as it warms and less radiation when it cools. But, look at http://i249.photobucket.com/albums/gg220/erlandlong/SSTandOLR.jpg
You see that as sea surface temperatures fall radiation increases and as they rise, radiation falls. Why?
The tropics lose some energy to the atmosphere and some by transfer to high latitudes. If the energy that is supplied to the tropics is diminished it affects sea surface temperature in the tropics very little at all. But it affects transfer to high latitudes a lot. If a body (the tropical oceans) cools only slowly (by virtue of great mass and high specific heat of water) is maintained at a given temperature by radiant energy from an external source sufficient to maintain the body at a given temperature while enabling some lateral transfer of energy to high latitudes, consider what happens to the transfer of energy to high latitudes, and the transfer of energy to the atmosphere above the tropics, when a good absorber-emitter-reflector (a cloud) is put in the way. The amount of energy given off by the tropics to the atmosphere immediately above (where we are measuring the OLR) hardly changes at all. The amount transferred to high latitudes (where we are not measuring the OLR) diminishes. The transfer as measured at the top of the atmosphere above the tropics is the sum of
1. OLR from the tropical oceans (virtually unchanged).
2. OLR from the good absorber-emitter-reflector, the cloud. (increases in proportion to cloud cover).
Let’s engage the brain. The only way that the tropics can lose energy when supplied from an invariable energy source like the sun is via the intercession of cloud (increase in albedo). The relationship between sea surface temperature and OLR demonstrates that the Earth warms and cools via changes in albedo and this takes place primarily in the tropics where the supply of energy is greatest. There is more radiation absorbed between 40°N and 40°S than is emitted. Elsewhere, more is emitted than is absorbed from the sun.
We see also the importance of the transfer of energy from the tropics to high latitudes. Significantly, it is the winter temperature at high latitudes that rises and falls by 4-6°C over 30 to 100 or more years.
What could explain an increase in albedo in the tropics? For this to happen the air in the cloud zone must cool. This increases relative humidity and produces cloud. It is well known that there is a relationship between 200hPa temperature and cirrus cloud density in the tropics.
We observe that temperature change in the tropics is driven by albedo and not some mysterious ‘internal oscillation of the climate system’.
We know that there is both ozone and water vapour in the upper troposphere and we are aware that ozone absorbs ultraviolet radiation imparting heat to the surrounding air.
We know that the relationship between 200hPa temperature and sea surface temperature is very close (a correlation co-efficient of 0.9 is usual). We observe that at times when 200hPa temperatures rise very strongly such as in 1978 sea surface temperatures increase dramatically, and high latitudes begin to lose ice.
It may interest you to know what is happening at 200hPa now. There should be lots of cloud. See: http://i249.photobucket.com/albums/gg220/erlandlong/200hPatemp2006-2008.jpg
While at 100hPa where there is much more ozone we see a strong response to increased OLR every northern Hemisphere summer. Right now we have the northern hemisphere losing energy at a similar rate to that over the period 1948-2008. See http://i249.photobucket.com/albums/gg220/erlandlong/100hPa2006-8.jpg This is rather more than in 2007. My guess is with the cooling of the tropics there is less humidity in the air and less cloud in the northern hemisphere allowing good summer heating and efficient re-radiation.
Notice that 100hPa temperatures peak in August while 200hPa temperatures peak in March. The distribution of land and sea drives the response at 100hPa. The sun drives the response at 200hPa. 200hPa is about the upper limit for cirrus cloud.
You can work out for yourself what sort of winter is ahead.
Stephen
Not hard to work out where sea surface temperatures are headed. Is this your ‘hot water bottle’? http://i249.photobucket.com/albums/gg220/erlandlong/SST1-20S.jpg
It seems very unlikely that we will see an increase in temperatures in the ‘hot water bottle’ before November 2010 at the earliest. Not much chance of an upswing in SC24 during the impending Southern Hemisphere summer. That would mean an even colder NH winter 2009-10.
Erl,
Although I use the term ‘Hot Water Bottle’ it is to reflect my view that primarily the oceans not the greenhouse effect keep the Earth warmer than it otherwise would be. My article envisages both warming and cooling modes for the Hot Water Bottle Effect. One could theoretically have a water bottle in bed with cold water in it which would have a cooling effect. I certainly agree that at the moment continued cooling looks more likely than resumed warming.
Getting back to your ideas and the cloudiness aspect.To consider that further I need you to be clearer about the sequence of events that results in increases or decreases in cloudiness. To my mind El Nino warms the atmosphere but cools the oceans unless solar input is higher than the heat being released.
So during an El Nino there is much warmth and water vapour being pumped into the atmosphere. That will increase temperature differentials between surface and space and over time will, via enhanced convection evaporation and condensation, result in more cloud. The extra cloud will increase albedo and increase OLR further which over time might neutralise the El Nino. Once La Nina kicks in the cooling of the atmosphere would presumably enhance cloud cover even further because cooling air holds less water vapour and more cloud will condense out.
Increased solar activity would cause the atmosphere to behave somewhat differently. If the atmosphere warms mainly from solar input then the atmosphere warms directly and independently from the ocean. As it warms it is able to hold more water as vapour and clouds dissipate. If solar input weakens then cloudiness increases again because a cooler atmosphere will hold less vapour and it will condense out.
Thus we have two independent and constantly variable influences on cloudiness which need to be reconciled in real world observations of OLR. Can you ‘square the circle’ taking account of both phenpmena?
This scenario might work:
1) El Nino warms the atmosphere which can then hold more water as vapour so clouds dissipate. More sunlight reaches the surface and is retained. The amount of incoming energy retained exceeds the amount being lost from the warmed ocean surface and the atmosphere. OLR decreases despite a warm ocean surface.
2) La Nina cools the atmosphere which can then hold less water as vapour so clouds increase. Less sunlight reaches the surface and increased albedo reflects a portion back upwards. The amount of outgoing energy lost exceeds the amount being absorbed by the ocean surface and the atmosphere. OLR increases despite a cool ocean surface.
The problem for Erl’s idea is that in such a scenario the ENSO cycle is the driver of the tropical changes and not the sun. Although of course it is the sun that provided the energy for the ENSO cycle in the first place.
456 Stephen,
The data that I present represents the whole of the tropics. The shifting of the convection zone in the Pacific is just one facet of the changes that occur in a tropical warming event. The Pacific is the largest ocean and the spatial shifts in convection zones there are most spectacular but just one facet of complex changes in space (right across the tropics) that occur during warming events. When we focus on the Pacific we tend to ignore what is happening in the Indian and Atlantic oceans.
Change in 200hPa temperature across the tropics affects cirrus cloud density. Tropical warming events involve diminished OLR indicating a loss of albedo. Warming is warming. El Nino does not cool the oceans. This is a contradiction in terms.
Warming and cooling events involve dramatic changes in specific humidity as you say and this tends to enable a swift increase in cloud cover when 200hPa temperatures fall but nearly all of that change in specific humidity is in the near surface layers. Under sustained solar pressure as occurred after 1978 low level relative humidity fell and it did not fully recover for 20 years.
The data tells the story.
If ENSO is caused by changes in cloudiness, how does it explain the exact progression of an El Nino or La Nina event in ocean temperatures in the Pacific. Ex, http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/map/clim/sst_olr/old_sst/sst_9798_anim.shtml
Stephen/Erl:
Are you sure you’re not arguing at cross purposes? “Warming” does not imply “warmth”. One is a flux. The other is a state.
458 Mike,
Every ocean has an anti-clockwise circulation in the Southern Hemisphere that brings cold water northwards to the tropics. It is well to check the map showing actual water temperatures rather than the anomalies. Such a map is at http://www.eldersweather.com.au/climimage.jsp?i=sstg There is a lot of water in the Southern hemisphere driven eastwards by the westerlies in the Roaring Forties. Just imagine what would happen to this circulation if the gap between Tierra Del Fuego and the Antarctic Peninsula were choked off by ice. Just imagine what would happen if there were no continent called Antarctica to prevent the ice from melting from below as in the Arctic.
Imagine what would happen if the Westerlies ceased to blow as strongly in the Roaring Forties or the relatively cloud free zone that lies above the cold waters pushing northwards along the coast of Chile were to cloud up all of a sudden.
I don’t pretend for a moment that I understand all the variables that determine the temperature of the Eastern Pacific and neither should anyone else.
The Northern Pacific is probably a bit simpler. Its temperature depends upon the heat supply from the waters moving north in the Western Pacific. So, that depends directly upon cloud cover in the tropics.
At the end of the day we need to stop focussing on the Pacific as if it determined the fate of temperatures around the globe. Thats why I prefer to talk about tropical warming events rather than El Nino’s. It is tropical warming events that are reflected in this diagram: http://i249.photobucket.com/albums/gg220/erlandlong/LowLatandGlobe.jpg
Each of those warming events manifest quite differently in the different oceans.
You can’t properly describe a person via a minute description of his nose, even though it may be the most prominent feature.
Stephen,
It may be of interest to look at the change in warm water volume in parts of the tropical ocean at http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/tao/elnino/wwv/
Despite erudite and learned description of the supposed mechanisms that drive ENSO, none of the models that are built according to these ideas predicted the La Nina of 2007, underestimating its intensity throughout. Most models (and their predictions are collectively all over the place)stubbornly maintained that a return to neutral conditions was imminent.
The notion that ENSO is in some sense ‘oscillatory’ is maintained despite the obvious lack of resemblance to truly oscillatory phenomena where the height of the peak at one extremity provides some indication of the extent of the swing to be expected in the other direction.
Taking the tropics as a single zone, when sea surface temperatures move so does the temperature of the entire atmospheric column up to 200hPa. with specific and relative humidity moving in the same direction as can be seen here http://i249.photobucket.com/albums/gg220/erlandlong/SSTSHandRH.jpg However, temperatures at 200hPa are plainly independent of what happens below because under sustained solar pressure the excellent correlation between these entities falls away. The sea can not maintain the rise in temperature necessary to sustain the evaporation to maintain the cloud cover. After all, some of the energy gained by the sea is constantly leaching away to high latitudes.
Coming to grips with climate change involves estimation of the amount of energy transported polewards of 40°Latitude
in both hemispheres. Its the high latitudes that experience dramatic change in temperature. Its winter when the energy stored in the ocean is most important. That is what is apparent from this http://i249.photobucket.com/albums/gg220/erlandlong/Surfacetemperaturesglobe.jpg
This calculation of energy transported by the ocean has yet to be attempted. There is apparently no understanding that it might be relevant to temperatures at high latitudes.
Going up! http://www.eldersweather.com.au/climimage.jsp?i=soi
Next level, snow, ice, blizzards, winter woolies, heating oil and frost amelioration devices of all descriptions.
Heard on grapevine: On Tuesday, September 23, scientists from the Ulysses International Solar Mission will participate in a NASA teleconference that will talk about the solar wind now being at a 50-year low. The teleconference begins at 12:30 PM EDT (1630 UTC) and you can hear it live. You can see visuals that will accompany the presentations here http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/ulysses-20080923.html.
Looks like a new Cycle 24 sunspot has formed. #4 I believe and this one is no tiny tim.
Leif,
I have been playing with determining the AUC for TSI and SSN charts for a while using ImageJ. I was directed to Svalgaard #2, Pete’s comment 454 by Kim. Much to my surprise his chart was an exact duplicate of mine of the AUC under each cycle. I think I am using a completely different and simplier more flexible method (no “solar Index”). Also, it is easy to play with and maybe someone out there could use it better than me.
What I was curious about was whether there was any similiarity between AUC (“as energy”) and temperature (Hadcrut). I have taken the areas at different periods, 5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,16 and 22 years. I seems that I arrive in a Mannian twilight zone. All these periods have a “Hadcrut pattern” (as oppossed to a hockey stick) especially the 9,10, 11 and 22 year periods. What would be the reason for this? The pattern is pretty good but not perfect but as Pete pointed out the temperature record is not adjusted (oh no not again!) for volcanoes etc etc. thus maybe explaining the peak of solar “energy” ~ 1960.
Just for fun I did what you suggested Pete do, and projected cycle 14 as 24. However, I added cycle 6 as 25. This chart is posted on Solar Register on the Board if your interested (I don’t know how to post charts here easily). If this chart has any validity, the future does not look good if 24 has a 70 SSN max and 25 a 50 SSN max.
And yes, I am aware of the tiny TSI problem. But why would the ACU have ANY pattern the same as temperature or am I missing something very elementary here?
466 Hemst 101
I’d be interested in seeing your graphs, but where is “Solar Register” ?
466 Hemst 101
I’d be interested in seeing your graphs, but where is “Solar Register” ?
Me too, Leif
Leif, Pete
Link to chart:
http://www.climateaudit.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=454&start=40
If you are interested, I could fix up my excel spreadsheet (containing charts of all the periods + other stuff)so it would be reasonably intelligible and email it to you. Leif – use your website e-mail?
Pete:
Like your thoughts on modifying the temp record to reflect volcanic influences etc. I don’t have the skill to do that. Also re your Svalgaard # 4 comment 18 – did you see William Brigg’s RSS satellite wavelet analysis?
http://wmbriggs.com/blog/category/climatology/page/5/
Also, just for fun I did another projection using Cycle 19 and 20 after 23 since Hathaway is predicting a large cycle 24 160+. No deep decline.
469 (Hemst):
I don’t see any correlation or relationship.
Re: Leif Svalgaard (#470),
What was so telling then, Leif, that is no longer?
=============================
Hemst 101:
I read your link! You are too kind when you mentioned my “Solar Index” – I more or less did exactly what you did. I counted the ‘pixels’ under the graph! I just called it a Solar Index at the time, for want of a better description and something to define the relationship between Solar Amplitude and Solar Length.
I did nothing too magical with the Hadley data to adjust for Pinatubo. I read what the experts said on the matter and basically applied a +0.1 to +0.5 adjustment from July 1991 to Dec 1991. Then for 1992 +0.5C. 1993 +0.4C. 1994 +0.25C. 1995 +0.1C Then 1996 onwards as normal Hadley. This best applied what the scientists said the Volcano did as it firstly dispersed debris around the globe. Stayed there for a while and slowly fell out.
Hello Leif,
1. Are there any scientific comments on the prediction of a new Maunder Minimum by 2030 made by the late Dr. Theodor landscheidt?
2. The temp graphs of the Northern Hemisphere show 2 volcanic eruptions in 1982 and 1991 (El Chicon Mexico and Pinatubu Philipines.
After the second world war a series of atomic bomb tests were indertaken by the Russians and the Americans.
Are the (possible) effects of these tests ever taken into account as a cause for the lower temps during the period of ca. 1948-1963?
Many of these tests were > 1 megaton that must have put millions of tons of dirt into the stratosfere.
(Leif):
What qualifies as a falsification of the current theory of GHG direct control over the climate or at least the notion of catastrophic AGW?
Proof that there is a non unique average T or balance point not determinable by radiative transfer alone?
Proof that there is another factor not being considered, or being improperly considered?
Proof that the actual balance point is only indirectly tied to radiative transfer?
Proof that other parameters vary by much larger amounts than presumed?
473 (Ron):
I don’t think TL has credibility.
most of the nuclear blasts were air blasts. Just hitting the dirt doesn’t do much for testing yield.
474 (cba):
I don’t know what would qualify as ‘proofs’. There are models only, and if people believe them then they are going to be swayed by empirical data. Reading the scientific literary, I find more and more papers where the authors discuss the reaction of a model to something rather than actual data. If the models have enough adjustable parameters, then anything can be fitted if the authors want to. There is kind of a paradox here: people are weary of changes, of data, AND of models. shifting base line, etc. Personally, i think it’s ok to tinker with the model [not the data] all the time.
475 (cba): Not going to be swayed, of course.
475(Leif):
Are you suggesting that (at least in this area) the scientific method is essentially dead, possibly replaced by an overpriced “video game”?
Leif:
Could you explain your comment in Svalgaard #2 comment 455 please. Is it regarding the graph not having a secular trend?
If it is, then I do not understand what a secular trend is. And I think maybe Kim misinterpreted your answer too.
Wikipedia defines a secular variation as
The secular variation (or secular trend) of a time series is its long-term non-periodic variation, as opposed to its periodic variation. Of course, whether something is perceived as a secular variation or not depends on the available timescale: what appears to be a secular variation over a time scale of centuries can turn out to be a periodic variation over a time scale of millions of years. Natural quantities often have both periodic and secular variations.
Pete’s chart does not look regularly periodic. Are we dealing with the last part of the Wikipedia statement?
And why would what I and Pete found fit Hadcrut AT ALL? (By the way I took the AUC year by year from 1830, used your method of a Rolling average described in WUWT website and the fit was even better (except for ~1960s “bump”)). I sure you have a reason why this pattern appears to fit Hadcrut. What is it? Just a fluke? Or is there some statistical reason? I am skeptical of my results here. Just want to know why this pattern appears.
Leif,
I noticed on the SORCE site that TSI looks like it started trending up after around July 1st of this year. Does that signal that the sun is entering a new phase? Or is it just part of the normal cycle that doesn’t mean anything?
Here’s the SORCE link for 479:
http://lasp.colorado.edu/cgi-bin/ion-p?ION__E1=PLOT%3Aplot_tsi_data.ion&ION__E2=PRINT%3Aprint_tsi_data.ion&ION__E3=BOTH%3Aplot_and_print_tsi_data.ion&START_DATE=1800&STOP_DATE=2400&TIME_SPAN=6&PLOT=Plot+Data
A new Cycle 24 sunspot group appeared this morning. Stereo Behind is also showing a very active high latitude region about to rotate into view.
Looks like Cycle 24 is finally starting (although there have been 2 Cycle 23 spots in the last few weeks to go along with just one Cycle 24 spot).
Depending on how things develop in the next few months, the Minimum may have happened in August (which matches up with the Sorce TSI data as well).
479 (MarkT): It may not mean much, but I would personally see it as a sign that minimum was August 2008 and that there is a slow upwards creep. Of course, when we get first real SC24 spot, TSI will plummet.
481 (JohnL): August looks good to me.
Re: Leif Svalgaard (#482) 20081011, wouldn’t you say that the “August 2008 is probably minimum” comment is looking a bit sick by now? 42 days now without a sunspot is either the longest or second longest spotless period this minimum, depending on your opinion of the putative August 2008 spot.
And do you feel privileged to be living through such a quiet solar period?
Rich.
JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 113, A11311, doi:10.1029/2008JA013517, 2008
The effects of hard-spectra solar proton events on the middle atmosphere
A. Seppälä er al.
Abstract
The stratospheric and mesospheric impacts of the solar proton events of January 2005 are studied here using ion and neutral chemistry modeling and subionospheric radio wave propagation observations and modeling. This period includes three SPEs, among them an extraordinary solar proton storm on 20 January, during which the >100 MeV proton fluxes were unusually high, making this event the hardest in solar cycle 23. The radio wave results show a significant impact to the lower ionosphere/middle atmosphere from the hard spectrum event of 20 January with a sudden radio wave amplitude decrease of about 10 dB. Results from the Sodankylä Ion and Neutral Chemistry model predict large impacts on the mesospheric NO x (400–500%) and ozone (−30 to −40% NH, −15% SH) in both the northern (winter) and the southern (summer) polar regions. The direct stratospheric effects, however, are only about 10–20% enhancement in NO x , which result in −1% change in O3. Imposing a much larger extreme SPE lasting 24 hours rather than just 1 hour produced only about 5% ozone depletion in the stratosphere. Only a massive hard-spectra SPE with high-energy fluxes over ten times larger than observed here (>30 MeV fluence of 1.0 × 109 protons/cm2), as, e.g., the Carrington event of 1859 (>30 MeV fluence of 1.9 × 1010 protons/cm2), could presumably produce significant in situ impacts on stratospheric ozone.
————–
Energetic particles from the Sun have negligible effect on stratospheric ozone, unless you have a one-in-a-century event.
Leif,
The most common reason for an increase in sea surface temperature in the subtropics is warming from moist tropical air traveling south east (S. Hemisphere) or north east (Northern Hemisphere). This is apparently responsible for the warming of the Pacific east of Australia that we see at this moment.
At http://www.eldersweather.com.au/climimage.jsp?i=sstag one can see the development of warm sea surface temperatures in a region between 20°S and 30°S latitude adjacent to Chile and Peru. This is an area unaffected by the passage of warm moist air from the tropics. The warming here may be due to a different cause, the loss of high altitude cirrus cloud. From the satellite photo at http://www.intelliweather.net/imagery/intelliweather/sat_goes8fd_580x580_img.htm there appears to be a gap in the westward moving high altitude cirrus that is fed by convection from the Amazon and the gap is over this region of warming sea surface temperature.
In November, 200hPa temperature in this region jumped well above the long term mean, reaching a figure close to that of November 1997. If this continues it may be the first sign of a developing El Nino.
The source of warming at 200hPa must be short wave radiation from the sun. The increase of UV intensity in November can be confirmed by examination of the maps of the erythemal UV index accessible at http://www.temis.nl/uvradiation/SCIA/uvief.php
I can understand why this particular area in the upper troposphere should show a thermal reaction to UV light. It is here that 200hPa temperatures tend to be coldest because this is an area of strong downdraft associated with very cold sea surface temperature. The air in the upper troposphere here is ozone rich. The temperature reaction could possibly be due to an increase in ozone content but in this case there seems to have been an increase in UV intensity.
My question to you is: Are you aware of a recent change in the intensity of UV light in the upper troposphere/lower stratosphere? Is there a data series that documents change that is seen most graphically in the Sciamachy maps? I have asked the Sciamachy people for a data series in the past but they choose not to reply.
Meanwhile, here in Western Australia the rain continues and summer is slow to get underway. Strong rainfall has been experienced in the East of the country confirming that whatever the ENSO 3.4 temperature, the actual state of the atmosphere relates to the traditional Dawin/Tahiti SOI which has been strongly positive for a couple of months.
484 (Erl):
The erythemal UV intensity is depending on ground conditions as well, e.g. snow cover. You go snow-blind in Greenland during the summer if you are on the ice without sunglasses.
This has little if anything to do with UV in the stratosphere. In any event, the SORCE satellite data at http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/data/ssi_data.htm has data on UV variation form the Sun.
Re: Leif Svalgaard (#485),
Thank you Leif. Looks as if UV radiation at wave lengths greater than 300 began to increase in September. Has there been any change in solar wind parameters since June? 200hPa temperature in the area off Chile actually began to exceed the long term mean in July. In July, August, September and November the 2oohPa temperature was well above the mean.
The 1997-8 El Nino began with a strong increase in 200hPa temperature in the Pacific west of Chile in June 1997. Anomalously high 200hPa temperatures were maintained for a period of 18 months. The current event is so far starting off in a weaker fashion.
Re: Erl Happ (#484),
A good and very important post, Eri. As we know, Ozone is a greenhouse gas. Unlike carbon dioxide, its absorption frequency, 9.6 nm, is not masked by water vapor. It is right in the middle of the “clear window” of frequencies transparent to outgoing longwave radiation. Its concentration varies appreciably with the solar cycle, in step with the UV that generates it. If it can opacify the atmosphere at 9.6 nm, it can reflect all 9.6 nm radiation emitted by the surface downward, potentiating the greenhouse effect. Its effect on surface temperatures needs serious study.
Re: pochas (#487),
Yes, Pochas the presence of increasing levels of ozone in the upper troposphere and its affect on atmospheric temperature there is a matter of enormous importance. At the tropopause near the equator there is a strong temperature peak in August produced by the seasonal upsurge in long wave radiation due to the heating of the northern hemisphere land mass.
The very interesting thing is that the extra warmth created by the excitation of ozone by OLR in July-August has no affect whatsoever in shifting the maximum temperature at 200hPa from its seasonal peak earlier in the year. The force tending to produce a greenhouse result is completely overwhelmed by the primary dynamic of the troposphere. That dynamic is convection, driven by the fall in temperature with elevation and the very strong gradient in atmospheric density between the surface and the tropopause just 10km up.
I have written about this phenomenon at mind numbing length on my blog at: http://climatechange1.wordpress.com/2008/11/08/earth-laboratory-tests-the-greenhouse-theory-once-a-year-every-year-and-finds-it-wanting-every-time/
The critical part of that exposition is in figures 2,3 and 4.
My conclusion: The greenhouse effect is non operational. If we want to explain why the Earth has warmed we must look elsewhere. The focus on carbon dioxide (and all other so called greenhouse gases) is misplaced.
If you think that I am misinterpreting the data please let me know.
Re: Erl Happ (#488),
‘presence of increasing levels of ozone’ would be more better rendered as: presence of ‘variable but influental’ levels of ozone.
Leif: Is there anything new here: http://spacefellowship.com/News/?p=7700
Quote: The findings open the possibility of improving predictions of satellite drag (which are important for tracking low earth orbiting spacecraft) and predictions of the ionospheric electron concentration, which affects radio communications and GPS signals. The periodic nature of the solar disturbances may also influence the climate and climate change of the upper atmosphere.
Quote from http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/Space-Has-Never-Been-Closer/story.aspx?guid=%7B4F9C29E1-FE35-4C66-A38D-46870EBC13CD%7D The height of the ionosphere/space transition is controlled in part by the amount of extreme ultraviolet energy emitted by the Sun and a somewhat contracted ionosphere could have been expected because C/NOFS was launched during a minimum in the 11-year cycle of solar activity. However, the size of the actual contraction caught investigators by surprise.
At: http://www.agu.org/journals/scripts/highlight.php?pid=2008JD010066 we have an interesting observation of high ozone concentrations in the mesosphere above the equator at about 90–100 km during the equinoxes. This suggests a higher rate of penetration of short wave radiation at that time. This lends weight to the observation that the thermal hot spots at 50km, also at the equinoxes, are due to radiation.
The illustration of change in ionosphere boundary between day and night suggests a very strong reaction to change in short wave radiation entailing large fluctuations in density (since the Earth is a sphere)over and between solar cycles.
The fluctuation in density is described as a heat shedding process. Equally, one would expect strong variation in the rate of penetration of short wave radiation into the troposphere.
I have strong evidence in temperature profiles of the atmosphere over the East Pacific that short wave radiation (and long wave from the Earth) is interacting with ozone to directly heat the atmosphere as low as 500hPa.
Hi Leif,
I went looking for a solar signal in the historical temp data again and found that if I detrended the southern hemisphere data to a level line and smoothed it over 1/3 of a solar cycle, it correlates well with the sunspot number record. Here’s a sample showing 58 years. The small temp drop between solar cycles 21 and 22 would be the big ’83 El Nino. Would you agree that this signal is fairly unambiguous? Thanks.
Ah, images turned off?
492 (Stroller): No image.
486 (Erl): Solar wind magnetic field has been very steady. Solar wind speed was high the first half of 2008 and has since come down to ‘normal’ levels. The first entry on my website shows updated solar data: http://www.leif.org/research
Hi, I was wondering if anyone could pass any comment on this:
http://www.psi.ch/medien/medien_news_e.shtml#altai_e
In short:
An ice core drilled at the Belukha glacier in the Siberian Altai by a Swiss-Russian research team under the leadership of the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) in 2001 has now provided new findings in climate research. Oxygen isotopes in the ice were used to reconstruct the temperatures in the Altai over the past 750 years. The scientists discovered a strong link between regional temperatures and the solar activity in the period 1250-1850, concluding that the sun was an important driver of preindustrial temperature changes in the Altai.
There is a graph of the estimated temperatures and the ‘solar modulation’ at the bottom of the article. (which can be ‘clicked on’ to make it bigger).
Thanks
Re: Chas (#495),
A correlation that appears and disappears is not much use. Without a mode of causation its unconvincing. The proposed 30 year lag does not square with the reality of a six month transit between the tropics and high latitudes seen in the currents of the Pacific and the Atlantic.
#492 Stroller, why not use Photobucket for that image?
Re: Chas (#495),
The paper you refer to states (bold mine):
Without having the data that they used, we need only look at their graph:
(http://www.psi.ch/medien/Medienmitteilungen/mm_Altai08/englisch.jpg)
Clearly, from the graph that they provide, their statement is not only wishful thinking, but statistically inappropriate and misleading. The lower graph does indicate that both the temperature and CO2 appear to increase simultaneously, a visual similarity that the authors would like us to interpret as (positive) “correlation”. However, unless one is to believe that the pre-1850 solar forcing ceases completely, they have given us the wrong graph.
What they need to show is how much of the temperature increase is NOT accounted for by the solar effects. A more appropriate graph would be to show the difference between the red line and the blue line on the same graph as the CO2 level. This would be related to looking at the partial correlation coefficient of temperature and CO2 given the solar forcing. An examination of such a graph tells a radically different story.
The upper graph shows an apparent “divergence” between the temperature and their measures of solar activity begins about 1875 (from measurements of the graph using Photoshop), not 1850. The difference between the red and blue lines increases until 1925 and then decreases more-or-less monotonically until the end in the 1980s when it is about 50% of what it was at its maximum. This indicates that as the CO2 is increasing at an accelerating rate, the “unexplained” part of the temperature is decreasing steadily, hardly what I would call a “correlation”. Why does this difference increase and then steadily decrease? Who knows, but I would like to have the authors explain how such a pattern could occur as a result of a steady increase in CO2.
It would also be of interest to see what statistically valid techniques were used to decide that there was a time shift in the solar effect and to determine how large that shift was, but that would require the SI and a more in depth audit.
Leif,
You have stressed repeatedly that there is no evidence that short wave radiation has an impact on temperature below the tropopause. Let me direct you to http://climatechange1.wordpress.com/ where the evidence, an explanation of the dynamics involved, and of the importance of the phenomenon for the evolution of climate, is presented.
498 (Erl):
Figure 4 seems to be the important one, so I have this comment: Sea Level Pressure at a point is a measure of one thing only: the number of molecules in the air column over that point. 200 hPa is a pressure, and the altitude where 200 hPa is found is lower when SL pressure is lower because the number of molecules above 200 hPa is absolutely constant. The temperature in the troposphere at lower altitudes is higher, therefore, almost by definition, the temperature at 200 hPa will be inversely related to SL pressure. This is just trivial statics, no dynamics involved, and no mystery, and no revolution in meteorology, and no message of any import. It is like saying: “the temperature is lower where it is cold”.
In general, your story is marred by strange [undefined] notations, like “the strength of low-pressure cells”. What is that? Just the value of the central pressure? The energy in the circulation? The area of the cell? The integrated vorticity? or something else? You can only arouse interest if you have such details resolved, because only then can people relate what you are saying to hard science and data.
Re: Leif Svalgaard (#499),
You missed the point of of my query in #498. It’s all about figure 5, not figure 4.
But let us first deal with your objection to the relationship shown in figure 4, the inverse relationship between 200hPa temperature and surface pressure.
In the brick making industry you often find one chimney serving a number of kilns connected by underground passages and the distance between the installations can be considerable. So the air has to go down before it goes up through the chimney. If the plant is shut down and everything cools down you get a problem. When the fire is lit the smoke will not be drawn down into the underground passages because the chimney is cold. It just comes out of the firebox straight into your face. The solution is to light a fire in the chimney, preferably above the level of the kiln. In that way you start an updraft, lower the pressure below and draw the air from the kiln through the underground passages towards the chimney.
The same applies to the atmosphere. If energy is applied at the top of the column, the pressure at the surface will drop. The temperature at the top rises, not because you are measuring it at a lower, warmer level but because it is being heated, in this case from above.
Now, can we get to the point at issue, your longstanding denial that the influence of the sun extends below the tropopause. How is it that we see a temperature maximum below the tropopause in mid year at latitude 30°-40°S close to south America where the upper atmosphere is coolest for that latitude on a global scale. Is that temperature maximum not due, as I assert, to the presence of ozone in down-welling air and its excitation by radiation from the Sun and the Earth.
Let me remind you that in the southern hemisphere the surface is coolest in mid year.
Interesting
presentation by David Hathaway on solar cycle 24. Current irradiance is the lowest on record (well, since 1980ish)
500 (Erl):
The same applies to the atmosphere. If energy is applied at the top of the column, the pressure at the surface will drop.
No. You are saying that if I heat the top part of a layer covering the whole Earth, the surface pressure will drop?
Now, can we get to the point at issue, your longstanding denial that the influence of the sun extends below the tropopause.
Solar radiation heats the surface and, in turn, the surface heats the air. But you have this backwards: it is not my ‘denial’ that is important, but that you have not demonstrated your point to my satisfaction. Any ozone in down-welling air will be excited aloft and will not patiently wait [or somehow evade excitation] until it has descended deep into the troposphere.
Re: Leif Svalgaard (#502),
Not at all. The rise in temperature depends upon ozone content as the differentiating factor. That varies from place to place. As the air descends it warms and ozone does not like warmth or water vapour so the ozone content diminishes in descent. The effect I am talking about is at the top of the troposphere. The thermal reaction varies from place to place. The pressure systems continue with modified characteristics, the winds change at the surface.
If there is a global effect from upper troposphere heating it will be loss in cirrus cloud density.
Agreed.
Figure 5 is unequivocal. It shows a southern hemsiphere location so one expects minimum temperature in mid year. How can the upper troposphere reach its maximum temperature in July/August when the surface reaches its maximum in February? Plainly, the maximum in the upper troposphere is due to local heating in mid year.
Ozone is the most reactive greenhouse gas out. It absorbs at 9.6 micrometres and the median wave length for Earth emission is 10. It also absorbs UVB. Where is the problem?
Earth radiation peaks in mid year when the atmosphere reaches its highest temperature.
Leif, I don’t know if this has been asked before, but does the slowing speed of the earths rotation have any measurable effect on the earth’s energy input and retention. Will it have any effect the climate at all, at 1 second per year? Does it affect tides, or the solar orbit speed?
503 (Erl):
from 500: “If energy is applied at the top of the column, the pressure at the surface will drop.”
but from 503:
“No, not at all”
??
Where is the problem?
The problem is that the ozone just above the point at the altitude you are talking about will have already absorbed the UV coming from above, or the ozone just below the point will have already absorbed the UV coming from below.
504 (Max):
It is the other way around: the climate has an influence on the length of the day.
Re: Leif Svalgaard (#506),
The pressure drop at the surface is spatially confined. If pressure falls somewhere, it must rise somewhere else.
This is a nit picking, bear trapping exercise that wears my patience thin.
I have a new post that may help you understand the way it works if you have the patience to read it through. Some of the conclusions may surprise. It can be found at http://climatechange1.wordpress.com/2009/01/02/the-southern-oscillation-and-the-sun-2/
Leif Svalgaard:
November 27th, 2007 at 11:54 am
“So, if there is ‘solar activity’ or TSI forcing, the sensitivity of the climate system to this must be much greater than generally assumed.”
WHY NOT?
Click to access harrison2006.pdf
R G Harrison & D B Stephenson “Empirical evidence for a nonlinear effect of galactic cosmic rays on clouds” Proceedings of the Royal Society A (UK):10.1098/rspa.2005.1628 (2006)
http://geology.gsapubs.org/cgi/content/abstract/35/1/1
Yemane Asmerom1, Victor Polyak1, Stephen Burns2 and Jessica Rassmussen3 “Solar forcing of Holocene climate: New insights from a speleothem record, southwestern United States” Geology, January 2007, v. 35, no. 1, p. 1-4, doi:10.1130/G22865A.1
Click to access CRAS2A_2712.pdf
I.G. Usoskin, G.A. Kovaltsov, “Cosmic rays and climate of the Earth: possible connection” C. R. Geoscience (2007), doi:10.1016/j.crte.2007.11.001
Fig. 3. Variability of the low cloud amount [36](upper curves, left axis) and cosmic ray induced ionization at about 3 km altitude [80](lower curve, right axis), averaged over the West European region (30–70_N, 10_W–15_E). The grey curve depicts the annual mean of the cloud data.
http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/1748-9326/3/2/024001/erl8_2_024001.pdf?request-id=43dda6e0-5cfe-402e-9433-c147d73cb4d3
T Sloan and A W Wolfendale “Testing the proposed causal link between cosmic rays and cloud cover”. Environ. Res. Lett. 3 2008: 024001.
Leif, I’d like to know what you think of the new paper by de Jager and Duhau expecting decades of global cooling from the action of the sun. Please.
==========================================================
I don’t know if these are still ongoing, but I have a question for Leif: In this presentation Nicola Scafetta claims that recently published work by him and Willson has shown that the ACRIM composite is superior to PMOD:
Click to access scafetta-epa-2009.pdf
There is a lot in the presentation, so please, if you could, just address that one question (he gets into a lot of stuff I know you don’t care for, I don’t want you to go off on that).
The paper is:
Scafetta N. and R. C. Willson, 2009, ACRIM-gap and TSI trend issue resolved using a surface magnetic flux TSI proxy model, in press on GRL
Leif
I haven’t caught up on the last 9 month’s posts, but I wondered about an article I saw referenced on the climate research news website. It is by Nir Shaviv in the Journal of Geophysical Research (Space Physics), entitled: ‘Using the oceans as a calorimeter to quantify the solar radiative forcing.’ It seems to show that the heat absorbed by the oceans increases with solar radiation, but much more than the simple change in radiation would lead one to expect. If this applies to land as well as ocean it may indicate that Earth is more sensitive to solar radiation than had been suspected. This was of course one of the possibilities you suggested when you showed the changes in solar output were less than many people had thought.
Have you seen the article, does it intersect your area of interest, and do you have any comments?
Peter
pjm (511):
This is incorrect. The Ocean data is sufficient (because land heat content is to chaotic and not easy to measure, and anyway contains much less of the heat than oceans) to show that the solar forcing (not sensitivity) exceeds radiative forcing by TSI alone by an order of magnitude. That means you can explain ten times as much temperature variation with the same sensitivity as with TSI alone. With a much smaller sensitivity, the amount of temperature variation would be the same (but I’m not sure how likely that is, although temperature variation over the eleven year cycle is about 6 to 8 times more than models suggest so a smaller (but not hugely smaller) sensitivity may be appropriate.)
Re: Andrew (#512), I was referring back to Leif’s original post in Svalgaard #1. He noted at the end of his first comment on that thread that
Shaviv’s article (I only read the abstract) seems to indicate that TSI does in fact have a significant effect on Earth (measured in the oceans) and therefore that the sensitivity is indeed larger than had previously been assumed.
As to the distinction between sensitivity and forcing, I had not particularly been aware of a distinction in this context. I would have assumed forcing refers to the change in TSI, and sensitivity to the effects, whether on temperature or otherwise on the Earth’s climate system (in this case including the oceans). A better explanation would help me for the future.
Hey Leif: Do you care to speculate about why the “global averaage temperature” has not increased for over 10 years? (I assume you do acknowledge that temperatures are now declining and things are not going “right” for the doomsdayers). Do you think there might be a solar factor that could POSSIBLY expalain this decline in temperature? Is the cosmic ray hypothesis reasonable or quack-science?
kim:
509 (kim)
I’m afraid that I don’t have a high opinion of that paper.
510 (Andrew)
They use the Krivova 2007 reconstruction to bridge the ACRIM gap, yet in their conclusion section they state: “[23] On a decadal scale, outside the ACRIM-gap period, KBS07 fails to reproduce the satellite data pattern and trend.”
So, I’m at a loss why they think it is so great inside the gap. I don’t see any merit to this.
514 (pjm):
Shaviv’s paper is very model dependent and not convincing, but will undoubtedly find its enthusiasts.
pjm (514): The best explanation I can think of is that solar forcing refers to all the solar effects acting on climate, which includes but appears to not be limited to TSI (other sources of solar forcing may include cosmic ray effects, UV/Ozone interactions, and some other stuff (unknown mechanisms?)). Sensitivity refers to the actually temperature response to these forcings. Of course, if we assume that there are no additional solar forcings, this amounts to the same thing. Leif has, I think, expressed healthy skepticism of the existence of such mechanisms, so in these discussions, the distinction has usually not been very important (even less so when talking about Scafetta and West’s work, as their studies don’t argue from additional solar mechanisms, but from the TSI’s apparent effect on climate).
Leif (515): Thanks for your comment. It does seem odd to me that they would argue that proxy models for TSI are wrong because they can be used to connect satellite measurements which disagree. How odd.
Mr. Svalgaard, I am awfully sorry to be so late with my questions, but I hope you will answer me as well.
What is the uncertainty associated with your reconstruction? Can you confirm me an uncertainty of ±3W/m^2 associated with the current measurements of the so-called solar constant?
Thank you!
1) Are there other G2V’s out there of the same class as our sun that have been shown to have such variability?
2) What is the maximum possible change in solar flux that is predicted to occur eg, 100watts less or % change output?
3) There is an apparent link with Be10 isotope trends in soil and solar flux, I have only seen graphs going back to 10000B.C.E. is there any more extensive data than this?
4) If the sun was responsible for the previous minimums as the present knowledge suggests, was the sun also responsible for, or contributed to, previous ice ages-
4b) If so what evidence shows the suns effect was significant in previous ice ages?
I would like to lastly say that I believe it would be far less a concern, to have an ice age(or similar change), rather than further heating. As it’s far easier to mitigate an ice age by emitting more global warming gases such as hfc’s, methane or sulphur hexafluoride for example than turning of the lights to cease co2 production.