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Climate Audit 
339 Comments
I’ve put Kirsten Byrnes’ website “Ponder the Maunder” in the Websites and Resources section.
Anyone know where I could get unadjusted data for the Central England Temperature record stations?
(The official records are readily available through the Met Office website).
As has been commented on elsewhere (and if anyone has been following the tennis at Wimbledon), to date we have not had any proper summer weather (at least since April), yet apparently both May and June were warmer than the long term average.
I’m suspicious that there might be some rather significant adjustments going on, or some recorded warming due to site condition changes
NIWA announces free data policy
http://cliflo.niwa.co.nz
The hockeystick replaced in its historical context: Global warming, nothing but hot air?
#2 Ian Blanchard
Exactly the same thought occurred to me. I had a dig around Hadobs, but as far as I can see the June record temp of 15.1C is not a CETR temperature. I don’t know what it is though.
I haven’t been able to locate raw data for CETR, although some of the stations are in other networks and so it may be possible to get it elsewhere. I think you may be looking at a FoI request.
#5
I been thinking the same thing about the weather that we’ve been “enjoying” in the UK recently. Currently it’s cold windy and wet. However, I think that the CET is an average of daily and nightly temps therefore with all the rain, and associated cloud cover, the night temps may very well have been very mild. The Met Office June report – now available – hints at this by stating that the average maximum temperature for June (in Scotland, I think) was 1 degree below the long term average.
First read the literature:
Parker, D.E. and Horton, E.B., 2005. Uncertainties in Central England Temperature 1878-2003 and some improvements to the maximum and minimum series. Int J Climatol, 25, 1173-1188.
Manley, G., 1953: The mean temperature of Central England, 1698 to 1952. QJR Meteorol Soc, 79, 242-261.
Manley, G. 1974: Central England Temperatures: monthly means 1659 to 1973. QJR Meteorolol Soc, 100, 389-405.
Parker, D.E., T.P. Legg, and C.K. Folland, 1992: A new daily Central England Temperature Series, 1772-1991. Int J Climatol, 12, 317-342.
The difference between Manley(CET) and Labrijn(Holland) is that Manley used an
average of stations, whereas Labrijn used a splice of individual stations.
Recent CET is the average of Rothamsted, Malvern, Squires Gate and Ringway.
http://badc.nerc.ac.uk/data/cet/
Hans, your first sentence sounded alarmingly like Josh Halpern/Eli Rabett, both of whom use the same expressions in this regard. However, unlike Josh-Eli, you actually provided the references! As you can I well know, tracking down digital versions of data is not always a small task since climate scientists virtually ever provide proper data citations (compliance with formal AGU policies would be adequate, but climate scientists thumb their noses at such compliance).
in November 2004, the weather station Stonyhurst replaced Ringway and revised urban warming and bias adjustments have now been applied to the Stonyhurst data after a period of reduced reliability from the station in the summer months.
data is here:
http://badc.nerc.ac.uk/data/ukmo-midas/
A recent Met Office press release featured April 2007’s record breaking appearance in the Central England Temperature Series. The Met Office has also been making a lot of noise about how warm this winter and spring have been.
This is a plot of six-month winter/spring average temperatures using the CET monthly data.
I also graphed the temperature rankings (if that is the right term) to see just how ‘exceptional’ the 2006/07 value is. These data make a pretty smooth curve except for 1684 and 1740 at the lower end and the step change that leads to the 2006/07 figure (red). Of course a few similar seasons in coming years could smooth this, but even so it seems odd.
The CET data that I used can be found here. Graphing only the April temperatures seems to give much the same results.
Please forgive a non-scientist / non-statistician if this is rubbish. I just spend a certain amount of time looking critically at figures on spreadsheets and at graphs; I would want a lot of explanations before accepting the most recent winter/spring figure. Of course something really exceptional could have happened in central England during this period but, given that the CET covers almost 350 years, a glitch in the data would seem to be a more likely explanation.
I don’t have the necessary skills to pursue this any further. Perhaps someone else might already be doing so.
Hans, what is your comment about Philip Eden version compared to the “official”?
10: TonyN
An explanation of why the temperatures this past spring might have been higher can be found by looking at the graphs at the Met Office web site for sunshine and rainfall. March and April were particularly sunny with as much as 60% more sunshine than normal. April had a correspondingly large decrease in the amount of rainfall because of the lack of clouds. It isn’t that surprising that the temperature might go up. The same graphs indicate that this temporary situation has turned around in May and June. For them to say in the press release which you indicated that this is evidence that “The warming trend seen in the CET since the 1980s is consistent with climate predictions from the Met Office Hadley Centre, which undertakes research on the effect climate change could have in the UK and around the world” is gratuitous propaganda.
I agree with you that the value of the mean April temperature appears quite a bit larger than the others (although who knows what adjustments may have been added to the data). However, a glance at the November to April graph in your post indicates substantial variability in the year to year temperatures for the region.
RomanM
re 11:
http://www.climate-uk.com/CETcheck.htm
interesting 😉
As a resident of little old England, I can assure you it was not necessary to fiddle the temperatures last year. England has had a very noticeable 1C rise in 20-odd years, but the last 13 months (since June 2006) has been noticeably anomalous even with respect to that – I saved a fortune in heating bills.
Earle Williams,
So as not to drag the New York thread too far off point, thought I’d reply here.
The aches and pains indicate to me I’m not dead yet. Never see 60 again though. Located in Connecticut. Your name doesn’t ring a bell from the past. Another Koss maybe? Or is my brain more faulty than I realize?
#12: RomanM
The points about variability and the unusual weather in recent months are well taken, but it was adujustments that I was thinking about when I posted. This paper: Parker, D.E. and Horton, E.B., 2005. Uncertainties in Central England Temperature 1878-2003 and some improvements to the maximum and minimum series. Int J Climatol, 25, 1173-1188, mentions many and various adjustments that are made to the CET raw data, and where the there are adjustments the opportunity for error exists as many of Steve’s posts on this blog show.
Incidentally, the Horton and Parker paper (page 28) indicates that the Malvern station has quite recently been moved to Pershore, some 10 miles away across the watershed between the Severn and Avon valleys, and a very different kind of locality.
The Met Office have a chart here that shows the extent of the extent of the recent anomaly for more dramatically than I managed to do.
I always though that in science, data was collected and studies and a theory eventually was proposed that addressed all the known aspects. Then the theory, data, processes, and procedures were published for verification and validation. If it was shown that the theory did not address the data then the theory was retired. Why does that not happen with AGW CO2?
There is so much that works to discredit the science behind the theory and a lot of it is listed on this web site.
-Hiding data, processes, and procedures.
-Use of bad statistics.
-Proxies that don’t show a LIA or MWP, but also don’t show warming in the 20th century.
-Artic melting and temperature that are driven by dirty snow, not CO2 warming.
-The fact that the raw data does not support the theory, so the data is modified to do so.
-The fact that sea levels have not being rising for the last 10 years.
How does this go ignored?
#13: Hans Erren
Thanks Hans! I’m interested and mystified.
#16
The Met Office chart looks like…well…a hockey stick! 😉
For the record, I don’t doubt that from July 06 to April 07 we (UK) have had unusually warm weather, and that this probably sits on top of an increase in regional temperatures (although this may be slightly due to my perceptions, in that I moved south about 15 years ago, during this upward trend). It is interesting however that frequently during UK heatwaves it is reported how we are hotter in London than in (for example) Madrid or Athens. Suggests that whatever is happening is regional rather than global.
However, May and June have both been poor, with high rainfall and poor maximum temperatures. My perception also is that the night-time temperatures haven’t been unusually warm (the long daylight and short night mean that the diurnal range tends to not be very high during late spring and early summer), so how the averages have got to be quite so high is something of a mystery to me.
Interesting report discussing new researching on Greenland.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6276576.stm
Besides shedding new light on how recently Greenland was forested, it makes some interesting points about the resistance of the ice cap to changes in temperature.
Interesting in light on the continuing hysteria about ice caps melting, drowning continents etc.
Regarding warming in the antarctic, nobody seems to mention
much the effect of wind speed on ocean albedo which is
apparently very marked:
Click to access Volz.pdf
and
http://climatesci.colorado.edu/2007/07/04/antarctic-temperatures-disagree-with-climate-model-predictions/
More interesting news http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070705/sc_afp/germanyscience_070705151649
Seems to me that although the TOPEX/Poseidon satellite work may still have the rate of sea level change accurate, the updated and smaller diameter means the volume of change is smaller than previously thought. Heat storage estimates would also be too high.
Re #15
Bob Koss,
I have no reason to expect my name to ring a bell. My post in the Central Park thread was a takeoff from a signature line in the Escape from New York movie, in which the main character Snake Plisken kept encountering people who thought he was dead.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082340/
Earle,
Ok. LOL
Don’t think I ever saw more than bits and pieces of that movie.
#16: TonyM
Sorry. I missed the point of your post. I looked at the paper you referenced and it would take a lot of time to track down all the loose ends of what they are doing. I love the chart! That green bar for 2007 extending out of the graph is a real attention grabber. Initially, I was very impressed by the fact they they had managed to collect all of the temperatures right up to December, 2007, but then I rtealized that even they weren’t THAT good. I managed to figure out what they did to get an anomaly of about 2C by looking at their data. They calculated the mean temperature for Jan to June and then subtracted the mean Jan to June temperature for 1961-1990. Graphing this with the annual temperatures (with an error bar almost 50% larger) – nice touch. Compare apples to oranges.
They neglected to mention that the 2007 Jan-Jun anomaly was less than .2C greater than the similar value for 1846 and only slightly more than .2C greater than 1822.
Here is a plot of the data
Looks a little different from theirs.
RomanM
A question if anyone is very familiar with atmospheric science, eg. Callendar affect.
Suppose I make up eight weather balloons (balloon 1 thru 8) using PE or HDPE skins, thin wall, pretty transparent to IR. Some reasonable size like 100 cubic meters volume at launch altitude.
Fill with a gas mixture of Helium or H2 and a bit of CO2.
Each of the balloons weighs the same, but the amount of CO2 varies as follows 1:400ppm 2:800ppm 3:1600ppm and so forth). Weight is exactly the same and all are capable of expansion as they rise, thus each equilibrates with pressure at altitude.
Which, if any goes higher and by how much?
Has anything like this been done?
CLARIFICATION: I have no clue where the happy face came from; the second sentence should read
(balloon *one* thru *eight* etc….
29: I imagine baloon #5 will go like a rocketship clear to Mars :).
#26: RomanM
Great work and many thanks! It’s very frustrating when you smell a rat but can’t get it by the tail yourself.
If the level of scientific rigor at the Met Office, which your very crisp analysis of the ‘graph with the green line’ reveals, is reflected in the way that the CET data is collected and adjusted, then its not surprising that some of the values might look a little odd. Do you have any views on why they used the 1961-90 mean rather than 1971-2000? Other, of course, than that it would help the green line burst triumphantly through the edge of the graph.
On a quite different subject I’m still reeling from hearing Roger Harabin, the BBC’s environment analyst, describe Al Gore as a ‘climate scientist’ on the 10 pm TV News this evening. Yes Really!!!
I’ve seen several references that say that, with no atmosphere, the Earth’s temperature would vary between about 100 C in the day to about -160 at night (based on temperatures on the moon). The average would then be -30 C. Then I see references that say that GHGs add 30 C. That only brings the average temperature to 0 C. What am I missing?
wher has the sidebar gone with latest commenst?
Re 16: TonyN
When they have made all the adjustments as detailed in the papers quoted for station movements, synthesizing a temperature from the weighting of different stations, urban heating, different measurement techniques, population and so on (and see also New York thread) we obtain a new temperature – but of what?
“# Mike Hayes Says:
July 6th, 2007 at 4:21 pm
A question if anyone is very familiar with atmospheric science, eg. Callendar affect.
Suppose I make up eight weather balloons (balloon 1 thru 8) using PE or HDPE skins, thin wall, pretty transparent to IR. Some reasonable size like 100 cubic meters volume at launch altitude.
Fill with a gas mixture of Helium or H2 and a bit of CO2.
Each of the balloons weighs the same, but the amount of CO2 varies as follows 1:400ppm 2:800ppm 3:1600ppm and so forth). Weight is exactly the same and all are capable of expansion as they rise, thus each equilibrates with pressure at altitude.
Which, if any goes higher and by how much?
Has anything like this been done?”
Not that I know of, but its a nice expirement. Perhaps you could send it in to mythbusters? This might be just the sort of expt. they can do and would be good on film.
Earle Williams Says:
July 6th, 2007 at 12:10 pm
You can’t be dead. The governor gave you a reprieve despite your “production for use” craziness.
BTW I don’t like the new look.
Having numbers for posts makes it easier.
Am I the only one who just got a new version of Climateaudit? Where are the sidebars with latest commenst? Has someone “adjusted” my site?
The temperature is rising here!
Comment number ………..sorry M. Simon is right. Prefered the old one.
I am lost in a changing world of adjustments.
Sorry to be a pain but I used the sidebar with latest comments constantly to keep track of what was new at a glance and the numbered comments were used commonly to refer to previous comments on same or other threads.
Warwick Hughes has kindly hosted a Powerpoint version of my paper “The Past and Future of Climate”, given at the Lavoisier workshop last Saturday, on his website at:
http://www.warwickhughes.com/agri/The_Past_and_Future_of_Climate_May_2007_Lavoisier_Presentation_June_21_2007.ppt
I put up the Powerpoint version so that anyone wanting to use material from it might more easily recycle it. There is a pdf version, unfortunately missing a couple of graphs, on the Lavoisier website at:
Click to access Archibald2007.pdf
I do not like this new look at all. Echoing what Paul just said: “I used the sidebar with latest comments constantly to keep track of what was new at a glance and the numbered comments were used commonly to refer to previous comments on same or other threads.” Ditto Ditto Ditto Ditto …… Not only that, the typeface is smaller and very hard for me to read in my advanced middle age. (Gee, if we could just get the Beatles back together.)
Sorry Steve, I know you have changed the site for valid reasons but the look it not good.
Just googling “Beatles”.
David:
Interesting presentation – what was the response from those who see CO2 as a prime contributor to GW? Surely there were some in the audience?
I don’t know why the look of the site has changed.
Re Bernie, I was preaching to the rational faithful – nothing other than high praise.
Steve: It is completely different, whole new design, typeface, type size.
No side bar on rihgt hand side with threads and latest comments. The sidebar usually on the left with blog sites etc has moved over to the right and is only visible when on home page. No numbers on the entries on threads. Suddenly changed at about midday here in New Zealand.
Global warming?
Suddenly the Greenland ice caps are more stable than previously thought:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070705/sc_nm/glacier_greenland_dc_1;_ylt=AlfxBVUdRZosxm.sIpyrYuRkM3wV
“Scientists using DNA extracted from ice buried deep below the surface have found evidence that a lush forest once existed in southern Greenland, …”
“In southern Greenland they found a wide range of plant and insect life, including pine, spruce and alder tries along with beetles, flies, spiders, butterflies and moths, from 450,000 to 800,000 years ago.
Scientists had thought the area was last ice-free about 120,000 years ago during the last interglacial but the study showed southern Greenland was still covered in ice at that time.
This suggests the southern Greenland ice sheet is more stable than thought and might not be as big a contributor to sea level rises caused by rising temperatures, Willerslev said.”
This website layout is now almost identical to the CA auditblog layout, which I think is a common WordPress layout.
Maybe this current format is a default setting.
Clearly you havn’t changed it Steve, any ideas whats happened and how we might get it back to “unadjusted” so to speak?
I sent a message to John A detailing the problem. No word yet. From the CA Blog Setup link, it appears that the theme got reset. Hopefully, he’ll reset it soon.
Thanks for that
Sorry about that. Dunno what happened.
Please come back very soon you dear old site look. My eyes hurt, and I really can do without my daily dose of this site. Thanks.
H.K
Re: #53
No knowing, but being able to fix it, is a wizardly thing! The dementors must have invaded the site.
I think the problem was caused by a power drop due to all those earth concerts! Carbon neutral my a.. They say all the power was provided by biodiesel. Use biofuels and starve a human in the third world.
RE #27 All ballons will behave the same. The plastic are not transparent to IR radiation. In fact these plastic absorb quite strongly in the mid IR region i.e. ca 4000 to 600 wavenumbers.
Re #35
“You can’t be dead. The governor gave you a reprieve despite your “production for use” craziness.”
He’s just very lucky that Pettibone didn’t take the job in the city sealer’s office.
A nice animation of annual changes in the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool is located here . It shows the variation from 1950-2000.
The Warm Pool plays a key role in global temperature, putting large amounts of heat into the atmosphere via its thunderstorms. It is sort of like Earth’s furnace which sends heat to the more-poleward regions.
Note: the animation starts at 1950, which was probably the coolest time of the last 100 years, according to this accompanying chart . It would have been nice to have extended it back to, say 1930. The chart indicates that the major part of the Pool, the Pacific portion, is trendless while the Indian portion appears to undergo multidecadal variation and is currently in a warm part of its cycle.
The entire presentation is here .
Perhaps I’ve missed something and someone would have a quick answer for this:- I’ve skimmed some of the work you and Ross McKitrick did on the Mann et al Hockey Stick – also a bit of Wegmans paper and some subsequent things by Mann (posted over at RC).
Mann’s original Hockey Stick, (plastered all over the media etc), ran from about 1000AD to 1980. All the charts in MM/EE 2003 and Mann’s subsequent postings seem to run only from 1400AD or later. Why is this?
I thought the MWP, (one of the main points at issue), was largely 1000AD – 1300AD? Do all the data corrections and methodological changes you (and Wegman) reccomended make any difference to this earlier period?
Thanks if someone could help.
#59 The animation is indeed very nice. It looks a bit like water sloshing around in a giant bathtub.
It may just be a coincidence, but the period of the oscillations appears to be about 11 years. I wonder if they coincide with the solar cycles.
I caught the start of the Al Gore concert last night in Sydney. It opened with a fat guy with white makeup beating his own drum. And it wasn’t even Al Gore.
The form of the concert reminded me of last weekend’s Princess Diana concert except that it’s BIGGER, its consumption is more conspicuous and more lavish. Al Gore showed last year that he could use more electricity than 20 Americans and this year he showed that his concerts could use more electricity than 20 princesses. I guess that there must have been a form of competition between Al Gore and the Princes for stars. I wonder how many appear in both – I notice that Sarah Brightman is in both. Maybe some hung around London for a week watching Wimbledon.
Neither concert seemed very evocative of their causes. Elton John and Princess Diana – OK, I get that connection, but Kanye West and Princess Di? Somehow I doubt that many aspiring black rappers had little shrines to Princess Diana.
Today I pondered the linkage between Shakira and climate change. We used to hear about chaos and the butterfly effect – you know, the idea that when a butterfly flaps its wings in South America, it can change the chaos trajectory. Maybe this was what Al Gore was trying to illustrate – when Shakira sings about moving her hips and then shimmies for emphasis, this isn’t about music promotion, it’s a science lesson about the butterfly effect using a South American singer for authenticity.
But then over to Rihanna in Tokyo who was doing a ditty using umbrella as props. I think that the the message was that, with climate change, we would sometimes need umbrellas. But then she started shimmying as well, so maybe this was another lesson about the butterfly effect, but at a very profound level.
Regardless, both were big improvements over fat guys in white makeup beating their own drums. Anyway by this time, Wimbledon was on, so I could ponder more serious questions like whether Gasquet could challenge Federer or whether Djokovich had anything left in his tank after a 5 hour marathon match yesterday,
re #57 at this reference it seemed as if the effect of the thin plastic might be something that could be adjusted out. Let us say at least as well as the adjustments in ground temperature measurements (that last assertion being in jest, of course).
http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/~jaffer/FreeSnell/polyethylene#Absorption%20Lines
The apparent lack of any effort to validate the Callendar effect as currently asserted (as asserted that greenhouse gas forcing by CO2 is completely responsible for the alleged recent warming), outside of models, is odd. That is why I have brought this direction of testing up as a possiblity.
#62 Steve M
In some ways I’m quite glad that the Live Earth concerts are taking place. Why? Becuse I think ‘joe public’ is a lot more savvy than the MSM give him/her credit for. I think this whole AGW propaganda exercise will royally backfire. Most of the UK population I hope will now be able to, first hand, see just how hypocritical all these bloody pop star celebrities and their politician friends are. If they were genuinely serious about ‘saving the planet’ then they wouldn’t be living it up at Wembley Stadium while claiming to have offset it’s patently obvious massive carbon footprint. I think most of the population o fthe UK knows that carbon offsetting is a complete scam, so they very easily see that this whole ‘save the planet’ by having a concert thing is a complete crock of s**t.
Like yourself I’ve been watching Wimbledon instead so that unlike the hyprocites attending this event, I can minimise my carbon footprint while at the same time avoid participtaing in a obvious propaganda event.
This blog has discussed the unrewarded time and labor that goes into acquiring data and how its release is often delayed while an analytical paper is prepared, revised, accepted and published.
Timo Hannay, director of web publishing for Nature Publishing Group:
A Conversation with Timo Hannay about the scientific web.
Re: #40 David Archibald, your powerpoint presentation suggests that true global cooling is around the corner and that it will be much colder than the Little Ice Age. Given the length of the current interglacial period and the rapid drops to ice ages noted in the past cycles, is this likely to lead to the next ice age? Are we near what alarmists call a “tipping point”?
What metrics would you suggest to monitor your theory? Land based temperatures have too many problems as noted on other threads.
Re #61 You noted solar cycles and SST which reminded me of this plot I made several months ago. It shows the sea surface temperature (SST) in the deep tropical Atlantic and west of Spain; ACE ( a measure of Atlantic hurricane activity) and SLP (sea level pressure) in the western Caribbean. (The curves were made using a double 1-1-1 smoothing).
I have no explanation for the almost rhymthic variation in SST, no idea whether it is solar-connected or part of some other oscillation.
Re #67 By the way, I e-mailed that plot to one of the well-known hurricane climatologists several months ago and asked if he had any thoughts on the oscillation portion of the pattern. His reply was that the apparent oscillation in the four factors is an illusion created by my smoothing method and is not real.
So, I tried alternate smoothing techniques and, as best as I recall, I got similar oscillations. I never grasped what the climatologist was telling me with regards to this particular data set.
#67,68 David,
The climatologist was blowing smoke in your ear.
I suggest that without doing any smoothing of the SST time series, calculate the cross correlation function with the sunspot cycle and see if you get anything that’s significant. That will tell you right away if they have anything to do with each other, and if they do what the time lag is. You’re going to need something better than Excel to do the computation.
#60 Bill: The original hockey stick paper, published in Nature in 1998 and usually cited as MBH98, covered the years from 1400. This was followed by another paper in 1999 (MBH99) that extended the reconstruction back to the year 1000. The second paper really did not change anything reported in the first paper (I believe they state that they made some updates, but IIRC our host found absolutely zero difference in the post-1400 reconstruction between the two papers.)
The fact that there were two papers causes some confusion and some erroneous citations, but it is a trivial issue.
Hansen and Christy in Vermont Global Warming Trial
“potentially important”
#57/#63
Harold & Mike:
If this one will not work, can you think of another experiment that evaluates the CO2 saturation effect? If not plastic is there another light impermeable and expandable membrane that could act as a substitute? I really like the physical aspects of the proposed experiment. A bit like the galileo thermometer with multicolored balls, no?
Re 71:
A quote from the news article:
The curse of the well published.
Martin Durkin has done another OpEd for “The Australian” on “The Great Global Warming Swindle” which is about to be shown in Aus.
That would be Hansen the politician, not the scientist.
Heat vs. Temperature.
Anyone know, as a rule of thumb, how the modlers convert heat (as in IR in W/m2) into temperature?
If we were to take just the daily, or weekly or monthly temperature at a specific point over, say, 50 years and simply rank the temperatures, would the lineshape reflect Heat vs Temperature?
Re 67, your SST maxima coincide with sunspot maxima, which were in:
1957.9
1968.9
1979.9
1989.6
2000.3
The correlation breaks down in the last few years, but there has been a lot of CME activity in the last few years. You could also try a correlation with aa Index.
Re 66, the Little Ice Age was hundreds of years long, and there were some warm intervals mixed up within it. What I am saying is that the evidence points to a repeat of the Dalton Minimum – two consecutive cycles of low solar activity and low temperature. After that the crystal ball becomes very cloudy. It is significant though that Ken Schatten mentions work (not his own) suggesting a fall to Maunder Minimum-like levels of solar activity. He is the most respected solar physicist and choses his words carefully, so a further lowering of activity sometime out in mid-century is possible. I don’t believe in a tipping point – the oceans take ages to lose heat. That said, I believe we are watching a train wreck in slow motion. 300 years of De Bilt data and 200 years of Armagh data say that we are heading for a Dalton Minimum right now. Every day without a sunspot from Solar Cycle 24 means that global temperature will be lower again next decade.
1933 study of global warming from the US Monthly Weather Review.
One thing I noticed was that nighttime lows rose faster than daytime highs, which is considered to be a fingerprint of CO2-induced warming, but CO2 levels in that era were only around 300ppm, a bit low for a strong CO2 effect.
For a while now, I have been dissatisfied with the various attempts to outline why an otherwise smart person might remain unconvinced that massive interventions into CO2 production were justified based on the current state of climate science. I wanted to provide an accessible resource for laymen to understand the “skeptics” case on climate, and I was dissatisfied that other attempts, say via some recent movies, fell short of the mark (either they were too narrow or focused on less interesting topics or else they tried to propose very scientifically shaky alternatives). My purpose was not to say that man is not affecting the climate (a fairly untenable position) but that the future dangers from CO2, and our certainty about their magnitude, are overstated.
In putting together this paper, I have relied in part on a lot I have learned from this community. Hopefully I have used them well in context and have annotated them correctly, but I wanted to give you the chance to see the work and let me know if you would like to see a change.
The most recent pdf is here and an online HTML version starts here .
Thank you.
—
Warren Meyer
Coyote
#80 Warren (coyote)
I’ve just read your summary and will read your other chapters shortly.
May I congratulate you thus far on a well written, balanced piece of work. I sincerely hope that many people find their way to your web site and take the time to read, absorb and reflect on its content. I trust you’ve appropriately credited and linked to various threads on this blog and other?
Regards
KevinUK
Now this is what I call very specific suppression of information over on RC. I trying to discuss bias introduced by urbanization around surface stations in processing the temperature signal the following was not accepted it for posting twice, even though it was a direct response.
However, I finally guessed what they did not want talked about and removed this paragraph and my comments were then acceptible.
So I guess over on RC they just don’t want to admit that most if not all of the Artic warming and ice melt is not due to CO2 warming but just dirty snow.
re #80
Coyote, I have read your website for some years. Good PDF, I will have to print it out and study in depth.
#82
Or maybe they weren’t interested in an off-topic discussion of dirty snow (which is in fact covered in the IPCC WG1 report).
It’s 2-1 Federer right now – one of the greatest matches of all time.
Coyote,
I’ve had a quick look. Unfortunately the modelling chapter needs a lot of work.
It would be better without these sorts of comment:
Modelling centres are extremely competitive, not incestuous, and they all want to get the best physical representation of current, not future, climate since that is more likely to give better representations of future climate. The goal is to produce a stable model with a good ENSO, NAO, SPO, monsoon etc.
A bit further down, the following is wrong:
Climate sensitivity is a product of a model, not an input. There are no “feedback loops” programmed in, only basic physical parametrisations, often the same as those used for short term weather forecasts. As noted above, they are tuned to match current climate variability with approximately constant greenhouse gas levels. They are not set loose on the emissions scenarios till the tuning is done.
Steve (non-climate-scientist member of a non-incestuous climate model development community)
#86. Steve Milesworthy, I’ve been looking for some time for a clear exposition of how increased CO2 leads to 2.5 deg C warming – this is a topic nowhere considered in any IPCC report. I asked Boris for a suggestion and he could only refer me to two 1956 (!) articles by Plass. Surely there is something useful written in the past 50 years. I’m interested in a physics-based and quantitative exposition which does not rely on GCM outputs. The problems with GCMs for policy IMO is different than the concerns presented by other readers – I suspect that they are irrelevant for elucidating the issues and, worse, introduce a wide variety of modeling issues that confuse the physics arguments. But I’ve had trouble finding any discussion other than very trivial arm-waving analyses of the higher-the colder type.
Re: 84
Steve, if you had actually read the discussion over on RC, you might have noticed that the possibility of urbanization introducing a bias was poo pooed since almost all the warming is in the high northern latitudes. They introduced that, I rebutted it with the UC Irvine study that RC does not want admited or discussed on that site.
So yeah, it is ok to say the model says that CO2 is going to raise the northern latitudes more than the tropical latitudes but the facts indicate that possibly the oppisite is happening, that pollution based Artic warming is driving the warming of lower latitudes. Sort of kicks the CO2 climate models where it hurts.
So, Steve, want to try again? I love talking to a denier.
Re:79
Isn’t this also a “fingerprint” of increased cloud cover? (which could have a variety of causes, including ocean oscillations or solar-cosmic ray changes)
Re:21
Speaking of Greenland; this study has just been completed that shows no real temp increase in Greenland for the last 60+ years and infact teps. have ben relatively stable for over 200 years. If ice is melting I’d place my money on dirty snow.
Click to access vintheretal2006.pdf
Re: UK weather/climate
I grew up in London and remember the peasouper fogs that persisted for days or even weeks. Since then particulate pollution has been dramatically reduced and I believe the incidence of fog has also declined.
I can’t find any fog stats for the UK or their relationship to temperature, but the study below is one of several I found that relates particulate induced fog incidence to lower temperature.
Click to access manuscript_107.pdf
The UK’s warming climate could be due to less particulate induced fog.
Re #74
That pretty much hits all the targets and sums things up nicely. Expect the screams of wounded AGW supporters to be louder than a rock concert.
For those Aussies that do not already know, a shortened 1 hour version The Great Global Warming Swindle will air on ABC TV at 8:30 pm on Thursday.
The doco will be shown as part of a special edition of Lateline that will also feature an interview with the director Martin Durkin followed by a panel discussion “comprising leaders from the business and scientific communities, social commentators, environmentalists and academics. This group will include a number of climate sceptics who support Martin Durkin’s view of global warming.” For more info see:
http://www.abc.net.au/tv/swindle/
What many do not know is that the National Climate Centre, Bureau of Meteorology has released a review of the film written by David Jones, Andrew Watkins, Karl Braganza and Michael Coughlan which has been published by the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society:
“The Great Global Warming Swindle”: a critique
Click to access BAMOS_GGWS_SUBMISSION_final.pdf
Page 2 of the critique makes an interesting admission:
Now if you look at the footnote on page 2, you will find references 2 and 3 listed as:
One wonders how far off the rails things have gone when the BoM NCC uses an insurance company rep and RC as primary references for it’s critique!
#93
Carl…What did I write about Mark Twain not being
dark enough about homo “sapiens” (in the “Atlantic
hurricane track versions” thread, still open)
A little sad though and as we know the very same
people who are sheep in a collective can be marvellous
thinkers on their own. If you are of a skeptical
nature sometimes the reverse is valid…But
you know all the national weather bureaus and
institutes are now pro-AGW, CMIIW, WMO being the spider
in the net …
If my portuguese is not to rusty…never learned
it much but if you know french…the Metsul site
warned yesterday that coming wednesday or thursday
could bring snow to Buenos Aires that is the city
“la capital” Temps 1-2C That would be a first
since 1918…Given the enhanced UHI of BA since
then…Given first snowcover last June 27 in Joburg
since
1981…You see the numbers..Talk of “Orwellianism”
“1984” was written in
#95
Ooops!
Something happened when trying to edit…
“written in 1948” Orwellⳳ real name was
Blair and Tony Blair sat in number 10
for 10 years…AND Al Gore was in Buenos
Aires just months ago…
#90
Ice thickness might also have more to do with precipitation trends than temperature.
#85
Steve McIntyre talking of tennis, you know
Ie played a set “against” a former Wimbledon
champion, another Staffan, Staffan Stockenberg
he won the Junior tournament in 1948 aged 18 I
think, Now as a rather fat cat of 46 in 1976
he “won” the set 6-3 but he cheated like hell…
Serving 1-2 dm out was “correct” etc…Reminds
me of something else…
Robustness of Proxy-Based Climate Field Reconstruction Methods, J. Geophys. Res., is finally available:
http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/Mann/articles/articles.html
#99: It’s been already a while 😉 Supplementary info is available here.
Please, could someone check if I got this right:
Mann is reporting that his (in)famous North-American PC1 is orthogonal (r=0.011422767) to local temperature?
(MBHandMXDcorr.xls, MBH1980-sheet, row 89 and MBHHandMXDcorrNoInstr.xls, MBH1980-sheet, row 67)
Re #99,100
From the Mann paper:
I see a fight developing…
I love that false rejection of a skillful reconstruction
#79,
“One thing I noticed was that nighttime lows rose faster than daytime highs, which is considered to be a fingerprint of CO2-induced warming,”
That’s also the fingerprint of increased humidity. Perhaps there was an uptick in irrigation?
#102: I love that they are discussing rather time series/statistics issues and did not need to add a citation (except a couple trivial ones) to time series/statistics litereture to their 1,5 pages of references…
Robustness paper:
Ah, that’s the way to estimate the redness of proxy noise. But isn’t this obvious, we have a model
and as
is zero, we can estimate 
of n directly from the proxy data 🙂
#87 Steve McIntyre
I’m not sure that I fully understand what you require.
I am not a climate scientist, and in researching the subject and talking to some climate scientists I came to the conclusion I don’t think you’ll get the exposition you want without a GCM because the feedbacks are too complex.
For what it’s worth, I can accept the calculation of about 1C warming for doubling CO2 without feedbacks is accurate because I accept that CO2 is reasonably homogeneous and I know it is possible to model the radiative effects. I can also accept that if you know the properties of a column of the atmosphere (cloud, humidity, temperature) you can do the radiation calculation for that column – a description of this could contribute to the physics exposition that you require.
However, once you consider feedbacks things get more complicated eg. because the different sorts of clouds have different impacts depending on where they are, how quickly they form or disappear etc. So to get a proper understanding, it is essential to accurately match your model to the observations, and to check that your model behaves accurately as things change (warm up). I’m not sure what other ways you could get such an understanding.
I agree that GCMs are not yet good enough for deciding detailed local policy (other than “let’s use less fossil fuel”).
#106. You say “I know that it is possible to model the radiative effects…” I agree. However, if I were writing a survey of why increased CO2 matters, I would spend the first chapter presenting these effects. The idea is that as CO2 levels increase, more lines come into play. An engineering-quality study would specify those lines – say which ones have come into play between 1980-1000, which ones will come into play between 2000-2020 etc.
Also explain the issues relating to the overlap of H2) and CO2 absorption. The most detailed such study – Clough et al JGR 1995 – wasn’t cited in IPCC TAR or AR4 and that bothers me.
Also explain in detail “the higher-the colder” argument. The temperature in the atmosphere changes direction in the stratosphere and some portion of the CO2 radiation-to-space originates in the stratosphere. I’m not saying that there isn’t a net effect, but an engineering-level discussion wouldn’t arm-wave through this. Houghton’s text presents the higher-the colder argument, but it’s not in IPCC and it’s presumably the active ingredient.
As to water vapor feedbacks, these are parameterized in the GCMs. These are a big issue. An engineering-quality study would assess each of the major feedbacks in detail and consider their parameterization in at least one GCM. It appears that clouds are the major positive feedback (I’m basing this on a comment by Held at realclimate.) I’d like to understand why. What is the evidence that the lapse rate should remain fixed, as Isaac Held has argued here?
If GCMs are making gross parameterizations of clouds, then my guess is that the expected feedback is some kind of function of the parameterization. For the purposes of merely projecting global temperature, I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a lower-dimensional way of doing the problem. I’d like to see the best effort in existence to explain things without using a GCM.
Re: 107
Steve Mc, does chapter 10 of the 2006 NAS report give you a little insight, especially the page with the graph on page 103?
This appears to be what Lindzen refers to the “curve fitting exercise”. This particular chapter doesn’t address water vapor feedback directly, but isn’t it one of the same things that Hansen is doing to support a large positive water vapor feedback? The NAS group seems to showcase their own work rather than Hansen’s for their report.
I visited 4 USHCN stations in California last Friday, Davis, Napa, Santa Rosa, and Healdsburg. The sites were 4 for 4 with air conditioner units withim the viewshed of the thermomter.
Of particular interest is Santa Rosa’s USHCN station, which is on the roof of the Press Democrat and surrounded by a see of air conditioner units. Gere is a picture:
More here and here
Then there’s Napa State Hospital, which has an air conditioner about 10 feet away along with close-by parking:
More on Napa here
Sorry for the mistakes in spelling, “sea” and “Here” is how it should have read.
Daily minimum temperatures typical occur in the daytime, some time after dawn depending on season and lattitude. Jonathan Lowe has shown at his blog that increasing minimum temperatures are occurring without corresponding increases in nighttime temperatures. Increased minimum temperatures must therefore result from increased daytime warming (preventing that last bit of cooling in the early morning that normally results in the minimum temperature for the day), and that there is a corresponding increase in nighttime cooling to keep nighttime temperatures the same (despite warmer days).
The increase in minimum temperature is not primarily caused by warmer nights, at least in Australia. And an increase in nighttime cooling is directly contrary to the CO2 hypothesis.
http://gustofhotair.blogspot.com/search/label/weatheranalysis
James Annan informs us that Oxford and Wellington Universities are to make a documentary film about climate science.
From the web page on the documentary:
Perhaps they are taking a gamble that solar cycle 24 will be much the same as solar cycle 23, or perhaps have an even higher solar maximum.
I wonder what the general public can actually do? Replace incandescents with CFLs?
hey…what happened to the “look what the cat dragged in” thread? I’ve never seen a thread disappear here before. I can see closing it if it was inflammatory or incorrect…but why is it gone?
Steve: It isn’t gone, I just changed the name to “The Rain in Maine…”
Re #90, Greenland temperatures high in the 30’s and 40’s.
Dr. Gray, Dr. Mann to Greenland stat.
Re 113:
I believe the plan is to give up automobiles, air conditioners and air transport. But compact flourescents will e given most of the air time, IMHO.
Weather, not climate (but possible hints of what negative PDO and perhaps additional factors, mean, decadally) – Upper 30s N latitude, 120ish W longitude …. we are experiencing some unusual weather. There is a cut off low over Nevada which is retrograding. It is prog’ed to result in possible showers (and unfortunately, lightning, a bad thing in terms of wildfire potential) over the next 48 hours. If it were February we’d be talking about possible snow at sea level. Just thought I’d share ….
The US June temperature data is in.
June: 23’rd warmest of last 113 years
April-June: 19’th warmest
January-June: 18’th warmest
July 2006-June 2007: 10’th warmest
RE: # 118 – And those are likely contaminated with human caused energy dissipation and the impacts of land use changes on local climate. So in reality, the rank may be even further from record level for each of them.
Financial Post Article
Models Trump Measurements
120: Interesting article. Another inconvienient truth for the AGW crowd to ignore. A strong basic physical basis for showing that you can’t even get a doubling of CO2!
I found that article interesting and after a little reading I have to say the 50, 100, 200 or 500 year life of Co2 in the atmosphere is often quoted but without any reference. Would be interested in commenst from the “experts” here.
Steve, I don’t know if I violated your criterias with that, but I liked
to read it and to post it. So if, pls. delete this.
Regards
Klaus Brakebusch
“My Life With the AGO and Other Reflections”
http://www.lavoisier.com.au/papers/Conf2007/D-Evans2007.pdf
#120-122
Comments from the experts here.
[ 👿 ] http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=134
To preempt another confusion in the meaning of “lifetime”: Because CO2 revolves around a carbon cycle, the time a given CO2 molecule stays in the atmosphere is very much shorter than the time it takes for an “excess” if CO2 to be removed.
(For illustration, if 10% of CO2 goes into the oceans each decade and only 9.5% is replaced by releases from the ocean, then the lifetime of a CO2 molecule will be about 50-100 years, but in 100 years CO2 levels only drop 5%).
Argentina has gone into the deep freeze once again this southern winter, with Buenos Aires recording its first snowfall since 1918 ( link ).
RE: #124 – And there is no one who understands CO2 here? And furthermore, you assume that the caliber of experts at RC is higher than here? What is the basis for your thinking? Appeal to reputed authority? Whatever dude.
RE: #126 – I wonder if the cumulative monetary and human toll of this year’s disasterous SH winter will garner the media attention it deserves up here in the NH? (Again, being naive here …. I admit). While the prophets of doom theorize future climate disasters which a reputed AGW will bring, in the real world, deadly cold, is killing and damaging today. Honestly, which would humanity really prefer, warm, or, cold?
Ooops, I meant RE: #125.
This SH weather is pretty interesting. I wonder what the records will show once GHCN, GISS and CRU are finished with their adjustments.
And on a different note, compare the following with Cryosphere Today:
http://pafc.arh.noaa.gov/ice.php?img=ice
Once again, the Anchorage ice desk depicts much more ice than CT does.
Recent Buenos Aires weather is not “climate,” but we all know what kind of headlines it would be attracting if this were a record heat spell.
And there will be someone somewhere attributing this “extreme weather” as “consistent with global warming.”
I live in an area of New Zealand called Taranaki. Last Wednesday the central business district of New Plymouth was hit by a tornado. The following afternoon at 5.30 seven tornados came in off the Tasman sea. The house shook and the noise was deafening. Much like an earthquake which we get pretty regularly. A small village nearby lost 50 houses. A couple of tornados made their way across Taranaki to the coast the other side of Mount Taranaki (volcano). Today Northland (top of North Isalnd) is being drowned by torrential rain as it was about three months ago, the floods are devestating. In the last one I had a friend who had his motel washed away, and I mean washed away. Yes it is extreme weather but our temperatures here have NOT risen in the last 100 years yet the media still quote global warming as the reason for this weather. The next minute they tell you they are the worst floods for 50 years. Yes they have happened before and I wonder what the people then made of it all? Guess they just made a few more human sacrifices to please the gods.
Interesting discussion on a Sydney Morning Herald blog this morning re Martin Durkin’s GGWS.
http://blogs.smh.com.au/science/archives/2007/07/whats_wrong_with_this_picture.html?page=fullpage#comments
CA denizens might like to offer a comment.
re #124,
Why do you use illustrative numbers when actual numbers are easy to come by?
From relatively recent carbon cycle illustration:
Total atmospheric Carbon (all P g C or P g C /year) 751
Uptake from atmosphere by ocean = 91.9
Uptake to atmosphere from ocean = 90.6
So more than 100% of atmospheric CO2 enters the oceans in a decade and a similar amount is emitted. But the amount sequestered isn’t really very large. Still, the amount entering the ocean should be a simple function of the atmospheric concentration while the amount released from the ocean depends on the surface temperature and the atmospheric concentration and some other things. But the amount added each year or decade by human burning isn’t a high percentage of the amount already in the atmosphere. This means that if the amount produced by humans were to change greatly, the difference between the amount entering and leaving the oceans could change rather rapidly. Yes it will be an expotential decay, but it’s fairly likely to decay rather rapidly at first.
“Recent Buenos Aires weather is not “climate,” but we all know what kind of headlines it would be attracting if this were a record heat spell.”
It should be attracting headlines for one very important reason: It completely debunks Mann’s hockey stick.
If you look at the original “hockey stick” graph, we should be vary far along the curve now. Greenhouse warming of average temperatures would be felt most in the moderation of nighttime lows and winter temperatures. If that graph were correct, we should be seeing practically *no* record cold temperatures and day after day of record winter high temperatures.
Re #124
Atmosphere contains about 750 GtC, oceans 38 000 GtC. Each year atmosphere exchanges more than 100 GtC with oceans and more than 120 GtC with vegetation. It makes atmosphere turn over completely in less than 4 years. By comparison, carbon emissions from combustion of fossil fuels contribute to atmosphere about 6 GtC yearly. How “antropogenic carbon” has a life time in atmosphere measured in centuries is beyond my imagination.
#126 Steve Sadlov
Don’t be so sensitive – feel free to read it in an ironic way as the person who added the “smiley” did.
Anyway, Hans Erren has posted the following:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1807#comment-119142
Happy?
#134 Dave, Sorry it was past my bedtime – I knew those numbers!
Re: 120 & 124
Milesworthy is correct in the short-term. If a carbon atom goes into and out of various sinks, it’s residence time will be shorter than the time it takes for equilibrium. The article about ocean CO2 holding capacity assumes equilibrium, but the ocean only turns over on the scale of 800 to 10,000 yrs (depending on if you require complete mixing). Thus we could indeed get a short term (hundreds of years) spike even though it would be unsustainable over the long term as the ocean sucked it up.
Here’s an interesting link from Junkscience about the atmospheric lifetime of CO2.
Also in the real world, Prof. Segalstad’s isotope mass balance calculations — a standard technique in science — show that if CO2 in the atmosphere had a lifetime of 50 to 200 years, as claimed by IPCC scientists, the atmosphere would necessarily have half of its current CO2 mass. Because this is a nonsensical outcome, the IPCC model postulates that half of the CO2 must be hiding somewhere, in “a missing sink.” Many studies have sought this missing sink — a Holy Grail of climate science research– without success.
“It is a search for a mythical CO2 sink to explain an immeasurable CO2 lifetime to fit a hypothetical CO2 computer model that purports to show that an impossible amount of fossil fuel burning is heating the atmosphere,” Prof. Segalstad concludes.
The oceans and plants are currently sinking or taking up about 4.0 GT of the 7.5 GT (most recent estimate) of Carbon that humans are adding to the atmosphere each year.
If oceans and plants continue sinking Carbon at the current rate (4.0 GT per year) after humans slow down in adding Carbon to the atmosphere, it will take about 50 to 75 years to remove the 250 GT of Carbon (750 GT versus 500 GT natural) that humans have added to the levels of the atmosphere.
Of course, ocean uptake could change in the future. As the oceans warm, they will likely release more Carbon to the atmosphere than currently as they did during warming periods of the glacial cycles. If global warming is correct, ocean uptake of Carbon will slow in the future.
Plants could absorb more Carbon in the future since they grow better in higher CO2 and higher temperature levels.
So, the Carbon cycle says that the residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere is not hundreds of years but it will take awhile to remove the Carbon we have added to the atmosphere.
re 138 and others
The BBC, among other media sources, recently was touting a story that new research had revealed that teh southern oceans had reached teh saturation point in respect to CO2. As reported by the BBC, the ocean would not be able to absorb any more CO2 and so atmospheric concentration would rise rapidly. This was yet another smoking gun for AGW.
This is how the story was played by the BBC. I don’t know if it reflects the real result of the reesearch or not. Should anyone give any credence to this?
#141
re `142
It seems that BBC’s gun has cut back on its smoking 🙂
Any study which says the following:
… should immediately be considered as propaganda and not be taken seriously.
Jeez, it looks like in my #139 I didn’t read #138 right above it — in fact I hadn’t.
That’s a fair bit of coincidence.
I was wondering, if the UC Irvine study that shows Arctic warming/melting could all be accounted for by dirty snow and there is no warming trend in the Antarctic, what is the basis for CO2 based warming? From what I have read the GCM’s predict that polar warming would exceed lower latitude warming yet that does not appear to be so. So while I agree that there would be some warming by increased CO2, it does not appear to be a major driver.
Am I seeing this wrong?
#144
I was a little surprised by this too. They say:
So it matches model results, but I don’t know whether the references had done formal attribution studies.
#146 Vernon
The models I have seen do not show particularly marked warming in the Antarctic continent, as compared with the Arctic. I understand that Antarctica is somewhat insulated by the heat uptake in the southern ocean in the model simulations.
#148 If the warming in the Arctic is due to dirty snow, why cannot the models be wrong that the Arctic warming is driving NH warming? There is very little warming in the SH. Realizing that further study is needed but this seems to indicate that AGW by CO2 is not going the have the suggested impact.
More on SH weather.
Here in Sydney it is being bitterly cold (I am enhancing my carbon footprint by sitting on top of a heater while trying to find out about the future heat death of the planet). We had 50% of July rainfall in one day, and the following day was heavy rain (haven’t seen a report about how much).
Meanwhile today in Melbourne, they had fog and flights from the airport were delayed for 6 hours. It was a real pea souper.
I think the SH has decided it will no longer be taking part in any global *warming* trends.
re 150
How is the recent rain affecting talk of AGW-induced drought in Australia?
Re #151
The rain has worked wonders. The papers a few weeks ago were full of comments about climate change. There was going to be endless drought, the soil was drying out, snow would never fall again and the skiing industry was doomed etc etc. And the claim that AGW was going to lead to more droughts really seemed to fit in with all the worrying possibilities.
Since the rain there has a been a significant drop off in volume of this stuff. Except for the aggressive promotion of GoreAid a little bit of sanity has broken out in the media.
And Tim Flannery (Australia’s No 1 AGW alarmista) who predicted dams would run *dry* is not looking too smart.
Global Warming Swindle is appearing on TV this week followed by a panel discussion, should be interesting.
At last the truth about global warming….it has nothing to do with SUVs and power plants. It has to do with cows burping!!
Time to do your part to save the planet and eat more Steak!
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/43020/story.htm
RE: #132 – you are suffering from the impacts of super cooled pools of air aloft, not warmth. Your climate is quite similar to the climate found in a accute wedge of North America roughly delineated by Monterey Bay, the Alaska – BC border, and a point a few miles inland from there. Tornados in this sort of climate are always a result of an extreme cold pool coupled with shear conditions.
RE: #152 – My skis badly want snow. If only flights were cheaper, I’d be emitting a serious carbon footprint and heading South …. LOL!
“If the warming in the Arctic is due to dirty snow, why cannot the models be wrong that the Arctic warming is driving NH warming?”
Dirty snow could be an effect and not a cause. Consider the case where you have reduced precipitation. Snow and ice sublimation leaves behind dust which will increase in concentration on the surface until at some point, without additional precipitation, the entire surface of the ice will be covered with dirt.
Also, the Northern pole is sea water which mixes with waters from lower latitudes and this mixing might vary with long term changes in winds as would the movement of surface ice. So I would fully expect the thickness and extent of ice at the Northern pole to be more variable over time than the Southern pole which is in the middle of a fairly large continental land mass.
Add to this natural difference a bunch of thermometers placed in air conditioner exhaust and you can create whatever scenario you want simply by varying your selection of temperature recording stations. I would imagine that stations could also be selected that would show a flat to cooling trend if someone had the mind to do it.
156:
See CO2science.org, where they show one station per week with COOLING over the last 70 or so years.
One study that indicates that solar variability is reflected strongly in tree rings.
Sorry from CO, but A-basin closed on June 4th this year. There’s still snow in the mountains, even in the south, however. I was recently up by the headwaters of the Rio Grande playing in the snow. I should post a picture of that day, on Stony Pass between the RG resevoir and Silverton, CO. We decided we’re going to bring our skis next year just to say we skied in July. 😉
You can actually see this effect in the Mountains as spring melt sets in. Snow is actually very dirty, but it’s normally spread out. As the snow melts, the dirt gets concentrated into a layer on the top. It looks odd, actually.
Mark
#151
Austrailian climate is very susceptible to Central Pacific SSTs. The lack of rainfall in Austrailia mirrors rather high MEI (Multivariate ENSO Index) numbers of the last 5-6 years. Google MEI, ENSO and you can get to NOAA’s track of this. The Pacific has entered an ENSO neutral period, and should evolve into a La Nina period. If that’s the case, rainfall should again be returning to Austrailia.
Here in North America, we are sandwiched between a cooling Pacific and a Warm Atlantic. According to Joe Bastardi at Accuweather, this situation has analogs in the mid 20s through the 30s and 40s, in which several places in North America will see long term drought and excessively hot summers. Where I live in the Western Great Lakes, we have had a cold drought since April. The Polar Jet has pushed cold dry Candadian air masses southward, and as a consequence all of our Spring and Summer storms are focused in the Southern Plains and Lower Mississippi Valley.
One of the guys I just spent a week camping with is from Dallas. Every time we snuck into a place with phone access, the conversation with his wife (absent from the trip) went like “so it’s still raining, huh?… wow.”
Mark
RE: 156 Have your read the UC Irvine study http://today.uci.edu/news/release_detail.asp?key=1621. My reading is participates in the new snow. Could be wrong but take a read. Present-day climate forcing and response from black carbon in snow, J. Geophys. Res., Vol. 112, No. D11, D11202 10.1029/2006JD008003 05 June 2007.
133, Ray: I would wait to see the study and some feedback by the solar scientists before commenting.
124:
LOL. Why do the “experts” censor so many comments? Do they not have enough expertise to address them?
I’d think that there are more cooling stations (and/or grids) than there are warming ones, just the cooling ones aren’t colder as much as the warming ones are warmer. Like two stations at -.1 and +.3, if the more numerous cooling ones were like that compared to the less numerous warming ones, still a warming trend overall. Although possibly many more stations are cooling in the area around the thermometer. (If we assume the measured temperatures are accurate in the first place, of course.)
RE#152, but the cynic in me expects that any heavy rains, erosion, flooding, etc, will be blamed on global warming, too. And let’s face it, there aren’t many places on earth where rain never has deleterious effects. When those negative side effects are observed, it will be another cause to blame global warming.
Steve Milesworthy: Some questions:
Don’t the GCMs predict more warming in the mid troposphere than the lower troposphere? If so, why hasn’t this happened?
Why has there not been an increasing trend in temperature for the last 8-9 years (despite all the questionable “adjustments” of the surface temperature data and the locating of many sensors in artificially “hot” places)?
Do you believe that there have been wide temperature swings in the past? If so, what caused them?
Don’t you think that some of your “experts” over at RC have been pretty well discredited by Steve Mc’s work?
Don’t you think that IPCC should provide a basic physical explanation of just how the Anthro GHGs cause a significant amount of warming?
Can you cite any empirical evidence that the current warming is caused by GHGs?
If water vapor feedback is a big deal, why are average July temperatures at low elevations in the Desert Southwest higher than such temperatures in the humid southeast? (Please don’t conflate heat content of the air with TEMPERATURE here).
162. It’s kinda weird how the article you linked goes from this:
to the suggestion that the mitigation method should be decreasing industrial emissions. I submit that one large forest fire puts more soot into the air than many years of “industrial emissions.” I guess it’s not PC to suggest that Mother Nature may be causing a problem. Maybe better forest management should be considered. LOL.
#168
I also have to wonder about the impact of say a very long-term drought in the Southeastern or Mid-Atlantic regions of the US and the absolutely huge forest fires that would have raged prior to European settlement. It wouldn’t be hard to imagine nearly the entire Appalachian region being ablaze or even New England.
I would be willing to bet that a period of severe drought that followed a period of unusually wet weather (causing a buildup of fuels in the forest) would generate some truly spectacular fires in the prehistoric North American past.
Re#140, John Lang:
Humankind began to burn fossil fuels in somehow significant quantity only about 60 years ago. If you take a look at this graph (IPCC consensus science) comparing atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and antropogenic emissions of CO2, you will notice that before 1900 natural carbon cycle added net carbon to atmosphere, and then for some reason began to sequester it:
Most likely explanation to this shift is that it did not happen at all. As most recent stomata proxies for CO2 concentrations point out, 19 century concentrations of CO2 were 300-320 ppm, and increase since 1950s to present to 390 ppm level is due to ‘€” yes! ‘€” combustion of fossil fuels (I can’t believe I am saying this).
That’s to say, there is no anyhow accurate model of natural carbon cycle, and only 2-3% change in natural carbon sink could overpower all nasty carbon we release by fossil fuel combustion. Lifetime of antropogenic carbon in atmosphere could be 5 years, or 5000 years, and IPCC 50-200 year number is arbitrary and misleading at best. My personal opinion is that it is totally meaningless.
And I forgot to mention the potential for absolutely huge prairie fires during periods of severe drought in the Midwest. I don’t think it would be out of the question for there to have been fire raging from Oklahoma to Manitoba.
IPCC, NASA, NCAR, UK Met etc obsess about “killer AGW” – meanwhile, from a UN site, there is this:
http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=72357
Mind you, this is stale news, from late May. It’s only gotten more disasterous since then. Add to this, the suffering in shantytowns in Argetina and southern Brazil. Nary of word of this from the usual suspects. Only certain types of humanitarian crises warrent the focus of Northern elites. It is a true sign of the deep (im)morality beneath the “Green” veneer.
Why doesn’t anybody talk about convection around here?
Answer: It is computationally intractable.
Here’s a Joe D’Aleo article people will probably be interested in.
http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm?aid=544
RE: #117 – As predicted the cut off low retrograded out of the Great Basin and is now just off of the central California coast. There are showers wrapping around and approaching from the south. Unfortunately, they are light, and the lightning strikes are now erupting. Much of California is now under a red flag warning. This could end up being a serious issue, with fire crews already stretched from the many lightning caused wild fires currently burning in the intermountain region.
Weather, not climate: For the past several days the weather forcasters have been saying it would be in the high 80’s to 90 in Boston, yet it hasn’t gotten out of the 60s! Its only 66 right now.
RE: #176 – When I was in NYC last week, it was definitely cooler than forecast. I actually wore a sweater during the day one day and several evenings. Sweater? NYC? Summer? Ptah!
RE: #175 – Folks, wish me and fellow Californians luck. Major multiple dry lightning strikes as I write this in the central Sierra including Yosemite Nat’l Park. Meanwhile, a bit further to the west …. a budding cell moving right toward me – if there are strikes to my south I could be in a heap o’ trouble. Fingers crossed.
177: Good luck. We in So. Oregon are next, I hear.
At 2:00 pm it was a hellish 75F degrees in San Jose, California and a roasting 80F inland in Sacramento. I’m not sure we can stand this broiling much longer.
Yeah, it’s weather, but we really haven’t had much of a summer here. It got hot for two days and made the headlines. Most of this summer has been relatively cool. Temps tied the 1985 temperature in Vegas. Big deal. It gets 110+ in Vegas in July rather frequently.
RE: #178 – In my neck of the woods, there have been neither natural controlled burns nor unexpected wildfires during my life (over 40 years). Probably none in over 100 years. logging effectively ceased 80 years ago. I have a defensible space, so long as winds are not too high, it might not be too, too bad. Bummer for those who are less fortunate. Good luck indeed in Ore – the bands hitting the Sierra right now are definitely headed toward you.
Continued from “The New Mann Paper” but not really about it:
If we state for illustration that a) we have caused a 100 ppm rise and b) a 100 ppm rise absorbs 5% of the heat absorbed then c) Humans have caused a 5% heat absorbtion increase. It doesn’t really matter what the real numbers are, those are the details that get argued about, what does what and how much. (The weight in the atmosphere or the concentration in the atmosphere is really pretty immaterial also)
The actual number is more like a range of addition to the greenhouse effect, where CO2 is responsible for 10-30% of the greenhouse effect (an estimate also). See http://www.atmo.arizona.edu/students/courselinks/spring04/atmo451b/pdf/RadiationBudget.pdf http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/006.htm
Ramanathan and Coakley, Rev. Geophys and Space Phys., 16 465 (1978) gives the percent reduction in greenhouse effect of 12% if you remove CO2 by itself.
Hansen, J., Climatic Change, 68, 269, 2005 says the geological CO2 maxima is around 300 ppm (where the oft used phrase “since the industrial era” probably comes from). Although of course, that doesn’t prove all 100ish is from us, or that none is escaping, etc.
It’s a bit more tricky to actually get anything out of this. The PDF (you’ll have to read it to get the calculations and details) gives the CO2 contribution as clear sky of 29 WM-2 (cloudy 22). However, when combined with overlap effects with H20, it’s 32 WM-2 (cloudy 24). That calculates a clear sky percent contribution of CO2 as 26%. (It gives the total forcing as 125 WM-2 clear (86 cloudy))
From the PDF also: Percent of contribution to greenhouse: Water vapor: 60%, Carbon dioxide: 26%, Ozone: 8%, Methane, Nitrous Oxide and overlap: 6%
That doesn’t include clouds, oceans, sunlight, snow, etc etc, just GHG. So it’s not terribly useful to understand all the interrelations. Regardless. Given that,
Then you just have to figure out how to equate that to the temperature caused by the greenhouse effect and calculate it to 284 vs 384 ppm of carbon dioxide (or whatever) versus the anomalie trend for that period. And if you use other references, your numbers will change.
The actual numbers are a bit different, that 300 ppm is in 1850s and the GHCN-ERSST figures for anomalies only go back to 1880, which was 290 ppm, and now is 385 ppm. The temp anomalie trend line for 1880 to 2005 is about +0.6 C Change the period, it changes. Of course, I don’t know how important any of that is: Most of the change has been very recent. The point is, you have to know the time period and dataset you’re talking about.
Therefore, using those numbers since 1880 from GHCN-ERSST , the only fact is that carbon dioxide went up 95 ppm, as measured at Law Dome/Mauna Loa, and the reported anomalies on a global scale, as calculated, had a +0.6 C trend rise. So does this all correlate? Does 100 ppm ALONE cause .63 C of warming and is the 100 ppm ALL from us? What confidence interval comes out for you on that one?
The problem lies in figuring out some kind of rate of increase that will tell us given a time period what the temperature will do in the future. Anyone got a method that would plug in 1910-1940 and tell us with accuracy what it would have done in 1940-1970? Then I can use it to tell me what it should have done in any given time period, including from 2000 to 2015 or 1980-1990 or 1980-2010.
I’d love one of those. Anyone got one? No, I didn’t think so.
I interrupt normal programming to announce that I have received answers to questions, generated in discussion at the ClimateAudit blog, directed to D.E. Parker concerning his study on the Urban Heat Island effect, and its effect (or lack thereof) on the perception of global warming through land-based temperature measurements.
You can find his responses at:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1718#comment-119294 ,
starting at entry #386.
FYI:
https://thunderstorm.vaisala.com/tux/jsp/explorer/explorer.jsp
Lightning strikes in CONUS.
Meanwhile, in the Tahoe basin, an entirely different concern. There, the storms are definitely not dry. A look at the usual products (IR, water vapor) confirms this. There, a cold pool has become entrained into a vorticity max. In areas burned by recent fires, flash flooding is a distinct possibility (some may be occuring as I type this). Sodden thought – I wonder how well the NCAR models prog’ed all this?
More breaking news.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6290228.stm
Scientists have proved that the sun isn’t causing GW. In fact, solar output is down lately and temperatures are still going up (somewhere, it not been that warm in the UK lately) and cosmic rays have in the past influenced climate but don’t currently because of pollution.
So now there’s an apparent inconvenient divergence between surface temperature and solar effects. The possible good news is this could be the explanation for the satellite atmospheric temperature trends.
That just leaves the surface temperature measurements to be better validated.
Interesting.
Re: #338 Unthreaded #13There is no circumstances where CO2 can absorb all IR available to it at all frequencies (or actually at any frequency). A very high %, yes. But not all.
Dave,
Doh! And I made almost exactly the same comment to someone at RC at about the same time too. However, I think that most people would consider 3 absorbance units or 99.9% absorption as functionally equivalent to all.
I’ve been playing on the Modtran calculator ( http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~archer/cgimodels/radiation.html ). It turns out that the statement that methane has 23 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide is more than a little misleading. It’s true that a 1 ppmv increase in the atmospheric concentration of methane calculates to a significant temperature increase. However, considering that the current concentration of methane is 1.7 ppmv, that amounts to a 60% increase in methane concentration. It would also take over 50 years to happen in the worst of the SRES scenarios, and probably a lot longer, if ever, considering that the current rate of increase is essentially zero. Also, if you do a plot of temperature vs ln [CH4], the slope of the (non-linear, btw) plot is actually considerably smaller than that for a similar plot of T vs ln[CO2], both at current concentrations. In fact, at 1.7 ppmv CO2, an increase to 2.7 ppmv CO2 increases the temperature more than twice as much as from 1.7 to 2.7 ppmv of methane at 375 ppmv CO2. This appears to be because the methane absorption band is at ~1300 cm-1 where the radiated power density is much lower than at the CO2 band at ~1000 cm-1. Note: T is calculated by adjusting the surface offset temperature at a given methane (or CO2) concentration to give the same radiated power when looking down from 70 km as for the base case of 1.7 ppmv CH4, assuming constant relative humidity, clear sky and 1976 standard atmosphere.
Another thing that seemed counter to current dogma is that the Modtran calculator predicts less warming for doubling CO2 for the subarctic winter conditions (cold and low specific humidity) than for the tropics. Disclaimer again: I am not interested in discussing the validity of the Modtran calculator, I’m just using it to see how it works, as it is pointed to by people like Gavin as being very close to the radiative energy transfer codes in the GCM’s.
Re #185
AGW must be responsible for the warming of other planets in the solar system as well.
DAMN YOU CARBON DIOXIDE! *sob*
FYI, from RC:
#
The following comments can be found on climate audit which imply belief in 4 of the assumptions. I was particularly irritated with the first comment because it is clear from the rest of the article (about Parker 2006) that Steve McIntyre understands the difference, but the diversion completely confused the subsequent discussion. Google them to find the context.
1. Steve McIntyre: If you are not a climate scientist (or a realclimate reader), you would almost certainly believe, from your own experience, that cities are warmer than the surrounding countryside
2. Anthony Watts: If you were conducting an experiment where the results were likely to shape national and world policy, wouldn’t it be prudent to check the origin of the data set?
5. Bob Meyer: Is Schmidt actually suggesting that large changes in the individual station data would have no effect on the grid data because by some occult process they have already “fixed” the deviant station data?
6. David Stockwell: if removing the contaminated stations reduced the 20th century increase to the point there was no increase in temperature, how could that possibly improve model fit, when the models show an increase of 0.5deg?
Comment by Steve Milesworthy ‘€” 3 Jul 2007 @ 7:09 am
For the statistician types, could we get some trends of Co2 and temperature for each decade period from the start of the records? Rather a correlation between 10 years of temp reacting to what other 10 years of Co2 or vice versa, with a look into how the acceleration of temperature v. concentrations is working? It may be rather interesting to try and guess 2001 to 2010 with it.
Re: 181 and others – With the unknown effects that these non-GhG factors have in combination with or without the GhG part, simply discussing Co2 alone is not very interesting or pertinent at all, it seems. In general, studies checking what happened 30 myr or 10 kyr ago or even in the last 2 kyr, none of that would be very helpful to understanding what is really going on either from a scientific perspective today.
Re: 182 – Did you have to post that in every bloody topic?
Re: 184 – I’m glad I was aware of what CONUS meant!
Re: 185 – Very interesting. I should chime in with “validated at all,” perhaps?
Re: 188 – That is rather funny! How about Dear damned carbon dioxide. We hate you. Yours, those that think you are a very bad little substance these days.
Re: 189 – Well yes of course Mr. Milesworthy. It goes without saying.
How about this as a little bit of something. http://green.yahoo.com/index.php?q=node/994
Here we go again…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,2123447,00.html
Sam Urbinto:
The best thing, quite primitive, but I bet it is more telling then complicated computer models, could be to compare two global temperatures between most resent peaks of warm PDO phases.
First peak, 1938-1945, antropogenic emissions of CO2 were low at about 1 GtC per year, CO2 concentrations were about 310 ppm.
Second peak, last 5 years, antropogenic emissions of CO2 are high at about 7 GtC per year, CO2 concentrations are about 390 ppm.
Temperature: according to HadCRUT3 temperature dropped from 1938 to 1958 by 0.2 C. According to radiosonde temperature measurements, temperature in 1958-1960 was roughly the same as in 1979-1980. Next leg is increase of temperature by 0.3 C according to MSU satellite measurements from 1979 to 2006.
All in all: combustion of fossil fuels added 80 ppm CO2 to atmosphere, and combined effects of added CO2 plus other GHG plus all positive feedbacks minus all negative feedbacks heated Earth atmosphere by 0.1 degree C.
Solar influence and aerosols are not included. This is so far maximum possible total antropogenic warming effect.
I can live with that.
Readers or Climate Audit know that public data isn’t always very public. Hopefully there is some movement on that front. From Michael Arrington at TechCrunch:
From the Grauniad article
“They changed direction in 1985, the climate did not … [the temperature] increase should be slowing down but in fact it is speeding up.”
“Global temperatures are going up by 0.2 degrees per decade and the top 10 warmest years on record have happened in the past 12 years.”
Speeding up so much that the rise has flatlined for 5 years, with 1998 still being the hottest year on record. Still, shouldn’t let observational data get in the way of the models (whether the surface temperature constructions or the GCMs)
It’s interesting that the RC’ers think that any lack of correlation between solar output and temperature proves that the sun can’t be responsible.
Yet they are very quick to dismiss anyone who points out that on a year by year basis, there is very little correlation between CO2 and temperature. Both in the present, and in the past.
MarkW (#196) it is interesting how both AGW scientists and RC folks draw the same curious conclusions in this field:
a) Sun’s influence can be judged from a couple of graphs, CO2’s one should not be judged by raw data;
b) Sun’s correlation is not good enough, while CO2’s one is (indeed, Sun’s correlation is excellent until mid ’80is, while CO2’s one is so good only between 1978 and 1998…);
c) if Sun is not guilty, then CO2 must be (and why?);
d) no other cause is possible, no cosmic ray, no internal variability, no uncertainty, nothing at all;
e) anyway, models modeled by us following our theories would confirm our view, for thousands years…no matter if we have to extract just a couple of good runs from a tens-runs model which show everything and its contrary;
f) as in any discussion concerning AGW, they consider temperatures rising at unprecented and exponential rate even if they actually slowed down on global average.
#189 Steve Sadlov
Your point? It was in reply to Dan Hughes who asked:
If I was scared of you Mr Sadlov I’d have used a different pseudonym.
I forgot:
g) correlation must be perfect and effects must be immediate, no delay time is allowed, and thermal equilibrium must be reached immediately (things that contradict both their theories and principles of physics).
#192
Interesting. In 2003 the same M. Lockwood co-authored an abstract, where they pointed out that it seems that
#198,
Getting a bit touchy are we?
Who said anyone was scared of anyone?
RE: #201 – Just another AGW fanatic mole, trying to fly under the radar screen here. Look I have no issue with diversity. But if one is an AGW fanatic, than come right out with it, like Steve B and Peter H have done. It is the ones who try to pretend to be “neutral” but really aren’t, who irk the heck out of me. Open kimono and all that sort of good stuff ….
#202 Steve Sadlov
Do I come across as neutral to you!? I thought you were trying to get your mates to gang up on me rather than “exposing” me as an “AGW fanatic”.
If you must know, I am here because a good way of learning is to discuss with people who have a different point of view, because you then are forced to get to grips with all the uncertainties.
If you’d prefer a bit of a ding-dong, then I’ll try and be a bit more inflammatory. As it happens I did criticise Steve’s take on Parker 2006 in Steve’s thread, not just on realclimate.
If you’d rather I went away so you can agree with yourself with no interruptions, then just say so 🙂
#200 EW
Interesting. So we have a scientist who has found a proper link between solar cycles and climate (rather than one that depends on mining cloud datasets for the best fit this week). But he’s shown that all the measures are in opposition to the warming trend.
That blows out two sceptic arguments in one.
#192 and others, the paper is here: http://www.journals.royalsoc.ac.uk/content/h844264320314105/
They are using statistically very appealing method of “visual inspection” 😉 The interesting thing is that I applied their very naive filtering method to UAH MSU LT data (the paper is using GISS and CRU global temp data) and the result is, using the Team terminology, “remarkably similar” to those solar curves in Figure~3. Has the Royal Society abandonded the use of reviewers … I mean the first thing that came to my mind is how about satellite temperature data??
Few things about the Lockwood paper:
1) I haven’t seen a copy of the full paper so I am going off of the abstract, the press release, and the figure posted on the new scientist story. With that said, I don’t understand what he is showing with the a) figure showing sun spots. The sun spot number should have been at a minimum in 1986 and 1996, while the figure shows a maximum in 1985. Also, the cycle length shown in the figure b) graph appears to be off or oversmoothed. Cycle 21 was just over 10 years from 1976 to 1986, cycle 22 was ~10.5 from 1986 to 1996-7, and cycle 23 is approaching 11 years with a predicted length of nearly 12 years for the current cycle. Correcting that graph would show the shortest cycles from 1976 to 1997, when the largest increase in T was occurring, and would show the longest cycles in the 1960s and 2000s when very little warming (or even slight cooling) has occurred.
2) Where is the delta T graph coming from? I don’t know of any global anomal graph that shows warming from 1998 to 2002 as is shown on figure f) of his graph. With any of the typical global anomaly graphs that shows warming from 1976 to 1998 and then cooling or stable temperatures from 1998-2003, the correlation of T with solar activity would be readily apparent from his figures alone.
3) Lockwood wrote a paper in 1999 saying the solar magnetic flux rose significantly from 1964 to 1996. Yet now he says the sun’s output has been declining since 1985? Which is it? The press release and abstract for the new paper appear to be silent on the relationship between solar magnetic flux and galactic cosmic rays (GCRs). Is that because the magnetic flux hasn’t tracked the other measurements listed in the paper?
4) Total cosmic rays measured at a satellite is not the same as GCRs measured at the earth’s lower atmosphere. The total CR flux is dominated by the flux of solar generated CRs. The solar CRs are not the ones implicated by Svensmark in the GCR-cloud theory. The cyclical changes in total CRs are dominated by the solar cycle derived CRs and any change in GCRs at the earth’s surface due to interactions between the earth’s mag field and the IMF would not show up in measurements at a satellite.
5) Is it mere coincidence that the total CR flux reached a peak in about 1998 at the same time that the earth’s mag field reached a low and the global T reached a peak? No, it isn’t. Higher solar flux during solar cycle peaks distorts and weakens the earth’s magnetic field. The expansion of the sun’s magnetic field during such times results in a net decrease in GCRs reaching earth, but the total CR flux due to solar activity is much higher. So the earth’s magnetic field is lower, solar activity is higher, and GCR flux is lower right around 1998…what else happened around that time? Oh yeah…the earth was hotter than it has been at least since the 1930s (depending on how much UHI you think has occurred, it may be the hottest in centuries). But forget about that clear correlation ok? Just look at the misleading graphs and listen to what the nice man is saying…the sun isn’t causing climate change.
I really am curious to find out what made Lockwood apparently ignore the solar magnetic flux in this new paper. His 1999 paper was pretty emphatic in stating that the flux was much higher in the late 1990s than in the early 1960s. Given the importance of the magnetic flux in the grand scheme of the IMF and the GCR theories, I would have expected at least some discussion of why it wasn’t a factor if that is what he believes.
Thanks for the link Jean S. After reading the full paper, obviously there are some corrections to make to what I said above. The CR counts make the same error as the others trying to debunk Svensmark in that they use the total neutron count at Climax to represent GCRs. The total neutron count as I described in the previous post totally swamps the GCR count, and changes in the GCR flux will be totally lost in the neutron flux swings associated with the solar cycle. Also, by smoothing the solar cycle length over a long period, they are looking for a long term signal, whereas GCRs should produce a nearly instantaneous temperature signal. So if shorter cycle length correlates to fewer GCRs through some mechanism, then smoothing the length over several decades will prevent such a correlation from being apparent. The two shortest cycles of the last 5 were from 1976 to 1997. That is also the time frame over which global temperature climbed by most of the 0.6 degrees cited as caused by GHGs.
Also, great point about the satellite temperature data. If they are purporting to rely only on actual data, why go and take a dataset that has been heavily adjusted and use it for comparison instead of the raw satellite data? Given the MANY questionable adjustments to the rural T record revealed by Anthony Watts and Steve M, it would seem prudent to compare the solar data to raw satellite T instead.
I agree with the comments above. Most of the data presented does not match up with anything I have seen.
Good points by Bill F and Jean S. It appears to me that this is another study that was done by seeking data to support a pre-determined conclusion (and ignoring data that don’t support that conclusion).
Here’s a rather off-the-wall article, but there may be some other solar-related factors at play, also.
#203 lol, no interruptions. But I wouldn’t exactly call you a fanatic. Just a bit confused. 🙂
#190, 193 Unless you account for clouds, you’re using a different set of forcings, which could throw things quite a bit off. With CO2+H2O cloudy forcing is only 75% as strong as clear, but in the entire forcing level, it’s only 68.8% as strong. The same goes for ignoring any of the other factors, you end up with a system that isn’t reality, so why bother arguing about it? It’s not real and it’s not science. It’s not even climate any more, it’s just some numbers. Like removing the components of the GhG singly you get a number, but in the system it’s not the same number due to interactions. Like where examining the particle changes how it acts, so you can never know what it really looks like.
Also, I had some numbers wrong. 1911 ice was the 300 Well, 301.1 (1832 ice was 284.3 ppm 1850 ice was 284.7 1880 ice was 290.7)
However you slice it though, we have about a 100 rise in the last 175 years, of which 85 was in the last 100ish and of which 75 was in the last 65ish.
RE: 205
I just read/scanned the paper. I’m a physicist not a climate scientist so this maybe a stupid question. What decoupled the global climate from solar radiation/solar magnetic field/cosmic radiation in 1985? I would think that if “greenhouse” effects had taken over, those effects would be superposed on the solar effects. I don’t understand why “greenhouse” effects would REMOVE the solar effects. Or is there something I’m missing?
WRT the Lockwood paper, there is a quote from Dr Lockwood on the BBC website (here), referring to ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’ which is especially glorious:
Bring the proxies up to date, I say 🙂
#211: I’m not a physicist, but as far as I can see you are not missing anything. BTW, notice that practically only meaningful changes apparent in solar data (after the naive filtering) in the last 30 years occur in mid 80s and 90s. If you repeat my experiment in #205, you’ll find those also in the MSU data. This is what I meant by my rather sarcastic comment “remarkably similar”.
#211 Dave
Nothing decoupled it. But the cooling from the sun is greatly outweighed by the warming from the CO2.
#207 Bill F
They have set a 3GeV lower limit which rules out solar cosmic rays.
Also, do you think cosmic rays caused the 1998 El Nino then?
What’s interesting is that we talk about water like it’s not important at all, we ignore it really, but it is the single most important component of the climate due to its volume. Look what we have when we focus so much on less than 400 ppm of carbon dioxide, no matter how strong it is, is (ignoring overlap) only 1/3 as much of the Greenhouse Effect of 20-30 C (nice percise number) as water is. (Ozone is about 1/4 as strong as that) This of course ignores cloud distribution levels, (clouds which are of course also made of water of course) Water, ah. Lovely water.
Liquid form: Oceans, Lakes, Rivers, Streams, Rain
Solid form: Ice (glaciers), Ice (clouds), Snow
Vapor form: Atmosphere
And of course although water vapor doesn’t have low enough energy vibrational modes to match what carbon dioxide can do, there is a huge amount of it so it makes up for that. And it can emit and absorb IR during rotational transitions, such transitions can also be caused by collisional transfer.
I love water! It’s cool. (Go ahead, take some, you know you want to)
In case you didn’t get part of #215 above, the fact it does absorb IR sometimes means water is also at times a forcing, btw.
Anyway, the water effects (specifically to me, clouds): This ties back to the fact we leave out so much important stuff, .5C is such a small part of what we leave out. But let’s do a ‘what if’.
So GE is 20-30C CO2 is 1/3 of GE, so let’s say 10C We’ve supposedly added a persisting 100 ppm (I’ll round it nice and neat) which is 33% more than the 300 in 1911 (I’m trying to keep this simple) We are estimating a linear trend of .6C from 1911 to 2005 (I say estimating because we don’t know if the temperature measurements are correct) However, that .6 is a trend, it’s .51 as of 2005, and that is THE highest it’s ever been since 1880. That could be in the Margin Of Error from the original measurements, so we could just stop – .1C is nothing (if we take it as being an MOE of .5 and use the actual temp) eg if thermos were only accurate to .5 from 1961-1990, then right now we could be at 0 or 1 compared to that 30 year period) (In fact, the trend for 1976 to 2005 is the same .5 as the current high in 2005)
But let’s go high end trend plus add MOE, which would be 1.1C. If CO2 is 10C of the GE at the 1961-1990 baseline, and we’ve added 33% to that, we get 13.3C (This gets complicated, the baseline is shorter than the CO2 rise, but we’re trying to torque this up)
Now here’s the question. Why did temps go up 1.1C but that should have been 3.3C? Ah, that’s the wonderful lag we keep hearing about. We’re 2.2C behind! But now we have another problem. Most of the rise (and certainly the most rapid part) has been since…. 1955 70 ppm since 1955. (Unfortunate, but that’s only 22% of 316.) (Surprise, same trend of around +.6C total) So has 70 ppm has caused 1.1C of warming in the last 50 years? Are we adding 22% CO2 and causing a 2.2 rise?
So we could have a 0 temp rise since 1880 with a rise of 100 ppm (MOE negative)
Or we could have a 1.1C temp rise since 1984 (MOE positive) (.44 a decade)
Or something anywhere in between, or higher, or lower. More could be coming. Or not. One thing is for sure, though, the trend recently is about +.6C no matter how you slice it. The interesting thing to me is when we’ll see it go over 1C a year for the first time!
Oh, back to the guessing game.
If I understand correctly, CO2 magnifies the effect of IR Radiation from the Sun. Of course if the Sun also has an effect on cooling mechanisms such as cloud cover then that should still show up in global temperature record. i.e. The results of the electro-magnetic output from the Sun can’t just spontaneously disappear from the temperature record in 1985 and be replaced by a correlation with atmospheric CO2 concentration. Where did it go? I didn’t see any explanation of this in the paper.
So I don’t think you answered my question.
You need to understand Mann’s evolving multivariate regression. Before that, no one can help you.
I’ve been spending a lot of my spare time trying to educate myself about the AGW issue. I’m not convinced one way or the other, but nothing I’ve run across has made my BS Alarm shut down. Papers that show 120 years of temperature correlation with Solar activity shutting down and never comment on possible mechanisms* don’t help at all.
*This would require a strong extra-Solar source of radiation, would it not?
It is pretty clear that Lockwood is using Mann-type data in this study. It bothers me that these researchers keep getting away it – I just saw a long report about this study on BBC International.
The Sun did NOT do a “U-turn in 1985” as Lockwood states and some posts above have asked questions about.
For example, Solar Cycle 22 which ended in May 1996, was just 9 years 8 months long, the second shortest on record indicating a very active Sun, not a cooling U-turned one.
Some climate researchers, noting that the solar cycle length versus temperature link was very strong, started trying to rewrite the data like they did with the temperature data.
Here are the real solar cycle lengths versus whatever Lockwood presented.
Solar cycle:
23 – 11 years 2 months and counting
22 – 9 years 8 months – ending May 1996
21 – 10 years 3 months – ending September 1986
20 – 11 years 8 months – ending June 1976
19 – 10 years 6 months – ending October 1964
18 – 10 years 2 months – ending April 1954
17 – 10 years 5 months – ending February 1944
16 – 10 years 1 month – ending September 1933
15 – 10 years 0 months – ending August 1923
14 – 11 years 5 months – ending August 1913
13 – 11 years 11 months – ending February 1902
Notice the similarity between rising temperatures and shortening cycles and visa versa (especially when one uses the historical temperature data that has not been adjusted by Hansen and his cohorts.)
RE: 205 Jean S
It seems that Lockwood has received something from someone somewhere. What he says about a decline in Solar Irradiance is plainly false. There’s been no decline since 1985 to the present according to satellite data.
1610 —- 1364.7338 W/m^2 (Little Ice Age starts)
1710 —- 1363.6195 W/m^2 (Little Ice Age)
1810 —- 1363.7976 W/m^2 (Little Ice Age stops)
1885 —- 1364.7394 W/m^2 (Warming Era)
1910 —- 1364.6566 W/m^2
1985 —- 1365.6506 W/m^2
1998 —- 1366.1111 W/m^2 (warmest year of the decade)
2000 —- 1366.6744 W/m^2
2007 —- 1367.15 W/m^2 (from recent measurements obtained from satellite devices)
Can someone tell me – is solar irradiance falling or is it rising from 1985 ?
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/climate_forcing/solar_variability/lean2000_irradiance.txt
JeanS writes:
First consider satellite TSI: (from the Lockwood paper, pg.4)
One might reasonable wonder what Willson, the PI of the instrument, thinks?
http://www.acrim.com/
Special session at Fall 2006 AGU
http://www.acrim.com/AGU%20Fall%20Meeting%202006%20presentation.htm
TSI composite according to Willson
http://www.acrim.com/ACRIM%20Composite%20Graphics.htm
Odd that they don’t discuss the other reconstructions….. or other recent relevent results.
I’ll be very interested to see what Nir Shaviv and other Solar experts have to say about this paper.
214:
How absurd! Why, then didn’t the CO2 AMPLIFY the effects of the Sun in the past? If CO2 is that important, then we certainly should have had more than a 0.6 C increase. Of course, we don’t even have that, using satellite data….
Don’t feel the troll.
No, I’m not kinky, I meant, don’t feed the troll.
Cold weather hits Europe (Start of a New Little Ice Age in Europe, as a result of AGW?):
Shades of The Day After Tomorrow!
#214 Steve,
The 3GV cutoff doesn’t exclude solar particles, it just reduces their influence to some degree. The difference between the 3GV cutoff at Climax and the ~13GV cutoff at Huancayo shows the change in solar modulation from lower energy particles to higher energy particles. While the solar cycle pattern still shows up in the Huancayo data, it is very muted compared to Climax, because Climax measures more of the particles that are likely to be affected by solar cycle fluctuations. The fluctuations of the higher energy particles are very small in relation to the large fluctuation of lower energy particles…thus at monitors like Climax, the solar cycle fluctuations swamp any other trend that might be present.
As for the 1998 El Nino, I do happen to believe that there is a relationship between solar activity and El Nino. I haven’t seen any good mechanism proposed yet, but the ability of Landscheidt to predict El Nino activity more accurately than anybody else based on solar cycles suggests a relationship.
As for the Lockwood paper, the more I study it, the more I hope that Steve M or somebody with a better statistical background than mine will take an interest in auditing it. The smoothing methodology clearly seems to smooth out important fluctuations in all of the data presented, including temperature. It looks like they put everything through a Mann-o-matic to me…but I am hoping Steve or somebody can work through it and explain exactly whether what they did was valid or not from a statistical standpoint.
Another nice website is this atmospheric animation from Florida State ( link ). It shows the movement of parcels of air about a mile above the surface of the Atlantic and adjacent land masses.
Click the “FWD” button to start the animation. The display is current, so the details change every day.
The yellow parcels have some counterclockwise inward spin (sort of like cyclones) while the green areas have clockwise outward spin (sort of like fair-weather high pressure areas). As is shown, there are many such weak areas in the everyday atmosphere. You can see the general circulation around the Atlantic’s Bermuda High. Today (11/7) the model shows a vortex (tropical depression or storm) spin up over The Bahamas.
#227:
Well, there is nothing to audit at least from the statistical point of view. Only thing they did was that they low-pass filtered data sets with a simple, ad-hoc filter, and then claim that since the filtered temperature does not correspond (visually, “no numbers please, we are climate scientists” 😉 ) to their predetermined way how it should compare to the filtered solar data, this somehow shows that there is no connection. IMO that is closer to astrology than statistics.
If they truly want to show something more convincing, they might want to consider Granger causality or something like that. Now that I think of it, it would be interesting (any econometricians with spare time out there 😉 ) to test Granger causality of solar series with respect to satelite temperature series.
I was mainly referring to the validity of the smoothing methodology. It seems like they are taking things that have short term effects, smoothing them over long periods, and then looking for short term correlations visually.
Just as a hypothetical example…lets say that GCRs have the largest impact on climate by modulating cloud formation over tropical oceans. In that case, the lack of GCRs would cause fewer clouds…which would heat the tropical waters, which would eventually warm up oceanic air masses and bleed heat into temperate and polar waters. In such a scenario, the usual suspects in the historical temperature records would be late to recognize such a trend, because their networks are underrepresented in tropical and oceanic settings. So the time needed to accumulate the heat in the ocean, the time needed for that heat to spread to other locations where more temperature monitoring occurs, and the time needed for the temperature at those locations to persist long enough to show a trend would all have to be factored into the lag from the GCR decrease to the change in the temperature signal. If you then smooth the GCRs over a long period and smooth the temperature series over the same period of time, you are unlikely to see any correlation at all, even if it is really there. I am not saying the mechanism above is right or wrong, but it is an example of a mechanism for which the Lockwood method of smoothing would likely eliminate any possibility of seeing the solar signal in the climate data.
#224 Mr Sadlov
There, you see we’ve learnt something from Bill F about Solar cosmic ray energies. Surely there is a comment there if you can show that the different cut-off produces a different plot – the smoothing statistics they used are not complex and are described in the paper.
#223 Jae
Anthropogenic CO2 amplifies the sun by about 1%, so solar variations of 0.1% would be amplified by 0.001%.
#all
I have to say, when I read what their smoothing method was, alarm bells started ringing (though not quite as many as when I read the last Svensmark paper). I don’t have the paper in front of me now, but I assume that the 1985 “peak” must be a result of the shape of solar cycle 23 – a strong rise and a weak fall would produce the result they show. What did cycle 23 look like?
231: Here ya go.
231;
You are simply incorrigible. You are ignoring everything but TSI here, and you know it.
#231 232
Here is another from Goddard
#217 David
I have the same problem as you however I have found this at CRU and I think I can see the TSI superposed on the signal. CRU use a ‘simpler’ method of smoothing I believe.
#231, The CLOUD project proposal from CERN (http://cloud.web.cern.ch/cloud/documents_cloud/cloud_proposal.pdf) says this about modulation of cosmic ray flux by different stations (Figure 4 caption, page 6 by page number at bottom of pages…page 10 of the pdf file):
In simple terms, what they are saying is that the higher energy GCRs that spawn muons (which are the lower energy particles that Svensmark and others have claimed are linked to cloud changes) are less affected by solar wind modulation than lower energy GCRs. The fluctuation of cosmic ray flux at higher latitude and higher altitude neutron monitors such as Climax that have lower geomagnetic cutoff energies is much higher over a solar cycle than that measured at lower cutoff energy monitors such as Haleakala and Huancayo (Haleakala was brought online to replace Huancayo in 1992 when Huancayo closed), because of the stronger modulation of the lower energy particles measured at Climax by the solar wind. As a result, the ~3% fluctuation of muons is swamped by the 20+% fluctuation typically measured at Climax over the course of a solar cycle.
For a good example of where the flux at the two stations didn’t track solar activity in lockstep during the decline of Solar Cycle 20, see this paper:
http://spaceweb.oulu.fi/~kalevi/publications/Usoskinetal1997.pdf
It shows a period in the early to mid 70s where Huancayo did not correlate with solar activity and where the Climax monitor didn’t correlate as well as the Oulu monitor which has a cutoff of ~1GV. They indicate that this is evidence of the importance of particle energy in CR modulation by solar activity and speculate that the weakness of Solar Cycle 20 was to blame for the poor correlation.
Extrapolating that finding in the other direction would lead to the conclusion that stronger solar cycles should produce stronger modulation of higher energy particles (including those that produce muons), and should have a larger affect on muon flux than weaker cycles. Cycles 21 and 22 from 1976 to 1997 were significantly stronger than Cycle 20 or Cycle 23 (which were similar in strength, with 23 slightly stronger). Thus, it is no surprise to those who lend credence to the GCR modulation of climate theories, that most of the global warming in the last 40 years happened between 1976 and 1998. It should also give those who live in northern climates pause when they read about predictions for Cycle 24 that are quite a bit weaker than Cycle 20 and predictions for Cycle 25 that rival the Dalton minima. Global cooling would be far more disastrous for more people than global warming has been.
#217 Jan Pompe
Thanks for the links. I don’t have time to dig out the data and graph it. But I agree the TSI graph you link looks like a much better fit to the temp data than the data from ‘unconventional’ source used in the paper.
I would have been ‘smacked down’ during my thesis defense if I had cherry picked the data to use. Why couldn’t Lockwood et. al. have shown both data sources and then made the ‘better calibration’ argument?
#237 David Ermer
i agree they should have but while it might be an unfortunate usage of the word but the Guardian article says
(emphasis mine) it might even be a Freudian slip but it seems at least the journalist thought there was a prior intended bias. If so, they would not want to publish anything that might suggest an alternative view might be more accurate. I’m sorry if I seem too cynical but since I’ve been looking into this I’ve seen far too much of this sort of thing.
#206
Ivanka Charvatova writes about the influence of solar inertial motion (SIM) on sunspots, geomagnetism (aa index) and temperatures. Sun travels through ordered and disordered periods under the influence of giant planets. In the ordered periods, sunspot cycles are more homogenous and of 10 years, whereas in the disordered phase the cycles vary. Interestingly, while many people predicted strong cycle 23, she predicted a weaker one, which we finally got. In 1985, Sun entered a disordered phase of cca 65 years, which may mean this:
Abstracts:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/nl55542wjg7uw716/
http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=3435545
http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=1355096
re 239:
Is there a correlation between solar activity and volcanism? New to me.
Charvatova says so:
in the papers:
Charvatova, I., Strestik J.
Periodicities between 6 and 16 years in surface air temperature in possible relation to solar inertial motion. Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics 66 (2004) 219’€”227 (can send a .pdf)
and here
Charvatova, I., 1997. Solar-terrestrial and climatic phenomena
in relation to solar inertial motion. Surveys in Geophysics 18,
131’€”146.
#233 Jae
I’m not that incorrigable. In #223 you said that the Lockwood position (a cooling sun) was incompatible with an expectation of warming from CO2, and I was merely saying it wasn’t incompatible.
But it was interesting to follow some of the citations to the Lockwood papers above, and find that the surface temperature signal seems to show a correlation with solar changes over solar cycles that are two or three times stronger than that expected by changes in TSI alone.
Do Models Underestimate the Solar Contribution to Recent Climate Change? Stott et al, AMS
Thanks, EW.
Appears we have a winner. Quite appealing climate mechanics:
-motion of big planets affects sun motion around center of gravity and modulate currents under sun surface
-currents under sun surface affect solar activity ‘€” witnessed by sunspots, and modulate SI, UV and solar wind
-SI and UV affect Earth climate directly, and solar wind modulates GCR
-modulated GCR affects clouds formation
-clouds affect climate.
From Charvatova abstract:
“The long-term maxima of surface air temperature occured in the central decades of the trefoil intervals”
Which in 20 century (am I right?) are years 1945-1995.
Superimpose PDO oscillations (which are internal exchange of thermal energy between ocean and atmosphere): 1905-1945 warm, 1946-1977 cold, and 1977-present warm, and we have perfect match with 20 century climate record (ST). No AGW involved.
The troubling thing is that we apparently facing coincided cool PDO and weak solar activity. And yes, “huge volcanic events” plus La Nina. Could be really chilly (no sarcasm).
In this free article Charvatova explains the phases. Trefoil in 20th century is 1907-1956, the disordered periods are 1840-1905 and 1980-2045. There’s that 178.8 year periodicity. The period starts with trefoil, which lasts 50 years and then it gradually enters the disordered phase.
Re 243:
See also papers by the late Dr. Theodor Landscheidt. He was quite successful in performing some El Nino predictions using similar solar angular momentum calculations.
http://bourabai.narod.ru/landscheidt/new-e.htm
#226
Hans! If you mention DAT Movie/film “Day after tomorrow”
somethingⳳ gonna happen Check Weather On Line Top
ten coldest 20070712 1230 GMT …Berlin-Mitte : -54 C
Has Knut the polar bear cub begun growing beyond
the tipping point??? Is he sucking in all the coldest air
of Antarctica??…it passes througout Africa, leaving some
desoriented Royal Penguins in the midst of Sahara and half
of the BAS researchers on the North Pole, they say they
couldn care less, pole as pole…(If you have some
Freudian thinking about that, shame on you, 5 minutes
for severe cross-checking…LOL) This scenario
should be checked against the Hansen/Gore one…
No, IⳭ fine thankyou, but I now have a 17,1 year old CAT
in a cage to leave with my also rather old parents Iⳬl
hope Iⳬl see all three alive in 3 weeks…
Some popu-scientific points: When checking the
last time Johannesburg had a real snow-cover 1981
Sept 11 That day Pretoria at the most had snowy
rain at 3 C above zero CMIIW SOMEBODY and max-temp 13 C Now 2007
June 27 Min -0.4 C Max +9.3 C There is only
one more day with sub 10 C TMax in the last 8-9 years…
Weather in Solna (home of KI Karolinska Institutet etc)
Octobrish still 12-13 C, rain…SMHI supported by one
evening paper tries every 10 days to evoke some hope
of warmth 20-25 C is warmth in the middle of July nowadays…EFN
(Enough for now)
#243, 245
If you want to examine the solar torque issue further, you will find a comprehensive list of Dr Landscheidt’s papers here:
http://landscheidt.auditblogs.com/papers-by-dr-theodor-landscheidt
Steve Milesworthy,
The amplification of the temperature response versus TSI changes over the solar cycle is explained in one of Svensmark’s papers I believe, although I can’t recall which one at the moment. The basic idea is that the TSI changes roughly in concert with the modulation of GCRs over the course of the cycle. When TSI is up, GCRs are down, and as a result, there are fewer clouds to block the increased TSI, which results in a higher level of IR reaching the earth’s surface. When TSI is down, GCRs are up, resulting in more clouds to block the already lower TSI, resulting in even less IR reaching the surface. Thus there may only be a small change in the TSI overall, but the amount of solar IR reaching the earth’s surface varies by a wider margin than the overall TSI, resulting in a amplified temperature affect relative to the change in TSI. I think direct measurement of that is probably complicated by things like El Nino and the expected lag in accumulation of oceanic heat being spread to continental land masses, but I don’t personally have much doubt that the effect is real.
July or October?
Thanks for the references (Landscheidt’s papers).
I would like to add that while solar activity could trigger PDO and ENSO events, they are quite independent from solar forcing phenomena affecting tropospheric temperature, and are defined by measurements of local ocean surface temperatures. Hence superimposition of solar and oceanic factors having independent mechanism of affecting climate is legitimate thing to do.
John Lang in post 220 presented length of solar cycles of 20 century:
23 – 11 years 2 months and counting
22 – 9 years 8 months – ending May 1996
21 – 10 years 3 months – ending September 1986
20 – 11 years 8 months – ending June 1976
19 – 10 years 6 months – ending October 1964
18 – 10 years 2 months – ending April 1954
17 – 10 years 5 months – ending February 1944
16 – 10 years 1 month – ending September 1933
15 – 10 years 0 months – ending August 1923
14 – 11 years 5 months – ending August 1913
13 – 11 years 11 months – ending February 1902
Assuming short cycles representing active sun and warming, and long cycles representing weaker sun and cooling, and superimposing PDO cycles (just from Wiki):
‘€¢ 1905: After a strong swing, PDO changed to a “warm” phase.
‘€¢ 1946: PDO changed to a “cool” phase.
‘€¢ 1977: PDO changed to a “warm” phase.
‘€¢ 1998: PDO index showed several years of “cool” values, but has not remained in that pattern
We have quite compelling match with 20 century temperatures.
Am I missing something here?
Here are two quotes from the Lockwood paper that seem to contradict themselves:
The authors first state:
“The thermal capacity of the Earth’s oceans is large and this will tend to smooth out decadal scale (and hence solar cycle) variations in global temperatures, but this is not true of centennial variations”
They then go on to state in the conclusion:
“Our results show that the observed rapid rise in global mean temperatures seen after 1985 cannot be ascribed to solar variability, whichever of the mechanisms is invoked and no matter how much the solar variation is amplified.”
So which is it? If the oceans dampen short term decadal (solar cycle) variation, then how can you state in the conclusions that there is no solar input over the last 20 years? The authors effectively negate their own conclusion when they stated previously that decadal scale variation is too short of a time frame to measure climate response to changes in solar input!
#248 Bill
Lockwood mentions 3 things: total TSI, UV and magnetic changes.
I can see why Lockwood uses Climax data. Because Svensmark uses Climax data for the excellent fits he has obtained.
Given that modulation will be stronger at high latitudes, it is curious that the statistical fits are poor at high latitudes and better in the tropics.
Also, given that cosmic rays, uv and TSI aren’t perfectly correlated it would be interesting to repeat his tests using one of the other two measurements to see what the correlation with them looks like.
Putting all that aside, I checked the following plots of cosmic rays from the two other stations you mentioned.
There seems to have been a low in the early 1990s, but other than that, there don’t seem to be any obvious strong trends superimposed on the solar cycles. I understand that these measurements exclude the lower activity prior to 1950.
Question:
I reading today’s WSJ article on the economics of reducing CO2 emissions at power generation plants. A thought occurred to me: What is the difference between CO2 and O2 in terms of reflecting back radiation? Does O2 act like an aerosol or a ghg? This may well have been discussed before, so my apologies if this is redundant. If so, just tell me where to look.
#251 cbone
The GGWS programme made great play of the fact that there was a direct correlation with solar changes and temperature, and didn’t see fit to invoke a delay. Of course we know the programme was nonsense, so maybe they got that bit wrong too – what’s the theory Bill or Jae?
QUIZ HOUR FOLKS!!
Following the snowfalls in Johannesburg, Valparaiso,
La Paz, Catamarca, Rosario, Pretoria RSA if there is one
in ARG too…How many countries in West Africa can receive
snowfall, sticking to the ground or not??
Milesworthy: have you read this, yet? If so, can you enlighten us further with all your knowledge of the Solar effects??
#254 Steve,
I haven’t seen GGWS, but I suspect that it is alot like An Inconvenient Truth (which I haven’t watched either) in that both went with visuals that match their intended message, regardless of how true to the underlying science they may be. What I do know is that studies of Forbush events have made it very clear that there is a direct and very immediate link between cloud cover changes and abrubt changes in GCRs reaching earth. My inclination is to believe that the strongest affect of GCRs will be over open oceans in tropical latitudes, where a lack of nucleation sites are more likely to be the limiting factor in cloud formation than over land surface (where dust provides ample nucleationsites) or at high latitudes (where moisture content and temperature will be more limiting to cloud formation than a lack of nucleation sites).
If that is the case, then we should expect the bulk of the change in IR reaching the earth due to GCR changes to happen over the ocean and to result in changes in oceanic heat content. Those changes will take longer to trigger a change in the “global” temperature signal than changes in IR over land would have, especially since most temperature monitoring networks are pretty spotty in the tropics and over the ocean. So in terms of what we would see, the GCRs and low cloud data should have a very clear and close relationship without any sort of lag…which Svensmark and others have shown to some degree (how well depends on whose interpretation of cloud satellite data you believe). In terms of temperature, I would assume that the GCR trends would produce a somewhat lagged, longer term signal that would match up better over a few decades than a few years.
One of the things I want to do sometime soon is to find some long term tropical oceanic or tropical island temperature series and try to match them up to sunspot data. If my take on things is correct, there should be a more immediate GCR signal apparent at those locations than can be seen in temperature globally, although it will still probably be somewhat muted by the inertia of changing the oceanic heat content by a measurable amount.
#252 Steve,
Can you point me to a link where Svensmark is using Climax data to compare directly to clouds or temperature over a short time frame? In the Marsh and Svensmark 2000 cloud paper and the 2007 Cosmoclimatology papers, the comparison to clouds uses Huancayo data. The only place I have seen them use Climax data is in the much longer millenial length studies where they use Climax data to correlate with the 10Be and other isotope proxies. The reason for using Climax in that context is that they are looking for much larger trends in CR flux in general caused by things such as trips through the spiral arms of the galaxy and not very small GCR/muon flux trends caused by small changes in solar modulation. The 10Be isotope data reflect a larger range of particle energies and compares better with the Climax data than with the more restricted energy range at Huancayo.
As for the lack of an apparent trend post 1992-ish, I don’t have a great answer for that, other than to refer back to my previous post about the lag time, and also to point out that I think there is alot about sunspots and GCRs and their impact on various places on earth that we don’t yet understand. Keep in mind that with the very small percentage change in muon flux over the course of a solar cycle (~3% according to Svensmark), it may be very difficult to visually see a significant trend in the GCR data, even at Huancayo. Also, keep in mind that the Huancayo data ends in 1992 and is replaced by Haleakala. There is only a few months of overlap between the two to calibrate the relationship, so we have no way of knowing if changing the location from the southern hemisphere to the northern hemisphere slightly further from the equator would have an affect on the long term trend.
Svensmark has a paper out (that I am not sure if it has been published yet) suggesting that there is a polar oscillation where ice core data at Greenland and Antarctica show an inverse relationship, implying one hemisphere warms while the other cools. That would match up well to what we have seen with most of the recent “global” warming occurring in the northern hemisphere. I have reviewed some papers looking at prolonged periods of time where one polarity of the vertical component of the IMF (Bz) dominates over the other for years at a time. I haven’t yet compared the findings of that paper to the hemispheric overabundance of sunspots in a given cycle or the relationship between the polarity of the earth and sun at any given time, but I suspect there is some kind of a relationship there. If there is a disparity between the hemispheres, then the switch from Huancayo in the southern hemisphere to Haleakala in the northern hemisphere in 1992 might alter the apparent trend in a way that isn’t visually obvious over the short correlation period available.
If I could just find one of those oil companies that would fund my research so I don’t have to work all day anymore, I would be able to get to all of these things alot faster…
I see many contradictions among AGW papers. Lockwood et al say that they found that the solar activity has declined from 1985 to date; however, other AGW papers say the oposite, that the solar activity has increased and continues. Judith Lean et al, who are AGW supporters, made a reconstruction of the Solar Irradiance and they say that the Solar Irradiance has raisen by 0.2% per decade. Other AGW authors found that for each 0.01% to 0.02% of increase of SI the tropospheric temperature can rise by 0.185 K.
On the other hand, if Lockwood et al have found that the SI has declined, that may be the cause by which the tropospheric temperatures from 1999 to date are decreasing. The warmest year of the last decade was 1998, and from 1997 to 1998 the X-class Solar Flares reached 87 in number when the sunspots cycle was in its lowest period.
Good point about the X class flares Nasif. There is good evidence for a significant decrease in ozone from high energy flares. The ozone levels typically are only depressed for a few months, but 87 in a year would be likely to create a significant dent in the ozone at a time when solar activity would otherwise be low and when GCRs would correspondingly be high.
# 260
Bill:: There is more on solar flares here, for the year 2005, another “low” sunspots activity period but with many powerful X-class flares:
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/15sep_solarminexplodes.htm
You can see, Lockwood paper is biased and confusing. Some paragraphs to remark from NASA’s paper:
“Sunspot counts and X-flares during the last three solar cycles. Note how solar activity continues even during solar minimum.”
Actually, solar minimum, the lowest point of the sun’s 11-year activity cycle, isn’t due until 2006, but forecasters expected 2005, the eve of solar minimum, to be a quiet year on the sun.
“It has not been quiet. 2005 began with an X-flare on New Year’s Day–a sign of things to come. Since then we’ve experienced 4 severe geomagnetic storms and 14 more X-flares.”
“That’s a lot of activity,” says solar physicist David Hathaway of the National Space Science and Technology Center in Huntsville, Alabama.”
242: Link doesn’t work for me.
Nasif,
…and here we are in mid 2007 with the beginning of the next solar cycle now predicted to still be 8-12 months away…still waiting on the minimum.
Lots of intriguing things going on solarwise are mentioned here.
Nasif,
I think I spoke too soon without looking for myself. Do you have a link to the 87 x class flares in 1997-98? I went and looked and don’t see more than 10 for either year. Are you sure you weren’t looking at the xray flux value or something like that?
Can somebody help me please:
The ice cores show a lag between temperature rise and CO2 levels of anything between 800 and 1600 years. The Roman and mediaval warm periods unexplained by human induced CO2.
Seems to me to be a case of being confident that CO2 causes temperature increases now whilst ignoring some pretty damning evidence against it in the past.
In my medical training we were taught to look to common diagnoses first “common diseases happen most commonly”, and next, to uncommon presentations of common problems. “When you hear hoofbeats, think first of horses not zebras”.
There is an analogy here: The role of the sun in influencing climate seems obvious to all but the most ardent, cloistered and evangelical of the climate science community who would rather find trace gasses and SUVs responsible. Even as the hoofbeats of a solar connection get louder, these idealogues resist the most obvious, common sensical, best-supportable and scientifically sound diagnosis in favor of this AGW-Zebra. Worse, the green cure — a draconian reduction in world energy use — will do nothing except lower living standards and cause the kind of economic suffering the socialist schemes always do — a morbid elixer for a non-existent disease.
Here’s something new on the solar connection by the way courtesy of JunkScience: http://www.umweltluege.de/pdf/Gamma_Rays_and_Climate.pdf
That is an extremely interesting paper. very logical explanations which at first hand would appear to solve some of the problems that currently exist in relation to the sun being at the heart of the issue.
A 34 year lag! ?
#258 Bill
I’ve been reading the CERN CLOUD proposal which you linked in #236. Svensmark is a coauthor. The graphs reference CLIMAX data. I think I recognise one of the graphs, Figure 5, (comparing with ISCCP data) from Svensmark 1997 (though I haven’t rechecked the 1997 paper to see whether it is exactly the same.
Thanks for your response with regard to temperature lags. I’d assume this must be the case, so GGWS would seem to have misrepresented both CO2 effects and the cosmic ray theory!
#256 Jae
The link you post didn’t say how close the link between solar changes and temperature is. I note it is extremely careful to say that “anthropogenic” contributions are uncertain (because of uncertainty in aerosols) without directly addressing the well understood forcing of CO2. So the title is misleading. Since we might expect an eventual reduction or stabilisation of anthropogenic aerosols, he should take the CO2 impact more seriously.
All the solar stuff looks fascinating. I note that the “consensus” on the next solar cycle is split between weak and somewhere between 22 and 23 with a feeling that it all depends whether the cycle is underway before next March. Presumably if the cycle is weak this argument could be over one way or another by about 2010.
re: #266,
Not that I want to be called a warmer, but there’s a confusion about the CO2 causing heating and heating causing CO2. Both are true, but it takes a while for a warmer climate to produce more CO2 from the ocean and other ways. But in the present circumstances humans are adding CO2 to the atmosphere and while it will slowly be taken up in various ways, plants liking CO2, most of the CO2 cycle comes from plants photosynthizing and then respiring, with animals eating plants and respiring so that even a small increase via humans can result in significant increases in the atmospheric CO2. But what we see in ice cores is something basically different, the reverse of CO2 uptake as climate warms. While there’s likely some feedback as CO2 is also a GHG, if it weren’t we would still see an increase in atmospheric CO2 lagging increased temperature.
In the same way, current warming will / would increase the pre-industrial CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. But there’s no guarantee or even likelihood that if we stopped burning fossil fuels the CO2 level would continue to rise. The equilibrium level of CO2 from the current temperature is probably not much higher than 300 ppm. Attributing the current warmth to CO2 and feedbacks is no slam-dunk. So in summary, neither the present warming or the past outgassing need to necessarily imply the other.
271: Like me, you are a lukewarmer 🙂
May I take it that what you are really saying is “We don’t know the answer”?
#270 Steve,
Interesting that they show both in Figure 4 and discuss how Huancayo is better and then use Climax for figures 5, 6, and 7. My first guess is that the amplitude of the solar modulated CRs at Climax is greater, so the trend is easier to show visually. It also may have to do with not wanting to use the spliced Huancayo/Haleakala record for simplicity’s sake and with the knowledge that Huancayo decoupled from the solar cycle for a period in the early 1970s.
In any case, it is clear that we still have a lot to learn about how the sun works and how it might impact climate. People who dismiss the solar connection as insignificant relative to CO2 at this stage of understanding are clearly overstating the level of our current knowledge. I think if the lower end predictions about solar cycle 24 come true and the CLOUD experiment proceeds on schedule, the whole debate will be about over by late 2010. I just hope that Al Gore and his band of merry alarmists haven’t talked the world into mortgaging our economic future over a few computer models by then. My real fear is for Cycle 25 though…between the early precursors noted by NASA and the predictions by guys like Landscheidt based on solar angular momentum, it appears that it could be really low…which in every past instance has led to extreme cooling.
Re Lockwood et al. Recent oppositely directed trends in solar climate forcings and the global mean surface air temperature.
Have I got this right? It seems to me that what Lockwood has done wrt TSI is use various smoothing mechanisms and then take an average. This assumes that all smoothing mechanisms are equally valid. Now when you look at the average of the smoothed TSI you would think that TSI was lower in, say, 1992 than 1986. Now look at the unsmoothed data and you realise that this can’t be the case. It seems to me his average TSI is merely an artefact of giving each smoothing mechanism equal weight.
Alan (#275), I agree that it is possible that
which, if he cherry-picked from a bunch of different approaches, was likely to provide him with whatever result he wanted. I suspect that something like this explains why the Lockwood results are at variance with those of Svensmark (though I have no idea which of the papers, if any, is right).
Incidentally, I suspect a similar problem may be found in the paper cited by George H (#267) that jae noticed employed a 34-year lag. That lag seems suspicious, too large to be physically plausible without some specific explanation. One wonders if the author tried lags of 0, 1, 2, …, until hitting the jackpot (statistical significance!) at lag 34. Given not quite independent trials, one should expect to get a significant result after testing a few dozen models.
Of course, it is altogether possible that any (or all!) of these results are, in fact, valid. 😉
Try these ASWA educational reports:
http://www2.ips.gov.au/Educational/2/4/4 and
http://www2.ips.gov.au/Educational/2/4/5
I don’t know why the data from NOAA have disappeared… BTW, does Hansen still work for NOAA?
Well Tamino has corrected me (and deleted my last post, by the look). Lockwood et al didn’t average the smoothe curves, they took the midpoint. But this still means they have essentially taken each smoothing as ‘equally correct’ and then plotted the midpoint. So what should the error bars be in this case?
#274 Bill
Thanks for your pointers on this, I know a bit more about the argument now.
Looking at it purely in terms of correlation, cosmic rays appear to have changed a lot in the early 20th Century, but haven’t changed nearly as much in the last 50 years. So it is hard to see how both the 1910-1940 warming and the 1980-2001 warming can be attributed to solar effects.
Because of the better correlation at the tropics, I will bet that if the correlations shown in the CLOUD proposal does have a valid solar-related physical cause, it won’t be the cosmic rays. It would be nice to see these correlations done with other solar variables and other time periods. Have they been audited?
The sun is important, but I still don’t see how people can bet the farm on a solar connection and on the other hand ignore the CO2 element. But there we are. I’ll be hoping for late 2008 start to cycle 24 to get this sorted once and for all.
Steve Milesworthy (#279), I agree with your comment that
I am charmed by your optimism about a quick resolution of the issues:
However, I’m not convinced that it will be so easy to separate the effects of natural/solar factors from anthropogenic GHG factors. The system dynamics are complicated, exhibiting response across a broad spectrum of time scales, and we don’t have a complete understanding — maybe not even a complete list — of causal factors.
We also don’t fully understand background noise — ice ages? multi-century droughts? 100-meter sea-level changes? — which complicates any effort at attribution.
Finally and most importantly, we need reliable data if we want to test hypotheses. What we have seen recently with respet to the USHCN is not reassuring.
It’s not that we are ignoring the CO2 element, it’s just that to date, nobody has presented a mechanism by which CO2 can be shown to be anything more than a minor factor in climate change. (until models can accurately hindcast historical data, they don’t count as a mechanism.)
Interesting interview in The Times Higher Education Supplement with Chris Rapley, retiring head of the British Antarctic Survey. Very revealing about the extent to which political motivation can influence scientific research.
Oh! And of course this is RC’s William Connolley’s boss.
#226: weather on the Alps (both south and north), Germany, France and overall UK is indeed unusually chill and rainy for July and for the last years: but even if 2 July snowfalls at 1800-2000m (with maybe a 3rd one on 22nd-23rd) on Italian Alps is a very rare event and there is some local cold record of the month, until now there is nothing so exceptional – we will turn to a new LIA when we will see a cold spring followed by a chill summer, not a cold spring then a hot summer (2006) or a warm spring then a chill summer (2007): unfortunately we have to wait!
#255: I think just north-western Africa – then Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco (on hills and mountains, snow may rarely fall also on the coasts but it is very difficult to see it settling so low – anyway Morocco had its coldest winter ever in 2005) and Mauritania mountains.
I can announce you that Buenos Aires, having been covered by snow, saw its major snowfall since 1918, maybe 2007 one is even a greater event (more snow).
The very cold winter continue in the area, frost all over North Argentina and Uruguay, but also in Southeast Brazil (0°C even in Porto Alegre, on the coast, but its historical record is -4°C) where coffee plants are at risk, and in South Paraguay.
Regarding the cold in the southern hemisphere, it appears that southern ocean temperatures are well below normal right now on average. There is one large pool of warm water in the central southern pacific but the ocean waters around southern Africa, South America and Australia are 1.0C to 2.0C cooler than average.
The animation of the past two months shows these conditions have existed for awhile.
http://coralreefwatch.noaa.gov/satellite/current/crblrg_sstanom_2m.html
(The La Nina pool of cool water shows some interesting wave patterns right now and with cool water immediately to the north and south of the La Nina area with the chance these cool areas could merge into it, we might be in for a very significant La Nina event.)
RE: #272 – Me too!
Re: Lockwood paper. It is not sufficiently appreciated that if you correlate the wrong things, you will get no relationship, and that in the climate system it is very easy to pick the wrong variables because it is complex and we don’t have a priori theory about which variables truly represent some phenomenon (which measure of clouds is best?). Thus Perry (linked to above) shows that there is good reason to think heat will take different lengths of time to be transported to different regions by the ocean conveyors, so these different regions will be lagged compared to solar effects and not in phase with each other. Simple correlations of any of them with each other or with sunspots (or TSI, etc) will show a bad relationship but only because the system has time delays in transporting huge bodies of warm water around.
#283
Mille Grazie Filippo!
But I was specifically asking for West African countries
and according to a WIKIPEDIA page the number is…not…0
Itⳳ…3!! From the south 1 Equatorial Guinea (The “Afrcan
Kuwait”) They have a volcano out on the island Biyogo
where also the capital Malabo is situated. Itⳳ called
“Pico de Santa Isabel” in my old 1970ⳳ atlas “Basile” by
WIKIPEDIA reaching only 3008 m ASL with a terrible thunderstorm
first with hail then some flakes may come after?? Is this
assumption correct?? somebody with tropical extreme weather
insights help! Happened more often in 19th century though (WP)
2. Cameroon with Mont Cameroun a little more than 4000 m ASL
depending on recent volcanic activity…
3. Cabo Verde islands!! Fogo mountain but never sticks
to the ground probably
RE: #284 – I wonder how real Southern Ocean conditions square with the current panic du jour of AGW fanatics, who are now up in arms claiming that the SO is saturated with CO2.
The MORONS in the US Congress now have a new GHG bill, guaranteed to ruin your Friday.
286: Craig: When is your new paper going to appear?
Craig,
Along those same lines, I spent some time last night comparing the ocean buoy air and water temperature data around Hawaii to the CR data from the Haleakala observatory. There is a very tight correlation at least from a visual perspective. I am working right now to figure out how to incorporate cloud data to show that the change in T at the locations are related to clouds and not simple changes in incoming IR. If anybody knows of a good muon/ionization chamber at a tropical latitude in an oceanic environment, please let me know. I would love to correlate the muon flux with the neutron flux and then compare it to T and Cloud data from nearby locations.
Ideally, if I can separate out a T signal vs GCR relationship at tropical oceanic locations, then it should become easier to track the movement of the heat changes from those locations to more distant regions and evaluate the lag based on that tracking. The more I look at it, I think Lockwood had his heart in the right place in trying to smooth out short blips and look at longer term variations to try to match them up. It just looks like he picked a lousy method with some obvious weaknesses to do it with. In particular, his smoothing method appears to artifically shift peaks and lows due to bias from the size of the adjacent trends, without regard to the actual data from that point in time. In particular, the data in the late 1990s is biased upward because the 1985 low slants the graph to the left, in essence removing the low in the early to mid 1990s.
Also, using Global T washes out any shorter term signal that may correlate in certain regions, even if the regional changes eventually lead to global T changes. I would love to see the same comparisons done with Pacific Warm Pool water T or Tropical Oceanic air T data sets.
#287: you are right, I have forgotten those mounts – I can just add Canary Islands, which are part of Spain but on the same latitude of South Morocco, right north of Cabo Verde islands, where you can take the Sun on the beach then go to their main volcano for skiing.
I am trying to find world temperature data for June 2007: it’s 13th July, and I still find none, no NOAA, no GISS, no MSU result; HadCRU seems to have stopped to April; one could calculate his own June data from NOAA, but it’s not the same thing; moreover, just this month that temperatures in some part of the World seem cooling, on an Italian forum a friend who is upgrading day-by-day TT data from NOAA, he has to stop to 30th June for now.
Maybe TT are too low in S Emisphere 😉 ?
292:
Hmmm, do you suppose they are trying to find a new way to report the numbers so they come out politically correct?
#293: indeed it is a bit suspect: when we had some very warm month globally, last winter, nearly we knew temperatures before month’s end – GISS and NOAA were really ready to announce new hot records.
But, for now, I blame just low efficiency for such delay…
Anyway, e.g. for GISS 2007 has begun with the race to match or overtake 2005 and 1998, and they are presenting temperatures this way.
But, from March to May, the gaps between 2007 and 2005 and between 2007 and 1998 have halved (always a few hundredths of degree…): and, since it is very probable that temperature drop from January to May will continue until autumn due mainly to Nina, and then even May should result a hot month in comparison with the second semester of the year, 2007 will probably not be the record year that has been claimed last autumn (but, for MSU and HadCRU, already in April this thing was clear) – even, if from June to December all months had the same mean temperature of May, 2007 should anyway be second to 2005 for GISS data.
So, maybe they just lost their interest 😉 ?
On the Junk Science site (Global warming at a glance):
“http://www.junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/Warming_Look.html”
Under the Hadley CET section there is a link that does have the June average:
“http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcet/cetml1659on.dat”
Isn’t that just the Central England data?
Here are several links to current data (unplotted):
UAH lower-troposphere satellite
RSS lower troposphere satellite
GISS surface / BBQ pit
NCDC surface / air conditioner exhaust
#295: I check often that link, of Junkscience, but until this afternoon (evening here now) it was not upgraded to June.
re: 290
new paper in Energy & environment, fall 2007
#284
It makes one wonder whether there is a general shift in the PDO. Could it be transistioning to negative? Or will we just see an extended, strong La Nina episode?
# 283
Filippo Turturici,
And yes, we’re here also with comfortable and stable temperatures in a summer month like July, when usually the temperatures raised up to from 100.40 F to 107.60 F. The highest registered temperature since 13 June 2007 to date (13 July 2007) has been 101.48 F on 15 June 2007 at 18:05 UT. Global Warming is a psychological issue.
Re #282 Thanks for linking to the Chris Rapley interview, Tony.
According to Rapley, the makers of Channel 4’s recent programme The Great Global Warming Swindle…are “like the cigarette manufacturers in the 1960s, deliberately creating propaganda to cast doubt”. But where is the self-interested benefit for them? Or any skeptics? I don’t see it. Or do we simply write this off as an unfortunate comparison?
I don’t think so. He cites James lovelock as a seer into the future. Way back in the 1980s, the evidence would emerge for climate change beyond normal variability, he claims, and Lovelock “was pretty much right.” But the SAR tagline claiming that “The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate …” was a political decision, not a scientific one, which resulted in widespread dissent about the document. Thus, this is about the sociological seduction of a scientific cadre.
This is about True Belief, not testable and falsifiable science. By Rapley’s lights, it is about following through on an intuition going somewhere ritghteous’€” ie, getting on the ACW gravy train, justified by apocalyptic environmental fears. The dispassion or disinterestedness he implies for himself is nowhere to be found here.
I posed this question yesterday and I am still interested in a reference or explicit answer:
To my simple mind, CO2 means that an atom of C has been added to the existing atmosphere and thereby displaced a free floating 02 molecule with a CO2 molecule. Now if the O2 molecule has similar characteristics to the CO2 molecule in terms of reflecting radiation, etc., then the net effect of CO2 would hardly be worth talking about. Therefore, I am assuming that the two molecules have very different characteristics: I would just like to understand how different. Can anyone help?
It is totally different: biatomical gases, like O2, are transparent to radiation, so their effect is almost none at all; triatomical gases, like CO2, absorb/emit part of the infrared spectrum, then the “greenhouse effect” (also for more than triatomical gases, like methane).
#279
Steve Milesworthy,
Have you walked barefooted on asphalt, concrete or sand at noon? Do you know by pure chance which is the power of the Sun to warm up the whole Solar System? Please, go to others with that tale saying that the Sun does have nothing to do with the Earth’s climate. If their “science” were not tendentious, why they erased the graphs about the reconstruction of Solar Irradiance since 1610 from NOAA site? Why they erased from NOAA site the data published in 2005 on the number of solar flares through 1997-1998 and then published them later with “amendments”? Why they hide those data from the public?
Steve, just answer ONE question for me, Is James Hansen still working in NOAA? If your answer is yes, then I have the answers to all my questions.
I have the data in paper published by NOAA in 2005, and they reported 87 X-class solar flares. But in the new data they “amended” their own report, and one will find only 14 X-class solar flares from 1997-1998. I wrote in my message #277 the links to ASWA where they report about 38 X-class and more than 96 M-class solar flares for the same period! If ASWA is wrong then who’s right? Is it the original records of NOAA or the “amended” records? What’s behind the NOAA “amendments” to the 2005 reports, eight years after their publication? Is it a US vice-presidency if mister A-G reaches the presidency, perhaps?
Steve McIntyre, I’m sorry by this political piece, but I’m annoyed.
#302 TJ! With an allusion to Patricia Highsmith CMIIW
“The talented Mr Rapley”…But I would insert yet another
letter in his name to tell what he did with the BAS!
Interesting that this came up, I don think it was
a comment on my “Brainstorm” (post #246 in Unthr no 14,LOL)
Alarmclocks big as our sun should be heard when anybody
calls James Lovelock “Jim”…And Rapley started out as a
Sun physicist of course…So you see Tactics are SIMPLE:
1 Scare with CHAOS 2 Promise CONTROLE if you repent and
follow our good advice…Sincerely in the end I know
the fatalists will win! What are we made of? So are
stars aware they are not eternal too? I would say so
and then(in “after the universe”) after an infinite amount of
“Nicht-Zeit” it all starts again with the
akronym HWGA…
Nasif, if you and others can confirm these data and these dubtfull corrections, it would be a “good scandal” to be divulged.
Staffan, it seems we are at least more lucky than Gore, Hansen, Lovelock et al. all Anglo-saxons media, in recent weeks and overall after Live Earth, tell about an increasing “skepticism” in the public and about more studies on different positions (with an increasing scientifical credit for Sun and cosmic rays roles) in the question of GW: people can be scientifically illitterate, but this does not mean they are stupid too.
# 303 and 304
Bernie and Filipo:
Gases with nonpolar symmetrical molecules like H2, O2 and N2 absorb and emit heat within very limited ranges of heat incoming from the Sun and emitted from the Earth’s surface and other gray bodies. That’s talking broadly. Gases with nonsymmetrical molecules like SO2, H2O, CO2, Alcohol, ether, acetone, methane, etc. have and absorptivity that is dependant upon wavelengths bands, structure, thickness, density, transmissivity, etc.
The structure of CO2 is nonsymmetrical and bipolar.
Filippo, I know it would be a major scandal, but it seems I’m the lone crazy upon the issue. I hope you understand.
# 308
Filippo, you wrote: “people can be scientifically illitterate, but this does not mean they are stupid too.” You’re pretty right.
On the Lockwood paper:
TJ Olson: #302
I think that you are right in referring to ‘the sociological seduction of a scientific cadre’. IMO the root of the problem lies with a ruthless, vociferous and ambitious minority of scientists – a self appointed elite – who are the seducers.
When I hear someone like Rapley murmur aproval of calls for Nuremberg style trials for those who resist their advances, it reminds me of “the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science”, and it makes my flesh creep.
In 1945 people had good reason to understand the dangers of demagogic coercion. Sixty years later it seems that we may have to learn the same lessons again.
WOW, what a strong statement! Need to see the research papers, though…
From 312:
This really makes sense to me. It seems to me that if there were no negative feedbacks to radiation from GHGs, then every time the Sun caused the humidity to increase, we should have a runaway warming (more water, more radiation from the water, producing more water, etc.) That’s why the additional CO2 cannot possibly lead to positive water vapor feedback and additional warming. The GHGs do not INCREASE the temperature, they simply keep some of the heat from leaking back to space. (Which, again, is why it is hotter in July at low elvations in the Desert Southwest than it is at the same latitudes in the soggy Southeast).
RE: “On Radio 5 he slammed Prof Lockwood and other protagonists of man-made Global warming for describing light variations from the sun as ‘solar activity’ when the correct understanding of the term is the Sun’s particle and magnetic effects.”
As I have been saying all along. Big difference between irradiance and particle flux.
Re #294
An Excel plot of various temperature anomalies over the last five years is here
Note the growing divergence between the surface record and the satellite-derived record.
Filippo and Nasif:
Many thanks for the quick and specific response. I guess, it is what we don’t ask about that makes us stupid.
July or October?:
“GFS AND ECMWF LONG RANGE RUNS CONTINUE A COOLING TREND FROM TUESDAY
THROUGH THURSDAY AS AN UNSEASONABLY COOL TROUGH MOVES INTO NORTHERN
CALIFORNIA. THE GFS ACTUALLY GENERATES QPF BUT THESE SOLUTIONS HAVE
BEEN DISCOUNTED FOR NOW. HOWEVER IT IS WORTH NOTING THAT MOS
GUIDANCE FOR SANTA ROSA HAS 47% POPS ON WEDNESDAY…WILL WATCH THIS
AND CONSIDER ADDING SLIGHT CHANCE POPS TO FUTURE FORECASTS IF THIS
TREND CONTINUES BUT THIS SCENARIO REMAINS DUBIOUS.”
I doubt it less than the NWS. Sort of sucks, I’m planning a camping trip Fri through Sun. Hope the trough is weaker by then.
You forgot the most important part jae #315, all the CO2 forcing in the artic/antartic and in the oceans. One of the problems I have had with CO2 having such a large effect is the runaway effect. If you read the alarms being sounded by CO2 advocates, they are now proposing
This is about albedo, back to CO2 in a minute….
Let us state the obvious from geological records
1. The earth has been hotter than it is now by at least 5C (if you use meters sealevel rise and current estimates, it may be more or less choose you most favorite or least favorite…your choice).
2. If every time the earth heats up it releases CO2 or methane (basic biology and any decent search engine will find http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2005/permafrost.shtml Giving credit where credit is due.
3. There is not a proposal from climate alarmists except for man’s intervention to stop this.
What happened in all those epochs when man was not available??
It can’t be the sun, quote RC
Well I guess you are not impressed because consensus science knows that the earth is heated by CO2 and not the sun (sarcastic grin).
So I ask the patient readers of this Blog and any lurkers, if it is not the sun, just what is it? Notice from the information above about the permafrost, if GHG are the driving force we have constructed a model of ever increasing temperature until it “naturally” reduces itself. Please note that this model means that the “tipping point” actually occurred when man first started using fire in slash/burn agriculture. It is a positive feedback remember. Thus rather than discourage CO2 emissions, we need to accelerate our emissions so that the “natural reducer” can kick in sooner. Of course, if the “natural reducer” is time itself, then we all should join the “What. me worry?” club.
I had been thinking this if the spikes are blurred out then the historical levels would underestimated the only question is by how much?
As a layman/lurker, I have to ask:
The summation of Mike Lockwood et als report, is, as I see it, is that from 1985 the observed anomalous temperature rise is definitely not explained by Solar emissions because Solar emissions fell during that period.
From what I see from the media reports, it is agreed that there was some noticeable degree of solar variance influence on world temperature up to this point in time, but after it is apparently swamped by some other influence, maybe man-made CO2 output?
Why is the temperature relation so strikingly different after 1985 (barely two Solar cycles of 11 years) and are really in another “ball game”?
If temperature correlation with solar observations change so quickly at a known boundary point in time then isn’t this a good point to direct the scientific observation to answer AGW once and for all?
I am a bit cynical I admit, because I have followed this site for while, and have seen Steve McIntyre rewarded for his long term effort in critiquing of the Hockey stick eventually rewarded as science correcting itself by the NAS. (my interpretation)
If science corrects itself, then no single person need get kudos for fixing the errors I guess 😉
#322 Stuart
Mid eighties is also the time that we start to see the divergence between surface temperature measurement. While that in itself might not be significant it’s a reason to at least audit the weather stations producing the data since it appears as a common factor.
I’m not so sure; there is a lot of inertia in the scientific world it sometimes takes persistent effort on the part of the likes of Steven et al to bring about that correction. Mind you a certain amount of inertia may prevent some of the more hair-brained ideas from taking root too quickly.
#323 Stuart
I might just say Oops I got distracted by hyperactive dogs and broke a sentence:
It should have included “and tree ring thickness”
LOL. The Emporer has no PHYSICS! (let alone clothes)!!!!!
Has anyone read the latest Popular Science issue? Looks like they went overboard in a one sided story about the melting of the Greenland ice cap. They seem to have ignored the the volume measurement.
Jan
Thanks for the reply,
As I said I’m a layman who’s followed this site and others, I am an engineering kinda person who has seen thermal runaway in the all the horror of having his finger burnt by a transistor, I know if there was a great turning point where thermal runaway took over the whole planet we would be doomed by definition.
So I get cynical when people say they can predict it will happen in ‘n’ years, as if it is part of a design of the whole world we can avoid if we do some rather abstract things.
I think it is true (as some have said) that engineers tend to be the kinda people are more likely to be sceptics, as they know that even simple systems are unpredictable.
When information is offered they are very interested to know what it exactly means. I understand the concept of “cognitive dissonance” and always try to rigourously apply any test about it to myself (tho’ I cant be sure if anyone telling me stuff is suffering from it!)
Even if I’m wrong about my current beliefs the media doesnt help me, and if there really is a good reason for this particular divergence (in the solar evidence), then it strikes me as interesting.
Jan, Hope the dogs have calmed down 🙂
What is wrong with this logic: GHGs STORE heat, they do not create it. So temperatures cannot rise with stored heat, vis a vis the first law of thermodynamics? (Luckily, Steve M is gone and I can mention the T word). It’s really that simple. Only the Sun can add heat (temperature).
# 327 Stuart
Studies like the Lockwood et al one don’t satisfy me they just say with some given data look it’s diverging without giving a sound reason as to why not even speculatively this is particularly annoying when for many many years there has been good correlation. Then you take a look at the data and you find there a two or more different and in some cases opposing interpretations from different branches in the same organization (example this discussion here
also this article suggests there has been an increase in solar irradiance. How is right?
BTW the dogs have settled but I have to go to work soon so they’ll probably start acting up as soon as I’ve gone.
329: OK, not my smartest post, too much vino. But, dammit, you can store energy with GHGs, but you cannot INCREASE the temperature with GHGs. That’s what is WRONG with the whole GHG theory.
# 329 jae
Sort of the body (through chemical reaction) can create heat the clothing just stops it from getting away too quickly. This is hand waving of course but it works as such what we really need is some good quantitative analysis of just how much increasing the CO2 slows down the heat bleed. The experiments of Heinz Hug and Jack Barrett are a tantalizing beginning in this direction.
# 331 jae
I’m going to be late for work. The body in Australia at the moment would become hypothermic rather quickly without the blanket so in that sense the blanket ‘raises’ the temperature.
Re: #331 Simply put, it is quite impossible for CO2 to perform the parlor tricks claimed by the pro-AGW contributors to the IPCC. Proof of the impossibility is the Earth’s past experience with CO2 concentrations and temperatures during the most recent 600 million years. Current planetary temperatures and CO2 concentrations are abnormally low in comparison to most of the hundreds of millions of years preceding the most recent periods of ice ages. Biodiversity has suffered severely as a consequence of these abnormally low temperatures. Throughout these past climatary changes, CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have demonsrated no consistent correlation with changes in planetary temperature. CO2 concentrations of 7,000ppm, 2,000ppm, and 1,000 ppm have dominated most of the Earth’s biological existence with highly beneficial effects. The only periods in which the biosphere has been subjected to mass extinctions has been when the planetary climate experienced CO2 concentrations and temperatures like those of the present day and 1C with 100ppm CO2 less than the present. If the IPCC scenarios had any validity whatsoever, the Earth’s atmosphere would long ago have been more akin to the present day atmosphere and climate of Venus. To test the IPCC claims against the planet’s past experience use the IPPC formula to calculate what the planet’s temperature scenario is supposed to be for atmospheric concentrations of CO2 ranging from 1,000ppm to 6,000ppm. Then compare the IPCC calculation/s to the actual past experience of the Earth. See what you think once you’ve seen how their math and so-called models compare to 600 million years of reality.
Particulates/aerosols are the obvious candidate for what changed around 1985. In the developed world, particulate emissions were dramatically reduced around that time. At the same time, particulate emissions began to rise in places like China and India.
If the warming was due to reduced particulates in the developed world, then there should be a corresponding cooling trend in industrializing countries, as this Indian study shows.
Unfortunately, the prevailing dogma of global climate change appears to preclude comparative climate studies.
Anyway, we are reducing AGW month by month: we started this year with the IPCC last report, blaming man-made gases for all the warming since mid-XIXth century (then from LIA); then they too had to admit that solar activity was the main responsible for the temperature changes until 1940 (then 90 years of AGW less, still blaming industrialisation for following cooling then warming); now, neither Lockwood can deny that at least until 1985 Sun might be the main responsible of all temperature variation (thus just last 20 years of human interference: too fast and sudden to be true).
This is how Stelvio pass, 2750m/9200ft, presented 4 days ago (of course, much of the snow has quickly melted under summer Sun):
http://upload9.postimage.org/208109/photo_hosting.html
My son about Lockwood: “Mum, the article is mentioned in all newspapers. However, they say that he worked on it only three months – isn’t it too short? You muse about your articles at least a year…”
Actually the atmosphere is a source of heat too, so it’s kind of like an electric blanket.
But anyway, There is plenty of research on how much CO2 adds to temp. WHy would you think this research doesn’t exist? I don’t know about Barret, but Hug completely ignores decades of research and obsevration of the real atmosphere and simply repeats an experiment from nearly 100 years ago, getting a very wrong answer.
Boris:
Actually very unlike a blanket, electric or otherwise. Blankets (and greenhouses) warm by suppressing convection, and barely by suppressing radiation. The atmospheric “blanket” does the precise opposite.
There is plenty of evidence that in a bell jar in a laboratory, adding carbon dioxide should increase temperature all other things being equal. But in the real world, the rise of carbon dioxide does not precede temperature rise, but follows it by centuries. So a linear experiment with a near equilibrium scenario in a laboratory does not translate to a non-linear, very non-equilibrium scenario in the Earth’s atmosphere.