Are transfer functions meaningless (the “white noise” point)? Beware your assumptions!

Some people are claiming that the transfer function is meaningless because you could use white noise instead of temperature data and get the same notch. It’s true, you could. But the argument is itself a surprisingly banal fallacy. It looks seductive, but it’s like saying that it is meaningless to add 3 oranges to 3 oranges because you could add 3 oranges to 3 apples and you’d still get six!

It is trivially obvious that the transfer function will find a relationship between entirely unrelated time series, as any mathematical tool will when it’s misapplied. The question that matters — as with any mathematical tool — is has it been misapplied? What matters is whether the base assumption is valid, and whether the results will be a useful answer to the question you’ve asked. If the assumption is that apples and oranges are both pieces of fruit, and the question you ask is “how many pieces of fruit do we have”, then it is useful to add apples and oranges. But if you are trying to compare changes in fruit consumption, adding the two is mindless. So let’s look at the assumptions and the question being asked.

Assumptions first

Two […]

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I’m sure some people must be tired of discussing the solar model 😉

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Sea level rise less than 1mm for last 125 years in Kattegatt, Europe — Nils-Axel Morner

Nils‐Axel Mörner has a new paper out (his 589th). For 60 years he has been tracking the coastlines close to him, and carefully isolated the exact part which appears to be the most stable. From that he shows that the real sea-level rise in Northern Europe is less than 1 millimeter a year since 1890. This is less that the 1.6mm trend in 182 NOAA tide gauges, and far below the estimates of the IPCC reports.

There is also no sign of acceleration in sea-levels for the last 50 years. (How much should Europeans spend to stop a 1mm annual rise that was already going in 1890 and has not changed much since then?) If anything, Nils work shows how difficult it is to measure true sea-level rise on land that shifts.

In this graph below, he compares the rise of most tide gauges with the Kattegatt region, and the IPCC results. This is only one result from one place, but it is based on thousands of readings from sites all around Kattegatt. His painstaking attention to extreme detail and empirical data stands in stark contrast to the IPCC where the trend depends heavily on adjustments. (Those adjustments appear to […]

BIG NEWS VIII: New solar theory predicts imminent global cooling

To recap — using an optimal Fourier Transform, David Evans discovered a form of notch filter operating between changes in sunlight and temperatures on Earth. This means there must be a delay — probably around 11 years. This not only fitted with the length of the solar dynamo cycle, but also with previous independent work suggesting a lag of ten years or a correlation with the solar activity of the previous cycle. The synopsis then is that solar irradiance (TSI) is a leading indicator of some other effect coming from the Sun after a delay of 11 years or so.

The discovery of this delay is a major clue about the direction of our future climate. The flickers in sunlight run a whole sunspot cycle ahead of some other force from the sun. Knowing that solar irradiance dropped suddenly from 2003 onwards tells us the rough timing of the fall in temperature that’s coming (just add a solar cycle length). What it doesn’t tell us is the amplitude — the size of the fall. That’s where the model may (or may not) tell us what we want to know. That test is coming, and very soon. This is an unusual […]

Color me skeptical – the Gore and Palmer paradox

The Fairfax press say the improbable Gore-Palmer play was a win for alarmists. The Australian calls it for skeptics and says Gore is a fool. I’m not calling anything until I see the fine print. Palmer says he’s met P.M. Abbott and he was ‘encouraged’ by his climate plan.

The only thing I can say for sure is that the science of CO2 is irrelevant to both Gore and Palmer. Everything else is a paradox. We’re not being told everything.

It seems now that Palmer’s amendments to repealing the carbon tax do not include an Emissions Trading Scheme (even the Fairfax press agrees). That makes it look like a skeptic win, but keeping the $10b Clean Energy Finance Corporation is a win for Gore, and so is keeping the RET (Renewable Energy Target) and the Climate Change Authority — it’s another government funded advertising unit for the carbon scare campaign. The more patrons who are dependent on the carbon-subsidies, the more pro-carbon lobbyists there are. And they lobby like their livelihood depends on it — because they have nothing if the government policies don’t prop up their pretend free market.

Why would Gore have any interest in standing next to […]

Unbelieveable – Palmer to axe the tax, but vote for Carbon trading scheme?

This is not what PUP voters thought they were voting for… but the Big-Bankers will be happy.

Really? Clive Palmer holds the balance of p0wer in the new Australian Senate, due to start on July 1. He’s the coal magnate who made it clear he would get rid of the carbon tax. Now he’s palling up with Al Gore, and saying he’ll vote the tax down but only if we add a clause for an emissions trading scheme that is conditional on China, the US, the EU, Japan and Korea joining in too. Is this a meaningless dead-duck promise that is unlikely to happen, or is this the long softening up for the UN convention in Paris next year, when weak schemes (like China’s, where lots of permits are free) are used as leverage to call in the sub-clauses? I don’t think Gore would be flying out here if there was no chance this legislation would matter. At the very least he will use it to lean on other countries, as evidence that “Australia wants in”. At the very least this is about keeping the illusion of momentum going.

What is going on behind the scenes for this extraordinary turn-around? […]

BIG NEWS Part VII — Hindcasting with the Solar Model

The Solar Series: I Background | II: The notch filter | III: The delay | IV: A new solar force? | V: Modeling the escaping heat. | VI: The solar climate model | VII — Hindcasting (You are here) | VIII — Predictions

All models are wrong, some are useful. That’s how all modelers speak (except perhaps some climate scientists).

The barriers to making a good climate model are many. The data is short, noisy, adjusted, and many factors are simultaneously at work, some not well described yet. Climate modeling is in its infancy, yet billions of dollars rests on the assumption that CO2 will cause catastrophic warming and the evidence that most recent warming was due to CO2 comes entirely out of models. It’s important to focus on the pea:

“No climate model that has used natural forcing only has reproduced the observed global mean warming trend” (IPCC 2007)

It is a crucial plank that modelers say “we can’t explain the current warming without CO2”. Current climate models assume that changes in solar radiation have a small immediate effect and solar magnetic […]

Don’t miss Jennifer Marohasy speaking in Sydney Wednesday

Jennifer Marohasy has been very involved in looking at Australian temperature data this year. She is speaking in Sydney on Wednesday about what she’s found. She’s talking about the new temperature dataset the BOM uses called ACORN, which they built after we asked them for an independent audit of their High Quality set.

Modelling Global Temperatures – What’s Wrong. Bourke & Amberley – as Case Studies

From Jennifer’s site: “The most extreme example that Ken found of data corruption was at Amberley, near Brisbane, Queensland, where a cooling minima trend was effectively reversed, Figure 1.” Jennifer has also raised her concerns (repeatedly) with Minister Greg Hunt.

Venue: The Gallipoli Club, 12 Loftus Street (between Bridge Street & Alfred Street), Sydney Time: 5.30 for 6pm

Additional Information: **Bookings from 11 June only ** BAR OPENS AT 5 PM – LIGHT REFRESHMENTS

Click here for info on how to book

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Sorry…we’ve been busy in the comments

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Climate Rage: We absolutely cannot have… a rational conversation!

This post bumped to the top so it doesn’t get lost under the newer post: Solar Model Part IV below.

In The Rage of the Climate Central Planners, Jeffrey Tucker describes something we’ve all experienced. That moment where the social atmosphere turns suddenly poisonous. Climate Rage!

Namecalling is a tool to stop debate. It works to keep the wandering minds in the square. But the flipside is that sooner or later the smallest crack, the tiniest doubt, elicts a bizarre over-the-top response and the mismatch reveals the game. How many passionate skeptics are created in the moment a fence-sitter realizes that those who say they love the environment will risk friendships and burn relationships in order NOT to discuss it? For surely there is only one possible interpretation of Climate Rage.

“They really can’t allow a debate, because they will certainly and absolutely and rightly lose.”

“When that is certain, the only way forward is to rage.”

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BIG NEWS part VI: Building a new solar climate model with the notch filter

The Solar Series: I Background | II: The notch filter | III: The delay | IV: A new solar force? | V: Modeling the escaping heat. | VI: The solar climate model (You are here) | VII — Hindcasting | VIII — Predictions

Open Science live — The story so far: Dr David Evans is building the O-D notch-delay solar model. It’s a much simpler big-picture approach than Global Climate Coupled Models. They use an ambitious bottom-up system where the models add up every small aspect in every small cell of the Earth’s climate atmosphere and oceans and try to predict everything, but the trap is the errors — small errors in 10,000 calculations add up to big-mush. David’s approach is top-down. He looks at the whole system from the outside, and doesn’t try to understand or predict each individual part. It’s a way of starting at the start — to shed light on the big forces and processes that happen as energy arrives on Earth, gets reflected, or blended, and eventually changes the surface temperature. His model won’t tell us what happens to rainfall in Sudan in 2050, but […]

Lubos and a few misconceptions

In typical style skeptics love to criticize, it is our strength. Sadly, diplomacy, manners, courtesy — burned at the door on a moment’s notice. Sigh. After five years in this debate you’d think I’d know not to expect respect or goodwill from every fellow skeptic. Call me naive, I don’t expect them to agree with me, just to be polite. If someone asks you for a review before they publish, would you congratulate them privately, ask questions, ignore the answers, ignore large parts of the paper, then later post those misunderstood points, without so much as a courtesy check first? Yes, I’m baffled too.

Hey Lubos, no hard feelings, but next time let us save you from posting unnecessary innuendo, irrelevant criticisms, and not-so-informed commentary. It only takes an email.

I groan. In a highly gregarious species, where power is clawed through high-order political games, schmoozing and collaboration, some skeptics still wonder why people who are bad with numbers but good with people, control the institutions, the publications and big budgets. The mystery of it all!

Anyhow, because it is out there (or was, I’ve reproduced it here)* and is being discussed, obviously we need to correct the errors. Lubos […]

BIG NEWS Part V: Escaping heat. The Three pipes theory and the RATS multiplier

The Solar Series: I Background | II: The notch filter | III: The delay | IV: A new solar force? | V: Modeling the escaping heat (You are here). | VI: The solar climate model | VII — Hindcasting | VIII — Predictions

David Evans has analyzed the black box system that is effectively “Sunlight In, Temperature Out”, and found a notch, a delay, and a low pass filter. The problem then is to work out their order and to fill in any other bits needed by the model. This post then, doesn’t have big blockbuster moments (sorry), but these points need to be said.

Energy leaves Earth through a range of electromagnetic frequencies, but the bulk of them can be grouped into three main “pipes”. Radiation either comes directly off the land, oceans, ice and what-not on the ground, or it leaves via the atmosphere. Up in the air, carbon dioxide and water molecules do most of the work sending emissions of infra red to outer space. In the atmosphere, the radiating “surface” is a virtual concept and is effectively at different heights for different greenhouse gases. This is all non-controversial […]

When is your Green Charity too big? When it loses $5m currency trading

We need a Big News break for a day or so. Part V coming soon. Discussion is animated. — Jo Financial speculation on currency sees Greenpeace lose €3.8m

[BlueandGreen] Campaign group Greenpeace lost €3.8m (£3m, or $5.5m AUD) after an employee took a gamble on the currency market in 2013, it has been revealed.

The employee responsible for losing the money took a gamble on the euro remaining weak against other currencies. However, the euro strengthened later in the year, resulting in the losses.

Greenpeace, save whales, trees, and help financial houses too. Who knew?

That $5m you were thinking of donating? Don’t bother, it wouldn’t have made any difference anyhow:

No Greenpeace campaign would suffer as a result of the loss, which would be absorbed by reducing expenses such as infrastructure over the next two to three years.

I don’t think this is quite the message Greenpeace meant to send.

Big-Green has truly become the Big-Business they pretend to oppose. Greenpeace has a total annual budget of around €300 million. It’s so big, it has to trade currencies, make property investments, and deal with “infrastructure”.

h/t Tim Blair See also the Sydney Morning Herald and The […]

BIG NEWS part IV: A huge leap understanding the mysterious 11 year solar delay

The Solar Series: I Background | II: The notch filter | III: The delay | IV: A new solar force? (You are here) | V: Modeling the escaping heat. | VI: The solar climate model | VII — Hindcasting | VIII — Predictions

Implacably, the discovery of a notch suggests a delay of anything from 10 to 20 years but most likely 11 years. (Don’t miss the delay post — two very big important concepts out in two posts). The big mystery is what could cause such a long delay in the correlation of solar radiation with temperatures on Earth?

David and I spent months wondering “what on Earth” could drive it. There were many possibilities though none of them seemed to be able to respond with the right timing: A resonant slop in ocean circulation could absorb extra energy, but it was difficult to see how the timing would be so tight with solar peaks. Likewise changes in ice or land cover. Then there are lunar cycles of 9 – 18 years, potentially generating atmospheric standing waves, but they were not synchronous with the sun.

Given that marine life can produce […]

Unthreaded again

Look just because some people want to talk about something other than the new solar theory….

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BIG NEWS Part III: The notch means a delay

The Solar Series: I Background | II: The notch filter | III: The delay (you are here) | IV: A new solar force? | V: Modeling the escaping heat. | VI: The solar climate model | VII — Hindcasting | VIII — Predictions

UPDATE: July 21 Thanks to Bernie Hutchins, David found a problem with the code, which means the notch no longer guarantees a delay. The delay still likely exists (see the other evidence in the references below) but this post, particularly figure 2 needs correction and updating. – Jo

Strap yourself in. The Notch in the Earth’s response to incoming solar energy means that every 11 years (roughly) the solar energy peaks, and at the same time the climate’s response to the extra energy changes. What on Earth is going on?

The thing about notch filters that is hard for anyone who isn’t an electrical engineer to understand is that it appears to start working before “the event” it is filtering out. This is obvious in the step response graph. That’s Figure 2 – which shows what happens where there is a […]

BIG NEWS Part II: For the first time – a mysterious notch filter found in the climate

The Solar Series: I Background | II: The notch filter (you are here) | III: The delay | IV: A new solar force? | V: Modeling the escaping heat. | VI: The solar climate model | VII — Hindcasting | VIII — Predictions

This is the first of many posts. It is primarily about the entirely new discovery of a notch filter, which electrical engineers will immediately recognize, but few others will know. Notch filters are used in electronics to filter out a hum or noise. You will have some at home, but everyone seems to have missed the largest notch filter running on the planet.

This post is also about the broad outline of the new solar model. It’s a O-D (zero-dimensional) model. Its strength lies in its simplicity — it’s a top down approach. That solves a lot of problems the larger ambitious GCMs create — they are a bottom up approach, and effectively drown in the noise and uncertainty. This model does not even attempt to predict regional or seasonal effects at this stage. First things first — we need to […]

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More action coming very soon, in the meantime, a space for all the things that are not the solar model…

(UPDATE: It’s posted!)

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BIG NEWS Part I: Historic development — New Solar climate model coming

Behind the scenes a major advance has been quietly churning. It is something I have barely even hinted at. (Oh how I wanted to!)You may have noticed my other half Dr David Evans has been quiet — it’s not because he’s moved out of the climate debate, instead a strange combination of factors has pulled him full time into climate research. Things have been very busy here. He’s discovered something extraordinary, and like all real science, it’s been a roller-coaster where the theory appeared to collapse, and we nearly gave up, but then a new insight would turn out to be more valuable than the version that went before. Other times it all seemed so obvious in hindsight we wondered why no one had done this before. But the answer is that there is a very unusual combination of factors at work — how many people have Ivy League experience in Fourier maths, and electrical circuits and have worked as a professional modeler, software developer, and have an interest in the finer details and theory of the climate debate? Who of the people with this background would also be prepared to spend months working unpaid to investigate a non-CO2 climate […]