Fig 3 (Part VI only) Sunspot drawing of by G.D. Cassini in 1671 (Oldenburg, 1671c).
What is surprising is just how much data we have on the Sun from 400 years ago.
For some aspects of solar activity we barely have a half a solar cycle. For example, on solar spectral changes: UV and Infrared light swing up and down through the solar cycle, but we only got a good grip on these important changes in the last ten years with the SORCE mission.
But on other aspects of solar activity there is much more long term data than I expected: 400 years ago quite a few people were carefully recording detailed drawings of sun spots (like Cassini in 1671, right). Others were reporting aurorae — up to 150 a year in parish records, newspaper reports, and scientific observations, which tells us something about the strength of the solar wind. There were also observations of the solar corona during eclipses at the time, which suggest the sun was less active as well.
Lately some (Zolotova et al) have said solar activity was not low during the cold Maunder Minimum period from 1645 – 1715. Usoskin and others have responded by amassing a compedium of historic data demonstrating that something very unusual was going on with the sun during that time. They not only look at sun spots, but aurorae, solar corona observations, Beryllium in ice cores, Carbon 14 in tree trunks, and titanium in meteorites.
We know aurorae were rarer or smaller during the Maunder minimum because for 80 years there were virtually no reports of auroras in Great Britain, though keen observers were looking for them, and recording “clear skies” day after day.
There were reports of aurorae from the late 1500’s in the UK, Denmark, and Prague, but then early in the 1600’s activity fell away. The silence was loud. At the end of the Maunder period, across northern Europe on “Tuesday 17th March 1716” people all over Northern Europe reported aurorae, including Edmund Halley in Great Britain, who had never seen one before, yet had read about them, and looked for them. He’d begun to despair he might never see one. One Petter Dass in Norway did miss out, he diligently recorded the night sky from 1645 to 1707 when he died, and though he had read many historic reports of aurorae, he never recorded seeing one himself. His bad luck, to be an astronomer and his whole adult life spent during the quietest period for centuries.
The Usoskin paper is an interesting read for people interested in the history of early science as well as for the history of solar activity.
Total sunlight levels suggest the Sun was very quiet 300 years ago
The world has warmed since 1680, as best as we can tell, and solar activity has increased since then too. This graph of TSI (total solar irradiance) shows that rise — though the absolute change is tiny. TSI changes are small but appear to be another indicator of solar activity.
Fig. 17. Selected TSI reconstructions since 1600, labeled in the plot are: Sea09 –Steinhilber et al. (2009); DB11 – Delaygue & Bard (2011); Wea05 – Wang et al. (2005); Kea10 – Krivova et al. (2010); Dea14 – Dasi-Espuig et al. (2014); Vea11 – Vieira et al. (2011). The green, blue and red colour tones are used for the reconstructions based on the 10Be, sunspot and 14C data, respectively. The black dotted line marks the TSI value at modern solar activity minimum conditions according to SORCE/TIM measurements.
As we keep suggesting, some other factor on the Sun, like the solar-magnetic, spectral changes or solar wind may be responsible for changing the climate on Earth. Correlation is not causation, but neither is it nothing. Yet, the mainstream Climate Models assume all the other solar factors are irrelevant.
That’s record low activity
The Zolotova and Ponyavin paper suggested that solar activity was much higher (red dashes) compared to other reports.
Fig. 1. Annual group sunspot numbers during and around the Maunder minimum, according to Hoyt & Schatten (1998) – GSN, Zolotova & Ponyavin (2015) – ZP15, and loose and strictly conservative models from Vaquero et al. (2015a) (see Sect. 2.1), as denoted in the legend.
ABSTRACT
Aims. Although the time of the Maunder minimum (1645–1715) is widely known as a period of extremely low solar activity, claims are still debated that solar activity during that period might still have been moderate, even higher than the current solar cycle # 24. We have revisited all the existing pieces of evidence and datasets, both direct and indirect, to assess the level of solar activity during the Maunder minimum. Methods. We discuss the East Asian naked-eye sunspot observations, the telescopic solar observations, the fraction of sunspot active days, the latitudinal extent of sunspot positions, auroral sightings at high latitudes, cosmogenic radionuclide data as well as solar eclipse observations for that period. We also consider peculiar features of the Sun (very strong hemispheric asymmetry of sunspot location, unusual differential rotation and the lack of the K-corona) that imply a special mode of solar activity during the Maunder minimum. Results. The level of solar activity during the Maunder minimum is reassessed on the basis of all available data sets. Conclusions. We conclude that solar activity was indeed at an exceptionally low level during the Maunder minimum. Although the exact level is still unclear, it was definitely below that during the Dalton minimum around 1800 and significantly below that of the current solar cycle # 24. Claims of a moderate-to-high level of solar activity during the Maunder minimum are rejected at a high confidence level.
Look at the detail of this drawing by Cassini, 1671
Fig. 2. Drawing of a sunspot group observed in August 1671, as published in number 75 of the Philosophical Transactions, corresponding to August 14, 1671.
The amount of aurorae data is remarkable
Fig. 11. Occurrence of auroral reports, 1700-1900. The green line is the number of auroral nights at geomagnetic latitudes below 56◦ from a combination of several catalogues (Nevanlinna, 1995; Fritz, 1873, 1881; Legrand & Simon, 1987). The points show the geomagnetic latitude and time of auroral sightings from the catalogue of V´azquez et al. (2014) (their Figure 9). Black diamonds, red squares and red triangles are, respectively,
for observing sites in Europe and North Africa, North America, and Asia. Blue dashed lines mark the minimum latitude of auroral reports in the last solar cycle of the Maunder minimum (MM) and in the two cycles of the Dalton Minimum (DM).
There is a stark dearth of aurorae recorded during the Maunder Minimum:
Fig. 12. Same as Figure 10 (see caption below graph box), but compiled from 41 different catalogues of auroral observations at magnetic latitudes below 55◦ in Europe, Asia, North Africa, New England and Great Britain. The time series covers both the Maunder and the Dalton minima.
[Fig. 10. (a) The grey histogram shows the number of auroral nights, NA, in calendar years for observations in Great Britain collated by E.J. Lowe (1870) with the addition of the observations by Thomas Hughes (Harrison, 2005) and John Dalton (Dalton, 1834). The black line shows the annual group sunspot number of Hoyt & Schatten (1998), with the adoption of recent corrections by Vaquero et al. (2011) and Vaquero & Trigo (2014). Lowes personal copy of his catalogue of natural phenomena (including auroras) was only recently discovered and was compiled completely independently of other catalogues. Yet it shows, like the others, the dearth of sightings during the Maunder minimum, some events in 1707 and 1708 and the return of regular sightings in 1716. (b) Annual variation of NA in the same dataset and of RG.]
Usoskin et al describe the extraordinary sighting of the first aurorae for decades
What is significant about this event is that very few people in the country had seen an aurora before (Fara, 1996). Indeed, Halley’s paper was commissioned by the Royal Society for this very reason. This event was so rare it provoked a similar review under the auspices of l’Acad´emie des Sciences of Paris (by Giacomo Filippo Maraldi, also known as Jacques Philippe Maraldi) and generated interest at the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin (by GottfriedWilhelmLeibnitz).All these reviews found evidence of prior aurorae, but none in the previous half century. Halley himself had observed the 1716 event (and correctly noted that the auroral forms were aligned by themagnetic field) but had never before witnessed the phenomenon. It is worth examining his actual words: “…[of] all the several sorts of meteors of, this [aurora] was the only one I had not as yet seen, and of which I began to despair, since it is certain it hath not happen’d to any remarkable degree in this part of England since I was born [1656]; nor is the like recorded in the English Annals since the Year of our Lord 1574.” This is significant because Halley was an observer of astronomical and atmospheric phenomena who even had an observatory constructed in the roof of his house in New College Lane, Oxford where he lived from 1703 onwards. In his paper to the Royal Society, Halley lists reports
of the phenomenon, both from the UK and abroad, in the years 1560, 1564, 1575, 1580, 1581 (many of which were reported by Brahe in Denmark), 1607 (reported in detail by Kepler in Prague) and 1621 (reported by Galileo in Venice and Gassendi in Aix, France). Strikingly, thereafter Halley found no credible reports until 1707 (Rømer in Copenhagen and Maria and Gottfried Kirch in Berlin) and 1708 (Neve in Ireland).He states “And since then [1621] for above 80 years, we have no account of any such sight either from home or abroad”. This analysis did omit some isolated sightings in 1661 from London (reported in the Leipzig University theses by Starck and Fr¨uauff). In addition to being the major finding of the reviews by Halley, Miraldi and others (in England, France and Germany), a similar re-appearance of aurorae was reported in 1716-1720 in Italy and in New England (Siscoe, 1980).
The absence of auroral sightings in Great Britain during the MM is even more extraordinary when one considers the effects of the secular change in the geomagnetic field. For example, using a spline of the IGRF (InternationalGeomagnetic Reference Field, http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/IAGA/ vmod/igrf.html) model after 1900 with the gufm1 model (Jackson et al., 2000) before 1900 we find the geomagnetic latitude of Halley’s observatory in Oxford was 60.7◦ in 1703 and Edinburgh was at 63.4◦. Auroral occurrence statistics were taken in Great Britain between 1952 and 1975, and of these years the lowest annual mean sunspot number was 4.4 in 1954. Even during this low solar activity year there were 169 auroral nights observed at the magnetic latitude that Edinburgh had during the MM and 139 at the magnetic latitude that Oxford had during the MM (Paton, 1959). In other words, The British Isles were at the ideal latitudes for observing aurora during the MM and yet the number reported was zero. This is despite some careful and methodical observations revealed by the notebooks of several scientists: for example, Halley’s notebooks regularly and repeatedly use the term “clear skies” which make it inconceivable that he would not have noted an aurora had it been present. Halley’s failure to find auroral sightings in the decades before 1716 is far from unique.
..
REFERENCE
Usoskin et al (2015) The Maunder minimum (1645–1715) was indeed a Grand minimum: A reassessment of multiple datasets, arXiv:1507.05191 [astro-ph.SR]
h/t Willie.
Gavin Schmidt talks about the influences on climate and Climate Modelling…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmKyJ-_7LWA
In the video , Schmidt talks about ALL the influences that affect climate Change , but the number of times he mentions “the Sun” as an influence creates serious doubt as to level of confidence one has in his statements on climate science.
in the video – He poses the question ..
“what would be the effect of reducing the emissions of on-road transport ?”
Schmidt’s answer: “…you would have a reduction in air-pollution and thus a Net Cooling.
It is interesting that on 9/11 all the aircraft in U.S. were grounded, the result was an immediate increase in surface temperature by 1.1C.
Shmidt’s reluctance to accept that the Sun has a role to play in Climate change is beyond “stubborn”
This is what happens when you let a mathematician work on the physical science of climate change.
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I’m only a mech. engineer not a scientist, but when my principal source of heat is a stove and I’m getting colder or warmer I look at the stove first.
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ScotsmaninUtah,
Also of note is that over the period of the late 1970s to the early 1990s was that both Western and Soviet societies enacted laws to curtail atmosphic pollution with ‘Clean Air’ statutes coming into force across the Northern Hemisphere.
What was the effects of the clearing air at this time, when the sun’s radiation (and sunspot maximum) was climbing to a peak in the late 1990s-early 2000s?
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tom0mason,
great point 😀
It is not coincidental that the EPA came into existence in 1970 amongst others, as you so rightly describe in your post.
Many years ago there used to be a great video on YouTube called “the Dimming Sun” (from PBS I think ) which described the effect of pollutants, and claimed that the Sun’s radiation hitting the Earth’s surface had been reduced by as much as 10%.
….this wholesale “cleaning” of the atmosphere will most certainly have changed the presence of particulates in the atmosphere…
But Schmidt and others are so focused on CO2 as the cause….
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“The Sun, no longer deemed important by some… but not forgotten..”
Jo a great post 😀
The complete absence of aurora and their subsequent return marking the end of the MM is a significant observation.
I think coupled with the new findings on “multiple interference cycles” this data is very revealing.
Climate Scientists need to return to doing real science and refrain from having so much reliance on mathematical models. These historical accounts and records are “jam packed” with important climate data.
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Back in those early days of scientific discovery, scientists had generally open minds and an urge to make real discoveries, using real evidence, to gain real credibility. Unfortunately, in today’s scientific world, for many, none of that matters as they are happy to take the easy road and then simply rely on computer models to make their discoveries. So when garbage goes in, garbage comes out.
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Indeed. They apparently don’t teach that anymore.
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David Maddison,
Oh, they definitly still teach that. What they’ve done is a bit more clever. They’ve redefined garbage to mean ‘that which disagrees with your hypothesis’. Anything that does agree with your hypothesis is now called ‘valid evidence’ even if you just made it up. And. if you’re astute enough to develop a way to ‘homogenize’ or otherwise adjust your empirical observations, they now call that ‘data’. (And for that, you get free press to boot.)
Rational adults see all this non-sense for what it is. Propaganda. Nothing more, nothing less.
Abe
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What amazes me, is the utter dedication of those people who would make observations, night after night, only to record, “nothing to report”; and continue to do that, for years.
I have to admit, my reaction after three or four days, would be, “Stuff it, lets get a video out”.
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And a couple or three ‘cold ones’!. 🙂
Abe
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Maybe they are so talented they can do both
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The sad thing is that we have science by big government. Thus, the scientists do as the government wants, or no more salary, grants, etc.
When the government is loony and radical leftist and wants to destroy America you get science such as is being produced in the USA.
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I am seriously wondering how effectively the scientific method is being taught today.
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I’m sure that they do, but clearly other priorities/motives take over for many, meaning that particular discipline is quickly dropped in favour of following the consensus.
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Here’s another example: http://scitechdaily.com/cryosat-satellite-shows-increased-volume-of-arctic-sea-ice/.
The scientific method is staring them in the face, yet still they keep quoting flawed models!
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I asked Harry (or one of the other noise machines) a question about that, but an answer was declined, saying that if I didn’t know the answer, he was not going to help me do my homework.
I was a bit affronted by that, but it made people in my office laugh.
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Even Gavin A. Schmidt and Michael E. Mann were worried enough to model the heck out of it.
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ScotsmaninUtah
“The Sun, no longer deemed important by some… but not forgotten..”
But just in case NASA, ESA and a few thousand scientist worldwide, costing many millions, study the variations of the sun. Scientist study the effects of solar radiation on this planet now and over a long history. Scientific historians dig through piles of old scripts looking for past solar observations. Many studies and papers continue to be published every year.
Umm, makes you wonder that the nay-sayer of solar effects on this planet are just a politically directed distraction from the truth. 🙂
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There is not much evidence to suggest the Maunder Minimum caused global cooling. WRT that recent news article, Media Watch on the Australian ABC got the details correct (they did a good job). They also contacted the Royal Astronomical Society to check.
There is evidence that the Little Ice Age did start well before the Maunder Minimum.
——-
[Note to readers: HArry Twinotter ignored the evidence I posted showing that the whole of the Northern Hemisphere was colder 300 years ago. . The Global nature of the LIA is shown in scores of studies including from 6000 boreholes around the world. Comments in #3 subthread are off topic/unhelpful until #3.2. I will try to clean up the thread later. — Jo]
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There is not much evidence to suggest the Maunder Minimum caused global cooling.
There is evidence that the Little Ice Age did start well before the Maunder Minimum.
. . .
Unfortunately for you, and in the best interest of unbiased debate, you offer no evidence for these two statements.
Then again, you think Mediawatch “did a good job”.
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Got to love Sacrophage’s Godwin A-bomb in the comments. One can only assume that was a false flag commentator … surely no warmista would be that obtuse? Then again after seeing 10:10… who knows. There are some crazies out there.
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Sorry to hijack – Labor is going for a 50% RET by 2030:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-07-22/labor-puts-forward-50-per-cent-renewable-energy-target-by-2030/6638880
Tony from Oz is going to have a field day 😀
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Already mentioned it an hour ago at the earlier Thread, (hat tip pat) and I listened to Fran Kelly
bowing down beforeinterviewing Mark Butler, the clueless speaking with the clueless.I worry what will happen when the public really does find out the truth, and what will happen to these Politicians, mainly from the left and far left who have nailed their futures to this and find it’s a house of cards, and they have said so much about it, all of it without having checked first.
I fear for the backlash when it becomes plainly obvious that the real sources of electrical power generation were allowed to get so old, and go unreplaced out of a misguided false fear, because then, it won’t be an easy thing to replace them, because that will take years, and that’s what they won’t have if those old plants get to the stage that they just don’t work any more.
People have to seriously start being told that electrical power consumption IS NOT what is being used in their personal home. People must also be told that rooftop solar CANNOT supply the real levels of power consumption.
The TRUTH has to get out there, but no one even bothers to check.
Tony.
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Hi Tony,
A little to what I was alluding to in the last post.
Add to all the problems with Wind and Solar is that they don’t work so well in the cold !!
The warmist brigade love to throw the precautionary principle about what if we are right about man made global warming?
They never consider the consequences of what if they are wrong. Not only billions wasted, and people killed as a result of not being able to pay for heating if the status quo in global temperature is maintained.
but what if cooling is coming down the track? we have then bet our livelihoods on even less efficient power sources when the need is even greater.
The risk reward graph based on the actions taken now, is vastly skewed to being far worse if they are wrong than if they are right.
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Their response will be it is Bush’s fault.
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Listening a few minutes ago on ABC with Messers Shorten and Butler espousing the benefits of their power policy with reliance on renewables. I just wonder how long before reality kicks in; the problem being that a lot of people believe that renewable is the way of the future.
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Shorten vs the economy: demands higher power price
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/shorten_vs_the_economy_demands_higher_power_prices/
With insane policies like this the alp (Australian Liars Party) must never ever be allowed to govern Australia again !!!
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People think that the electricity just comes out of the ‘hole in the wall’, and as long as that happens, then the myth of renewable power will persist.
The ONLY reason it does come out of that proverbial socket is because of the vastly humungous amounts of power provided from large scale plants, and only when that power is taken away will people start to see the truth about renewables.
People still think that new battery technology is just around the corner, and that it will be immensely affordable to everyone. It isn’t either of those! And that new battery technology will only be for homes, and very few homes at that, a small percentage, of an overall small percentage of the overall total power consumption, all at enormous cost.
If you think that the Health budget is problematic, then this myth of moving to renewables will dwarf that health budget.
And all for an unattainable phantom.
Tony.
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When the coal fired power plants are dead and power is rationed, people might begin to see reality and perhaps that will be the beginning of nuclear power in Australia.
On another note, you should read (or perhaps not) sites like this to realise how apparently smart people see the tale: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=2420653. Sad really.
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Are there in fact any new conventional power stations planned or under construction? And how much lifetime have our existing conventional power stations got?
30
David,
there are a couple of medium large scale plants in Queensland which were constructed in the mid/late 90’s to early 2000’s, but other than that the ‘youngest’ of them are all thirty years old, plus, most 40 to 50 years old and older, and the expected life expectancy is 50 years. As they age, some of them move into the realm of running reserve, and it’s nice to have a very large single unit in use for that, instead of mini/micro plants and then having to run all of them when needed.
Even those older coal fired plants used almost solely as running reserve are now closing.
So what we have is an aging fleet of plants, all approaching their use by dates, all of them having gone without replacement at all.
Bayswater had in planning an upgrade to build a two unit USC plant alongside the existing Bayswater plant. This would have been two X 1000MW (total Nameplate 2000MW) units and would have delivered around the same power to grids as is currently being delivered by Bayswater itself, which is 4 X 660MW, so the new Plant was a smaller Nameplate but delivering the same power for much less coal being burned and much less CO2 being emitted.
Now, what that proposed USC plant would have meant is that the nearby Liddell Plant, now almost 45 years old could have been closed as the new plant came on line.
Now, MacGen has sold off both plants to a new owner, and you can bet they will grind all they can out of Liddell and also Bayswater.
MacGen was going to build the new plant, so now having sold it, you can bet that Upgrade is now dead in the water, as it was almost from inception.
A similar 2 unit USC plant was also proposed for the Mt. Piper Plant, near Portland NSW, not as an extension, but as completion of the original project, and I’m not certain if that is still in play, or has also gone to heaven.
Everywhere else, large scale coal fired plants are being run to their death, and I can see no replacements anywhere, as there is no reason to even propose it as a thought bubble before it would be shot down.
No political party of any persuasion is willing to start work to replace them in the current environment, so they’ll run what they have till they drop, and then ….. well, you’re on your own.
Not our fault will say the plant operators. WE actually tried to do the right thing.
This will be the fault of politicians.
When that time comes, look out. There’ll be absolute anarchy.
Tony.
170
The elephant in the room is the fact that when it hits the fan, there will be nobody around to fix the problem.
The engineers who have the knowledge in building power plants, whether they be thermal or nuclear, are all now retiring. They are not being replaced. Similarly, the educational infrastructure required to train new entrants to the field is also dissipating.
And that is before I even mention the dissipation of the entire infrastructure network required to manufacture all of the components of a power supply and distribution system.
So, when reality hots, humanity will have to go through the entire process of re-discovering the knowledge, then training the army of engineers required to implement it.
Looking back over history, the reconstruction of our current energy production and distribution system could take generations.
I can foresee a long period of humanity living in the equivalent of the medieval dark ages. I’m glad I have retired and will not have to live through that.
170
Having a bit of fun in there today berating them for using “denier” all the time. The gatekeepers in the “climate change facts” thread are feral. Hangman, Mr Tea, yasdlibAuthor … to name a few. They will defend any pro-warmist argument regardless of how silly… as was the case for Flanneries dam prediction.
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William,
you mention the Engineering problem, especially the lack of them for when the time will come.
There was a very interesting parallel here in the late 40’s when (Sir) William Hudson first proposed and then started The Snowy Mountains Scheme.
Very few Australian Companies were involved at the start, mainly Norther European Countries and the U.S. and there were numerous Companies which formed Consortiums to do the work, Kaisers foremost among them, a U.S. Consortium, well, Kaisers had their hands in a couple of them really, which did a lot of the original work after the Scheme itself sent the work out for contract.
Some of that work, well most of it remains invisible these days, the huge number of vast tunnels through the mountains and pumping stations to move the water around from dam to dam, the most visible aspect of the Scheme.
The Americans did a lot of the power plant work, and then, when Tumut Three started, a lot of heads were put out of place when a Japanese Company was awarded the contract, even then, in the late 60’s early 70’s.
They just went where the technology was the best.
It’s all in an absolutely astonishingly good book titled Snowy. The making of modern Australia, written by Brad Collis, and if you can find a copy, I thoroughly recommend it to anyone, not just those with an engineering bent.
Incidentally, one of the contracts was awarded to a tiny little minute Queensland Company, Thiess, and everyone just shook their heads in wonderment how they got the job. They then went ahead to do what the Biggies had already been doing for many many years, and Thiess did it quicker, better, and humungously under budget. Thiess was made from that point forward.
A great great book.
A similar situation is developing here and now, and when the time comes, we may even have to go to China for the technology, because now, they have it down pat, and are in fact working now on the next level, Advanced USC.
Tony.
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William, I agree with what you said – only issue is that I have been posting here for a while as William, I would hate there to be any confusion! Cheers
20
bemused,
¯
The problem is that these people have been taken in by the notion of something for nothing in generating ‘renewable’ power, and/or the computer modeled figures of delivery from a ‘smart’ grid.
They fail to understand that they want power 24/7, something ‘renewables’ can not provide.
They also fail to comprehend a ‘smart’ grid is where the power producer necessarily defines the demand with the consumer subordinate to that requirement. Currently the boot is on the other foot with consumers defining power demand.
20
Bemused – had my fun in Whirlpool for the day. They are worse than SkS it seems. They don’t want to look at the 1,350+ skeptical paper link at Poptech, because it is a “pseudoscience” web site. No doubt my posts will get memory-holed soon by the mods. It is amazing how pedantic the gatekeepers are, let alone how countradictory at times. When you haul them up for doing things they chide other people for, they just slime away and move the goal posts once again.
Funny to see how excited they get every time there is positive “affirmation” of the CAGW meme. Latest one being that this year is well on track to be the hottest evah! Then in the next post they will bag a “denier” for cherry-picking. It’s pure comedy gold.
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Whirlpool is a waste of time, the moderators have been biased for some time. I gave up posting there over 3 years ago. It wasnt too bad bad before, but when you win the argument, they just ignore you.. haha, now it looks like the mods just delete the sceptics arguments to look like a win. I think sks is still worse, they dont just delete posts, they change the context of posts by deleting select content.
40
mobihci.
No the moderation at Skeptical Science is pretty good. I think what puts some people off is they do not allow sloganeering and other propaganda, and off-topic (change of subject) posts. Also anything that is controversial has to be backed up with sound scientific references.
18
The Chinese are building coal plants today, so they have the engineering expertise required. And the Germans: Mar 3, 2015 – Tomorrow, a new 800 MW hard coal plant will go into operation in Hamburg, Germany.
Tony, a question for you: Given that wind generators on average produce only about 25% of their nameplate capacity, if wind capacity increases to meet 25% of demand on average, we could have a future situation where on some days wind supplies 100% of demand. But then what happens when the wind doesn’t blow? Where does the backup supply come from?
70
Robber,
this looks suspiciously like I’m plugging my own Posts, but rather than explain it in a short fashion, this Post explains the whole of it.
In short, the power has to come from somewhere when the wind falls away. That is from smaller plants usually scheduled to run for small time periods, around 4 or five hours a day tops. Those plants budget all their costs around that. When the wind stops for extended periods of time, they just have to run for periods of time way longer than normal. They have to then purchase their gas (as, in the main, they are small gas fired plants) at the going rate, well considerably more than their normal contracted price, and run for anything up to ten hours or more constantly, with all the excess costs that incurs. It all has to be recovered, and that is done by the increase in their unit cost for the power they sell to the grid.
Wind supporters say that this has nothing to do with wind, but it is a direct (and hidden) cost of the result of wind’s failure to deliver.
You only have to look at ANY daily AEMO price schedule and you can pick very easily the days when the wind is not blowing in South Australia, which has the highest cost for power in Australia, when the wind IS blowing, and an even higher cost when wind is not blowing.
Link to Post – Is South Australia’s Wind Power Cheap? Well, No (This Post is from May 2013, during the Carbon Tax period, hence other State’s power prices were artificially higher because of that)
And while this details one occasion, there are plenty more I can point to, all of them the same, and all of them the same end result as this, very little wind power.
Tony.
141
Tony, you mention the Snowy scheme and its history. In this day and age I would wonder if such an ambitious scheme such as the Snowy would ever be undertaken again? Although there is little scope anyhow the last large hydro scheme, Gordon Stage 2, was blocked by PM Hawke. Now Tasmania is importing power from Yallorn rather than selling much hydro at during the peak times which was the idea of BassLink. I remember 1963? when Tasmania virtually ran out of power, there was little rainfall and not much water in the dams, the Peddar/Gordon scheme was only in planning stages, towns were without lighting during the night, daylight saving was introduced as a power saving scheme, and they tied-up a diesel electric boat at the Aluminium smelter at Bell Bay and a jet engine turbine was installed at Self’s Point in Hobart.
Is this a picture of the future under Labor’s Renewable Energy Policy?
70
Harry, where is the evidence that the Little ice age started before the Maunder minimum?
I trust you can provide numerous references (peer reviewed, of course) for us to read?
293
Still waiting Harry.
152
I have it on good authority that the supercilious grin on Barry’s face encouraged many lukewarmers to join the coolists, while the rusted on warmists dug themselves into a deeper hole.
Harry you can get a rough idea from this graph of how temperatures on earth are influenced by the sun.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sp%C3%B6rer_Minimum#/media/File:Carbon14_with_activity_labels.svg
(Unfortunately being wiki they lowered the warmth of the MWP and raised the Modern Climate Optimum for obvious reasons.)
92
My bad, wiki got it right, the sun hasn’t been this active in 8000 years.
http://www.mpg.de/research/sun-activity-high
90
el gordo.
Some of the solar proxies are interesting, the research continues I understand.
But other proxies contradict the magnitude and extent of the MWP and LIA; for example going by the global Hockey Stick temperature reconstructions the events are hard to find.
If the sun caused temp variations, a reasonable assumption is the temp variations should be global (the sun effects the whole globe). But Mike Lockwood and others have pointed out that a small change in the sun can alter circulation patterns which in turn might just affect certain regions of the globe.
217
The MWP was universal, take a fresh look at the evidence.
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/mwpp.php
The high point of the MWP was between AD 1000 and 1100, when Viking exploration was all the rage.
LIA signals can been seen in the Baltic Sea around AD 1200 with the arrival of cool water taxa and within 50 years there were large icebergs floating in the North Atlantic.
The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and others are directly influenced by the behavior of the sun. Think of them as switches with the capacity to flick the whole system into a negative phase fairly quickly.
We are at a tipping point.
81
el gordo,
Where do you get the belief that the LIA began in 1250? Because that would prove Twinotter’s point.
I think you are being too loose with your language. There are warm periods and there are cold periods and by implication there are periods in between which are average – neither warm nor cold. The regions of the world do not all warm at the same rate and peak at the same time. By 1250 you may have the cessation of the MWP in the North Atlantic, but that doesn’t mean the LIA has started.
Also, we were not in an LIA in 1912 and yet there were icebergs in the North Atlantic… as one famous passenger liner found out the hard way.
61
The Baltic Sea was much warmer during the MWP, but that changed around 1200 AD and the warmth has not returned (to the best of my knowledge) in this Modern Climate Optimum.
‘Also, we were not in an LIA in 1912 and yet there were icebergs in the North Atlantic…’
In the southern hemisphere it remained chilly up to WW1 and that is the coldest it had been in more than a thousand years.
http://hol.sagepub.com/content/2/3/205.abstract
‘I think you are being too loose with your language.’
Harry thinks the solar impact is minimal and its up to us to prove otherwise, but let’s not ignore the evidence just because it doesn’t fit our preconceived ideas.
Its generally agreed that the LIA was universal by the 14th century and I draw your attention to the AD 1300 Event in the Pacific.
61
In central Ireland the LIA began around 1270.
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/studies/l3_monganbog.php
10
El Gordo.
“English: Changes in the 14C record, which are primarily (but not exclusively) caused by changes in solar activity. Note that “before present” is used in the context of radiocarbon dating, where the “present” has been fixed at 1950.”
Going by that sun activity graph, you might think that the current warming (up to 1950) was greater than the MWP.
16
Harry there is still a lot we don’t know, but there is definitely a strong solar connection with our earthly climate.
Hiroko Miyahara et al., Solar and Stellar Variability: Impact on Earth and Planets
‘… climate proxy record shows cyclic variations similar to stretching/shortening Schwabe/Hale solar cycles in time, suggesting that both Schwabe and Hale solar cycles are playing important role in climate change. In this paper, we review the nature of Schwabe and Hale cycles of solar activity and cosmic-ray flux during the Maunder Minimum and their possible influence on climate change. We suggest that the Hale cycle of cosmic rays are amplified during the grand solar minima and thus the influence of cosmic rays on climate change is prominently recognizable during such periods.’
152
el gordo.
“Harry there is still a lot we don’t know, but there is definitely a strong solar connection with our earthly climate.”
No, not really (at this on shortish timescales).
The cosmic ray hypothesis does not have much evidence to support it. It looked promising for a while, then the correlation between solar activity and global temps broke down. No experimental evidence has been found either. There is also some evidence from the paleo-record that suggests cosmic rays have little to no effect on the earth’s climate (I don’t have a reference for it, it is something a climatologist talked about).
On long timescales with the help of feedbacks changes in the sun do have a big impact – the Ice Age cycle.
212
please lie under a sunlamp for 2 hours , get back to me if you notice any results.
113
RogueElement451
“please lie under a sunlamp for 2 hours , get back to me if you notice any results.”
OK done it.
Hmmm global temps are still going up, are you sure you know what you are talking about?
19
Harry,
That is the presumption fallacy of Argument from Ignorance. You will need to qualify your statement with an alternative hypothesis. Or deny that the sun has any influence at all. Which is it to be?
Argument from Ignorance: You cannot know what evidence exists, so you cannot say that there is not much.
I could claim that you were using the fallacy of begging the question. But I prefer to say you are using the fallacy of false presumption. You presume that a correlation would need to exist between two factors chosen by you, and ignore connections between any other factors that could be material.
And that is the Red Herring fallacy.
Do tell us Harry, are you trying to collect the whole set of logical fallacies? Do you get a bonus points for using every logical fallacy in the book?
171
Rereke Whakaaro.
You really have no idea what you are talking about, do you?
Keep in mind there are some people who do know science and skepticism (I can tell from their comments).
They can tell you are making a fool of yourself by misquoting logical fallacies.
012
Harry, I’m still waiting for your reply.
Where is the evidence that the Little ice age started before the Maunder minimum?
I assume by your distinct lack of response, that you are unable to provide anything except an opinion -which is just as worthless as mine.
61
James the LIA started before the Maunder, which was practically one of the last cabs off the rank.
80
James Murphy.
I posted two references yesterday.
06
Oh yes I do, Harry. I am talking about logical fallacies, which seem to be all you have to offer us by way of comment.
It is a pity that you fail to recognise them, for what they are.
71
So, you believe that there is a definitive, and approved, wording for each type of logical fallacy, that must be learnt and remembered verbatim; and having the ability to parrot the exact wording is the only measure of the comment, rather than its substance?
No Harry. It is much better to understand the logical principles involved, and be able to express that understanding in words that seem appropriate to the context at the time.
I may well have “misquoted” the wording, relative to whatever logical fallacy crib-sheet you happen to use, but that is immaterial. It in no way detracts from the fact that you use errors of logic to create an impression which is ambiguous or incorrect, and you do so with such remarkable frequency, I cannot help but believe that it is intentional.
When I notice you doing that, I will call out the errors, and I will do so using whatever mode of expression seems appropriate to me at the time. My comment at 3.6 for an example.
31
Harry, is someone paying you to write this nonsense?
(I am dispirited to see many thumbs up for this comment that badly derailed the thread afterwards,damaging a once good debate. I advise everyone to stop making these kind of useless comments that are off topic,creates a long line of wasted comments and cause a pall over the entire discussion) CTS
185
Either the watermelon greens or the alp (Australian Liars Party) must be subsidizing this “individual” “Harry Twinotter”.
Time to be honest with everybody and reveal who is actually sponsoring you “Harry Twinotter” !!
Oh wait, is that the sound of crickets chirping !@@#$?
(You did no one a favor here by making unsupported accusations, then club him over it for his not answering it) CTS
114
I think they’d do better to pay you though.
Love your work.
19
Moderator AZ.
I will gladly drop the subject when they stop accusing me of being a shill.
Fair is fair…
(They have been admonished on it, but you don’t have to be part of the problem in return, do you?) CTS
010
Harry, you are right, the rules are not equally applied. Tread lightly, stay on topic, and ignore any insults and you will be OK.
And Moderators, perhaps Harry deserves a little special consideration as he is the sole dissenting voice.
Dissent is required for debate.
47
Michael Collard.
Thanks.
05
The moderators seem to be touchy about the term C********* T*****. I am not surprised, so is WUWT. So I daren’t use the term Climate Change D*****, must I?
(You are advised to drop the Public complaints,get back on topic) CTS
010
Harry,
Putting all the moderation malarkey to one side.
I’ve read the comment thread on this post and it seems to be an argument that boils down to:
1. “The sun affects the climate!”
2. “No it doesn’t!”
3. Repeat ad nauseum
The more relevant way to look at it is that when the climate was cold we were overcome with famines, plagues, and storms. When the climate was warm civilizations flourished e.g. The Minoans and the Romans.
A hotter world is a greener and calmer world. Bring on the warmth I say!
110
Thank you.
It was about time that somebody said something rational, on this thread.
60
H2O at #45,
You’ve already found the “D” word which automatically triggers the moderation filter feature. Would you believe at one time in the past the word “backradiation” was on the blacklist? Those were interesting times, trying to convince GHE contrarians that this phenomenon existed without actually using the name of the phenomenon. There were just too many fruity responses about it, so I can understand the attempt to cut down the noise. You have found another term which continues to be strongly associated with bankrupt arguments, thus the filtering.
Jo’s request that people use proper English is a good one, and there appears to be no reason to justify the use of the C.C.D. term to describe people who merely do not accept the IPCC’s rather strong and specific position statement.
Even the very term “climate skeptic” is a misnomer for the same reason, as nobody is skeptical about whether we have a climate. Trying to be succinct without being simplistic or misleading is a bit of an art form.
30
Wow, my comment was automatically put in moderation. Nice.
It can’t be because “br” was still on the word list, I’m sure I used it just a few weeks ago without any holdup.
30
“…Harry deserves a little special consideration as he is the sole dissenting voice.”
NO!
81
Even now with these complains on this posting Harry Twinotter is attempting to drag the post off subject (of Solar activity was really at exceptional lows during the cold Maunder Minimum) and into the realms of how the blog is moderated.
Wrong!
If he feels so bad about it there is three course of action…
1. Hit the ‘Report this’ caption next to the comment.
2. Email Jo directly elucidating with quotes what the problem is.
3. Stop being the paid shill here 🙂
60
Old wisdom says …
60
Its unfortunate that the blog has developed tribal groupthink, we need a lot more dissenting voices so that we can hone our arguments.
I yearn for biff.
61
The biggest role in climate change will play a Jetstream. Locks polar vortex (galactic radiation) will cause the jetstream will move toward the equator. The effect will be that high latitudes will appear heat in the summer, but winters can be very sharp. Blocking change of course of circulation. In certain areas will be colder in other warmer (Alaska and north-east USA).
http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/250hPa/orthographic=177.15,-90.52,320
50
Let’s see how the sun. Currently, magnetic storm and strong growth of ionizing radiation (gamma?) at cruise altitudes.
http://sol.spacenvironment.net/raps_ops/current_files/rtimg/dose.15km.png
30
Harry Twinotter. Do you deny that you are a paid shill contracted to disrupt any dialog contrary to the CAGW dogma?
81
(Snipped repeated off topic baiting question) CTS
40
Trying to get this threaded correctly.
Harry Twinotter. Do you deny that you are a paid shill contracted to disrupt any dialog contrary to the CAGW dogma?
(Please drop the off topic questions that serves no useful purpose) CTS
81
“Harry Twinotter”,
YOU don’t make the rules of this blog !
Jo & the moderators do.
If you do not like them then you are most welcome to stop visiting and posting your drivel here !
IT’S THAT SIMPLE !!!!!!
(Then you agree that you will STOP baiting Harry with irrelevant off topic questions, get back on topic?) CTS
62
Election now!!!!
04
Angry.
Well you appear to be doing a good job making up your own rules.
04
(SNIPPED!)
(Angry, you must stop baiting Harry with off topic baiting accusatory questions. If you continue to waste your postings in this manner,then you will be put in Moderation to stop it) CTS
22
What a surprise !
“Harry Twinotter” to Gutless to provide a response !
I rest my case !!
(Stop being this dumb as there was no case to answer to in the first place. People like you cause a lot of off topic traffic that irritates the Mods who has to try cleaning up the mess afterwards. STAY ON TOPIC!) CTS
12
Moderator Fly.
Ummm I started this thread (#3), I am just responding to comments directed to me (not the off-topic ones about politics). People are not required to respond to it, it is entirely up to their level of interest.
“attempting to take the conversation off-topic over trivial arguments”
OK now that is just a stupid comment on your part. Anyone can see that I was responding to an accusation I was a shill. Look at comment #3.5 if you have missed it somehow. I challenge anyone to respond if they think that was an appropriate comment, and I am not entitled to respond to it.
“That contravenes the spirit of the blog rules about being respectful and polite.”
Yeah well that applies to many of the comments on this forum. Name-calling is a feature of this forum. Unless you would like to put forward a case that it only applies to me?
Moderator Fly, the ball is in your court. People will be reading your response with interest.
(You started complaining about moderation in the open,causing a long trail of off topic postings,when will you realize that you are acting like a troll here?) CTS
114
Harry Twinotter July 22, 2015 at 11:01 pm ·
Moderator Fly.
OK now that is just a stupid comment on your part. Anyone can see that I was responding to an accusation I was a shill.
Harry Twinotter. Do you deny that you are a paid shill contracted to disrupt any dialog contrary to the CAGW dogma?
-snip much BS-
71
It’s hard to judge without seeing the Otterian reply in question.
If HarryTO was only responding to the accusation that David Maddison introduced, then they must be talking about the same topic, therefore if HarryTO’s comment must be moderated as off-topic then David Maddison’s comment must be moderated as off-topic, that’s only logical.
It is true that name calling and other ad-hominem statements (i.e. insults) are permitted here as part of the freedom of expression. As to when it becomes too much from one person is very subjective and only Her Blogginess can decide what the rest of her readers should be expected to tolerate in some sort of robust way, versus what is detracting too much from the purpose(s) of the blog.
Presumably some amount of “dissing” is allowed for “dissident thinkers”.
50
Andrew McRae,
It appears that you’ve fallen into the false assumption that name-calling (i.e. insults) and the ad-hominem fallacy are one and the same thing. That’s understandable. Many people both here and on the web in general make that mistake quite often.
An ad-hominem fallacy is when one person presents an argument to which a respondent replies by attacking that person rather than addressing the argument itself. By doing so, the focus is taken away from the points raised in the original argument.
Insults have no bearing on the argument per se. They are only meant to criticise a person, generally their behaviour, in order to belittle them.
Your statement, as quoted, gives the impression that Jo will allow ad-hominem fallacies on a selective basis, as if there is some bias in the way she runs this blog. Nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve been here long enough to know that this is not the case and I believe that so have you.
In the specific case of Harry, go back and read the comment threads where he’s participated. You’ll see that the points he raises are thoroughly refuted without resort to ad-hominem fallacies and it’s only his behaviour that’s criticised, (or dissed, as you put it).
I think all here will agree that it’s perfectly acceptable to criticise any commenters behaviour, and yes, even insult them when they refuse to change their inappropriate behaviour. And this is what Jo does allow, and rightfully so.
Abe
73
Just-A-pinhead wrote:
No, pinhead, you’ve fallen into that blatantly false interpretation. Anyone else can read what I wrote and interpret it correctly. Just read the DICTIONARY.
When I say ad-hominem statement, I mean exactly what that literally says and nothing more. An ad-hominem argument is more specific and is different, as shown by the different words I just used to describe it.
I’m even tempted to ask… for real…is someone paying you to write this nonsense?
I can safely ask that of you since you are clearly blind to insults.
Number of ad-hominem statements I have made in this comment: 3.
Number of ad-hominem arguments I have made in this comment: 0.
All adhering to current comment policy.
– – –
Same to you Twinotter.
And isn’t it convenient that you can remove insults from “free speech” when it suits you. Perhaps you should remove anything else you don’t like, then people will only be able to parrot your point of view. It sounded like a great idea to Finkelstein.
(Please keep your cool, he is not worth getting in trouble over) CTS
73
Andrew McRae,
Thank you for reminding me that I need to respond to one of your older comments. Seeing as that thread has been closed to commenting, I’ll go ahead and post my reply in weekend unthreaded.
As far as what you wrote here, let me just say thank you for that lesson on proper English diction. I was fully aware of the translation from the Latin. I was not aware of the second usage as in, “The office was created ad hominem for Fenton.”, which is not a very common usage of that term. So, again, thank you.
Your assumption that everyone who reads this blog is as well versed in spoken and written English as yourself is unfounded as you can see from that map.
Because of that diversity and because of the varying levels of education we both know exist here, even among those who do speak English as a first language, I would never use the phrase ad-hominem statement when what I mean is insult. Too much room for misunderstanding. Know your audience and all that.
Wrong. My interpertation is correct.
Simple, but accurate.
And when I wrote “appears” I meant exactly what that literally means and nothing more. Look at definition 4.
Wow. I manged to get through that entire comment without even one single
ad-hominem statementinsult. Fancy that.Abe
03
http://wiki.ironchariots.org/index.php?title=Ad_hominem_abusive
I could go back thru several posts and give examples where people tried to insult me by mocking my internet handle etc. It is a form of the “poisoning the well” fallacy, a pre-emptive insult intended to reduce the credibility of my response or any new I choose to make. It is also very childish.
There are also some examples where I was insulted in a thread I wasn’t even participating in – go figure.
04
Andrew McRae.
The forum guidelines say ad hominems are a failure of logic, and I agree. In practice they have no utility in a discussion unless the credibility of a source is the issue; even then insults would not be appropriate.
Insulting someone has nothing to do with free speech.
06
It looks like replying has gone by-bys. Replies are popping up as new comments.
07
The moderators will not answer meta-conversations Harry.
You started “this thread” at #3, and here we are at #39, plus all of the sub-comment nesting that has occurred in that long thread, and yet you still complain, and feel hard-done by.
I think you are lucky, many sites would simply turn you off for dominating the conversation. A couple of wharmist sites (that I am not allowed to mention) will not even publish opinions that they consider counter. You have had a good run, but have obviously ignored the advice offered.
So be it …
60
Harry,
Saying that “there is not much evidence to suggest the Maunder Minimum caused global cooling”, is arguing from Ignorance.
Saying that “Media Watch on the Australian ABC got the details correct (they did a good job)” is arguing from opinion.
Saying that “They also contacted the Royal Astronomical Society to check.” is just here-say, since you can quote nothing from that conversation. They may have phoned up, just to ask the time.
Saying that “There is evidence that the Little Ice Age did start well before the Maunder Minimum.” is the cum hoc fallacy. The two events may be isolated, or there may be a third unknown event that caused both. But if there is causal evidence, then you should present it.
242
Rerekee Wakaaro,
Thank you for pointing out the various informal logical fallacies in Harry’s statements. Informal logical fallacies are used as rhetorical instruments to divert the discussion in some other direction.
The thrust of the O/P is that solar activity has been neglected by the IPCC, Inc. as a factor influencing the Earth’s climate system. They refer to it as ‘minor or negligible’. (Their exact wording is irrelevant. The conclusion is the same.) As we dig deeper into the extensive and meticulous research already done on solar activity, we begin to see just how much of that research points to a much greater solar influence on our climate than has been aknowledged.
As I pointed out to Harry in this comment below, no-one here is making that claim anyway, so his point is moot and irrelevant to the conversation at hand. That he insists on using these rhetorcal tools to derail every thread, is indicative of the lengths CAGW ™ adherents will go to avoid a rational, in-depth discussion of the real issues.
Abe
172
“…indicative of the lengths CAGW ™ adherents will go to avoid a rational, in-depth discussion of the real issues.”
Mere adherent Abe? No perhaps not. Harry appears ill informed enough not to be just an adherent but rather to be a top climate scientist of the CAGW variety. I wonder what his real name is?
81
llew Jones.
You do not appear to have enough intelligence to argue your case.
Insults and name-calling are you only strong point.
111
Indeed Rereke Whakaaro, this is a quote from
Response of Monsoonal Temperate Glaciers in China to Global Warming Since the Little Ice Age
SU Zhen, SHI Ya-feng (Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute, CCAS, Lanzhou Gansu 730000. China)
Just one of many studies out of Asia that observe effects of the 17th century solar minimum.
131
Forgot the attribution so here it is
50
Even some of those that do believe the party line are honest enough to report that the Maunder Minimum affected the Southern Hemisphere.
‘A 700year Record of Southern Hemisphere Extratropical Climate Variability’ by P.A. MAYEWSKI et al.
[my bold]
40
Temperature and precipitation reconstruction in southern Portugal during the late Maunder Minimum (AD 1675–1715) by MJ Alcoforado, M de Fátima Nunes, JC Garcia
Another report of the Maunder Minimum
20
Even Dr J. Hansen believes that the Maunder Minimum had a global effect , otherwise why does he attempt to simulate it?
50
Harry Twinotter,
Jo did not suggest nor did she imply that the Maunder Minimum caused The Little Ice Age or even that it caused the cooling that the world experienced during The Little Ice Age. The O/P does not state this and neither do any of the referenced materials in the O/P.
So what’s your point?
Abe
122
Harry,
the way you desperately kick up dust one could almost imagine your income depended on the global warming hoax…
The evidence of a solar connection or causation for the LIA is strong. First we have records of the unusual low solar activity and records of the unusual climate condition at the time. You can try with “causation is not correlation” but given there is a simple viable mechanism for the connection, that pig is not going to fly far.
The issue here spectral variance not TSI. The significant variation in the UV spectrum over and between solar cycles is a recent discovery, but when coupled with known engineering it gives a viable mechanism for solar influence on climate.
As I have stated before, the oceans act as an extreme SW selective surface not a near blackbody as climastrologists claim. (go on Harry, accuse me of lying again.) This means for the oceans not all watts are equal. Ie: 100 w/m2 of SW causes less heating of the oceans than would 100 w/m2 of UV. UV penetrates below the diurnal ocean overturning layer, so UV variance will have an effect on slower ocean energy accumulation and discharge (a likely cause of David’s “Notch”)
If climastrologists keep insisting that the surface of our planet can be treated as a near blackbody, what hope is there of them ever understanding how solar variation effects climate on this ocean planet?
122
Konrad
Please correct me if I am wrong, but …
If I remember my theoretical physics correctly, a blackbody must be capable of resonating equally at all frequencies at the same time.
A true blackbody is therefore only a hypothetical contrivance, that cannot exist in the real world, for any practical purposes.
Is that correct?
110
Rereke,
you are absolutely correct. A black body is a mathematical contrivance useful in theoretical physics as it provides a baseline for many calculations. It is the basis for the short form of the Stefan-Boltzmann equation.
A perfect blackbody could be described as an infinitely thin material of infinite conductivity that is opaque to all frequencies and has perfect absorptivity and emissivity at all frequencies. Such a material does not exist but some modern nano-carbon structures get close.
A “near blackbody” or grey body has less than perfect properties in these respects. However by using the S-B equation you find an interesting thing. For a body in vacuum, it is the imbalance between emissivity and absorptivity that determines equilibrium temperature for constant illumination. For instance for a body such as our planets surface receiving an average of 240 w/m2 setting a=e=1 or a=e=0.5 makes no difference. The calculation returns 255K. This is the hideous mistake the climastrologists made. They believed that absorptivity and emissivity of our planets surface were near unity around 0.9. Worse, the use of the S-B equation to determine the critical “surface without radiative atmosphere” foundation figure effectively treats the oceans as SW opaque.
When I say that the oceans are an extreme SW selective surface, I am not “making it up” as Harry claimed. Most surfaces are to some extent selective surfaces, some more extreme than others. Two main factors contribute to frequency selective properties of surfaces. While Kirchoff’s law is correct in that a material must have equal ability to absorb and emit at a given frequency, materials may absorb well at one frequency but emit poorly at another or vice versa.
Common examples are white titanium oxide paints used on spacecraft. This is a poor absorber of solar SW but a very good emitter in the LWIR. A spacecraft painted with this in earth orbit with no internal power would fall below freezing. (the white rectangles on the sides of the Apollo service module were radiators painted with a similar material). Another example is black nickel. This is used as a coating on solar hot water heater collectors, and improves the efficiency well beyond matt black paint. The reason is that it absorbs almost all solar UV/SW/SWIR but is a very poor emitter in the LWIR. A plate of black nickel placed in a 1AU solar orbit with its back insulated would glow cherry red.
But the other factor that makes a selective surface/material is depth of absorption, emission or reflection. Again an example from spacecraft thermal control – back silvered quartz mirror radiators. These are used to cool comms satellites etc. The back face is conductively coupled to the electronics and the clear quartz faces out. Sunlight passes through the quartz and bounces off the mirror causing little heating, but heat can conduct through the quartz to the outer surface where it is then radiated as LWIR. These radiators can provide effective cooling in direct sun.
Our oceans act in a reverse manner. Sunlight is absorbed and heats well below the surface. As water is LWIR opaque, this energy needs to convect slowly back to the surface where it can be lost to conduction evaporation and radiation. This delay allows greater energy accumulation than could occur in a SW opaque material. All these five rules apply to our oceans. None of those were considered by climastrologists making the 255K “surface without radiative atmosphere” claim. It should be 335K for the oceans or a global average of around 312K. Given global average is currently 288K, this shows the net effect of our radiatively cooled atmosphere to be surface cooling not warming.
In the radiative physics of spacecraft thermal control, understanding surface properties is critical. Our planet is effectively a giant spacecraft and climastrologists provably fouled up on surface properties. They got it so wrong it beggars the imagination. What is truly sickening is the mendacity that followed the mistakes.
111
Rereke,
My apologies for what looks like a lack of response. I did type a full reply, but it appears stuck in moderation.
Essentially you are correct about the theoretical nature of a blackbody.
My reply went further, covering near blackbody, greybodies and several examples of selective surfaces/materials commonly utilised in engineering.
80
It appears to have gotten through the bottleneck now, so thank you for your full, and very understandable, response.
60
Konrad,
Can we “sweet-talk” Jo and/or Anthony into publishing an expansion of that discussion to Rereke, as a complete post?
10
Mark,
forget Anthony. Lost cause.
He couldn’t even work out that most of the “slayers” were a false flag op. Thick as.
Anthony is now motivated more by the fear of being wrong rather than the opportunity to be right.
Stick or carrot. Flight or fight. Anthony chose stick and flight. Disappointing, but that’s how the cookie crumbles. (He used to be empiricist like me, but no more).
Under advice from Willis, Dr. S and Dr. Brown, Anthony is now imprisoned in the “Co2 must cause warming” ideology. It’s sad, but it was his choice. You make your bed, you lay in it.
60
Hey Konrad,
Two things probably of interest.
Thing The First.
Regarding the whole DWLWIR issue, I found it interesting that SoD’s page on atmospheric absorption calculates that the 14μm band never gets much further than 1m above the ocean before it is fully absorbed by CO2 (at 380ppm). Considering water vapour is far more populous than CO2 at the ocean surface and has almost total absorption at wavelengths from 14μm to 50μm, that means about 50% of LWIR travelling downwards from the sky never makes it as far as the ocean surface. This means all your efforts to show LWIR can’t heat up water may have been in vain, as it would be sufficient for DWLWIR to heat up the water vapour in the air to make a GHE.
Thing The Second.
I can’t see how UV can have a greater heating effect than SW through greater penetration depth when the fact is that water has absorption coefficients between 200nm and 400nm about the same strength as for visible light. The absorption at 200nm UV is about the same as at 700nm red light, and the coefficient at 300nm is about the same as 500nm blue-green. Just look up the absorption spectrum of water. Segelstein 1981 is one reference, but here’s another. If the requirement for having a stronger heating effect on water, watt for watt, is to have greater penetration depth than visible light, then UV doesn’t do it.
Water’s absorption of near UV is however about 1,000,000 times weaker than for LWIR, so that part checks out okay.
40
Andrew,
thank you for taking an interest in the science most others fear.
First with regard DWLWIR and heating or slowing the cooling rate of water, this is something I haven’t addressed on this thread, although it was a primary focus of my experiments in 2011.
You are essential correct about atmospheric optical opacity and the amount of DWLWIR returned to the surface. But I went full “mythbusters” and pushed it in the experiments. I “maxed” the LWIR to prove a point.
First I tried reflecting outgoing LWIR back to cooling water –
http://i47.tinypic.com/694203.jpg
Whoops, LWIR reflected back will diminish as samples cool. What about constant LWIR sources? –
http://i42.tinypic.com/2h6rsoz.jpg
Nope, still doesn’t work. Incident LWIR cannot heat nor slow the cooling rate of water free to evaporatively cool. (and remember air is moving at Beaufort scale 4 on average over the oceans).
But it all works fine (well, climastrologist “fine”) if you constrain evaporative cooling with a few drops of baby oil. Suddenly the water sample under the stronger LWIR source cools slower.
Andrew, this is a more complex area of discussion. This is molecular kinetic theory, combined with radiative physics. What needs to be understood is that not all molecules in a fluid or gas have the same velocity, even though the fluid (gases are fluids) has an average temperature. Molecules are moving at different velocities in anything less than a solid.
What happens to a fast moving H2O molecule in the skin evaporation layer of the oceans when hit by a atmospheric emitted LWIR photon? It is tripped into evaporation. Ie: surface cooling.
What happens to a slow moving H2O molecule in the skin evaporation layer of the oceans when hit by a atmospheric emitted LWIR photon? It is not tripped into evaporation. Ie: surface warming.
Net result? Zip. Nada. Nothing. It is not physically possible for DWLWIR to be raising ocean temps by 33K. The people who claim otherwise are drivelling morons or self interested propagandists.
Andrew,
as to your second question, please re-read what I wrote to Rereke. Depth of absorption is critical. UV frequencies typically penetrate deeper than SW frequencies. Most of the planets oceans are not turbid like littoral waters. Do we have a major technical malfunction? Watch your data carefully people…
And if you are relying on SoD, you sure as S–t aren’t watching close enough. I have screen shots of the SoD crowd trying to erase the 0.67 hemispherical LWIR emissivity figure for the oceans from history. Where were you?
80
OK.
1. CAGW was a proposition of increasing surface air temperature right from the beginning. Your experiment 1) constantly removes humid air and replaces it with less humid air from the room, and 2) measures water temperature when the CAGW proposition was a statement about air temperature, and 3) due to the lower heat capacity an increase in humid air temperature will be measurable more easily than in water for the same flux integration time.
Having said that, checking whether the snowball earth hypothesis could be true is worthwhile in itself, as part of checking the whole climate dogma collection, but you can’t go around claiming you’ve disproven surface air warming under present day conditions with that experiment. I think you have even conceded in previous comments that land is the only place GHE might work.
2. Nothing you’ve said here alters the measurements of absorptivity of water. That’s not open to opinion, it’s measured. You would have to argue (with empirical evidence) that the ocean doesn’t exhibit the absorption with depth that is predicted by lab spectroscopy, but you have not argued that yet and I don’t see how anyone could. The salt and the plankton is only going to make UV absorption happen faster in saltwater than pure.
Also, when I search for “Konrad” on SoD with Google and Bing I get no hits. So actually the question is… where were you?
21
‘There is evidence that the Little Ice Age did start well before the Maunder Minimum.’
That is correct, although there is much debate about the start and finish times of the LIA.
The early 13th century is a reasonable starting point in the northern hemisphere.
80
el gordo
“That is correct, although there is much debate about the start and finish times of the LIA.”
Yes, lots of debate. This is an indication the evidence is not very good which is my point.
216
The LIA started in the northern hemisphere and the North Atlantic became a disaster zone, with great sea floods and violent storms throughout the 13th century, then came the Wolf Minimum.
There is no doubt that by AD 1300 the LIA was universal.
81
Lamb, HH (1972). “The cold Little Ice Age climate of about 1550 to 1800”. Climate: present, past and future. London: Methuen.
Eddy J.A. (June 1976). “The Maunder Minimum”. Science 192 (4245): 1189–1202
216
Ha ha why does a reference quote get a couple of thumbs down?
Gotta love voting systems where people select themselves 🙂
215
Because the thumbs are an indication of the utility of the information presented.
Utility can be usefulness, or humour, or content that is informing or interesting and presented in a friendly way.
Commentators who are bombastic, or domineering, or just plain obnoxious, tend to get more red thumbs than green, for some reason.
111
Rereke Whakaaro.
I posted some references after I was asked, and got thumbed down!
The relevance of what you just posted makes no sense to me at all. I suspect you have lost it, you are overwhelmed by your desire to stalk and harass me with pointless responses to my comments.
08
Well Harry, you seem to be your own bad example. Just look at your response …
It would have been more in your favour, to have done that as a courtesy, and not waited to be asked.
Did you give the references with grace, or did you feel the need to make a snide remark, or score a point, as you did so?
Did you just give a reference to a whole document, or did you refer to the specific part of the document that was relevant to the discussion? At a guess, I would say that you just referred to the whole document, which was probably hundreds of pages long. Is my guess correct?
But communication is all about the recipient gaining insight that they did not have before. It is not about building yourself up to appear (but not necessarily be), superior because of the knowledge you possess, and they do not.
That is because, in your mind’s eye, you see yourself as being the centre of it all. You are the person with the latest information, you are the person with your finger on the pulse. You are the person who will become rich and famous, by saving us from ourselves.
It is nice to dream Harry, but life unfortunately is not like that.
What you should take away from this exchange is this:
Knowledge only has power and value, at the time, and place, when it is shared.
There are organisations that are in the business of researching and providing information to Senior Business Executives, and Politicians. They would not make any money at all, if they kept that information to themselves, or could not explain the information in a context that was relevant, and in ways that their clients could immediately understand and use.
If you don’t see the utility in that, it will be difficult for me, or anybody else, to help you.
90
Rereke Whakaaro,
For what its worth I believe he does not know, or can not use, html tags correctly that is why there are no links. Or may be you’re correct and he’s just too lazy. Hard to tell…
(Thankfully my 16 year old Pentium PC still allows me to do that, and much more.)
60
Yea gods. That is old. Does it use Arabic or Roman numerals?
60
Rereke Whakaaro,
No its a normal keyboard. I got the aged machine last year, basically to scavenge parts I need for the 14year old PC I’m using now. The older one was as amazing (to me!) as is this one. A woman sold it to me for $5, telling me it hasn’t been used for years as the power supply had blown and the batteries were dead. I got it home connected to a compatible PSU and up it came with all gore that Windows 95 can muster. Still have it working at top speed of 300MHz Pentium II and 320MB of PC66 SODIMMs, updated the bios (good old IBM still has all the files for free), installed Linux on a replaced ($5) 120GB hard disk.
I find doing this fun, some think I’m nuts. But I say if it still works why throw it?
40
It’s not that we don’t believe you’re quoting texts accurately, but it would have been more helpful to link to the source document, or some kind of detail that explains how Lamb reached that conclusion. Aha!
Eddy J.A. (June 1976). “The Maunder Minimum”. Science 192 (4245): 1189–1202
http://www.leif.org/EOS/Eddy/1976Science_Maunder.pdf
Reference 75:
So the MWP was not a global event because conditions in coastal Western Europe aren’t necessarily representative of the whole globe, but the LIA started in 1550 because a “Paris-London Winter Severity Index” can be taken as representative of the whole globe. Rrrright.
You have a rather stark choice, Harry. If you want to believe HH Lamb’s “Paris-London Winter Severity Index” as the date of the LIA, then you’ll also have to accept that the deepest points on his temperature reconstruction fit exactly with changes in 14C proxy of solar activity, as Eddy himself said (my bolding): [Eddy,J., CLIMATE AND THE CHANGING SUN, 1977.]
If you don’t want to believe Lamb’s LIA dating, the Loehle 2008 temperature proxy that I referred you to the other day gives a roughly compatible starting date from a world-wide network of proxies. Indeed in his reconstruction the temperature anomaly goes below -0.2 in ~1450 and does not go above -0.2 again until 1750.
Eddy also shows the 14C records as having an unusually low period beginning around 1430, which was how he discovered the Spörer Minimum.
So all these sources are pointing to the Spörer Minimum as starting the LIA in ~1430 and the Maunder only made it colder.
But wait, it gets better!
Eddy wrote that in 1977. How could IPCC skeptics exist before the formation of the IPCC?
Talk about cognitive dissonance! Poor old Harry.
71
Andrew McRae.
If you look at references given in a scientific study, they usually give only the year, lead author and study title.
17
Andrew McRae,
You’re wasting your time here. As you can see from his reply, Harry’s not interested in responding to any of the points you made about the start/end dates of the LIA. Just look at the response you got;
How is that in anyway a response to your post? (Not a rhetorical question.)
Well, I’ll tell you how. He just ‘cherry-picked’ the most irrelevant, off-topic, inconsequential part of your comment and shifted the focus to that statement!
He’s been doing this from the time he became a regular here around the end of April, 2015. That’s why he’s here. It should have become obvious to you and the others by now.
About the only positive outcome that’s come about as a result of his participation is that you and others will sometimes go ahead and do the research to bring the facts out in the open. But, as you can see from Rerekee’s response below;
People don’t always have the time to go through the motions. Especially when experience has shown them that he won’t respond in kind. He’ll just continue on with his non-sense and his purpose, i.e. to derail the thread, will have been accomplished.
And therein lays the true damage he wreaks. When people don’t reply to all of his false statements, they stand unopposed. This tends to give some of the casual readers, of which there are thousands, the impression that he may be right. After all, no one refuted him an those points.
Cost benefit? The cost of having counter-factual statements go un-clarified is greater than the benefit of successfully refuting those comments that are.
Abe
70
Andrew you ask him to link the document, that would be new! Harry has never link a single document during time he has indulged us with his comments. I’m not sure he understands what a linked document is, certainly he does not or can not link sources.
To be honest you are better ignoring his comments, but surrounding his foolish entries with large number quotes and document references that directly contradict his mindless assertion. And reply to others correctly but include a line or two that indirectly refutes his garbage.
Fools like him soon disappear when no one replies, and talk around him.
You know some less intelligent commenters think that telling you what you already know about academic papers is an answer to you comment when actually it’s a distraction trying to derail the thread.
Old wisdom says don’t feed the troll! 🙂
30
The Sporer and Maunder Minimums were the depths of the LIA.
71
You mean the LIA that you and your alarmist friends insist never happened? Twotter tales continue.
172
Alicia,
Excellent point, Alicia. Give ’em enough rope and they will hang themselves.
Every time.
Abe
141
Just-A-Guy and Alicia,
Yes, anti scientific warmist are entombed in the echo-chamber of their own doom. For ever reiterating the same empty messages of fake cause and effect (instead of correlation and probability), shouting about adjusted figures that prove nothing, and screaming of modeled outcomes of hypothecation that lead to a remote unreal future.
These are the people, along with their advocate followers, who will ensure real progress stalls, that tax and overspend policies foisted on the West by the UN endure, that maximum damage is inflicted on the biosphere under the banner of ‘saving the planet’.
91
Go ask Alicia.
The LIA the scientific evidence suggests was not global you mean.
It is fascinating to see people cling to an outdated idea. They believe the LIA was global because scientists said so. They don’t believe the LIA was local because scientists said it was local.
It must be a source of cognitive dissonance.
117
El Gordo provided you with a long list of papers that lists the evidence. Granted, not a chapter in the IPCC summary for policymakers but scientific evidence.
Considering how hard it is to get, I was surprised by the number of papers. How many were you unaware of when you made the above declaration?
How many are you going to read before you declare that it is not good enough?
121
RB.
Long list? Hmmm, I don’t think so. It was actually a fairly short list. I did a quick search of “Little Ice Age” and got over 42,000 hits.
No, I tend to go with the current understanding of the LIA and the review done by the IPCC. If you dispute the IPCCs findings, you can go thru their references one by one and check.
Even Wikipedia has a good set of references.
I tell you what you can do, go thru El Gordo’s “long list” and summarise each one for us. That will save some time.
BTW I thought many climate change dissenters didn’t like “consensus” science, so what good is a “long list” going to be unless you feel there can be a consensus?
07
What defines a ‘a good set of references’?
To me,, that is, as a geologist, and someone who actually does read quite a lot of journal articles as part of my job, this implies that you have read them all, and understood them all well enough to be able to comment on their quality and veracity. Sorted the wheat from the chaff, so to speak.
Unless you have free, or very cheap access to said journals, it must cost you a small fortune too? Some are freely available, but most are not – without infringing on copyright laws, anyway. luckily for me, my employer has an extensive subscription list, but even then, there are many journals not included.
I freely admit that it would take me a long, long time to wade through the wikipedia list you mentioned, in order that I make sure I understand and appreciate the contents – and that doesn’t include time spent getting distracted by other references, and time spent clarifying my understanding of aspects with which I am unfamiliar.
Where do you find the time? I don’t know about you, but just reading abstracts isn’t enough for me, and I do not desire to spend every waking moment reading journal articles about a subject which is interesting, but not one which I am passionate about.
70
No then. You were not aware that there was a lot of evidence to back it up when you wrote
Even in your reply you show that science to you is merely parroting authority.
41
RB.
Parroting the authority of those climate scientists, silly me.
Honestly, what alternatives are there?
Look, I tell you what. Since you do not trust the climate scientists, go and do your own research on the various proxies and publish the results in the peer-reviewed scientific literature.
05
It does summarise them. You didn’t even look at it and you wrote
Your opinion is not based on evidence. Could you keep it to yourself?
51
Here is an example of the MWP in New Zealand and you can see the AD 1300 Event.
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/studies/l1_nzcave.php
40
It’s good to see people are starting to think more about the influence of the sun on earth’s climate, in fact the driver of it, rather than computer driven prediction. From a scientific viewpoint I think Svensmark’s hypothesis on sunspot activity and climate is far superior to the carbon dioxide theory. Let’s look subjectively at the available evidence rather than some political agenda; there is a lot of it to arrive at a reasonable conclusion.
251
Unfortunately Robert, it is solely about a political agenda, and has always been so.
120
But I did enjoy watching Steven Schneider’s reaction, when Svensmark announced that he had created an experiment in a cloud chamber that produced empirical support for some of his hypothesis.
It is good to know that empirical evidence still trumps belief.
130
The warmists show arrogant gall,
To dismiss the effects of King Sol,
To treat with distain,
How our star can explain,
Earth’s climatic change best of all.
302
Ruairi,
Exceptional! 😉
Abe
90
I’m not up on my European history but could there be other reasons for the small number of sightings: war, famine, pestilence? Just playing Devil’s advocate here.
71
Ron in Austin
Here is an article observing the regime change precipated by droughts in China during the Maunder minimum.
Reports of effects in Europe are here
40
Another pdf book on the Maunder Minimum is here. and published by American Association for the Advancement of Science.
30
Then there is of course some about LIA effects around the world —
Evidence for the existence of the medieval warm period in China (Climatic Change, Volume 26, Issue 2-3, pp. 289-297, March 1994)
– De’Er Zhang
The Little Ice Age as Recorded in the Stratigraphy of the Tropical Quelccaya Ice Cap (Science, Volume 234, Number 4774, pp. 361-364, October 1986)- L. G. Thompson et al
Tree-ring and glacial evidence for the medieval warm epoch and the little ice age in southern South America (Climatic Change, Volume 26, Issue 2-3, pp. 183-197, March 1994) – Ricardo Villalba
The Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm Period in the Sargasso Sea (Science, Volume 274, Number 5292, pp. 1503-1508, November 1996) – Lloyd D. Keigwin
Global Warming or Little Ice Age? (Journal of Coastal Research, Issue 17, pp. 371-382, 1995) – Theodor Landscheidt — Look at the refernces
20
Ron surprising it maybe but most normal everyday activities go on as usual during wartime.
I think the US even managed to proclaim a national park during the civil war?
40
Ron in Austin,
Sorry I can’t find much on European effect, most seems to be about global effects.
40
Jo, fantastic post,thank you.
100
Ditto!!!!
60
I’m presuming that the peak of red squares a bit after 1850 is the “Carrington Event”.
Can anyone confirm?
50
TedM,
You might find this of interest.
20
A little “off topic”, but I have noticed the BOM are getting a new super-computer; a Cray XC 40 for $ 77 million. It has a capacity of 1660 teraflops and is to be up-graded to 5 pentaflops.
So I image we will be seeing a lot more flops of data from he BOM. Even more than before.
—-
It doesn’t matter how big the computer is. A junk model based on the wrong assumptions is just bigger faster junk. Thanks Paul – Jo
50
The total solar irradiance may look small, but it is only one side of the ledger. Has reflection, reradiation also increased equally from a system in long term equilibrium? An increase of 0.07% per year over 50 years would be cumulative and 3.5% in total radiation received less the back radiation. Now we have a potential increase in surface temperature, mainly in the oceans which directly receive 2/3 of the heat. That is possibly why Dr. Selby found a direct and close correlation between the integral of temperature, possibly a direct instantaneous measure of irradiance and CO2. So steady heating not matched entirely by increased back radiation and you could get a 1C increase in ocean surface temperature. This would lead to about a 50% increase in CO2 under Henry’s law, produced by the huge reserve in the deep ocean which would massively amplify surface effects. So everything fits. What was the problem again?
120
Sorry, the TSI increase may look small.
40
TdeF,
As has been said before the weight of evidence suggests that solar changes have contributed to small climate oscillations occurring on time scales of a few centuries, similar in type to the fluctuations classically described for the last millennium: The so-called Medieval Warm Period (AD 900-1400) followed on by the Little Ice Age (AD 1500-1800)
20
A comment long ago possibly in my treasured Encyclopedia Brittanica of the late 1960’s on the amount of time that a light photon takes to get from where it is generated in the Sun’s fusion core to the solar surface from where it radiated into space really got me intrigued.
So from NASA’s Ask a Space Scientist site [ circa about 2006 ] we get this very rough estimation of the time a photon takes to transit from the Solar core to the Solar surface .
The estimated time taken might surprise you.
The Sun >> [ 31 ]- How long does it take light to get out from the inside of the Sun?
I suspect that if we again move into a Dalton or the more severe Maunder type solar minimum that there will be a fairly rapid switch from the played out and by then thoroughly dis-proven catastrophic CO2 warming hypothesis to a sudden scientific concentration on the Solar phenomena as scientists, [ most of whom won’t deserve the title of “scientists”, “scientific carpet baggers” being a better description ; Def; “any opportunistic or exploitive outsider”:] of every conceivable level and stripe try to get aboard the funding band wagon to try to ascertain just how severe and how long the Solar activity hiatus might endure and what will be the consequences for humanity and the planetary climate.
And those consequences if we are to believe history might just possibly be very severe for adequate food production for the by then approximately 8.5 billions of humanity of whom perhaps at least 60% or more will reside in cities of over a 100,000 population.
50% of humanity’s numbers already reside in such cities.
*
Having written the above, I along with most of humanity have this inherent tendency to try and predict the future at which we all, every one of us, almost invariably fail.
Or as they say in economics, the archtypal [ failed ] predictors of the future. “Economists have forecasted ten recessions out of the last four”
But then as Rupert Murdoch put it; We all know economists were created to make weather forecasters look good.
130
‘history might just possibly be very severe for adequate food production’
Food security will be become a major issue, which is why the Chinese are investing in agribusiness in South America, Africa and Australia. China has a long history of starvation and the central government cannot afford to let it happen under their watch.
50
‘I suspect that if we again move into a Dalton or the more severe Maunder type solar minimum …’
Or a worse case might be a 8.2 kiloyear event which is reckoned to be associated with the 1470 year cycle.
40
“What is surprising is just how much data we have on the Sun from 400 years ago.”
Why is it surprising? I have never heard of a civilisation in which Astronomy was not a major field of study, both for the practical issues of setting a calendar and predicting the Gods’ intentions, and for its own theoretical interest. Many astronomers were government scientists. Kepler’s work used the data from the Royal Danish Space Exploration Programme. (Director: Tyge Brahe. You call him “Tycho”, but I use his real name because I can pronounce it.)
Since it was recognized fairly early on that the Sun played a role in the seasons (important to know about for agricultural purposes and to ensure that the Emperor performed the correct rituals at the correct time) it is reasonable to expect some attention to be paid to it.
100
Study of the sun fell away very significantly when industrialisation began to fall into the hands of just a few interested people, the early “scientists”.
Agricultural productivity rapidly ramped up in the 19th century and there was a mass exodus from the rural farming and food production scene into the rapidly industrialising cities of the early 19th century.
Prior to this rural to city exodus, about 80% of the population was rural based and engaged in food production so the onset of the seasons and the outcomes of that year’s crops and food production as driven by the timing of the Sun was of paramount importance.
The Sun was the ultimate giver of life and the only source of that life to those who lived before the British Industrial Revolution was getting under way so it was very closely studied and followed for both pragmatic, practical and religious reasons linked also to the Sun’s life giving output.
An Industrial Revolution which we still living in and which has given us so much in the way of health and personal freedom and removed the fear of hunger for nearly all of today’s humanity.
More so because the bulk of food production in those pre-industrial times was only available to and was consumed by the locals where it was grown.
There simply was no means of transporting large tonnages of food to other areas to cover times of localised shortage ; ie starvation and famine or to dispose of surpluses in years of plenty.
In the last 200 years of a very benign climate mankind has flourished and the Sun was to all intent and purposes ignored as being no more than a scientific item of interest but of little consequence to those who lived through these benign climatic times as their lives were comfortable and free of food and energy shortages which in our usual human way , they thought would go on forever.
Now the realisation is dawning that as the case for a CO2 created climate change of major proportions collapses, the realization that maybe we are in for much harder times climatically as the Suns activity over the last century appears to be declining, is winding down, the prospect of hard times ahead climatically as previously shown by past climate history is again beginning to come to the fore.
And for those who know or have any inkling of their paleo and climate history and who know their global food production and global energy requirements, it scares the hell out of us.
92
The time has come, the Walrus said to speak of many things. It would seem that it is finally dawning on many even rusted on warmanista’s that mayhaps their narrow view of all things climate is not entirely correct. With no warming for longer than there was warming, must be giving pause for thought, the Harry twin otters of this world will cling to the carbon nonsense until a glacier encroaches on their front door.
The new paradigm of a quiet sun will make for an interesting study of the conniption fits, about to come in the ranks of climate[so called]scientists.
173
I know I have written many times on the C14 graph and how it is categoric proof that CO2 vanishes with a half life of 14 years into the vast oceans and man cannot raise CO2 levels. The Atom Bomb graph shows how C14 was doubled in the mid 1960s and is reverting on a perfect e-kt curve, denying the Bern model and every other model. The IPCC says the half life is 80 years for CO2 reabsorption. They are so obviously wrong. It is not worth writing a paper. There is no other conclusion.
However an article on C14 which makes the projected data of the infamous Hockey Stick look reasonable! Reported in a column in this morning’s Australia as real news, published in the UK Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
By Dr. Heather Graven
and the image needs to be posted of her C14 vs time with her remarkable tacked on data projections. The projection denies reality of a perfect fit over 60 years of e-t/14 years, a half life of 14 years.
The C14 from the bombs and all the other CO2 is being exchanged with the vast ocean with a half life of 14 years, but instead of drawing the obvious conclusion, we have the triumph of wishing over data and the exercise of projection based on theories which do not fit the present.
<a href=" “>Perfect fit
So most of the article is, in my opinion, nonsense. In fact one about distinguishing old tusks from new is quite wrong. Dental researchers and others have used the rapidly changing C14 levels to track tooth/bone growth over years, not centuries. It has been very useful. However the worry about a T shirt being indistinguishable from cloth from William the Conqueror is nonsense.
All evidence points to C14 levels returning to the norm, just slightly below the very old levels. Dr. Suess who pioneered the effect noted all this in the 1950s. He said less than 2% of man released CO2 was in the air up to 1956 including all of WW1 and WW2 and half the 20th century. Murry Selby estimates 4%.
To just bolt on crazy projections and present them as science is not sensible. You have to fit the last 60 years before you talk about the next 60.
82
The graph. I know it is completely off topic, sorry, but the Australian has two big alarmist articles and this is one of them, suddenly the end of radio carbon dating as we know it.
71
Data Glue needed
See if you can spot where the real data ends and the fantasy begins..
71
My point is that a single unknown commentator writes a trivial, even silly paper about an unlikely problem in the future with radio carbon dating and it gets a whole column in the Australian? This is not news. The fact that the article is not right and the alleged data is not data at all but a wild projection using MathLab is not the point. It is news because it finds another downside to man made CO2 driven global warming and is presented as fact. Then you get the usual mid summer article about how people are juggling the last ten years to work out which is the warmest by a tiny margin and manage to miss the fact that the warming has stopped? Why do papers carry this stuff?
70
It doesn’t matter,this past June was one of the hottest eva in the history of the world and already they are predicting that this year will be the hottest eva.
So as we can easily guess the entire planet could be covered by a blanket of snow and ice and still temps will read on the upper centigrade scale.
The science is settled,next years temps have already been decided on and written into the diaries ,so no need to worry our little heads about it.
112
Sadly you are absolutely right. Sadder (but unsurprisingly) still the voices delivering those messages will be regarded somewhat higher than 17th century pencil sketches and 800BC Chinese anecdotes.
We do our arguments no favours with these information sources. We ridicule warmists for similar historical flights of fancy, but seem to welcome it when it suits our position.
Im changing my name to “The Last Skeptic” and its though its lonely, its fulfilling to hold the line.
41
The amount of aurorae data is remarkable, but has it been homogenised?
40
Not yet Skeptik, but I expect they will homogenise the data against readings taken at night when the sun is so covered in black spots you can’t see it.
30
Further reading which Jo and others here might be interested in as it takes the first recorded Sun spot observations back to 800 BC ; ;
————————–
The Historical Sunspot Record
Chinese astronomers recorded solar activity around 800 B.C. and astronomers in both China and Korea frequently observed sunspots. However, there are no known early Chinese or Korean illustrations of solar events or sunspot activity
The first person to actually observe and draw pictures of sunspot activity was not Galileo Galilei, as is commonly thought, because an observation of sunspots
and the resulting auroral activity appear in the historical record almost 500 years before the invention of the telescope. “In the third year of Lothar, emperor of the Romans, in the twenty-eighth year of King Henry of the English…on Saturday, 8 December, there appeared from the morning right up to the evening two black spheres against the sun.”
This description of sunspots, and the earliest known drawing of sunspots, appears in John of Worcester’s Chronicle recorded in 1128.
On the night of 13 December 1128, astronomers in Songdo, Korea, witnessed a red vapour that “soared and filled the sky” from the northwest to the southwest.
A delay of five days is the average delay between the occurrence of a large sunspot group near the center of the Sun – exactly as witnessed by John of Worcester – and the appearance of the aurora borealis in the night sky at relatively low latitudes.
Chinese accounts state “there was a Black spot within the Sun” on March 22, 1129, which “died away” on April 14th. This may well have been one of the sunspots Worcester had observed 104 days earlier, on the other side of the world.
There was considerable controversy in the early 1600’s as to who was the first to discover and study the sunspot record, as well as the nature of sunspots.
Were sunspots on the surface of the Sun – destroying the perfection of the heavens, or were they satellites of the Sun?
The earlier Chinese and Korean observations and the illustrated records in John of Worcester’s chronicle were not known by the active observers in the early 1600’s.
A page from Thomas Harriot’s notebook, dated 8 December 1610, describes sunspot activity and includes several drawings.
This is the earliest known detailed recording of solar observations in the 1600’s and predates Galileo by more than a year.
Thomas Harriot also was the first person to make a drawing of the moon through a telescope, on July 26, 1609 – again predating Galileo’s moon drawing by several months.
[ much more ]
……………………………………….
illustrations;
John of Worcester Sunspot Drawing, 1128
Korean Auroral Text
Thomas Harriot
1560-1621
Page from Harriot’s Notebook
Johannes’ Pamphlet [ 1611 ]
Sunspot Drawing by Scheiner
Rosa Ursina
_______________________
Paywalled; Somebody here might be able to access to this paper which appears could be quite interesting in a solar sunspot record sense.
Solar Observations in Ancient China and Solar Variability
Xu Zhentao
Abstract;
In this paper I review both the history of solar observations in ancient China and recent researches on solar variability.
The paper consists of three parts.
In the first part I describe Sun worship and the early observations of solar phenomena.
In the second part I concentrate on sunspot observations and improving the catalogue of naked-eye sunspot records.
In the third part I discuss long-term variations of solar activity by using historical sunspot records over 2000 years.
The 210-year cycle, which has the largest significance in the power spectrum, may have an important influence on the forecasting of the next cycle (no. 22).
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Thank-you ROM for reminding people that other educated civilizations; Chinese, Indian, and further back Arabic, observers had been making and recording their observations for many centuries.
20
ROM,
This location has the report ‘Solar Observations in Ancient China and Solar Variability by Xu Zhentao . If you want it get it while it’s freely available.
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tomOmason @ #18.2
Done! Many Thanks for that. 🙂
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The ALP want Australia to produce half of its electricity from renewables within 15-years;
http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/andrewbolt/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/shorten_vs_the_economy_demands_higher_power_prices/
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Beautiful dreamers to a man in the party formally known as The Labour Party.
What we see now is a gaggle of self obsessed, pseudo intellectual water melons on a mission to destroy what remains of the legacy of the party of the Australian worker.
Not a murmur on IR…. not a whisper… The one topic Shorten should be able and willing (even motivated) to go hard on and what to we get, more power dreams from unicorn farts.
Its a joke of a sideshow of a bunch of [snip].
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ok Unicorn wind then… Whatevs
41
Off Topic but Fairfax is in raptures over Shorten’s plan for 50% renewables in 15 years. When I pointed out problems in reaching that goal I was shouted down by those who think it is as good as done. One pointed out a number of countries that had a greater use of renewals (which didn’t address my comments at all) but didn’t compare geology or climate conditions that allowed them to use renewables (hydro, geothermal etc). Another responded that there are wonderful new technologies so there will be no problems meeting that target.
My back of the envelope calculations based on renewables current (alleged) contribution to Australia’s power with solar 2%, wind 4% and hydro 7%. To bring that 14% to 50% would have hydro still at 7% – unless some dams were built immediately and we had sufficient rain – so solar, wind and other renewables would have to contribute 43%. If wind provides say 28% and solar and any emerging sources 15%, we would need an extra 11,000 turbines spread out over 800,000 hectares of wind farms scarring our hills and coastlines using nearly 3 million tonnes of steel and 9 million tonnes of concrete to construct them. (based on Capital and Macarthur wind farms and Suzlon S88 turbines) Plus the roads and electrical infrastructure, plus the battery arrays, and so on.
But according to the alarmists commenting at Fairfax, Shorten’s proposal is as good as implemented!
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BTW The missing 1% in the current 14% (first line second para) is biomass – a CO2 emitting fuel that is supposedly countered by growing more biomass crops to soak up the CO2 that has been emitted and burning them and releasing CO2 which is then absorbed by new biomass crops etc etc etc – a rather pointless exercise.
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BBC’s Click program gets more CAGW all the time. lengthy piece on the treemails in their latest program, which is up on their website:
16 July: BBC: The Melbourne treemail phenomenon
About 3,000 emails have been sent to individual trees in the last two years. This didn’t start out as an exercise in sentiment, but a hard-headed attempt by Melbourne city council to manage an urban forest in decline – as a result of drought, by 2009 40% of the 77,000 trees in Australia’s “garden city” were struggling or dying…
***The council believes planting additional trees could bring down Melbourne’s sizzling summer temperatures by four degrees Celsius.
As well as cooling its citizens, planting 3,000 new trees a year will help the city to breathe more easily. Individual trees have received emails thanking them for extracting carbon dioxide from the air…
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33560182
***in the Click interview, Wood said 10 years of drought, 13 years is mentioned in the following, but important to note it’s all about countering the URBAN HEAT ISLAND EFFECT:
20 Feb: Herald Sun: Rebecca David: 202020 Vision calls on planners to create more shade to tackle urban heat island effect
PHOTO CAPTION: Cr Arron Wood is the chair of the City of Melbourne’s Environment portfolio.
A lack of trees and shade is contributing to the urban heat island (UHI) effect, making it harder for many areas to keep cool in hot weather.
The effect occurs when built-up areas with surfaces such as roads, concrete and buildings absorb heat on hot days, increasing the temperature and retaining heat into the night.
Victorian research shows inner-urban areas can be up to 5C warmer than surrounding rural areas, and it is forecast warming due to the UHI effect will continue to rise by approximately 1C each decade…
Simon Divecha, from the University of Adelaide’s Environment Institute, said there needed to be an urgent culture shift to counter the UHI effect…
Councillor Arron Wood said it had a target of 3000 new trees a year, which he hoped would significantly increase the canopy over the Melbourne Council area.
“The City of Melbourne has long been regarded as Australia’s ‘garden city’, but ***13 years of drought in tandem with severe water restrictions left the city’s urban forest in a state of unprecedented decline,” Cr Wood said.
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/leader/east/vision-calls-on-planners-to-create-more-shade-to-tackle-urban-heat-island-effect/story-fngnvlxu-1227225795876
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About as convincing for me as 0.xx mm sea level records from 150-200 years ago sorry.
Its still just another grain of sand in the thimble to try and find a pattern on the beach.
Yawn.
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TonyfromOz –
how can ABC be made to report the truth about solar/wind?
i find it unconscionable that they are getting away with airing fantastic nonsense every day.
it’s tragic that Greg Hunt isn’t putting out press releases presenting the real facts & figures.
there’s hardly an ABC program that’s free of CAGW propaganda. on the last two RN “Big Ideas” programs, there have been snide remarks:
on 20 July’s “The Australian constitution, rights and Magna Carta”, Dr Nicholas Gruen, Chair, Open Knowledge Australia and CEO of Lateral Economics, suggested 100 random citizens should be given a voice somehow, and it would be interesting to see how they would have voted on the carbon tax (he obviously believed they would have been against the repeal).
on 21 July’s “Corruption – the invisible worm”, Geoffrey Watson, Barrister and former counsel assisting the Independent Commission Against Corruption, got laughs from the audience for saying (paraphrasing) if we can have a federal commissioner for wind farms, why can’t we have a commissioner to look into federal corruption?
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They cant and they wont. They allowed multiple labour stooges to hit the mic today and misrepresent the words of Dick Warburton with their claim renewables put downward pressure on pricing. When he said renewables put downward pressure on wholesale pricing. Which is about as useful to consumers as rubbing nylon undies on your head to generate your own power.
The simple fact that wholesale pricing advantages are not only NEVER passed on to consumers, but generally stacked on with more charges seems to not worry Labour one jot. If it can be argued that the Govt. favours profiteering in the fossil fuel sector, then it can be equally and more accurately argued that Labour supports profiteering in the energy retailing sector.
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AND AGAIN…WITH LABOR, GREENS, SOLAR REP SPIN. not even BBC is as ridiculous as “their ABC” when it comes to CAGW propaganda:
22 July: ABC The World Today: Shorten to unveil ambitious 50 per cent renewables target at ALP conference
ELEANOR HALL: …He says a more ambitious renewable energy target will help keep power prices down in Australia and it will also boost jobs.
But he says he expects a Government scare campaign on the issue.
In Canberra, political correspondent Louise Yaxley reports
LOUISE YAXLEY: Bill Shorten visited a business in northern Tasmania which makes equipment to generate wind power to make his announcement.
He says it’s achievable that in 15 years, half the nation’s power could come from renewables…
BILL SHORTEN: Labor believes that with emerging technology from solar power batteries, to investment in wind energy, to building confidence in the future of renewable energy, through greater investment in jobs, through lower prices for consumers and households and small businesses, that we will see a great future for renewable energy in this country: less pollution, more jobs, and downward pressure on electricity prices.
LOUISE YAXLEY: Mr Shorten says Labor’s plan means Australia would be keeping up with the rest of the world…
BILL SHORTEN: Jurisdictions right around the world from Germany to New Zealand to California, the rest of the nation is setting itself ambitious goals. Leadership in Australia shouldn’t be about telling people that things are too hard and they can’t be done, shrugging and giving up and pulling up the drawbridge, and pretending that the world is not changing around you.
You do no favours to the people of Australia, no favours to your own families and successive generations by saying that we can’t do anything about climate change.
LOUISE YAXLEY: His climate change policy focuses on the stronger renewables target…
He’s trying to head off political danger by promising to achieve reductions with an emissions trading scheme that he describes as “soft.”
BILL SHORTEN: Labor has learnt some of the lessons of the past. The core strategy of Labor’s plan to deal with harmful climate change is to focus on renewable energy. We are proposing a reasonably soft emissions trading scheme and it’ll be linked to the rest of the world…
LOUISE YAXLEY: The Environment Minister Greg Hunt has already gone on the attack.
GREG HUNT: Call it an emissions trading scheme, but it has exactly the same effect in exactly the same way. One is a fixed price; one is a floating price, but they cover all of the electricity emissions in Australia. That means that the price of electricity will go up. That’s still their fundamental policy.
LOUISE YAXLEY: But Mr Shorten says the more ambitious target will help keep prices down, and he has the backing of John Grimes from the Australian Solar Council…
GRIMES: (SOLAR SPIN BLAH BLAH)
LOUISE YAXLEY: Greens senator Larissa Waters also cites the Government’s own figures…
LARISSA WATERS: (GREEN SPIN BLAH BLAH)
LOUISE YAXLEY: But Senator Waters says Labor’s target doesn’t go far enough.
LARISSA WATERS: Certainly this is welcome change of heart by Labor, but saying he’ll make a better climate policy than Tony Abbott is like saying you’ll beat a baby in a running race, of course you will…
http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2015/s4278611.htm
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22 July: AFR: Geoff Winestock: Labor dreams of 50pc renewables by 2030
Mark Butler, the opposition spokesman on climate change, said on Wednesday Labor would take the “50 per cent by 2030” goal to the next election. But if Labor wins it will seek advice on the details of the policy. “We do not have a pre-defined view on the best way to reach that goal,” he said…
He said Labor might encourage the closure of coal-fired power stations that are approaching the end of their useful life…
The Clean Energy Council, the lobby for the renewable energy industry, welcomed the 2030 target. “The industry’s track record provides confidence that a target of 50 per cent renewable energy by 2030 is entirely achievable,” it said.
Mr Butler argued that renewable energy was driving down wholesale prices. Environment Minister Greg Hunt said the Labor plan would push up electricity prices and cost jobs and would include a carbon tax.
“There is no detail on how Bill Shorten will achieve his renewables plan without adding costs to the electricity sector which will be passed onto households,” he said…
Tony Wood, energy policy director at the Grattan Institute, said that both sides of politics had huge gaps in their climate policies…
Mr Wood said Labor’s commitment to 50 per cent renewables by 2030 seemed arbitrary considering it had not even decided on an emissions reduction target post-2020. He said it would have been more logical to decide on the emissions target and then work out the role of renewables.
He said Labor was trying to tap into popular support for renewable energy and was hemmed in by fear of a repeat of the carbon tax debate of the 2013 election. “The risk is that this will not result in good policy,” Mr Wood said…
http://www.afr.com/business/energy/labor-dreams-of-50pc-renewables-by-2030-20150722-gii21l
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loony Larissa gets the final word; Bloomberg does their anti-coal thing; the coal lobby barely gets two paras; Shorten gets the PIC. so why the misleading headline?
22 July: SMH: Nicole Hasham: ‘Economically irresponsible’: Coal lobby’s warnings over Labor renewable energy plan
A Labor plan to recast Australia’s energy landscape towards renewables is economically irresponsible and technologically doubtful, the coal lobby claims, amid debate on whether consumers would pay more for power.
The clean energy industry and a leading analyst say the plan would likely lead to mass power station closures, but it would massively boost investment and put the nation on a firm economic footing in a decarbonising world…
Minerals Council of Australia chief executive Brendan Pearson said a 50 per cent share of renewable energy by 2030 was “not economically responsible and … technically questionable”.
The existing renewable energy target granted subsidies to the renewable sector which translated to higher energy costs for industrial users – an effect that would multiply if the 50 per cent goal became mandatory, he said.
The Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union has previously expressed concern that a firm 50 per cent renewable energy target would harm manufacturers…
Head of Australia at Bloomberg New Energy Finance Kobad Bhavnagri said a “suite of policy mechanisms” would be needed to achieve the 50 per cent goal. He said power prices were unlikely to be affected and the move to renewables would lead to more overall jobs, however “quite a few” coal-fired generators would have to close.
ACIL Allen chief executive Paul Hyslop, whose consulting firm was engaged for the government’s review of the renewable energy target, said modelling showed a 30 per cent renewable energy scenario led to slightly lower power prices than a 20 per cent share.
But he warned that demand and other variables meant prices would not necessarily be lower under a 50 per cent share, which would “lead to a dramatic change in the structure of generation in the market”, including power station closures.
Acting Greens leader Larissa Waters said the 50 per cent goal was an improvement on the government’s stance, but fell far short of her party’s call for a 90 per cent renewable energy target by 2030, required “to protect the community from the devastating impacts of global warming”.
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/economically-irresponsible-coal-lobbys-warnings-over-labor-renewable-energy-plan-20150722-gihy2p.html
Industry cautious over Labor plans to ramp up renewables to 50pc …
The Australian-4 hours ago
The Labor Party has commissioned no modelling on the impacts of its proposed 50 per cent renewable energy target, saying it will consult on “the finer detail” of the policy when it is in government…
12
There are two possible scenarios that could spell the end of the obsession with ridiculous power generation systems.
1. Labour is re-elected, they implement their “policy” (more like napkin based brain snap) and by 2030 our economy has flat lined and no one can afford to pay a power William. (I don’t like saying Bill’s name)
2. Labour is not re-elected and they finally realise after 2 hidings in a row that people would rather they sought treatment for political Alzheimer’s and returned to a genuine workers party set of values if they wish to remain viable as a party. The notion of subsidising tadpole powered centrifuges and the like dies the death it so richly deserves.
Either way this could be the downhill run back to reality with any luck.
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Evidently Australian’s don’t care less about alleged AGW and are far more concerned about terrorism.
http://m.dailytelegraph.com.au/rendezview/from-the-greatest-moral-challenge-of-our-time-to-an-afterthought/story-fnpug1jf-1227452235872
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for those who can access it:
Renewable politics for Labor | afr.com
The Australian Financial Review – 31 minutes ago
Bill Shorten is counting on the fact Australians are extremely enthusiastic about the idea of renewable energy – even if most don’t understand the intricacies of energy policy.
nothing more in the article from Hunt than the following! no facts & figures showing how ridiculous it is. there’s a 5-min video i haven’t bothered to watch which might say more:
22 July: Sky News: Hunt hits back over Labor renewable promise
Greg Hunt says the new policy doesn’t make sense as Labor and the government have recently voted for a compromise deal to lower the target.
Why did they just vote for a completely different figure? They voted a month ago for a different target, now they say they need a new law to make comething which is lower cost more acceptable. It doesn’t make sense,’ Mr Hunt told Sky News.
The environment minister told Sky News Political Editor David Speers the new policy is a ‘diversion’ from what he says is Labor’s plan to reintroduce the carbon tax and increase power prices…
http://www.skynews.com.au/news/top-stories/2015/07/22/hunt-hits-back-over-labor-renewable-promise.html
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They didn’t ask me how enthusiastic I was….
Also, I heard Shorten mention batteries. We are all going to have batteries in our homes to store this wonderful “green” energy.
Oh, and a green person on SBS tv news just said that Australia is one of the sunniest and windiest countries in the world.
Now on the news the Pope is talking about climate change.
I think I’ll go and vomit.
61
Judith Lean’s paper ‘Evolution of the Sun’s Spectral Irradiance Since the Maunder Minimum’ is worth a read.
51
And also Influence of the Schwabe/Hale solar cycles on climate change during the Maunder Minimum
40
Although not intended to show more than just the LIA and Maunder events this document called ‘Holocene Climate Variability by Paul A. Mayewski’ does show both the MWP and LIA was not just in Europe.
00
i agree with the GST comment (any rise in GST should be taken to the next election. even Peter Costello wrote that this week), but Kirkham apparently has no idea about the impossibility of the 50% renewables target & even thinks it might make Shorten “a serious figure in Australian politics”!
Kelly is totally ill-equipped to write about anything but politics (same as with almost all our “journos”:
22 July: The Monthly: Sean Kelly: Battle stations
Can Bill Shorten really fight an election campaign on global warming?
A friend of mine – with no political affiliations – said this to me yesterday:
“It’s astonishing that the Liberal party can campaign against a carbon tax because it raises the cost of living – and then advocate a tax, the GST, that literally raises the cost of living.”
It’s a good point, and one that indicates just how far from sanity both the climate debate and the taxation debate in this country have run…
Shorten has to do something to justify his position – not so much to his colleagues, who are not going to move against him anytime soon, as to voters.
The renewables announcement may be the start of that. We shall see.
The announcement is important not just in itself but because of what it signals politically. Mark Kenny, who broke the story for Fairfax this morning, wrote that the policy is designed to “make global warming the defining battleground of the next federal election”.
That might be “courageous” in the Sir Humphrey sense. Given Labor’s ugly carbon heritage, it could be a disaster. But it might also work to show Shorten as that absent figure at the moment – a serious figure in Australian politics…
https://www.themonthly.com.au/the-monthly-today/sean-kelly/2015/22/2015/1437547287/battle-stations
the following explains a lot. apparently the question from ***linda mae reeb didn’t go unnoticed, with Chris Kenny writing in The Australian “ABC hides Green Left bias – The ABC has a novel way to guard against Green Left bias shown by many presenters: read out questions from audiences”. a few websites picked up on this. the interview is endless and uninterrupted:
15 July: ABC Lateline: Interview: Greg Combet
Former Climate Change Minister Greg Combet talks to Lateline’s Tony Jones about Labor’s plans for a new climate change policy.
TONY JONES: …He’s now advising Bill Shorten on Labor’s climate change policy and he joins us now in the studio…
TONY JONES: Now, any emissions trading scheme will have to put a price on carbon, will it not?
GREG COMBET: Yes, that’s right. I think whenever you start looking at climate change policy and if you’re respectful of the science, then you move to a position of principles about how you formulate policy and the principles, I think, are three-fold. One is that a scheme – whatever you do, has to be environmentally effective in reducing emissions and boosting renewable energy. Secondly, it has to be economically efficient, that is, at the lowest cost for the economy and households and businesses. And thirdly, it needs to be socially fair. And when you operate from those principles, suggests that a carbon pricing scheme of some form is one of the most efficient ways of going about it. And that’s well accepted and it’s been accepted in the Liberal Party in the past too…
***TONY JONES: Let’s go to a Facebook question. This is from Linda Mae Reeb and it’s on this subject. She asks, “Can you estimate the investment required in the Australian renewable market to achieve a 50 per cent reduction in emissions?”…
http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2015/s4274533.htm
Facebook: Larissa Waters
Linda Mae Reeb: Add my hubby to the list of highly skilled renewable energy workers ON THE DOLE because of the idiots in Canberra. Insane!!
https://www.facebook.com/larissawaters/posts/10153190640199099
Linda is listed on Guardian discussions as well, naturally.
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Then there is this “Bicentennial Decrease of the Total Solar Irradiance Leads to Unbalanced Thermal Budget of the Earth and the Little Ice Age” by Habibullo I. Abdussamatov a very interesting document.
51
Willis Eschenbach solves the riddle of the cool Dalton, it wasn’t because of Tambora, so in my mind it must have been a quiet sun.
‘In this manner, despite even the size of the 1815 Tambora eruption, and despite the fact that local areas showed cooling after Tambora, the stratospheric aerosols from this huge eruption had little effect on the global average temperature. More stratospheric aerosols are simply balanced out by less tropospheric clouds, and the beat goes on.’
50
should have posted Hawker Britton alumni Sean Kelly’s bio at The Monthly, for those who aren’t aware of his political connections:
“Sean Kelly was an adviser to prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard. He is the Monthly’s politics editor.”
also an excerpt from Chris Kenny’s Australian piece, “ABC hides Green Left bias” found online:
“On Lateline last week Tony Jones was interviewing former Labor environment minister Greg Combet. “Let’s go to a Facebook question,” said Jones. “This is from Linda Mae Reeb and it’s on this subject, she asks, `Can you estimate the investment required in the Australian renewable market to achieve a 50 per cent reduction in emissions?’?”
Combet nodded as Jones read it out. Why wouldn’t he? What a pleasant break from the rigours of a forensic television interrogation.
We look forward to similar intermezzos when government ministers are grilled.”
21 July: CNN: Delia Gallagher: Pope: We cannot separate ourselves from the environment
California Gov. Jerry Brown quoted the founder of the Italian Communist Party, Antonio Gramsci, “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,” to encourage mayors to not be, “in any way confident or complacent,” in the fight for change…
http://edition.cnn.com/2015/07/21/world/pope-francis-climate-trafficking-conference/
***ABC7/AP links the Californian drought to CAGW & claim to know what “climate change supporters” are asking!
21 July: ABC7: Adrienne Bankert: Gov. Jerry Brown blasts climate-change naysayers at Vatican symposium
Ahead of the meeting with the pontiff, Brown, who previously studied to be a catholic priest before entering politics, quoted from the Bible to make a case for moving away from the use of fossil fuels.
“God is not mocked for whatsoever a man soweth that he shall also reap and what Saint Paul said in reference to God, we can also say about God’s creation. We have heard what we are doing to that creation. What a trillion tons of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses will do,” Brown said.
It’s not the first time the governor quoted Bible verses in his speeches – but it might have been the first time he used the word “bamboozled” to describe those who believe climate change is not sound science.
“Right in the middle of this problem, we have fierce opposition and blind inertia and that opposition is well financed. Hundreds of millions of dollars going into propaganda, in falsifying the scientific record, bamboozling people of every country, television stations, political parties, think tanks, PHDs, university personnel,” Brown said…
Brown said taxpayers will not be paying for his trip to Rome.
***For all of the green changes in the golden state, California also has been under the worst drought conditions of anywhere in the country.
Climate change supporters ask – what else but global warming could be the cause of such severe weather?…
The climax of Tuesday’s inaugural session was an afternoon audience with Pope Francis, who has become a hero to the environmental movement and has used his moral authority and enormous popularity to focus world attention on climate change and its effects on the poor.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
http://abc7.com/news/gov-brown-blasts-climate-change-naysayers-at-vatican-symposium/868994/
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Hey, in 2030 when Bill Shorten’s Labor dream for renewables at 50% is not fulfilled, I’ll be almost 80 years old.
No one will notice, or care, when I say I told you this would never happen.
So, I’ll say it now.
THIS WILL NEVER HAPPEN!
Let’s pretend that Australia stagnates and that there is zero growth, and that there is also zero population growth, and because of that then electrical power consumption stays exactly the same as it is now.
There is currently 210TWH of power generation in Australia, so 50% of that is 105TWH ….. to come from renewables.
There won’t be any new hydro on the scale required, and probably no new hydro of any scale at all.
So, in effect, nearly all of that increase must come from Wind. Rooftop solar has just about reached saturation, unless they start giving them away, and hey, it’s only around 3GWH a year anyway, and with their new all singing all dancing cheap as chips last forever batteries, that’s nothing new anyway, because that means they’ll be off grid, so nothing to the grid there. Hot rocks will be close to nothing as will wave power, and for large scale solar of any sort, that’s 2 solar plants for one wind plant.
So, it will all be virtually all of it from wind power.
So then, how much.
Well, half of 210TWH is 105TWH. Currently they hope to get 37TWH, so to take that up to 105TWH, then that’s 68TWH of new Wind power.
At the standard average Capacity Factor of 30% that total power delivered means a Nameplate of 26,000MW.
We currently have a total wind Nameplate of 3700MW, so what is needed ….. by 2030 is the current Australian total multiplied by 7, so that means a new existing total every two years between now and 2030.
Or, Macarthur Wind Plant is 400MW, so that’s 65 NEW Macarthurs between now and then, or one new Macarthur every 12 weeks, (and that’s if they start tomorrow, because the longer they are out of Government, then the time frame shortens even further) and it doesn’t stop there because the ones coming on line this year will be all but time expired by then, so they’ll just need to keep on going.
The cost. Hey who cares!
Macarthur was around $1.2 Billion. The failed King Island was around $2.2 Billion, so I’ll split the difference and say $1.7 Billion, so $110 Billion all up, or around $7 Billion a year.
Where do they even hope money like that will be coming from? I’ll bet you thought that the Health Budget was going to cripple us. Well add this to that.
Bah! I’ve had enough. No one will listen to what I have to say on the matter anyway. I don’t know why I bother really.
Oh, and another thing. Half of the existing 210TWH is 105TWH
Of that existing right now 210TWH, around 125 to 130TWH is required absolutely for 24 hours of every day, every day, every day, got it yet.
So if they want 105TWH to come from renewables, then that cuts into that absolute requirement by 25 to 30TWH.
I wonder what they propose to shut down and not get their 24/7/365 power, because none of these NEW renewables can do that.
See now how I can be so confident to say that this will never happen. They’ll have to shut down a third of the Country in reality if they want this to come to pass.
It’s just wonderful when pie in the sky wishes and dreams come face to face with Engineering.
Well, after all, Bill is a lawyer I suppose. He has no need to understand Engineering, now does he?
Tony.
160
Tony, that is the problem, they are nearly all lawyers, ex unionists or party hacks and lack any solid knowledge of scientific or engineering reality. See my comment about the reality of 1963? when Tasmania nearly ran out of power which portends our future under Labor’s policies; Sir William Hudson will roll in his grave.
110
Hey, how cool is that.
I do the numbers as I am actually writing the above comment, and this morning ICIL, the largest independent public affairs consultancy firm in Australia makes a release basically agreeing with everything I said in that Comment.
Tony.
120
Sorry, that should be ACIL.
Tony.
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Tony, rest assured what you write is read by many. I have followed your postings re electricity since you first started visiting jennifer morohasy’s web site/ I have sent old postings of yours to people to use when they want real facts on energy and i will use them myself when i give a talk on adaptation vs mitigation for year 12 economics students and teachers later this year.
Please keep posting your interesting and informative comments, i am sure i am not alone in saying you are a well respected commentator in the blogoshere.
thx again!
Toby
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TonyfromOz,
I believe it may be to your benefit if you bookmark the link to that ACIL article for future reference. If you could post that link here, I know I would not only like to read im but bookmark it myself.
Abe
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To the Volunteers Moderators (paid for by big coal?)
Keep-up the good work — job well done!
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For forecasts of the timing and amplitude of the coming cooling see
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2014/07/climate-forecasting-methods-and-cooling.html
For a useful measure of the comparative strength of the solar magnetic field between about 1700 and the 20th century see the Dye-3 10Be flux difference in Fig 11.
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Dr Norman Page,
Thanks for the informative link.
I too am of the opinion that we know so little about the basics of weather and climate to understand where we are going on a meaningful timescale.
I feel that if the next glaciation is the only plant in the garden then the flight path of a butterfly is our weather. An average of the butterfly’s flight path is (in broad terms) our climate heading to the glaciation plant. We may know where the butterfly is heading but we have little knowledge of how long it takes and little useful knowledge about the exact route (in all dimensions) that it will take. And so it is with our understanding of weather/climate; sometimes it is like analysising a butterfly’s anatomy to try and guess where it will fly next…
We know so little about how the myiad patterns of natural variability fit together to make a whole climate.
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Jo
Somewhat o/t but FYI
A Chiefio pondering on the sun
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2015/07/22/the-iron-sun-pro-link-and-anti-density/
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Harry is alright, think of him as the resident troll.
Its important to have counter arguments otherwise we have a medium sized chat room. So we need Harry more than he needs us, a feisty debate is required and the more dissenters the better.
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I agree, but only up to a point.
We have had several instances, in the time I have been visiting this site, where people suddenly turn up, and expect to run the party as if it were their own. They grandstand, throw tantrums, complain to the building owner (Jo in this case), and just make snide remarks about the other commentators, some of whom know considerably more about the world than they do.
The funny thing is, that they always seem to be male, are usually in their final year at uni, and are faced with the prospect of having to find a job in their chosen profession.
Feisty it may be, but a debate, it is not.
None of us have the time to revisit papers we may have read three or four years previously, and discarded as being worthless, just because somebody like Harry has just discovered them, and has had a lightbulb moment. It would not be so bad if he could express an opinion, based on his chosen source material, but even that seems to be beyond him.
The dissenters that are worth having, are the ones that actually understand the material, but are drawing totally different conclusions from those that you or I would make, and can explain those conclusions logically and lucidly. One or two of those people are really worth their weight, because they force the rest of us to think differently, and that is all to the good.
I call those people, “the court jesters”, because they perform the same function as the historic jesters, which was to stop the king from getting complacent.
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Yep, the situation looks hopeless.
I asked Craig to invite some of his Deltoid cronies over for a discussion, but the last I saw he was talking to himself over there.
The possibility of inviting Cook et al students to debate would probably fall on deaf ears.
I don’t have the answer.
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To answer the headline question, the answer is yes, solar activity was very low during the Maunder.
I’ll put this up again so you can see how the LIA began.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sp%C3%B6rer_Minimum#/media/File:Carbon14_with_activity_labels.svg
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The world as we know it is coming to an end, after this strong El Nino we should see a slide in temperatures.
https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/1997-2015-el-nino.jpg
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The most interesting Figure in the paper is Figure 13 that shows that there has been no Grand Modern Maximum. Solar open flux and cosmic ray intensity has been similar in the last three centuries, and is similar to the newly reconstructed Sunspot Group Number since the Maunder Minimum. The climate should also have been similar the last three centuries. Here is their Figure 13 with the reconstructed group number:
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The img tag didn’t work. Here is a link:
http://www.leif.org/research/Usoskin-et-al-2015.png
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[…] Fonte Web: Solar activity was really at exceptional lows during the cold Maunder Minimum […]
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