New Science 22: Solar TSI leads Earth’s temperature with an 11 year delay

We’re launching headlong back into the New Science series with a major post

Global temperature and 11-year delayed TSI trend together
Lots of things will fall into place — as befits a potential paradigm step forward. For decades, people have been looking to see if the Sun controlled our climate but the message was perplexingly muddy. In the long run, solar activity appears linked to surface temperatures on Earth.  (Solar activity was at a record high during the second half of the 20th century when temperatures were also high.) But when we look closely, firstly the solar peaks don’t exactly coincide with the surface temperature peaks, and secondly, the extra energy supplied during the solar peaks is far too small to do much warming. So how could changes in surface temperature be due to the Sun?

A few researchers noted an esoteric correlation of long solar cycles with lower temperatures in the next solar cycle, but mostly those papers were left on the shelf, ignored. Dr David Evans’ notch-delay solar delay theory can explain this odd pattern.

To unravel the connections David took a new approach which cleared out the dead-end complexity of the current climate research. Instead of trying to predict everything from a bottom up detailed approach, he worked “top-down”, treating the Earth as a black box, as a simple Energy-In-Energy-Out type problem, and used the kind of maths that makes modern electronics work. It was an odd combination of factors that came together: David would have to be the only professional modeller on Earth who has a high level PhD in Fourier transforms, experience in electrical engineering in Silicon Valley, and a science blogger as a wife to focus him on this problem (and raise barely enough funds to pay the bills while he worked — it’s been three years full time work now).

This was an Oooh-look-at-that moment. Eleven Years?!

The light in the darkness was this extraordinary pattern that turned up in the Fourier analysis. It lit up a strange path, and following it uncovered the papers that had been largely ignored. Suddenly the disparate observations which had made no sense in conventional models fitted the new theory.

The light on the new path was finding a “notch” filter (it’s a common garden-thing for an electrical engineer, but probably unknown to climate scientists). That notch filter was published here 18 months ago. With one minor proviso, almost all that work there remains intact, and stronger. The proviso is that at the time we thought the notch guaranteed a delay, but we now know that while notch filters can work with a delay, it’s not obligatory. That difference is mostly immaterial now, because the evidence found for a delay turned out to be so strong.

The notch was “the dog that didn’t bark“, the big clue. Somehow at the peak of solar incoming energy, there was a sudden shift in the way Earth responds to incoming sunlight. The extra energy (which is very small but detectable with Fourier analysis) is reflected or not absorbed by the system. This is a screaming red flag that some important change is going on, through a mysterious unknown mechanism.

If there was a delayed action creating this notch filter pattern, further analysis showed that spookily, the delay was 11 years. Crikey, send up the fireworks — it was unmistakably the exact same length as the average solar cycle. This was an Oooh-look-at-that moment. Eleven Years?! And when I say spooky, I mean spooky. This is not just the usual type of “delay” where some effect takes 11 years to be big enough to notice, or the effect gets smoothed out — it’s like there is an 11 year memory built in to the system, a 11 year gap between two discrete events. A fall 11 year ago correlates better with the present than a rise 5 years ago. It’s just weird. Tantalizing, but odd.

The delay may just be the missing key to understanding the Sun’s effect on Earth.  Earth’s temperature seems to follow the pattern of rises and falls in solar energy, but with an 11 year average delay. Looked at this way, suddenly the correlation improves, the observations fit.  (More specifically, in each cycle the length of the delay seems to wax and wane with the length of the solar cycle).

But there were still mysteries to solve. Make no mistake, it’s not as if the energy from the Sun is arriving on Earth in eight minutes and then taking 11 years to reach thermometers. No way.  Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) is not the cause of global warming, rather it is a leading indicator. What on Earth was the mechanism? David and I (and many others before us) had looked for an accumulation effect, or a smoothing pattern — where the extra energy was stored and took a few years to show in thermometers. It didn’t make much sense. Not many things on Earth would operate on that kind of cycle. Not ocean currents, not jet streams, not ice melting , and not arctic tundra growth. And it certainly wasn’t cicadas. I like the idea of a biological process — it made sense that phytoplankton or plants would be adapted to this cycle that had run for millions of years. But still, that didn’t explain a delay — it explains a smoothing process, but not a gap of a decade.

At some point David realized, from the electrical analogy, that the timing was suspiciously precise. Because the delay was the length of a solar cycle, and the notches were synchronized to the Sun, the cause of the delay wasn’t on Earth — but inside the Sun. The delay was not a smeared out thing, but a literal delay — the effect due to a change in TSI only begins to act one sunspot cycle later, and quickly affects the surface temperature here on Earth.  The flickering signals from total sunlight are a clue that precedes some other change in the solar dynamo.  We’ll talk about the possible mechanisms in future posts, because there are a lot of fields, fluxes and particles coming off the Sun that could potentially affect our climate.

In this post David goes through paper after paper that we found along the path, once we knew we were looking for a delay of one solar cycle. Don’t miss this part. It’s the reason we are now sure that some other factor on the Sun is key to understanding Earth’s climate, and it occurs one solar cycle after TSI changes. Below that, he updates the notch filter which proved so useful (get into that beautiful graph in Figure 2, all you maths-heads and engineers). In future posts we’ll use the delay to predict what seems to be coming for us climate wise. This new theory can be tested soon. It’s falsifiable — unlike the carbon religion. More on that soon too.

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PS: The first part of the New Science series (on the flaws in the architecture of conventional climate models) are summarized on the project home page. The conventional models are stuck in a rut, they don’t even include the possibility that feedbacks might allow the energy to reroute to space via water vapor. And they overestimate the sensitivity to CO2 by a factor of five to ten.  The synopsis was updated this week with several new diagrams of the atmosphere, illustrating the rerouting feedback and movements in the water vapor emissions layer.

— Jo

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22. The Delay

Dr David Evans, 12 February 2015, Project home, Intro, Previous.

This post makes the case for a delay of ~11 years or one sunspot cycle between a change in smoothed TSI and the corresponding change in surface temperature. And we mean an actual delay between two discrete events, not just a corresponding gradual surface warming smeared out through time as the effect of the change in TSI builds up.

(By the way, what motivated us to look for a delay, which is a novel thing to do? Well we had initially thought that the notch filter found in post 21 implied that there must be a delay, but this was based on an incomplete analysis that indicated that a notch filter is necessarily non-causal (see the old blog posts). Such a non-causal transfer function requires an accompanying delay to make it physically realistic. But a notch filter can also be causal, as insisted upon by blog reader Bernie Hutchins, and as a complete analysis later showed.** In retrospect this was a lucky mistake to have made, because once we started looking for evidence of a delay we found rather a lot of it.)

Observational Evidence for a Delay

A delay of ~11 years from changes in smoothed TSI to corresponding changes in surface temperature has been found independently several times, though apparently mostly interpreted as delays in the propagation of heat around the Earth. Few, if any, appear to have considered the delay might be in the Sun itself.

– 10 Year Delay to Tropical Atlantic Sea Surface Temperatures

Willie Soon (2009, pp. 156-157, [1]) found a good correlation between changes in 10-year-delayed TSI to changes in the tropical Atlantic sea surface temperature from 1870 (see his Figure 4), and ascribed it to delays in heat propagation in the oceans: “The chosen delay time of 10 years is only a rough estimate for the thermal-cryospheric-salinity and mechanical wind stress effects occurring within the Arctic and northern North Atlantic basins to propagate southward. But it is clear from both empirical evidence … and careful ocean modeling … that a physical delay of some 5 to 20 years is reasonable.”

– 12.42 Year Delay to Sea Surface Temperatures Near Iceland

Moffa-Sanchez, Born, Hall, Thornalley, and Barker  (2014, [2], Supplementary, p. 5, Fig. S3) found a lag of ~12.42 years from changes in TSI to correlated changes in North Atlantic surface temperatures derived from a marine sediment core in the Iceland Basin, from 900 AD.

– 12 Year Delay to Northern Hemispheric Ground Temperatures

Usoskin, Schuessler, Solanki, and Mursula (2004, [3], p. 21) found that the correlation coefficient between the northern hemisphere ground temperature from Mann and Jones (2003) and sunspot numbers reconstructed from Be-10, from 850 AD, was greatest when the temperature lagged the sunspot numbers by ~12 years (see their Fig. 3).

– Delay of One Sunspot Cycle to Northern Hemispheric Ground Temperatures

The correlation between temperature and the length of the previous sunspot cycle (“solar cycle”) is one of the strongest correlations in climate science, unexplained to date and largely disregarded, but the notch-delay hypothesis offers support and explanation.

Friis-Christensen and Lassen (1991, [4]) found that the length of a sunspot cycle correlates well with the northern hemispheric surface temperature on land during the following sunspot cycle — the longer a sunspot cycle, the cooler the Earth during the following sunspot cycle — from 1861. (The correlation is strong to 1970 in their data then there is a dispute. Damon and Laut (2004, [5]) claim they mishandled their data and that the correlation from 1970 instead predicted level temperatures while in fact they went up strongly, thereby breaking the correlation and supporting the CO2 theory. However this is strongly disputed by Friis-Christensen and Svensmark (2004).)

Butler and Johnston (1994, [6]) found the correlation applied to temperatures at the Armagh observatory in Northern Ireland from 1795.

Archibald (2010) showed the correlation applied to the 350 year Central England temperature record, the De Bilt data from Holland, and temperature records at a number of places in the northeastern USA: “in the latter, the relationship is that each 1-year increase in solar cycle length corresponds to a 0.7°C decline of atmospheric temperature during the following cycle”. David Archibald also proposed using the correlation as a predictive tool. He has been championing this correlation in recent years.

The duration of the ascending part of a sunspot cycle (roughly its first half) is anti-correlated with the peak sunspot number of the cycle, which is known as the Waldmeier effect. However the strength of this negative correlation depends strongly on the measure of the rise time and which index of sunspot numbers is used (Dikpati, Gilman, and de Toma, 2008, [7]). Higher sunspot numbers correlate with a higher peak of TSI, so from the Waldmeier effect we deduce that a longer sunspot cycle correlates with lower levels of TSI during the cycle, which correlates with lower surface temperatures during the following sunspot cycle.

Thus lower TSI during one sunspot cycle correlates with lower surface temperatures during the next sunspot cycle. The delay implied by this correlation is roughly one sunspot cycle, or ~11 years.

Note also that the existence of the correlation supports the notion that the Sun has a major influence on temperatures.

– Delay of 10–12 Years to Surface Temperatures in Norway and the North Atlantic

Solheim, Stordahl, and Humlum (2012, [8]) found that a lag of 10–12 years gives the maximum correlation between sunspot cycle length (SCL) and surface temperatures in Norway and the North Atlantic, from 1880: “This points to the Atlantic currents as reinforcing a solar signal.”; “it is reasonable to expect a time lag for the locations investigated, since heat from the Sun, amplified by various mechanisms, is stored in the ocean mainly near the Equator, and transported into the North Atlantic by the Gulf Stream to the coasts of Northern Europe”; “They also found that temperatures shifted 11years back in time, correlated better with SCL measured between minima than between maxima.”

Recent History Suggests a Delay

Lockwood and Froehlich (2007, [9]) found that four measures of solar activity — sunspots, TSI, coronal source flux, and neutron count due to high energy cosmic rays — all peaked around 1986 and 1987 after rising since at least 1970, once the usual fluctuations of the sunspot cycle were removed by a smoothing process. Global surface temperature rose until peaking in 1998 (or maybe 1997 if the effect of the 1998 El Nino is smoothed out), before leveling off.

This suggests a delay of ~11 years from changes in TSI to corresponding changes in surface temperatures. Indeed, without a delay it is difficult to see how TSI could be signaling the major influence on the surface temperature. (The Lockwood and Froehlich paper is often held by the establishment as evidence for the lack of solar influence on global temperature.)

Observations are Suggestive of a Delay

We constructed a composite TSI record and a composite temperature record by splicing together the data mentioned in post 21 on the notch. Fig. 2 below shows global temperature versus 11-year-delayed TSI, back to 1800, where the TSI is 11-year smoothed to remove most of the effect of the sunspot cycle (the smoother simply averages the values in a centered 11-year window; if the sunspot cycle was exactly 11 years such a smoother would remove all cyclic behavior). With the obvious exception of the 1950s through early 1980s, which we discuss in a later post, the temperature and 11-year-delayed TSI trend up and down mainly in unison — which is suggestive of an ~11-year delay. Be aware that the data is from proxies before 1850 for temperatures and before 1979 for TSI.


Global temperature and 11-year delayed TSI trend together

Figure 1: Global temperature and 11-year delayed TSI, both 11-year smoothed, have mainly trended together. (For the the composite TSI from standard sources replaced by Leif Svalgaard’s reconstruction, see here.)

 

Implications of the Delay for Climate Influences

In the reasoning and observations above, the magnitude of the surface warming is great enough to be easily observed — so something either amplifies the direct heating effect of a change in TSI, or is a climate influence in its own right. In either case, there is a warming influence that lags TSI by ~11 years, and its magnitude is much greater than the direct heating effect of changes in TSI (see post 10).

Note also the observed delay of ~11 years cannot be simply due to propagation of heat around the Earth because:

  • The delayed warming influence just mentioned is too large to be due to the direct heating effect of TSI.
  • The time constant of the low pass filter that mimics the thermal inertia of the Earth is ~1 to ~3 years (post 12) — so the global temperature reflects the new level of direct heating by the TSI much sooner than the ~11 years of the delay.

 

**Why We Considered the Possibility of a Delay: The Notch

We are interested in all possible systems that both fit our formal description (Fig. 1 of post 21) and are compatible with the empirical transfer function (Fig. 2 of post 21): a notch in the amplitude transfer function, centered on a period of ~11 years, with no constraints on phases.

We assume the system is describable by a linear differential equation, like a typical physical system of continuous variables. The simplest filter that could produce a notch is 2nd order, corresponding to a 2nd order linear differential equation (an equation containing only the input and output functions, their derivatives, and their second derivatives). Higher order notch filters are merely cascades of 2nd order notch filters, corresponding to higher derivatives — for example, a cascade of two 2nd order filters is described by a 4th order linear differential equation. A 2nd order filter is sufficient to produce a notch, so, invoking Occam’s razor, we assume the system contains just a single 2nd order filter.

The “step response” of a system is the output of the system when the input is a unit step function — which is zero until time zero and one thereafter (it “steps up” from 0 to 1 at time zero). A causal step response is zero before time zero — it obeys the “law of cause and effect”, the response comes after the cause or stimulus. But a non-causal step response is non-zero before time zero, which is impossible physically, though mathematically plausible.

It turns out 2nd order notch filters come in four “classes” — filters within a class may have different values of the real-valued parameters but are qualitatively similar, while the classes differ only by the values of two binary parameters (k and l below). Two of the four classes of 2nd order notch filters have causal step responses, while the other two have non-causal step responses. See Fig. 1. (See here for the complete analysis.)


Step responses of notch filters.

Figure 2: The step responses of the four classes of 2nd order notch filter, for realistic parameter values for the Sun-Earth relationship (values determined in an ensuing post). We characterize each class by the values of two binary parameters k and l: when l is 1 the step response is casual, but when l is 0 the step response is non-causal.

While the causal step responses are possibilities for the Sun-Earth relationship, what about the non-causal ones? Well their non-causality dies out exponentially with decreasing time, so simply delaying the step response by a few years (by combining the notch filter with a delay filter) makes the step response of the combined filter causal, to a good approximation. Note that a delay filter only affects the phases of the transfer function, not its amplitudes, so adding a delay does not affect notchiness.

If the Sun-Earth relationship involves only the causal step responses then a delay is compatible with the observed empirical transfer function, but if it involves the non-causal step responses then a delay of several years is mandatory. This suggests that there might be a delay of several years, which motivated us to look for evidence of a delay.

References

[1^] Soon, W. W.-H. (2009). Solar Arctic-mediated Climate Variation on Multidecadel to Centennial Timescales: Empirical Evidence, Mechanistic Explanation, and Testable Consequences. Physical Geography, 30, 2, pp. 144-184.

[2^] Moffa-Sanchez, P., Born, A., Hall, I. R., Thornalley, D. J., & Barker, S. (2014). Solar forcing of North Atlantic surface temperature and salinity over the past millennium. Nature Geoscience, Supplementary Information.

[3^] Usoskin, I. G., Schuessler, M., Solanki, S. K., & Mursula, K. (2004). Solar activity over the last 1150 years: does it correlate with climate? Proc. The 13th Cambridge Workshop on Cool Stars, Stellar Systems and the Sun (pp. 19 – 22). Hamburg: ESA SP-560, Jan. 2005, F. Favata, G. Hussain & B. Battrick eds.

[4^] Friis-Christensen, E., & Lassen, K. (1991). Length of the Solar Cycle; An Indicator of Solar Activity Closely Associated with Climate. Science, Vol.254, No.2032, pp. 698-700.

[5^] Damon, P. E., & Laut, P. (2004). Pattern of strange errors plagues solar activity and terrestrial climate data. Eos, Transactions American Geophysical Union, Volume 85, Issue 39, pages 370–374.

[6^] Butler, C. J., & Johnston, D. J. (1994). The Link between the Solar Dynamo and Climate – the Evidence from a long Mean Air Temperature Series from Northern Ireland. Irish Astronomical Journal, J.21, 251 – 254.

[7^] Dikpati, M., Gilman, P., & de Toma, G. (2008). The Waldmeier Effect: An Artifact of the Definition of Wolf Sunspot Number? Astrophysical Journal, 673: L99–L101.

[8^] Solheim, J.-E., Stordahl, K., & Humlum, O. (2012). The long sunspot cycle 23 predicts a significant temperature decrease in cycle 24. Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics.

[9^] Lockwood, M., & Froehlich, C. (2007). Recent oppositely directed trends in solar climate forcings and the global mean surface air temperature. Proceedings of the Royal Society, 10.1098/rspa2007.1880.

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356 comments to New Science 22: Solar TSI leads Earth’s temperature with an 11 year delay

  • #
    James Bradley

    Enjoy the chocolates.

    Thank you James! Very helpful. — Jo

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      Sweet Old Bob

      The red thumbers should be publically shamed !
      Chocolates + Valentines Day….what is their problem ? ( They didn’t get some ? )
      / grin!

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  • #

    The thing I’d like to know is whether it’s going to get hotter or colder?

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    • #

      Looking ahead a bit: cooler, possibly starting as early as 2017.

      Regardless of which of the TSI datasets or reconstructions most bandied about that you believe, there was a fall off in underlying TSI around 2004. The length of the current solar cycle is around 13 to 14 years, so sometime around 2017 (or maybe a couple of years after) this should result in global cooling.

      Prediction: There will be a sustained and significant fall in global temperature from about 2017 – 2022, of about 0.3 deg C. The 2020s will be cooler than the 1980s.

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      • #
        King Geo

        David I trust your prediction is confirmed because once this “sustained and significant fall in global temperature” does come to fruition in the 2020’s, then there will be a lot of explaining to do by those on the “Warmist Gravy Train” which feeds inexorably on exorbitant amounts of government funding globally with the primary objective to endorse the “IPCC AGW Theory”. What a sickening waste of resources.

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        • #

          Well the prediction is only based on a theory. But that theory fits the observed facts much better than the carbon dioxide theory, which is essentially due to estimates from a connected series of models stretching back to 1896 that simply omit a major major feedback to increased carbon dioxide because it is not also a feedback to increased surface warming. Simply mental, but our stupid elites swallowed it all up.

          If the 2020s are cooler than the 1980s, it will go a long way to confirming solar theories in general, and perhaps the notch-delay theory in particular, and should bury the carbon dioxide theory for good.

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          • #
            Dave

            David:

            “If the 2020s are cooler than the 18980s, it will go a ….”

            1890s or 1980s ??

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          • #
            Paul

            David,
            As you keep pointing out, the problem with the carbon dioxide theory is the divergence of observed facts from predictions made by climate scientists who rely on the current crop of global circulation models.

            However, you wouldn’t need significant cooling to strengthen your case that these models are fundamentally wrong. Even a couple more years of flat temperatures would be enough.

            As Steve McIntyre points out in his blog, Two Minutes to Midnight, the observed facts already exceed 95% confidence intervals for all climate models based on RCP8.5 scenarios, and remained inside the 95% confidence interval for only about 25% of all climate models based on RCP4.5 scenarios.
            http://climateaudit.org/2013/09/24/two-minutes-to-midnight/

            The only remaining “valid” IPCC predictions are those based on RCP2.6 scenarios. Since those scenarios are based on CO2 emissions peaking between 2010 and 2020 and then declining substantially, only a few more years of flat temperature trends will make the divergence of observed fact from climate science “theory” painfully obvious, even to policy makers with no science background.

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            • #

              Indeed Paul.

              I’ve strengthened the skeptical case against the models by pointing that they have all, right from Arrhenius in 1896, systematically omitted various feedbacks due to poor architecture, and that one of these feedbacks, the rerouting feedback, appears to suck nearly all the power out of increasing CO2 to the extent that the data shows less than 20% of the recent global warming due to increasing CO2. See here.

              The predicted cooling, both timing and magnitude, is extra. As it says here,

              Please note that even if this solar hypothesis and prediction prove to be wrong, the identification of the errors in the conventional climate models and the finding that carbon dioxide is not the main cause of recent global warming are still correct.

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          • #
            Just-A-Guy

            Dr. Evans,

            You wrote:

            Well the prediction is only based on a theory. But that theory fits the observed facts much better than the carbon dioxide theory, . . .

            If the 2020s are cooler than the 1980s, it will go a long way to confirming solar theories in general, and perhaps the notch-delay theory in particular, and should bury the carbon dioxide theory for good.

            The thing that I found most striking about the observed ~11 year delay is that although the researchers in each of the papers are using different data sets and methods, spread out over differing time intervals, in every case they all found The Lag!

            •Willie Soon (2009, pp. 156-157, [1]) found a good correlation between changes in 10-year-delayed TSI to changes in the tropical Atlantic sea surface temperature from 1870 . . .

            •Moffa-Sanchez, Born, Hall, Thornalley, and Barker (2014, [2], Supplementary, p. 5, Fig. S3) found a lag of ~12.42 years from changes in TSI to correlated changes in North Atlantic surface temperatures derived from a marine sediment core in the Iceland Basin, from 900 AD.

            •Usoskin, Schuessler, Solanki, and Mursula (2004, [3], p. 21) found that the correlation coefficient between the northern hemisphere ground temperature from Mann and Jones (2003) and sunspot numbers reconstructed from Be-10, from 850 AD, was greatest when the temperature lagged the sunspot numbers by ~12 years (see their Fig. 3).

            •Friis-Christensen and Lassen (1991, [4]) found that the length of a sunspot cycle correlates well with the northern hemispheric surface temperature on land during the following sunspot cycle — the longer a sunspot cycle, the cooler the Earth during the following sunspot cycle — from 1861.

            •Butler and Johnston (1994, [6]) found the correlation applied to temperatures at the Armagh observatory in Northern Ireland from 1795.

            •Archibald (2010) showed the correlation applied to the 350 year Central England temperature record, the De Bilt data from Holland, and temperature records at a number of places in the northeastern USA:

            •Solheim, Stordahl, and Humlum (2012, [8]) found that a lag of 10–12 years gives the maximum correlation between sunspot cycle length (SCL) and surface temperatures in Norway and the North Atlantic, from 1880:

            The diversity in data sets used, methods employed, and time scales examined, lends the most credence to the hypothesis in general and your current analysis in particular.

            No matter how you slice the cake, the slices are always the same size! 😮

            Cheers,
            Abe

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        • #
          OriginalSteve

          I suspect by that stage they Warmists will have made sure laws are passed to prosecute & silence anyone who dares waiver from the global warming fairy story…..cant have the truth coming out, now can we?

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        Thanks David. I don’t know why, but my gut feeling is that it’s going to get cooler (in Victoria at least), noticeably so over the next few years and then flatline to a new average low for a number of years. I would rather that it remained warmer, but I’m preparing for the opposite. The thing is, colder isn’t going to mean wetter, it could very likely be colder and drier.

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        David, I’ve been developing the global warming from basics and was just about to start considering “real” spectra and mixed atmospheres when I read you article: http://jo.nova.s3.amazonaws.com/guest/david-evans/synopsis-of-basic-climate-models.pdf

        In section 4.2 you talk about the Water Vapour emission layer descending – but the description is too short and I’m not clear about your logic. You talk about a less steep lapse rate. As you correctly state, that may mean a slowing of the convection currents, but it also means that necessary drop in temperature will require a greater rise in height – thus suggesting that cloud formation will occur at a GREATER height.

        I think your conclusion is probably right – in that water vapour will increase emissions, but I’m not sure the mechanism you have is correct.

        Or perhaps do you have it written up in more detail?

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        • #

          Mike, the synopsis got updated a couple of days ago with a bunch of diagrams explaining WVEL movement, which may help.

          The full paper looks like it will get published middle of this year. Section 4 of the synopsis is the most detailed qualitative description of the rerouting feedback in existence.

          However the paper describes the movement of the WVEL in terms of other parameters quantitatively. Takes lapse rate, emissions heights, surface warming, etc into account. This was also shown and developed in the “New Science” posts 11 – 18 (see here). It also takes cloud top data into account — avg cloud top height might be expected to drop slightly too in response to increased CO2.

          The quantitative description and real world data strongly suggest that water vapor emissions are increasing as CO2 emissions decrease. I may not have the exact mechanism correct, or it may need more fleshing out. If you can contribute along these lines, or have any ideas, I’m all ears.

          In checking back to Arrhenius’ model, none of the conventional climate sensitivity models or climate models have taken feedbacks other than to surface warming into account, other than in trivial ways. Sherwood and others have begun to consider them (“adjustments”, 2014), but a hulking great rerouting feedback mitigating most of the effect of increasing CO2 is still far off in conventional world. Yet that seems to be what is happening.

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          • #

            Thanks – I’m going to have to think about it.

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            cohenite

            Is the WVEL the equivalent of the CEL as described by Christy.

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              Definitely not.

              The CEL is a fictional average layer at which all OLR originates, regardless of its true source — an average of WVEL, CO2 EL, cloud tops, surface, and the minor greenhouse gases. Because of SB, the notional temperature of this fictional layer is 255 K. Therefore, in this fiction, the CEL is at about 5 km. As it happens, very little OLR originates at this height. The CEL is a misleading dead end of a concept. Whenever you see it, you know that the author is not dealing with actual OLR from the disparate sources — and it is the interplay between these sources that matters. Increasing CO2 merely redistributes it between these sources, and using the CEL disguises what is going on.

              The CEL concept incorporates much of the architectural error in the standard, conventional, forcings-feedback model. I think the world would be better off without the CEL concept. As Einstein said, “everything should be as simple as possible but not more so”. The CEL is “more so”.

              For the real situation, see post 6 and post 8.

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                cohenite

                Thanks David. You may be interested in what Christopher Monckton says about the CEL in the context of his paper, Why models run hot: results from an irreducibly simple climate model. LM says this:

                The characteristic-emission layer – the “altitude” from which the Earth appears to radiate spaceward, and at which, uniquely in the climate system, the fundamental equation of radiative transfer applies – is the locus of all points at or above the Earth’s surface at which incoming and outgoing radiation are equal. In general, the mean altitude of the locus of these balance-points rises as a greenhouse gas is added to the atmosphere. Thus far, Mr Born is correct.

                His fundamental error lies in his assertion that the increase in the Earth’s characteristic-emission altitude reduces the effective temperature at that altitude, “so less heat escapes, and the Earth warms”.

                The truth, which follows from the definition of the characteristic-emission layer and from the fundamental equation of radiative transfer that applies uniquely at that layer, is that the Earth’s effective radiating temperature is unaffected by a mere change in the mean altitude of that layer. It is not, as Mr Born says it is, “reduced” as the altitude increases.

                The radiative-transfer identity, first derived empirically by the Slovene mathematician Stefan and demonstrated theoretically five years later by his Austrian pupil Ludwig Boltzmann, equates the flux density at the characteristic-emission layer with the product of three parameters: the emissivity of that layer; the Stefan-Boltzmann constant; and the fourth power of temperature.

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                We’ve discussed it at length. I think the CEL has caused Christopher some confusion. I know it’s in the textbooks, but so is the Co2 theory, and that’s not a coincidence.

                The CEL is an impediment to understanding because it is quite at odds with reality. OLR does not come from one layer, and should not be modeled as such for almost any purpose.

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                cohenite

                OLR does not come from one layer, and should not be modeled as such for almost any purpose.

                That is the key point. I haven’t looked at it for some time but I recollect this is one of the things Miskolczi 2007 was looking at.

                30

              • #

                From what people tell me about Miskolczi’s work, we have come to the same conclusions for different reasons:
                * ECS less than 0.5C, possibly much lower.
                * Increased carbon dioxide simply causes more OLR from water vapor (the “rerouting feedback”).

                30

      • #
        Matt Bennett

        And when this doesn’t come to pass, David, can I have your word right now that this will negate your theory’s validity?….

        413

        • #

          Sure Matt. And can I have your word right now that if does come to pass, that you will publicly abandon your support for the CO2 theory and agree that increasing CO2 was not the cause of the recent global warming?

          634

          • #
            Matt Bennett

            Yes, you can.

            250

            • #
              Peter C

              The bet is on then!

              Maybe needs a bit of tidying up with respect to the definition of when or when it does not come to pass. Also how much non warming is required.

              There are some people here who are of the opinion that CO2 does not and cannot affect global temperatures, so all this is no surprise to them.

              130

              • #

                Two people of science, interested in determining the correct answer, agree to relinquish their position to the other if evidence supports it.

                See that’s why I read this blog. Genuine care for what is fact and what is belief still exists.

                Which is more than we can say for this example of the exact opposite. Someone who claims to be interested in science, unwilling to commit to a change of view, even in the face of evidence to the contrary, should it come to light. Disgraceful.

                https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4baOeuRDK8

                Well done to you all.

                311

          • #
            Mark Stoval

            David, I like the bet but how can we measure it? I think NASA and NOAA will be claiming continued global warming even when the Northeast US is under a mile of ice. A small decrease like 0.3 degrees C will be easy to hide!

            This CO2 scam is a full scale fraud and cooking the books is going on as I write this. No reason to expect any honesty to just break out on its own.

            166

            • #

              Don’t I know it Mark. I already have a bet, and unfortunately it uses GISTEMP. Always knew data-fiddling was a potential problem, but I figured back in 2007 that by 2017 public scrutiny would be keeping it to a minimum.

              224

              • #
                John

                You don’t know the half of it. One lecturer I spoke to insists you’re a fruit cake and will do anything to discredit your work no matter how good it is.

                [snip annoying repetition]

                [So, it is not about debating the merits of the hypothesis, just childish namecalling – Fly]

                [Postscript: You spoke to a lecturer? So presumably you are a student who has to give the “correct” answers to examination questions? Do what you must! – Fly]

                212

              • #

                Bring it on John. Is that lecturer game to name the flaws? Let the two debate it out in writing. I’ll publish it. Is that lecturer brave enough to let you name him, or just another one who is all bravery as long as he/she can hide behind anonymity and their “talent” doesn’t get tested.

                271

              • #
                Don B

                There is always the possibility that the new US President will get rid of the Tom Karls.

                60

              • #
                AndyG55

                John has just outed himself as a low-end Arts/humanities student.

                111

              • #
                AndyG55

                I wonder how many 1st year subjects he is re-attempting this year.

                82

              • #
                AndyG55

                “and will do anything to discredit your work no matter how good it is.”

                Now that is a very interesting idea coming from a lecturer..

                And totally un-academic.

                82

            • #
              OriginalSteve

              In the middle ages it was ( lethally ) dangerous to criticize the ruling powers of the day, so they got around it by making up nursery rhymes….

              I propose an Inagural CAGW Nursery Rhyme Award, for anyone who can come up with a catchy rhyme that can spearhead into popular culture and stay anchored in there…..in years to come, it will be the expose of the whole scam.

              Any takers?

              61

              • #
                Belfast

                Quick Mick, the Hockey Stick,
                We have to tax the coal
                Sorry Larry, Stick is broke,
                And we are in in the cold.

                50

              • #
                observa

                Well not exactly a nursery rhyme-

                Come gather’round drones
                Wherever you home
                And admit that the taxes
                Around you have groan’d
                And accept it that soon
                You’ll be skinned to the bone
                If overtime to you
                Is worth savin’
                Then you better start objectin’
                Or you’ll sink like a stone
                For the climes they’re always changin’.

                Come blogger and critics
                Who analyse like wise men
                And keep your eyes wide
                The chance won’t come again
                And speak up real soon
                For the windmills in spin
                And there’s no tellin’ who
                That it’s harmin’
                For the losers now
                Will be later to win
                For the climes they’re always changin’.

                Come senators, congressmen
                Best heed our call
                Don’t stand in the freeway
                Don’t block up the coal
                For he that gets hurt
                Will be those you have tramelled
                There’s a battle outside
                And it’s worth wagin’
                It’ll soon shake your windmills
                And shatter your panels
                For the climes they’re always changin’.

                Come mothers and fathers
                Throughout the land
                And best criticize
                What you can understand
                Your sons and your daughters
                Are being given commands
                Your wise road is
                Needily cravin’
                Please stand up to the new one
                If you can’t lend your hands
                For the climes they’re always changin’.

                The time it is dawn
                For the lie that’s cast
                The slick ones now
                Will be gone fast
                As their present now
                Will later be past
                Their new order is
                Rapidly cavin’
                And the first ones now
                Will later be last
                For the climes they’re always changin’

                90

              • #
                OriginalSteve

                Very good *grin*

                🙂

                00

              • #
                KinkyKeith

                Observa

                Nice stuff.

                One of my favourite songs to very apt new words.

                KK ):

                00

              • #
                gnomish

                wow- observa did dylan!

                may i play?

                Ballad of the Skint Man

                The doctors in the lab
                made a seven legged math
                but the fat lady is singing
                there’s no baby in the bath
                and somebody next to you tries to feel your wrath
                as you grope for some sticks and stones.
                Something is happening but you don’t know what it is,
                Do you, Mr. Jones?

                you get thrown off the stage
                by an angry ground hog
                People smell a rat
                but you blame it on the dog
                but the peasants with their pitchforks
                don’t want to kiss your frog
                so you’ll have to feed the shark alone.
                Cuz something is happening here
                But you don’t know what it is Do you, Mister Jones ?

                You peek through the drapes
                At the tracks in the snow
                The butcher is looking for
                a goat named van gogh
                you quote nevermore
                but the man says he knows
                you’re shallow to the bone.
                But something is happening here
                And you don’t know what it is. Do you, Mister Jones ?

                Men in suits come by
                to help adjust your tie
                as you try to justify
                your incredible infatuation.

                On a chalkboard with perfect pitch
                The train starts to dig a ditch
                You hit the ignition switch
                and set off a terrible conflagration

                You blindfold your prisoner
                and whisper in his ear
                about your powerful alchemy
                turning pixels into fear
                but you stay in your closet
                with your inflatable langolier
                and fantasize about your clone.
                And something is happening here
                But you don’t know what it is. Do you, Mister Jones ?

                They’re rationing reason
                Beating space ships into plows
                You can still kill for treason
                the only question is how.
                But when you’re in season
                you say ‘the other cow!’
                and fill your boots with french cologne.
                Because something is happening
                But you don’t know what it is. Do you, Mister Jones ?

                Well, you walk into the room
                expecting some stares
                you eat worms from the can
                but hardly anyone cares
                you want to get naked
                but your clothes aren’t there
                and jesus doesn’t have a phone.
                Something is happening
                And you don’t know what it is. Do you, Mister Jones ?

                The old man in the painting
                looks you in the eye.
                you call for a friend
                but get no reply
                something under the bed
                says “we know where you lie’
                so you try to hide beneath a throne.
                And you know something is happening
                But you don’t know what it is. Do you, Mister Jones ?

                10

          • #
            William

            The beauty about your theory David, which I agree with, is that we will see a proof sooner rather than later – and more so that it is looking at what may well be, rather than another in a series of tipping points.

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        • #
          Cynical RB

          I’m backing Matt but for different reasons. Surface tamperatures will be higher in the next ten years than eva before.

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      • #
        sillyfilly

        Just wondering on this regurgitation of the “notch” theory.
        The graph in fig 1 extends well past 2010. How can that happen to TSI with an 11 year smoothing and an 11 yr phase shift to the left. Smoothed temperature is also impacted. Is there some estimation process to fill in the “missing” data or is it merely a labelling fault.
        Interesting that SIDC monthly sunspot numbers have trended lower since the early eighties. Latest data also shows average sunspots now at the low levels of the early 20th century. Two elements of the data but oddly missing from the graph.
        Just wondering. (already moderated so no more unnecessary delay please)

        07

        • #

          Sillyfilly it is hard to take anything you say seriously. Are you mischievously trying to mislead, or did you “carelessly” misread?

          The 11-year delayed TSI data goes to about 2013. The value in 2013 is the smoothed-TSI value from 2002.

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          • #
            sillyfilly

            I feel the same way about your graph, but getting back to the basics rather than the flimflam.
            The 11 year smoothing ends with last data point in 2013 (from you statement) that results in a last smoothed data point of be 2013 – 5 1/2 ie circa 2008/9, obvious to anybody (and having the same impact on temperature). A 11 year phase shift will regress that date to circa 1998/9 as the last data point to account for the “notch” filter. You graph shows a completely differing result.
            Firstly do you agree or disagree. And on what reasoning?

            07

            • #

              I see where you get you reputation from, and why you are moderated.

              The data from about 1996 – 2008 is averaged to form the smoothed value in 2002, then delayed by 11 years to appear at 2013 in the graph.

              Enough of your mudslinging and “misunderstanding”. No further correspondence will be entered into.

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    • #
      PeterS

      The obvious and clear answer is no one really knows when and how much the climate will get warmer or cooler. We simply do not have a good enough understanding of the climate in order to make such predictions years or decades in advance. For starters we don’t know what the Sun will do. Anyone who does is delusional at best. If we did have a good enough understating of the climate we wouldn’t even be having the global warming argument in the first place as it would have been resolved a long time ago.

      81

    • #
      Kenneth Richard

      Some seemingly relevant recently published scientific papers…
      —–
      http://www.nature.com/articles/srep15689
      The longest direct observation of solar activity is the 400-year sunspot-number series, which depicts a dramatic contrast between the almost spotless Maunder and Dalton minima, and the period of very high activity in the most recent 5 cycles [1950s – 2000s], prior to cycle 24. … The records show that solar activity in the current cycle 24 is much lower than in the previous three cycles 21–23 revealing more than a two-year minimum period between cycles 23 and 24. This reduced activity in cycle 24 was very surprising because the previous five cycles were extremely active and sunspot productive forming the Modern Maximum. … We predict correctly many features from the past, such as: 1) an increase in solar activity during the Medieval Warm period; 2) a clear decrease in the activity during the Little Ice Age, the Maunder Minimum and the Dalton Minimum; 3) an increase in solar activity during a modern maximum in 20th century. .. We note, in particular, a decreasing activity for solar cycles 25 and 26 coinciding with the end of the previous 350–400-year grand cycle and then increase of the solar activity again from cycle 27 onwards as the start of a new grand cycle with an unusually weak cycle 30. Hence, cycles 25–27 marks a clear end of the modern grand period that can have significant implications for many aspects of solar activity in human lives including the current debate on climate change.

      http://www.nature.com/articles/srep15689/figures/3


      http://www.doiserbia.nb.rs/img/doi/0354-9836/2015%20OnLine-First/0354-98361500018A.pdf
      A long-term negative deviation of the Earth’s average annual energy balance from the equilibrium state is corresponding with variations in its energy state. As a result, the Earth will have a negative average annual energy balance also in the future. This will lead to the beginning of the decreasing in the Earth’s temperature and of the epoch of the Little Ice Age after the maximum phase of the 24-th solar cycle approximately since the end of 2014. The influence of the consecutive chain of the secondary feedback effects (the increase in the Bond albedo and the decrease in the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere due to cooling) will lead to an additional reduction of the absorbed solar energy and reduce the greenhouse effect. The start of the TSI’s Grand Minimum is anticipated in the solar cycle 27±1 in 2043±11 and the beginning of the phase of deep cooling of the 19th Little Ice Age for the past 7,500 years around 2060±11.
      —–
      http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1384107614001080
      Total solar irradiance is the primary energy source of the Earth’s climate system and therefore its variations can contribute to natural climate change. This variability is characterized by, among other manifestations, decadal and secular oscillations, which has led to several attempts to estimate future solar activity. Of particular interest now is the fact that the behavior of the solar cycle 23 minimum has shown an activity decline not previously seen in past cycles for which spatial observations exist: this could be signaling the start of a new grand solar minimum. We also found that the solar activity grand minima periodicity is of 120 years; this periodicity could possibly be one of the principal periodicities of the magnetic solar activity not so previously well recognized.
      —–
      http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0273117715004901
      The recent extended, deep minimum of solar variability and the extended minima in the 19th and 20th centuries (1810–1830 and 1900–1920) are consistent with minima of the Centennial Gleissberg Cycle (CGC), a 90–100 year variation of the amplitude of the 11-year sunspot cycle observed on the Sun and at the Earth. The Earth’s climate response to these prolonged low solar radiation inputs involves heat transfer to the deep ocean causing a time lag longer than a decade.
      —–
      http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/10/5/054022/pdf/1748-9326_10_5_054022.pdf
      Numerous studies have suggested an impact of the 11 year solar cycle on the winter North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), with an increased tendency for positive (negative) NAO signals to occur at maxima (minima) of the solar cycle. Climate models have successfully reproduced this solar cycle modulation of the NAO, although the magnitude of the effect is often considerably weaker than implied by observations. A leading candidate for the mechanism of solar influence is via the impact of ultraviolet radiation variability on heating rates in the tropical upper stratosphere, and consequently on the meridional temperature gradient and zonal winds. … Recent analyses of observations have shown that solar cycle–NAO link becomes clearer approximately three years after solar maximum and minimum. … In this study, the impact of solar cycle on the NAO is investigated using an atmosphere–ocean coupled climate model. Simulations that include climate forcings are performed over the period 1960–2009 for two solar forcing scenarios: constant solar irradiance, and time-varying solar irradiance. We show that the model produces significant NAO responses peaking several years after extrema of the solar cycle, persisting even when the solar forcing becomes neutral. This confirms suggestions of a further component to the solar influence on the NAO beyond direct atmospheric heating and its dynamical response. Analysis of simulated upper ocean temperature anomalies confirms that the North Atlantic Ocean provides the memory of the solar forcing required to produce the lagged NAO response. These results have implications for improving skill in decadal predictions of the European and North American winter climate.
      —–
      http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364682614002685
      We find that the variations of SSN [sunspot number] and T [temperature] have some common periodicities, such as the 208 year (yr), 521 yr, and ~1000 yr cycles. The correlations between SSN and T are strong for some intermittent periodicities. However, the wavelet analysis demonstrates that the relative phase relations between them usually do not hold stable except for the millennium-cycle component. The millennial variation of SSN [sunspot number] leads that of T by 30–40 years, and the anti-phase relation between them keeps stable nearly over the whole 11,000 years of the past. As a contrast, the correlations between CO2 and T are neither strong nor stable. These results indicate that solar activity might have potential influences on the long-term change of Vostok’s local climate during the past 11,000 years before modern industry.
      —–
      http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/140225/ncomms4323/full/ncomms4323.html
      Our analyses show that the combined solar and volcanic forcing is highly correlated to both existing AMO reconstructions over the past two centuries. The correlation between the AMO reconstructions and the combined external forcing record is highly significant for both the tree-ring and multiproxy records after AD 1775 when compared with 10,000 randomly generated red-noise AR1 data. Comparison with red-noise AR1 time series suggests that the abrupt change in correlation around AD 1775 observed for the tree-ring AMO is highly unlikely to occur by chance (P~0.005). Cross-correlation analyses furthermore show that both AMO reconstructions temporally lag the combined solar and volcanic forcing by ~5 years in the interval following the transition around AD 1775. In these model simulations, the AMO lags the external forcing by ~5 years, which is in close agreement with the ~5-year lag observed in the present study for the period after AD 1775. A more detailed explanation for this lagged North Atlantic SST response to solar variability was recently proposed based on idealized experiments showing that a step change in ultraviolet forcing has an immediate impact on the atmosphere, which subsequently takes several years to accumulate in the ocean. During this time, the atmospheric response continues to increase, suggesting a positive feedback between the ocean and atmosphere. Similarly, several studies indicate that the ‘top-down’ stratosphere–troposphere mechanism represents an important response to solar variability, particularly at high latitudes.
      —–
      http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2013JD020062/abstract
      The surface response to 11 year solar cycle variations is investigated by analyzing the long-term mean sea level pressure and sea surface temperature observations for the period 1870–2010. The analysis reveals a statistically significant 11 year solar signal over Europe, and the North Atlantic provided that the data are lagged by a few years. The delayed signal resembles the positive phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) following a solar maximum. The corresponding sea surface temperature response is consistent with this. A similar analysis is performed on long-term climate simulations from a coupled ocean-atmosphere version of the Hadley Centre model that has an extended upper lid so that influences of solar variability via the stratosphere are well resolved.

      —–
      http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437114005226
      Appropriate solar proxy models demonstrate the existence of a significant sun-climate relation. [T]he solar signature in the surface temperature record can be recognized only using specific techniques of analysis that take into account non-linearity and filtering of the multiple climate change contributions; the post 1880-year temperature warming trend cannot be compared or studied against the sunspot record and its 11-year cycle, but requires solar proxy models showing short and long scale oscillations plus the contribution of anthropogenic forcings, as done in the literature. Multiple evidences suggest that global temperatures and sunspot numbers are quite related to each other at multiple time scales. Thus, they are characterized by cyclical fractional models. However, solar and climatic indexes are related to each other through complex and non-linear processes.

      160

      • #

        Thanks Kenneth. Good research!

        Some of those papers suggest a link between solar activity (TSI) and temperature (surface, on Earth) but are ignored by warmists who point to Lockwood-Froehlich 2007, who point out that TSI leaked in 1987 but temp kept increasing until 1998. Need a delay to explain this — see “Recent History Suggests a Delay” in the post above.

        Others of these papers spot a lag, and assume it is due to propagation lags in the oceans. But the time constant of the Earth for changes in solar radiation is of the order of 1 to two years (post 12), and the correlation between global temperature and TSI changes is best at 11 years, better than say at 5 years, which is a bit hard to explain with ocean heat propagation. Still, good to see many others are seeing the delay.

        The radical suggestion in this post (made previously in 21014, in this post and this post) is that there is a force from the Sun that acts quite quickly (less than 2 years, maybe in a month or two) on temp, but that it follows changes in TSI by about one sunspot cycle (avg 11 years). Given the complex changes in fields and particles emanating from the Sun, and that it is a dynamo working on a 22 year (avg) period, this is plausible.

        101

      • #
        jorgekafkazar

        I’m particularly interested in how the variation of ultraviolet flux fits into the historical record of TSI. Unlike TSI, solar ultraviolet radiation varies significantly, along with large changes in the thickness of the ionosphere. It may be noteworthy that, despite its low density, a photon can’t pass through the ionosphere without hitting at least one molecule.

        10

  • #
    el gordo

    The strong volcanic coolings of the early 19th century were Tambora and Cosiguina.

    ‘According to an analysis by Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature, the 1835 eruption caused a temporary decrease in the average land temperature of Earth of about 0.75 degrees C.’

    wiki

    80

  • #
    el gordo

    A hindcast back to 1200 AD would give me great advantage, I have a few scores to settle.

    60

  • #
    Robk

    Thank you David and Jo,
    Very interesting.

    70

    • #
      Robk

      So all we need now is the workshop manual for the sun.

      90

      • #
        el gordo

        Nicholas Scafetta has been doing the hard yards and was savaged for his efforts, but I think he’s on the money.

        ‘It is evident that any study on planetary influence on a star needs to start from the sun, and then eventually extended to other star systems, but probably we need to wait several decades before having sufficiently long records about other stars!

        ‘In the case of the sun I needed at least a 200 year long sunspot record to detect the three Schwabe cycles, and at least 1000 years of data for hindcast tests to check the other frequencies. People can do the math for how long we need to wait for the other stars before having long enough records.’

        110

  • #
    mat

    Hi David,

    Great to see you making falsifiable predictions within a timeframe. In the same vein, what measure of warming will be needed before you reconsider your theory, and what type of evidence would you need before acceptance of the consensus view?

    Cheers,
    Mat

    817

    • #

      Mat, if there is no sustained and significant fall in the next few years (at least 0.1 deg C), then the hypothesis that TSI changes predict surface temperature changes after a delay of about a sunspot cycle is a bust.

      If the 2020s are significantly warmer than the pause period (1998 – 2017) then solar activity (as indicated by sunspots or TSI) would not appear to be a major influence on surface temperature.

      If warming resumes at about 0.2 deg C per decade for the next few decades, then the CO2 theory is probably about right.

      Otherwise — we may not know, and might remain ambiguous.

      I reckon we could settle a lot of this if there was a satellite that could measure the Earth’s emission spectrum at sufficiently high resolution. As CO2 increases, less emissions should come from the wings of the CO2 blockage around 15 microns. But, does the corresponding increase in emissions (ASR = OLR, over longer time scales) occur at the wavelengths at which water vapor emits (the rerouting feedback) or in the atmospheric window (surface warming, as per the CO2 theory)?

      It will take decades of high resolution measurements to be sure. Rerouting could be occurring and countering nearly all the effect of increasing CO2, and at the moment no one would really know for sure — except that the water vapor emissions layer (WVEL) is dropping or staying at the same average height as the CO2 increases and the surface warms for other reasons. It would be nice to measure the emissions spectrum directly, rather than inferring it from changes in the average heights of the WVEL and cloud tops.

      294

      • #
        Rollo

        I reckon we could settle a lot of this if there was a satellite that could measure the Earth’s emission spectrum at sufficiently high resolution.

        Perhaps when the delayed RAVAN mission finally takes place some good data will be available.

        RAVAN will use a small, accurate radiometer, developed at L-1 Standards and Technology and not much larger than a deck of cards, to measure the strength of the Earth’s outgoing radiation across the entire spectrum of energy — from the ultraviolet to the far infrared. The secret to RAVAN’s precise measurements is a “forest” of carbon nanotubes, grown at APL, that serve as the radiometer’s light absorber. “The carbon nanotubes are a very deep black across the energy spectrum, which will let the radiometer gather virtually all the light reflected and emitted from the planet

        http://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/ravan.htm

        80

        • #
          Rollo

          PS The RAVAN mission is expected to launch in mid 2016

          30

          • #
            Andrew McRae

            It’s great how that worked out, isn’t it?

            June 1992 – Maurice Strong says ETSs and carbon taxes are needed for “financing environment and development objectives”.
            Feb 2007 – IPCC AR4 announces human actions are “very likely” the cause of global warming.
            April 2016 – Paris Climate Treaty to reduce CO2 emissions based on consensus of climate science becomes open for signature.
            July 2016 – Climate science begins studying the full spectrum Earth energy budget accurately for the first time.
            December 2016 – RAVAN projected to become non-operational.

            Not even a full year. It’s a half-hearted attempt, probably just to test space-worthiness of the CNT sensor prototype.
            But the politics part is working like a well-oiled machine, no worries there. Way ahead of science actually.

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            • #

              Good point Andrew, you got to wonder.

              Surely the possibility of increased emission by the water vapor in the upper troposphere was dead obvious –> end of CO2 potency. But with no actual measurement to directly measure the trends in emissions from water vapor versus the surface, they have plausible deniability for having “overlooked” it.

              Didn’t a couple of previous satellites with detailed emissions measuring equipment blow up on launch? Does anyone recall?

              102

              • #
                TedM

                Yes they did. I guess a google search may find the links.

                10

              • #
                Andrew McRae

                Sort of. Not many that I’ve been able to find.

                Triana (delayed):

                Triana was originally due to launch on a space shuttle mission in 2000, but Congress ordered NASA to put the project on hold in late 1999 pending a review by the National Research Council.
                … Triana’s sensors would have measured ozone and cloud distributions, vegetation changes, atmospheric pollution, and the planet’s radiation budget. The PlasMag instrument package was also included to study the solar wind.

                There’s been dispute about the mechanism for solar activity affecting climate, where Svensmark & Co reckon it is cosmic rays but Jeremy Corbyn says it’s something more substantial like solar wind. Possibly this satellite could have cleared up any ambiguity there a decade ago if it had actually flown on schedule. It was delivered to orbit in Feb 2015.

                OCO (crashed):

                The 972-pound (441-kg) OCO spacecraft was NASA?s first satellite built exclusively to map carbon dioxide levels on Earth and understand how humanity’s contribution of the greenhouse gas is affecting global climate change. The satellite carried a single three-channel spectrometer to make its detailed measurements and was slated to launch into a near-polar, sun-synchronous orbit that would fly about 438 miles (705 km) above Earth.
                Brunschwyler said the first sign of trouble during today?s failed launch occurred about three minutes after liftoff, when the Taurus XL rocket?s telemetry showed no sign it had shed its clamshell-like payload fairing.

                We saw the hullabaloo that erupted when JAXA’s Ibuki satellite showed big clouds of CO2 puffing out of the Amazon and a bunch of developing countries. It would have been the same picture but sooner if OCO had gone ahead.
                It’s been replaced by OCO2 in late 2014, which has a lifetime of only 2 or 3 years. Data is available as a 23GB block and some early charts were also released.

                41

              • #

                Thanks Andrew. Ok, one satellite, Triana, and we do not know for sure that its radiation budget sensors would be sufficiently high res. to detect the trends in the emissions spectrum. Anyway it was mothballed, in about 2002. Maybe it was not needed due to CERES (launched 2000, I think), whose emission spectrum data is not sufficiently high res. AFAIK.

                I am pretty sure someone told me a satellite launch with a high res. emissions monitoring instrument blew up, and it would have been sometime in the last 8 years. Maybe I misheard, but I remember thinking it would have been extremely useful to resolve this issue, and convenient for the CO2 theory for it not to have been deployed.

                62

            • #
              Peter C

              Dec 2016 RAVAN projected to become non operational

              I did not find that on your link Andrew.

              I did find this:

              “RAVAN (Radiometer Assessment using Vertically Aligned Nanotubes) is a low-cost cubesat mission led by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., to demonstrate technology needed to measure the absolute imbalance in the Earth’s radiation budget (ERI) for the first time, giving scientists valuable information to study our climate,”

              Surely NASA will find some way to fly it into space. The value of improved measurements of Earth’s outgoing radiation is of immense importance to the science of climate change!

              Cube sat apparently means the package is a cube measuring 10x10x10cm!

              10

      • #

        David, not quite! With El Nino disappearing we should see a peak in temperatures this year and then a few years of cooling. In addition there’s also the AMO 60 year cycle which is now in the cooling phase (peaked ~2010). So, cooling does not prove the additional affect from sunspots as amongst the known climate drivers the prevailing trend is for cooling.

        However, nor does warming disprove it, because natural variation (i.e. unknown climate drivers) may still be the biggest factor affecting our climate even if solar cycles are counted as “knowns”.

        In other words, until we can explain the majority of climate change seen in the longest temperature proxy from Central England then natural variation is provably the largest impact on climate.

        As such, there is still a significant chance of warming even though the known drivers suggest cooling.

        PS. Just for interest – if one were daft enough to have said “rising CO2 WILL cause warming with a 95% confidence” – then obviously cooling demonstrates this wrong with the same 95% confidence.

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          Mike, “natural variability” is just the bits the CO2 theory cannot begin to explain. That would include variation due to solar factors other than direct TSI heating.

          What causes ocean cycles? The notch-delay solar theory with a bit of CO2 warming and something unusual around 1940 – 1980 (aerosols? nukes? data problems?) potentially explains changes in surface temperatures and predicts ENSO moderately well.

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            Rereke Whakaaro

            A lot of dust was thrown into the atmosphere in the 1940’s and ’50’s, especially in Europe, and Western USA.

            Would it be significant enough to register in the temperature record? I don’t know.

            But if it does, then it will probably show as a variation between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres over those decades.

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          philthegeek

          With El Nino disappearing we should see a peak in temperatures this year and then a few years of cooling.

          Yup, this certainly complicates the:

          sustained and significant fall in the next few years (at least 0.1 deg C)

          argument for verifying this or not.

          Is the variation in temp from El Nino / La Nina big enough to swamp the variation from whatever is hypothesized to be happening with the Sun and how to analyse for that?

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          • #

            Perhaps, but it would certainly sort out the test between these two hypotheses for the next decade:

            1. CO2 theory: +0.2 C

            2. ND solar theory: -0.3 C

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              ianl8888

              A genuine prediction …

              And I may even live long enough to see empirical data sort this out

              A very positive step forward from this seemingly never-ending tar pit

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        Gary H

        “If warming resumes at about 0.2 deg C per decade for the next few decades, then the CO2 theory is probably about right.”

        Over the course of the past 150 yrs +/-, leaving the 11-year delay on the sidelines for a moment, seems to be a series of 30-40 cycles of either warming or cooling with more of a bias for more warming, than cooling; i.e., the overall trend has been one of warming.

        However, looking out over longer time frames — the Roman warm period, to the cold dark ages, to the MWP to the LIA — (cycles of perhaps 600 – 1,000 years, trough to peak, etc) what is the consensus view of what is driving these cycles?

        With that in mind, “if warming resumes at” some level, is it still not plausible that the driving force is what drives these longer cycles? The MWP lasted a lot longer than this warm cycle has so far (many would argue that it was warmer, w/ SL higher, during the MWP than at present.

        Thanks

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          If “warming resumes at about 0.2 deg C per decade for the next few decades” then the rising CO2 would have overwhelmed the long pattern of 30 -40 year cycles, and (apparently) would be controlling the global temperature. Eventually, same for the longer cycles. I don’t think it’s going to happen.

          Most simplistically, if CO2 is not in control and the cycles are still mainly in control, given that the recent moves up have faltered the next move is likely down.

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        Mark Stoval

        David wrote: “If warming resumes at about 0.2 deg C per decade for the next few decades, then the CO2 theory is probably about right.”

        That is just plain unscientific. The fact that your theory may go bust does not prove the CO2 delusion at all. After all, the planet warmed many times in the past without a rise in CO2 coming first.

        There are other explanations.

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          Kenneth Richard

          Correct. 93% of the heat from global warming ends up in the oceans (Levitus et al., 2012). Ocean heat is then transferred to the atmosphere. Whatever heats the ocean is what drives climate change. Therefore, CO2 – which is released by the oceans when they warm, and retained when they cool – would have to be the dominant source of net ocean heat, not a feedback or effect of warming.

          There has never been a controlled experiment or empirical observation with physical measurements that shows that increasing or decreasing CO2 concentrations in volumes of parts per million (0.000001) over a body of water causes ___ heat loss or ___ heat gain. Until we have those measurements, the assumptions about CO2 as a determinant of net ocean heat changes remains an assumption.

          Net heat changes in the deep oceans occurred independently from changes in surface temperatures and changes in CO2 concentrations in the past. Why would those physics be demonstrably different now?
          —–
          http://www.sciencemag.org/content/318/5849/435.short
          Deep sea temperatures warmed by ~2C between 19 and 17 ka B.P. (thousand years before present), leading the rise in atmospheric CO2 and tropical surface ocean warming by ~1000 years.
          —–
          http://www.clim-past.net/11/647/2015/cp-11-647-2015.pdf
          Despite the substantial dispersion of CO2 estimations, a character and a chronology of CO2 concentration changes are much closer to temperature changes rather than to heat flux variations. It may mean no significant contribution of CO2 forcing to climatically caused heat flux and thus to the temperature increase during Pleistocene–Holocene warming. About 10 kyr BP the increase of carbon dioxide concentration was replaced by its fall which ended about 8 kyr BP. This local minimum [in CO2 concentration] is not consistent with either GST [ground surface temperature] or SHF [surface heat flux] histories.

          The reconstructed surface heat flux reflects impact of all possible sources of radiative forcing. In addition to solar insolation, greenhouse gases (such as CO2) can be a source of additional forcing. On the other hand the increase of carbon dioxide may be a consequence of temperature increasing. Comparing the chronology of surface flux, temperature and carbon dioxide concentration changes, we can draw some conclusions about the causes of climate change. … The increase of carbon dioxide concentrations occurred 2–3 thousands of years later than the heat flux increase and synchronously with temperature response.”

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        RandyB

        I wonder what the ideal mission design to measure fully the OLR. Would it be something like the RAVAN sensor package suitably scaled for operation at the Lagrange 1 and 2 points? This would give 24/7/365 data on dayside and nightside OLR. Then, whatever the OLR emission response actually is could be used to falsify/confirm many of the models, both official and alternatives such as the one presented here.

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      Belfast

      Mat,
      Back at your for YOUR falsifiable predictions.

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    RoyFOMR

    “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy”. – Hamlet.

    I wonder what the Bard would have said about the “Settled Science” meme of the early 21st Century consensus on CAGW if he’d been with us today. It may not have used the word ‘spooky’ but I suspect that he would share the sentiment.

    Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose!

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    Another Ian

    Jo

    IMO This fits here for the knockers who’ll arrive soon no doubt

    ” DonM
    February 12, 2016 at 9:52 pm

    … and the “most adaptable” to change are climatologist and their theories.”

    Comments at

    http://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/02/12/record-cold-single-digit-to-subzero-valentines-day-expected-for-much-of-usa/

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    Wayne Job

    Hi David,
    Excellent work, your analysis is spot on. It is now up to real scientists to tell us why after 4.5 billion years the centre of our planet is molten and volcanic activity is rife.
    This force or power whatever it is heats our planet from the inside out some thing else the sun is emitting. Perhaps the dark energy of the 80% of the missing universe? It may have much to do with why you have an eleven year delay. I will send Jo the amazing results and the technical details of our now completed experiments. Our Aussie chief scientist thinks our results are amazing. Cheers

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    mat

    Wayne, that’s pretty well understood. Residual heat from gravitational collapse/ bombardment accounts for about 10%, while decay of radioactive isotopes (like Potassium 40, Uranium 238, 235, and Thorium 232) account for about 90%. Dark energy is not required to explain the molten core.

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    Agnostic

    Hmm. Typically after an El Niño there is a corresponding La Niña. Is it not possible that a drop in global temps look like it was cause by the cooling that usually comes from a La Niña?

    Is there some other indicator that can be pointed to that is predicted by this TSI indirect influence theory that won’t be confused with La Niña? It would be good to get them in a head of time.

    Also, is it possible that some sort of subtle blend of classic CO2 anthro warming theory and a solar indirect theory might be at work, which might attenuate the cooling influence of lowered solar activity?

    I guess you must have made direct comparisons with other periods to see how changes in TSI (as an indicator) was reflected in temps and with the current period to see if they were of the same magnititude. Are they? That would argue for low to insignificant CO2 effect.

    Another question, criticisms of the theory first time round also revolved around the solar data sets used. Which data sets are you using currently and how sure are you that they are accurate or good enough to support your theory?

    Could you discuss how the uncertainties the data you have used might affect the theory?

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      Agnostic, the ENSO (El Niño – Southern Oscillation) index predicts global temperatures well, six months in advance. So what causes ENSO? You cannot know what is controlling the global temperatures without knowing what causes ENSO, and thus El Nino’s and La Ninas. The El Ninos and La Ninas are part of the global temperature evolution, not some extraneous phenomenon independently superimposed on top, like the CO2 people tend to think of it.

      A period of global warming is characterized by more vigorous and more common El Ninos than La Ninas, and vice versa. If there is to be a cooling ahead soon, it may well be introduced via a La Nina.

      Yes, CO2 warming is also at work. Up to 20% of the global warming of since 1970 is from increasing CO2. See here.

      See upcoming posts for more on predictions, how they were made.

      Any use of solar data brings out the response from the usual suspects that “you are completely wrong because there is more than one solar dataset and therefore your theory cannot satisfy all of them”, and the obvious problems with their criticism are just howled down with unpleasantness.

      This post establishes the case for the delay without reference to any particular solar dataset. It implicitly uses a range of TSI datasets, and it relies mainly on their turning points, not the overall size of the TSI changes (the main point of the usual contention). The case for the delay relies on multiple lines of evidence, not on any particular solar dataset, so it is robust with respect to data uncertainty.

      Presumably the usual suspects will skip the “you haven’t used my favorite solar reconstruction” part and just howl it down, or maybe ignore it because it’s existence does not reflect well on them.

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        Imagine a noise source linked to a tuned circuit! The result is a pseudo random oscillation that appears to be cyclic – in that it has quite well defined periods, but in essence it is nothing but the amplification of a very narrow spectral range from the original noise source.

        Now imaging an ocean current – the mass is inertia, the heat profile through the ocean acts like a type of very weak spring. The result is a very low frequency resonator.

        To see images view my blog article on the subject: http://scottishsceptic.co.uk/2015/03/24/simulations-of-pacific-decadal-oscillation-enso/

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        • #

          Maybe.

          A resonance or tuned circuit requires two stores of energy, with energy slopping back and forth between the two stores. The slop back and forth tends to happen at a characteristic speed or frequency determined by how easy that flow is. What are the two sources in ocean oscillations? Different parts of the ocean? So why would it move back then forth? It is possible, but I don’t recall seeing a plausible explanation.

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            John

            “So why would it move back then forth? It is possible, but I don’t recall seeing a plausible explanation.”

            This is surprising, I thought you were meant to be an expert.

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            philthegeek

            [ What are the two sources in ocean oscillations? ]

            Very large amounts of water at different temps above and below a thermocline is the first thing that springs to mind.

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            Robk

            I do recall reading an old csiro paper on sea level measurmemts in the Pacific and it did mention an 11 year slop of around 100mm doing the rounds of the Pacific.

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            Resonance requires inertia and a single store of energy. The simplest form of such a system (e.g. a lake) would be where warm water is overlaying cold water. The mass of the water is the inertial element, the minuscule potential energy as the slightly denser material “bulks up at one end” would be the “spring”. Once set in motion, the system would very very slowly resonate (much slower than surface waves because of the very small difference in density between the bottom and top layers).

            Another similar but different system would be an ocean current that is pushed along via surface winds and then cools and travels back under the forward going layer.

            In this type of current, it would be similar to an echo delay box in that the current would tend to have the temperature it last “saw” when at the surface. So, when it reappears we see an “echo” of the previous current.

            There are also possible resonances involving plankton – in that plankton thrive when rich deeper currents come to the surface and they could affect the amount of sun-light caught by the layer and thus the temperature.

            Indeed, there is a well known climatic oscillation involving elephants. As they boom they kill off trees turning woodland to grassland. Then when populations peak and trees die – they all start starving. The population crashes and then the trees start regrowing. Because trees and grassland have different levels of transpiration, this has a small climatic effect and hence we see an oscillation.

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            Due to the fact that there is more ocean in the southern hemisphere AND oceans control atmospheric temperatures it follows that the warmth emanating from the southern oceans is what forces the ITCZ to have a mean position north of the equator.

            So, since the clouds of the ITCZ are more often north of the equator it follows that more sunlight gets into the southern oceans than the northern oceans.

            That is what leads to the thermal imbalance that creates the ENSO oscillation.

            The extra heat in the souuthern oceans builds up over time and periodically discharges into the northern oceans via El Nino events.

            I’ve been saying that for a few years on various blogs.

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              Mark Stoval

              Well Stephen, if it means anything, I have been listening to you and I agree with that observation.

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              ianl8888

              Due to the fact that there is more ocean in the southern hemisphere AND oceans control atmospheric temperatures it follows that the warmth emanating from the southern oceans is what forces the ITCZ to have a mean position north of the equator

              I’d like to believe you here – I’ve often asked the question: “What forces the ENSO oscillation ?” [I wondered if the Coriolanis forces may have been a factor]

              But I have a problem believing your assumption highlighted above. As I understand it, land mass warms more quickly than sea water mass, so if that was the only force behind ITCZ it should position south of the equator ?

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                Robk

                Ian,
                The “coriollus effect” will have an effect on any mass changing displacement from the axis of the earth’s spin. Understandably that displacement or Change in radius is more pronounced closer to the poles than at the equator.
                Yes, land mass heats quicker but also cools quicker I.e.its specific heat(storage) capacity is less. Stephen has a pretty firm grip on what is going on.

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                Robk

                Just to put that a bit more clearly:
                The “coriollus effect” will have an effect on any mass that is acted on by some force such that the mass changes its displacement from the axis of the earth’s spin. So there has to be a force acting (moving) the mass before there is an effect. The effect is more pronounced towards the poles.

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                Reed Coray

                Just a note on the Coriolis force and the centrifugal force. As applied to a particle having non-zero mass, the Coriolis force and the centrifugal force impose what are sometimes called fictional forces on the particle because according to Grant, R. Fowles (see Analytical Mechanics; page 98; published by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1962): “they are not due to interaction of a particle with other bodies, but, rather they stem from the particular type of coordinate system used to describe the motion of the particle.” Specifically, to characterize the motion of a non-zero mass particle in a coordinate system that relative to inertial space is rotating at a constant angular rate, “w,” in addition to accounting for real forces such as gravity, electromagnetic, friction, etc., a Coriolis force term and a centrifugal force term must be included.

                In terms of the position/velocity components of a constant-angular-rotation-rate coordinate system, the magnitude of the Coriolis force is proportional to the product of (i) the mass of the particle, (ii) the constant angular rotation rate, and (iii) the particle’s speed in the direction perpendicular to the axis of coordinate system rotation. The magnitude of the Coriolis force is independent of the particle’s position.

                In terms of the position/velocity components of a constant-angular-rotation-rate coordinate system, the magnitude of the centrifugal force is equal to the product of (i) the mass of the particle, (ii) the square of the constant angular rotation rate, and (iii) the particle’s distance from the axis of rotation. The magnitude of the centrifugal force is independent of the particle’s velocity.

                A coordinate system fixed with respect to the surface features of the Earth is rotating relative to inertial space–rotating both about the Earth’s north/south polar axis but also rotating about the sun and the center of the galaxy. Thus, when describing the behavior of say a molecule of air or water in an Earth-fixed coordinate system–such as geodetic latitude, longitude and altitude–Coriolis and centrifugal force terms must be included.

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              I’m glad to see so many positive thumbs up.

              AFAIK no one else has ever pinned down the cause of the ENSO process to that mechanism so if it is correct I look forward to it entering the text books in due course.

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        el gordo

        ‘Up to 20% of the global warming of since 1970 is from increasing CO2.’

        The Great Climate Shift of 1976 had nothing to do with CO2 and surely the hiatus falsifies the hypothesis.

        Summer temperatures in northern Japan haven’t changed in 400 years, yet a cooling trend began late last century when CO2 was being pumped out. Aerosols perhaps?

        http://www.co2science.org/articles/V19/feb/a1.php

        If I find a paper which shows warmer winters in the same region, then it would give your argument more strength, otherwise I’ll stay outside the lukewarm tent.

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          Paul

          el gordo,

          I can’t help you with a paper on warmer winters in Japan, but I did come across one that provided an explanation for “The Great Climate Shift of 1976”:

          http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2007GL030288/full

          This paper appears to determine that the climate system is mostly influenced by “the interplay of the (few) most dominant modes of climate variability in the northern hemisphere” – talking about ENSO, NAO, PDO or NPO.

          What is somewhat surprising to me is that its conclusion, that warming post 1970 can be explained by changes in ocean oscillations, hasn’t drawn more critisism. The strongest I could find was on Judith Curry’s site, and even then, it states that the mechanism developed in this paper is a good one.

          https://judithcurry.com/2011/01/04/scenarios-2010-2040-part-iii-climate-shifts/

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            el gordo

            Judith Curry at her brilliant best reviewing Tsonis et al.

            ‘…the general paradigm to consider the Earth system as a finite network of coupled (chaotic) oscillators is a good one and if one had the idea of the number of the oscillators, their average frequency and especially of the laws that govern them, it would certainly have some predictive capacity.’

            —–

            From my reading the NAO is closely linked to the behavior of the sun, so I’m suggesting there might be a knock on effect.

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            el gordo

            Paul there seems be a correlation with ENSO.

            http://www.webcitation.org/6CalUWNjb

            ———

            And I think Stephen Wilde is leading the charge on the mechanisms involved.

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            • #

              However ENSO misses the trends in temperature (the low frequency components), which is what we need for climate prediction and adjudicating on the CO2 theory vs solar etc. ENSO only good for short term, a period of a few years, where the correlation is very good with a six-month time shift.

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        The Backslider

        David, there is zero correlation between rising atmospheric CO2 levels and global temperatures, just as there is zero correlation between rising CO2 and human emissions.

        Look at a graph from Moana Loa. What do you see? A slow, steady rise not at all in step with variations in human emissions. For example, our emissions have increased by 300% since 2000, yet the graph does not budge from its slow steady rise….no spike whatsoever.

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      • #

        Solar induced changes in global cloudiness gradually skew the balance between El Ninos and La Ninas.

        When global cloudiness declines El Nino gradually increases in strength relative to La Nina and vice versa.

        That process is included in my New Climate Model:

        http://www.newclimatemodel.com/new-climate-model/

        Extract as follows:

        “6) The main cloud bands move more poleward to regions where solar insolation is less intense and total global albedo declines via a reduction in global cloud cover due to shorter lines of air mass mixing.

        7) More solar energy reaches the surface and in particular the oceans as the subtropical high pressure cells expand.

        8) Less rain falls on ocean surfaces allowing them to warm more.

        9) Solar energy input to the oceans increases but not all is returned to the air. A portion enters the thermohaline circulation to embark on a journey of 1000 to 1500 years. A pulse of slightly warmer water has entered the ocean circulation.

        10) The strength of warming El Nino events increases relative to cooling La Nina events and the atmosphere warms.”

        The available observations continue to fit that conceptual model.

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          Interesting, thanks Stephen. Good to have someone who knows a lot of meteorology on hand!

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          Robk

          Thanks Stephen,
          I accept what you say as crucial and dominant, but would there not potentially be a contribution to ocean mixing from an “annual solar tide effect” due to each hemisphere inclining towards the sun during its respective summer. If so, this effect would be perturbed by the elliptical obit of the earth and the procession of the equinoxes along that orbit?

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        Agnostic

        Ok, I take the point regarding solar data sets. The change points are what are critical….but won’t that tell you about weather you might expect warming or cooling but how are going to tell the quantative effect?

        The problem is as I see it, is that if you can’t say how large the effect is going to be you won’t be able to separate from other forms of climate variability. There are other hypotheses in the game at the moment as well, some that might be complimentary to yours, and others that might be in competition. For example, the stadium wave theory ALSO predicts a period of mild cooling statrting around 2018 or so and lasting at least until 2030. That is dealing with natural internal variability almost exclusively.

        Then there are other climate influences, such as volcanic activity, NAO etc etc deemed to have an influence. These could attenuate or emphasise the effect you may well have identified. With respect to ENSO, the CO2 AGW theory roughly suggests that these are broadly neutral over decadal time scales, and the longer term trend is forced by CO2. Bob Tisdale would probably suggest that a preponderance of El Ninos to La Ninas as a normal statistical distribution of natural variability is all that is required to explain modern warming. You would be suggesting (if I take your response correctly) that these might be influenced by some unidientified effect that is linked to solar activity. I suspect you might get push back as to what that physical phenomena that might be – not from me – I’m perfectly happy to accept there are things in science left to be discovered.

        Finally, I was wondering if you could elaborate on the

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          Agnostic

          ….sorry…..somehow got cut off mid sentence….

          …on the uncertainties in your theory. What are some of the other mitigating factors? If this happens then this effect might be delayed, brought forward, exaggerated, attenuated….?

          And how are you going to respond to the very likely decrease in temps as a result of the very likely La Niña that will follow this El Niño? You might be able to point to a decrease in temps that have turned up at the right time and others will say it is simply a La Niña that commonly follow El Niño. I’ve read your new science series with enormous interest Dr Evans, I’m merely trying to anticipate arguments and rationalisation you might face.

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          Agnostic: The estimate of the quantity of a future change is dealt with in an upcoming post. A model was built using this hypothesis, and fitted to the temp-TSI data, to get some idea of parameters. It predicts a cooling of 0.3 or so coming up soon. (The model was described in the old blog posts. This spreadsheet contains the model.)

          This post is arguing for the delay in quantitative terms, so that it has a wider audience. Likewise this new blog series is de-mathed, mainly. Even so some are apparently saying it is “too mathematical”. Whatever.

          Yes, if the stadium effect and this theory predict the same phenomenon and it occurs then that phenomenon will not distinguish between the theories. Maybe we’ll have to wait for another event for that. What other possibility is there? Maybe the stadium symptoms are due to a solar effect; maybe the internal variability described by the stadium effect just happens to occur each time after changes in TSI. Or maybe one is correct and the other not. Climate changes slowly, so it might take a while to find out.

          Ocean cycles appear to have a strong effect on global temp; TSI seems to have a strong effect on global temp. Therefore it would appear TSI has a strong effect on ocean cycles. I expect, if the hypothesis here is correct, that solar effects will be able to predict ocean cycles and ENSO.

          Uncertainties? We are talking about a linkage between two poorly measured and disputed time series (TSI, surface temp), so of course there are mammoth uncertainties. If it was obvious and certain, it would have discovered long ago. What is new here is (1) noticing a delay and (2) hypothesizing that since it is synchronized to the Sun, is too long and sudden to be heat propagation in oceans, and heat accumulation from TSI is too weak to explain global warming by an order of magnitude, that surface temperatures are in fact mainly due to a separate force from the Sun, changes in which are preceded by changes in TSI by one sunspot cycle. How does one express uncertainty on a hypothesis?

          Yes I expect a La Nina to come along soon. So what does the surface temp do in the year or two after that? See prediction.

          This is just science in action. New hypothesis appears to explain observed phenomena well. As if happens an event distinguishing it from the CO2 theory is coming up soon, so we can predict rather than just hindcast. Either way, we sit and see what happens 🙂

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            Agnostic

            Thank yu v much for your response. Honestly I think the theory and thinking behind it fascinating.

            FWIW I don’t find your simplified posts too mathy, and my maths is rudimentary at best. I do think an extremely consise summary, something no longer than a standard a blog post with links to more in depth examinations would be invaluable.

            I think discussion of uncertainties is really useful. You pointed out some….so you could say provided that data sets used are roughly right, then you would expect such and such effect. From what I understand from a cursory reading it is a fairly robust prediction (ie not depending on small variations within range of measurement uncertainties).

            It seems the thing to look for strong support of your theory is that a) a cooling were to occur that did not relate to La Niña type conditions, b) if a La Niña were to occur and the return to neutral conditions were significantly prolonged.

            Does that sound about right?

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    John

    Doesn’t seem to explain Ocean Heat Content very well.

    Will you be making any attempt to explain the heat accumulating in the oceans?

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    • #

      John: No, it ignores ocean heat.

      Ocean heat data has much higher uncertainties than advertised, so is essentially useless on the time scales we have measured it for. Ever wondered how they can measure ocean temperature changes to 0.004 degrees, yet air temperature only to 0.1 degrees? Why not just deploy Argo on land? Drive around in trucks and measure temperature at random times and places, perhaps with Argo sensors in bowls of water. Ought to do much better than the satellites. If you believe that…

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        John

        “Ocean heat data has much higher uncertainties than advertised”

        Can you cite the peer-reviewed paper that talks about this uncertainty and what errors Levitus makes?

        http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/

        Ever wondered how they can measure ocean temperature changes to 0.004 degrees, yet air temperature only to 0.1 degrees?

        No I don’t because I expect your assertion is incorrect.

        But I would be really really happy if you could cite the peer-reviewed science to correct my understanding.

        🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂

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          John, happy days. ARGO measured errors of 0.5C, and up to 2C. “100 times larger than advertised.”

          Hadfield 2007

          R. E. Hadfield, N. C. Wells, S. A. Josey, and J. J-M. Hirschi (2007) On the accuracy of North Atlantic temperature and heat storage fields from Argo, Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 112, C01009, doi:10.1029/2006JC003825

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            I was once asked to design an oven controller which was supposed to be accurate to 0.01C I got them to change the spec to something more manageable as now even the sensors were that accurate.

            And I doubt the Argo buoys are any better. (although any [snip] can say a sensor has whatever accuracy they want to tell gullible people it has).

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            David Smith

            Oh dear John,
            I think you just got pwned…

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            John

            Joanne you failed to address my question. Your response does not highlight any error with Levitus and if you follow your own link and read the paper they state:

            Errors of this magnitude suggest that the Argo dataset is of use for investigating variability in mixed layer heat storage on interannual timescales.

            🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂

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              John, to point out the bleeding obvious. If actual ARGO errors are measured at 100 times (or even 10 times) that claimed, it doesn’t matter which year the paper was published, unless of course, Levitus names a more recent paper that supercedes Hadfield and shows measurements fit his theoretical calculation.

              Apparently you have nothing, but a quote of a weak “suggested” caveat in a paper which is the mere washy opinion of authors in a field where not much gets past peer review if it doesn’t contain some paean paragraph to the Gods of the Climate Gravy Train.

              I quote hard numbers. Observations. You are observing a paper, while real scientists observe the ocean.

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                John

                The Levitus paper uses observations Joanne.

                [Snip]

                [You are introducing red herrings – Fly]

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              • #

                Not the right kind of observations John.

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                Mark Stoval

                ” … authors in a field where not much gets past peer review if it doesn’t contain some paean paragraph to the Gods of the Climate Gravy Train.”

                This is a great description of the whole “CO2 will fry us” myth. How can we have real science if the journals will not publish honest science but only the fake post-normal “science”. Karl Popper must be spinning in his grave.

                I think this topic itself is worthy of a post by you.

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            John

            Oh, and I would have been really surprised if the 2007 paper found fault with the 2012 paper.

            😉 😉 😉 😉 😉

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              Cynical RB

              you didn’t actually link to it.

              Ignoring the real error is not proof that the measurements were precise.

              UAH and RSS troposphere measurements come from sampling of the whole atmosphere up to the polar regions. The UAH guys estimate an error for monthly anomalies of 0.1 degree.

              The Argo buoys are one per an area the size of Bass Strait measuring 3 times a month. That has a spread of 2 degrees across its surface so one Argo buoy can not measure the average temperature on that day to 0.1 degree let alone the monthly average with three dips. Average temperatures to 2000m depth are even less accurate.

              A quick read scan of the paper has first.

              Argo profiling float data that have been corrected for systematic errors provide data through a nominal depth of1750–2000 m for the post-2004 period on near-global basis.

              So not only is the trend of the order of 1/100 of a degree over a decade but corrected.

              The actual error analysis is not light reading but it looks like the usual pretending that the sampling was perfectly random around the mean. Absolutely no mention of the Hadfield paper.

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                Exactly, Cynical RB. The CTD (conductivity–temperature–depth) sensors are good to within 0.005C apparently, then the usual argument about sampling a population to find its mean, with the error as 1/sqrt(number of samples). Drives total error in the mean estimate down to about 0.004C.

                So why not just use those CTD sensors to sample the surface air temperature through time and space, to estimate the global mean surface air temperature? The same argument applies, yet is obviously ludicrous because it is 100 times more precise than either the fixed thermometer network or the satellites.

                Warmists never mention Hadfield, AFAIK.

                On the other hand, Argo is stinky: search on “limbaugh” at http://joannenova.com.au/2010/10/is-the-western-climate-establishment-corrupt-part-3/. Josh Willis publicly admits to arbitrarily changing the Argo OHC results in response to political forces.

                Until all the processing from raw data to final product is made public and is reproducible by others, the Argo and Leviticus results are not science and are not to be trusted. (The Royal Society’s motto: Trust no one.) Given their political background, the Argo OHC results may well be a warmist fantasy.

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                AndyG55

                Furthermore. OHC as measured by ARGO bares no resemblance to the model projection

                http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/ocean/argo-ocean-heat.gif

                And certainly isn’t global

                https://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/figure-114.png

                You can see by this”coverage” data, than anything before ARGO is just imagination or model based.

                https://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/figure-42.png

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                RB

                I like this part from the link, David.

                Willis decided to recalibrate the Argo data by omitting readings from some floats that seemed to be giving readings that were too cold.

                And then the spread is treated as purely random. Hopefully, the real statisticians are in bed now and don’t have the misfortune to read this.

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        Roy Hogue

        Ever wondered how they can measure ocean temperature changes to 0.004 degrees, yet air temperature only to 0.1 degrees?

        I’ve wondered why they even worry about 0.004 degrees. Maybe their instruments can resolve temperature to 0.004 but why worry about it? Excessive precision is a form of innumeracy. And it isn’t useful.

        They remind me of the Star Trek character, Lt. Commander Data, who if asked how long something would take would recite off the answer in hours or even days, right down to the last second. Of course, if you’re an android like Data, it just rolls out of your computation and you recite it without thinking about it. Perhaps climate scientists should do a little more thinking about their problem. It couldn’t hurt.

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          Manfred

          I’ve wondered why they even worry about 0.004 degrees.

          In AGW and/or UN Climate Change™, where faith and/or political motive transcend science, being able to screech ‘evah’ becomes an important part of self-validation.

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          Greg Cavanagh

          If they rounded 0.004 to the nearest whole number they’d get 0.000

          It’s a trivial and silly number to advertise, let alone base public policy on.

          41

    • #
      Geoff Sherrington

      John,
      When a store has a sale and the missus says “that’s record cheap, why don’t we go and buy some” I think about whether it really so cheap, or simply adjusted and advertised. If the item is expensive, like into double digit dollars I have been known to take a look at prices in other stores.
      So it is with Ocean Heat Content. The changes claimed over the past decades are really minute and a significant technical challenge to measure instrumentally let alone account for what naturally caries in the remote ocean expanses. I mean varies, dental appointment on Tuesday, but a neat typo.
      Climate research is notorious for optimism when expressing uncertainty in measurement. I for one accept the possibility of change in OHC but I am far from accepting that the present advertised extent is real. Just keep an eye on its progress.
      Geoff

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    John

    Jeepers. TSI and temps don’t seem to fit very well.

    http://woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1979/plot/gistemp/from:1979/trend/plot/pmod/from:1979/offset:-1366/scale:1

    You’ve got a lot riding on “nuclear bomb testing, aerosols or [something]” but I don’t see any modelling whatsoever to calculate its impact.

    When do you expect to publish in a respected science journal rather than on Joanne’s website?

    🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂

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      Matt Bennett

      Don’t hold your breath John!

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        Robk

        It seems you missed David’s comment at 2.1.3.1.
        There you’ll find the answer.

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        James Bradley

        John and Matt,

        Shouldn’t you guys be putting your resumes together – after all it’s a tough jobs market out there for redundant modelers.

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        James Bradley

        There you go boys – just follow the link:

        https://www.humanservices.gov.au/customer/services/centrelink/jobsearch-facilities

        You might need to adjust the search parameters – when I typed “two out of work climate dudes” the spell checker kept overwriting ‘climate duds’.

        Go figure.

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        Winston

        Matt and John,

        A closed mind is certainly a very hard thing to lose, my friends.

        If one wanted to be provided with evidentiary support to justify one’s scepticism of all things CAGW, one need only read your comments above. You demonstrably have no passion for the truth, no desire to broaden your understanding whatsoever. Regardless of the validity of David’s hypothesis, it is an interesting take on possible mechanisms involved in the earth/sun relationship, and there certainly is enough room to drive a truck through between projections and observations in respect of your particular pet CO2 theory.

        You guys clearly seek to merely reinforce your own beliefs, a confidence in which appears founded on increasingly shaky grounds. The smell of fear is almost palpable.

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          John

          Winston, TSI has been studies many times before.

          For David to do it again but this time ignore physics and simply use math is basic curve fitting exercise.

          My mind is open, but I don’t ignore decades of known physics because it doesn’t agree with my ideology.

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            You didn’t read the post, did you John?

            The case above is a series of physical arguments and observations. No math (except in explaining what motivated me to look for physical evidence of a delay) and no curve fitting.

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            James Bradley

            John,

            You wrote “For David to do it again but this time ignore physics and simply use math is basic curve fitting exercise.”

            Einstein used only math to theorise gravitation waves…

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            Winston

            John,

            TSI varies little, the various wavelengths within that figure however vary quite a lot, and different wavelengths have different penetration and effects within the climate system, for example EUV effects on Ozone, and also shorter wavelengths better penetration of oceans and therefore differential contribution to ocean heating.

            Reliance on TSI as a homogenised number to discount various a sects of the solar influence is at best naive, at worst disingenuous.

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      Andrew McRae

      It doesn’t fit very well, but it’s not as bad as you make it out to be.
      TSI is roughly proportional to SSN during each cycle, so we should expect that relation to be true between cycles too. There is other evidence of solar activity affecting the climate. Therefore the SSN can be used as a proxy not just for TSI but for general external heating power. Since power sets the rate of change of temperature, its integral should be the same shape as temperature. However you have to use the SSN anomaly from longer term average under the assumption that the temperature would not change if the SSN was held constant at that average level, and the average of last couple hundred years is about 50.
      http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst3gl/from:1850/mean:72/mean:12/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1850/mean:72/offset:-50/integral/scale:0.00004/mean:12
      Not a perfect match because there are other factors affecting surface temperature, but it isn’t as bad as you make it out to be.

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        Winston

        One of the main logical fallacies alarmists rely upon is that, because they propose one over-riding driver of climate that supersedes all others, that to refute them one must propose another sole driver to replace it or else their hypothesis allegedly stands. While that is very clever, it not only reverses the onus of proof in a totally unscientific way, but also ignores the more likely scenario that climate drivers are multiple, a mixture of independent and interdependent variables, and ranging from galactic to solar to atmospheric to oceanic to microscopic in scale.

        The devil is definitely hidden in the detail, and the CAGW zombie corpse continues to wander the earth powered by the bewildering complexity of climate, relentless propagandising and proselytising, and the malleability of our painfully short, cobbled together, excessively adjusted, overly homogenised, and inconsistently measured observations.

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          Mark Stoval

          ” … ignores the more likely scenario that climate drivers are multiple, a mixture of independent and interdependent variables, and ranging from galactic to solar to atmospheric to oceanic to microscopic in scale.”

          Agreed. That is a wonderful description of the strategy of the alarmist con-artists “scientists”. It is completely non-scientific.

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        John

        That’s sunspot number not TSI and where’s you’re 11 year delay?

        Volcanoes, aerosols and 200 years of known physics about greenhouse gases suddenly disappear.

        🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂

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          Andrew McRae

          You don’t have time for trolling, kid. Have you cleaned your room and done your homework before Monday?

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          Winston

          The multiplicity of smiley faces is juvenile. Please stop that-it’s irritating.

          If you had read the rest of David’s 20 odd posts on this subject, you would know that his starting point was the simplistic model alarmists such as yourself rely upon to propagate the mythology that CO2′s effect within an atmosphere is entirely a simple radiation in/out model. He has worked within the accepted parameters of “the physics” of your “science” and points out there are several factors that are not taken account for in your basic model, for example the effect rising CO2 has upon the height of the water vapour emission layer, and therefore its efficiency in losing heat into space is increased via another mechanism YOU HAVE NOT ACCOUNTED FOR. Am I speaking slowly enough for you? Therefore David doesn’t ignore centuries of “the physics” but instead proposes modification of the model utilising known physics to make it more compatible to observations.

          If your mind isn’t closed, John, you certainly seem not to understand that concept David is proposing. Either that, or you are deliberately trolling to divert attention away from what David’s hypothesis proposes. If it is the latter, my observation is that it is not working. Just the opposite in fact.

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          Popeye26

          John,

          What’s with the smiley faces all the time – it indicates a lack of maturity, not a sense of humour.

          BTW – take a trip out to Alice Springs one crystal clear summers night, look up into the sky, then come back and explain to all and sundry here about how our planet is a greenhouse.

          Cheers,

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    “Because the delay was the length of a solar cycle, and the notches were synchronized to the Sun, the cause of the delay wasn’t on Earth — but inside the Sun.”

    Less likely a delay in the Sun and more likely a cycle outside of the Sun that influences it (such as intragalactic-space plasma current-transmission lines), but whatever makes it easier for you to get your paper published and/or conceptualize with the current models in Solar physics, as the case may be.

    Good work. It’s a step forward.

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      StefanL

      It’s hard to see what influences outside the solar system could have an 11 year cycle.
      On the other hand, the 11-year solar cycle is suspiciously similar to the orbital period of the dominant planet in the solar system.
      I would love to see David apply his Optimal Fourier Transform to analysing the combined gravitational effect of all the planets on the sun’s core, to see if that matches the known deviations (duration, SSN, rise time etc) of the solar cycle from a pure 11-year sinusoid.

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        Yes, but, with all due and sincere respect, this is an argument from ignorance (“hard for me to see, therefore probably doesn’t exist”).

        I’ve got to go at the moment, but I’ll get back to this when I can.

        Short answer, though, is variable electricity delivered by long-range plasma structures to our Heliopause.

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          Peter C

          this is an argument from ignorance (“hard for me to see, therefore probably doesn’t exist”).

          Good point,

          I did not understand the rest of it.

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            Mike

            Like… if central banks stop printing money for a country or other financial instrument, then it proaby does not exist.

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          AndyG55

          “therefore probably doesn’t exist”

          Where does he say that ?

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    graphicconception

    Thanks for another interesting post.

    I can’t comment on the applicability of your theory to the climate but as a one time electrical engineer who has dabbled with Fourier Transforms and digital and analogue filters I don’t see why you have to make excuses for the delay in a filter whether notch or otherwise.

    I also don’t know why you are bothering at all with anything non-causal. It won’t exist in the real world so can’t be affecting the climate.

    If you want to Fourier Transform a signal and end up with 0.1Hz resolution, say, you will need to sample the signal for 10 seconds. That 10 seconds is the reciprocal of the 0.1Hz and it applies to zoom transforms as well as base-band ones. So, there will necessarily be a 10 second delay before you can get the answer. It has to be like that because even after 5 seconds the algorithm will not be able to guess what happens in the next 5 seconds. You might get the other half of the 0.1Hz signal but it might just repeat exactly in which case the low frequency will be 0.2Hz.

    The same information theory applies to both analogue and digital filters. To my simple brain it makes sense that you can’t measure the amplitude of something unless you have a whole one to measure.

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    • #

      That’s why they invented Laplace transforms!

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        graphicconception

        A Fourier Transform is a slice through a Laplace Transform. It encapsulates the part that “does the work”. I don’t see how invoking Laplace alters the logic that you need a whole one before you can expect it to be detected.

        Imagine you have the first half cycle of my 0.1Hz signal. You might think that could be enough to derive the second half. It might, but then again, you could be wrong. The first half might just repeat. In which case you actually had a 0.2Hz signal with harmonics.

        It seems to be a fundamental condition to me.

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      Roy Hogue

      To my simple brain it makes sense that you can’t measure the amplitude of something unless you have a whole one to measure.

      Not so simple I think. That was always my worry when we used the Fast Fourier Transform for signal analysis. It’s a real problem without any kind of realistic solution when you’re measuring something unknown. I put prominent warnings about this in our user instructions.

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    jim

    Very interesting. Seems to be matching into the old photon theory of transfer of heat from the interior of luminous bodies, that I heard of in the 50-60 era. But that was dealing with weapon research.
    On to the less theoretical, orbit. Alignments, and gaseous bodies, and such. I don’t mean electrical earth, but a modified if there is a gasoues body, why is it treated as a ball? Why is our orbit treated as a circle? It’s easier in the math, I know, why is the output treated as no consequence to the earth. Just as in the distance from a campfire, closer warmer, just as even in standing in front , waves of energy pass by, convection, air currents. And space isn’t empty, otherwise no convection current. No heat transfer. And deep space between the galaxies isn’t empty, there are things that fall into our gravity well every day, could this be feeding the fire?
    But interesting, keep going..

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    The delay varies according to what metric you are using. For example the delay for the RSS TLT is about 12 years – and the delay in NH minimum sea ice volume is about 21 years .
    The millennial solar activity peak was at about 1991- the associated RSS peak was at 2003.
    .
    For a simple explanation see http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-epistemology-of-climate-forecasting.html
    and more complete review at http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2014/07/climate-forecasting-methods-and-cooling.html

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    Unmentionable

    This series has been a fascinating, I hope you’ve actually got something tangible in coming years. Love how it turns to astronomy as our ‘environment’, as just before I studied geology I read a small stack of books on the sun, and other stars, and was even more interested in that stuff than in the earth. One book in particular I remember was called, “Daytime Star“. I picked it up in hardback from a bargain bin at a supermarket for $1, and it pretty much blew my mind completely at that time, in a very good way. I’ve read many more since, so I’m going to enjoy this trip as it unfolds from here, so best of luck David and Jo.

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    Roy Hogue

    Interesting — a theory actually based on observation. Can you do that in this postnormal science world of ours? 😉

    But one complaint, David, you’re too thorough. I have to spend hours going through this stuff to even begin to get all the details. I should have studied hard science instead of computers. 🙂

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      Roy Hogue

      More math, numerical analysis would have been a smart move all those years ago.

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        Roy Hogue

        And it’s about time for someone to put forth a theory based on actual observation. I may kid around about that but it’s got to be out there for everyone to see. And you’ve been able to do it.

        I can’t hold a candle to your expertise but I can recognize it when I see it. So may I congratulate you on the huge effort and also on having the nerve to stand up against your critics who are bound to come out of every dark corner of “climate Science” to hound you to death about what you postulate.

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      Roy, I boiled it down to just a series of observations by others — no math, just climate physics! The only heavy math above is in the asterisked part, explaining the somewhat serendipitous motivation for looking for a delay and how it fitted with the math-heavy old posts.

      The point of this post was to make the case for a delay in non-math terms.

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        Roy Hogue

        The point of this post was to make the case for a delay in non-math terms.

        And you did, although there is quite a lot of it.

        But I remember differential equations that had me spinning around in my office chair. I think I have enough math background for that but it’s hard to dredge it all up after so many years of total neglect because computer programming never made me use any of it.

        In any case, I mean the congratulations. Boiling down the complex into something simple isn’t an easy job. Or maybe I should confess — it’s not an easy job for me.

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    CC Reader

    YeeHawwww. I had almost given up hope… Congratulations Dr.

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    doubtingdave

    OK , from a layman’s point of view I have two points I’d like to ask in order to gain a better understanding , first why is the maunder cycle described as a eleven year cycle rather than a twenty two year cycle , when it takes approx eleven years ( a linear trend ) to go from maunder minimum to maximum ??? . Secondely , is the fact that we have had both strong and week solar cycles in comparatively recent times a big help to understanding relatively small effects from changes in the activity on the sun a big advantage , considering solar cycle 24 is said to be the weekest cycle for approx two hundred years ?

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    • #

      Good points.

      The full solar cycle is 22 years, meaning the magnetic field strength waxes and wanes and takes about 22 years to come back to where it started. But the number of sunspots and most effects of the solar cycle depend on the power of the magnetic field squared, which is thus on an 11 year cycle ((-x)^2 = x^2). People who observe only the square of the magnetic field strength tend to think of the solar cycle as 11 years, because that is how it appears to them.

      Btw, I was surprised when talking to an eminent climate scientist a couple of years ago that they did not know this — he thought everything solar went on an 11 year cycle.

      The decreasing strengths of the current and maybe future cycles, after a delay as described here, will bring in increasing global cooling.

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        Mark Stoval

        “Btw, I was surprised when talking to an eminent climate scientist a couple of years ago that they did not know this — he thought everything solar went on an 11 year cycle.”

        Given the state of “climate science” that is not all that surprising to me.

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    lemiere jacques

    if the temperature dataset is wrong for any reason….

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    Bob Weber

    I wish to convey my utmost respect for the dedication and perseverance you and Jo exhibited for the past three years in doing this research. I can relate, as my solar model work has been ongoing for two years.

    If it matters to you, Dr. Svalgaard endorsed this TSI reconstruction as of a few days ago, the brown curve, as he said here http://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/02/08/a-tsi-driven-solar-climate-model/#comment-2140574:

    If I can find the time series I’ll forward a copy to you.

    Last year’s El Nino started in March, only one month after the smoothed TSI peak of solar cycle #24 on Feb 6, the day SORCE measured the highest value during it’s service life since 2003. http://lasp.colorado.edu/data/sorce/tsi_data/daily/sorce_tsi_L3_c24h_latest.txt

    It wasn’t a coincidence that temps in 2015 were warm when SORCE TSI for 2015 was at the highest yearly average since 2003:

    Year TSI
    2015 1361.4321
    2014 1361.3966
    2013 1361.3587
    2016 1361.2924
    2012 1361.2413
    2011 1361.0752
    2003 1361.0292
    2004 1360.9192
    2010 1360.8027
    2005 1360.7518
    2006 1360.6735
    2007 1360.5710
    2009 1360.5565
    2008 1360.5382

    Which means that TSI during last year was more important to temperatures last year than TSI from 11 years ago.

    Lower TSI from 2004 was not the reason 2015 was warm. Sorry.

    Recent reconstructions are most certainly imperfect, but they’re all we have. The first one below fills in the missing SORCE data going back to 2000. Interesting articles on how the composites were stitched together at http://ceres.larc.nasa.gov/science_information.php?page=TSIdata, and https://www.pmodwrc.ch/pmod.php?topic=tsi/composite/SolarConstant.

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    • #

      Bob, I am hypothesizing a delay of one sunspot cycle, which is eleven years on average.

      As it happens, the current sunspot cycle (24) is running about 13+ years, so the effect of the fall in underlying TSI around 2004 (the date is uncertain to a year or so) would makes itself felt around 2017 – 2022. Still too early.

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        Andrew McRae

        > “…the current sunspot cycle (24) is running about 13+ years, so the effect of the fall in underlying TSI around 2004 …”

        Hang on. Isn’t the relevant delay the length of the cycle that was in progress at the time the TSI was observed?
        Bob’s talking about 2004 TSI, which is in SC23, which had a length of 13.6 years, which added onto June 2004 is Jan 2018.
        Still at least two years to go, same end result but maybe not for the reason you gave. Is that how the Delay is supposed to behave?

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          Andrew: 2004 + sunspot-cycle-length(23) has already passed, so it’s not that one.

          So let’s see what happens at 2004 + sunspot-cycle-length(24).

          The observations above only tell us that the delay is about 11 years, from which we deduce it is a sunspot cycle length, but which one precisely? We don’t know the exact mechanism and we don’t know how the Sun works, so we are guessing.

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            Andrew McRae

            Eh? Hmmm. Lemme walk through this and you can tell me where we differ.

            If you average the monthly TSI observations for 2004, you get the 2004 average of TSI.
            The time co-ordinate for that TSI average is the average of the dates, which will be mid-year, 2004.5.
            Year 2004.5 was in SC23 according to the paper I referenced, and the same paper says that cycle was 13.6y long.
            The addition should not be controversial: 2004.5 + 13.6 = 2018.1
            So that time has not passed yet, it is still in our future. Maybe it will turn out the right rule to use is Len(SC(t)+1), but we don’t have to eliminate Len(SC(t)) as a rule yet.
            Where do we differ in that thought process?

            Agreed a lot of this is guesswork. I’m just trying to establish what your guess was exactly and it sounded strange to have the mystery climate force delay determined by the present rather than the past.
            Perhaps a model of that delay is like a tape recorder with two rotating drums, a write head above the unspooling drum, and a read head above the uptake drum. If you move the read head away from the write head then you have increased the effective delay between writing and writing a state, or you can move the write head closer to the read head and the delay decreases. The write head is where we observed past TSI and the read head is where the mystery force manifests as additional temperature change today. Moving the read head can alter the effective delay of a previously recorded state with no break in causality.

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              Andrew: Figures vary slightly. I see len(23) as 12.4 years, from a composite TSI of the main datasets.

              The date of the fall in 2004 is approx. Eyeballing the graph, late 2002 to beginning of 2004 is mostly likely period, pretty sure it would have been then, so say 2003.25.

              In any case, the only really strong part of the hypothesis (from fitting 2 centuries of data) is that the delay averages 11 years — and is therefore almost certainly one sunspot cycle. I guess it is the length of the cycle following the fall in TSI, i.e. the prevailing length from 2004 to 2017 or so, but it might not be.

              Modeling various fits of schemes of delays gives spookily good fits or quite poor fits at different times, on yearly scales, over the last two decades. But which TSI do you use? And, even, which temp? Reconstructions and measurements of TSI are all over the place from 1979 to 2003 even, so it is far from clear that anything is gained by analyzing TSI vs temperature. The data is not good enough, yet.

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        Bob Weber

        As it stands, this cycle started in 2008.9 (Nov 2008) according to http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/stp/space-weather/solar-data/solar-indices/sunspot-numbers/cycle-data/table_cycle-dates_maximum-minimum.txt, almost 7 and 1/2 years old now.

        ftp://ftp.swpc.noaa.gov/pub/weekly/Predict.txt indicates solar minimum from 2019-2020, about 11-12 years. There were three cycles during the 1600’s Maunder Minimum with long lengths of 15, 13.5, and 14 years, and one stretch, going through the Dalton Minimum, cycles #4-6, with lengths of 13.6, 12.3, and 12.7 years. Only three other cycles exceeded 12 years, and they were separated in time from one another.

        Cycle #23 was 12.2 years long, so it’s possible this weaker cycle could easily be longer than the NOAA-predicted 11-12 years.

        But, if the notch delay model is predicated on the notch occurring at the end of the solar cycle, if I’m understanding you correctly, then you have obviously found the timing & temperature effects of the average inter-cycle low TSI trough that occurs at every solar minimum, which is also when SSTs have typically taken a dive, between every two cycles except #21-22, until temps rose again after TSI increased again from higher sunspot activity during the rising phase of the following cycle.

        The drop in SSTs during solar minimums are evident in this graphic, which is what I started with as a basis for my research: http://climate4you.com/images/SunspotsMonthlySIDC%20and%20HadSST3%20GlobalMonthlyTempSince1960%20WithSunspotPeriodNumber.gif.

        I probably glossed over the part where the notch delay time depends on the length of the solar cycle. A variable notch delay period different for each cycle makes sense because there are varying cycle lengths, obviously.

        When does the model start/initialize? Do you have a sliding notch delay that moves in time? If we don’t really know what the actual current cycle length will be until it happens, then won’t there be some uncertainty in forecasting one cycle later from today?

        But what I don’t understand, is how far back in time do you decide today that you have to go from 2015 to account for the high TSI contribution needed from those x number of years ago to get high temps in 2015? 2002? How do you decide what amount of time to use for your model forecasts in any given year? How can you decide which solar cycle length you should be using at any given time, and when and how might that decision change as time progresses through the solar cycles and the lengths change, and when/how do you apply that?

        It seems that in order for your system to work continuously, the average notch delay time of 11 years would by necessity have to be applied continuously as time goes on to the TSI record of 11 years ago, and onward, to attain today’s temperature and onward. In other words it can’t be static – it has to be dynamic.

        If we apply the 11-year notch delay at the start of SC#24, in late 2008, we end up in 2020, at or near the next solar minimum. Do your modeled temps for 2020 exclusively rely only on the TSI from the year 2008, not on what the sun will be doing in 2020 at all, or do you mean the notch model incorporates all the TSI for the 11-12 years prior to the predicted temperatures, in other words, the cumulative TSI from 2008-2020?

        I use continuous accumulation above the warming threshold I established from analyzing the above SST/SSN image data. It works, and it’s telling me the same thing your model is telling you – cooling in about the same time-frame. Curious.

        My model is based on heat accumulating in the ocean during higher TSI periods, a fact for which there is copious evidence. There is no mysterious 11-12 year solar delay effect originating from the sun and not the Earth that warms the Earth, that would have had to thus far manage to go undetected and unmeasured. TSI directly warms the ocean at depths proportional to the amount and duration of energy in the sunlight in realtime only, and it takes a fair amount of time for that energy to make it’s way back to the surface, and during that time new solar energy is added in in a continuous process. That’s how solar accumulation in the ocean works. It only works when solar activity is sufficiently high for it to counteract the ongoing natural continuous cooling of SSTs. There is a breakeven point. Below the breakeven point the ocean goes into energy deficit and cools.

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          Bob: Your TSI-SST graphic shows the last five TSI peaks — three with SST peaks, two near SST troughs. The period 1950 – 1980 is always weird, perhaps for other factors (e.g. nukes, aerosols). How about the century before that? Not sure the relationship is too strong.

          I’ve tried various timing schemes for delays in the modeling, but while there are some apparent successes the TSI data is not good enough to get an indication of how it works, or even be sure it does work. See comment 23.2.1.1.1.

          Initialization: I usually gave the model runs 15 – 20 years (i.e. a bit more than one delay) of run-up time before matching to temperature, but once you go that far back in time you are into heavily disputed TSI data.

          Yes, the delay should be dynamic. The modeling I reported all used a fixed delay, and found that 10.7 years of delay best fitted the last two centuries since 1770 (the SIDC sunspot data begins in 1749, + a start-up of 21 years) (though a year either way did very well too). It’s an average. Ultimately I couldn’t conclude more than the delay is probably a sunspot cycle, but what function of the past and present sunspot cycle lengths I do not know. Again, stymied by poor TSI data, and to some extent poor temp data.

          While integrating TSI might give a good indication of force X, it is NOT the accumulation of TSI heat in the oceans that is driving global surface temperature. Even waiting for steady state in a million years, a radiation balance shows that TSI variation is just too small to explain what is going on — see the “Low-Noise Fourier Analysis” section and equation (1) in post 21. (Basically the extra OLR necessitated by a typical TSI increase does not require a big enough rise in surface temp to radiate it off to space, even taking water vapor amplification into account.)

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            Bob Weber

            David, by visual inspection of the SSN/SST image, it’s clear that the temperature response of one cycle washes out by the end of the next cycle, and any net change in the SST measured at the solar minimum depends on the strength of the immediately preceding cycle. You found the same thing.

            Yes, older solar and SST data get iffier the further back in time we go. I waited a whole year for the new SSNs to finally come out last summer before I attempted to fine-tune my model pre-1947, because I knew of the contentiousness of the old series, and I also needed the very best solar data, as any yearly errors propagate forward in an accumulation model.

            Examine the SSN/SST image again. See the rises and peaks in the smoothed SST line that coincide with each solar cycle peak, and also notice the SST dips that occur at each solar minimum. That tells me the current solar cycle always has more influence on SSTs than the previous solar cycle.

            SSTs trended downward during SC#20, and then trended upward during SC#21 and beyond. The fact that SC#20 was weaker than SC#21 is the one and only clue that triggered my realization that there is a level of solar activity below which SSTs fall, and above which they rise – a warming/cooling threshold. All manner of good has come from that insight.

            We can directly see from that image that there is accumulation of heat in the ocean during high TSI periods, as SSTs parallel OHC. How long does it take for the heat deposited by a day’s sunlight at 100 meters deep to reach the surface? If the heat at 100 meters isn’t gone in one day, then there must be heat accumulating in the ocean. Then the question becomes, how much solar activity, in TSI, is just enough to just maintain the temperature? My realization of and solution for that question started with that SSN/SST image.

            The only way that your assertion could be correct, that high TSI is not accumulating in the ocean, is iff the observed concepts I just illustrated are violated. You can only be right if you can prove that, without fail, the heat from sunlight penetrating to depths below the surface every day leaves the ocean during the same day it got there. If you can’t prove that, you must accept there is solar accumulation of heat in the ocean.

            Likewise, if you are going to claim changes in TSI aren’t enough to drive the recorded temperature increases in realtime, you’d also have to show why when SSTs are highest at solar maximums when the cycle TSI is highest, there is some other reason for the warmth at that time other than the high TSI at that time. Those are major hurdles that cannot be overcome using data, because ALL the data supports what I said.

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              Bob Weber

              “there is some other reason for the warmth at that time other than the high TSI at that time.”

              and from the build up of heat during the immediately preceding high TSI years, as was the recent case in 2015. This list is updated every morning, so the 2016 figure changes daily too:

              Year TSI
              2015 1361.4321
              2014 1361.3966
              2013 1361.3587
              2016 1361.2933
              2012 1361.2413
              2011 1361.0752
              2003 1361.0292
              2004 1360.9192
              2010 1360.8027
              2005 1360.7518
              2006 1360.6735
              2007 1360.5710
              2009 1360.5565
              2008 1360.5382

              http://lasp.colorado.edu/data/sorce/tsi_data/daily/sorce_tsi_L3_c24h_latest.txt

              http://lasp.colorado.edu/data/sorce/total_solar_irradiance_plots/images/tim_level3_tsi_24hour_3month_640x480.png

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                Bob,
                The variation of TE TSI is not a perfect sine wave, so does not cancel out completely, only nearly so. TE TSI is always a little bit (about 0.2 W/m2 = 0.015%) larger than 1AU TSI. But what you forget to take into account is that sometimes data is missing and that can make big difference. Imagine that in a year all data when TE TSI was larger than 1AU TSI were missing, then for the remaining data the difference would be a huge 28 W/m2 = 2%. Because the amount of missing data is different for different years, the differences vary wildly, as you noticed.

                You don’t see this for F10.7 because that series has no missing data.

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              David and Bob,

              Between you, you have both pointed to an issue that I was already aware of.

              TSI changes are not enough to drive the recorded temperature changes in realtime but cloudiness changes are.

              Cloudiness changes skew the balance between El Nino and La Nina but the basic Enso cycle is 2 to 5 years and the multidecadal PDO (Pacific Decadal Oscillation) cycle has El Nino dominant for 30 years and La Nina dominant for the next 30 years.

              In my view solar variations across multiple solar cycles only become fully apparent across successive 60 year PDO cycles so as to produce upward stepping when the sun is becoming more active (clouds reducing) and downward stepping when the sun is less active (clouds increasing).

              So, you can have lesser solar induced oscillations within a single solar cycle so that clouds are less at solar maximum and more at solar minimum and SSTs would be affected but the global effect would be suppressed or amplified by the 2 to 5 year ENSO and 30/60 year PDO.

              The effect of solar cycle 20 is interesting because it was a single low activity cycle amongst several high activity cycles yet even so it produced enough of an effect to cause concerns about global cooling for a while.

              I believe that it only had such an effect because it was in phase with a negative (cool) PDO and the effect of cycles 21 to 23 was enhanced because they were in phase with a positive (warm) PDO.

              I have previously considered the variable interactions between solar and oceanic cycles here:

              http://www.newclimatemodel.com/the-real-link-between-solar-energy-ocean-cycles-and-global-temperature/

              I think the negative PDO amplifying the effect of low solar cycle 20 is a better explanation for the 1950 / 1980 period than invoking nukes or aerosols.

              For those reasons I suggest that we may see a downward step in global temperature following the next La Nina. The quiet sun in cycle 24 should be amplified by the negative phase of the PDO.

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                Bob Weber

                All TSI-driven SST warming/cooling and ocean heat content accumulation is ultimately expressed in the AMO, PDO, and ENSO records.

                There is more evaporation during high TSI periods and following high TSI periods, as there was in 2015 (see my first comment), and there is significantly less evaporation under low TSI periods, such as during solar minimums and longer-term solar slowdowns, that have more droughts.

                I watch the Earth’s evaporation every day, recording the images, tracking TSI and other solar indices – it’s so predictable and amazing to see it happen – low evaporation and clouds under low TSI vs high evaporation and more clouds under high TSI. In fact I’m putting together a video that demonstrates it.

                December 2015 was a prime example, because when TSI trended back up again over the warming line, huge plumes of evaporation developed off the northern tropical zone and that energy and moisture devastated wide areas of the US with deluges, hail, winds, and tornadoes. TSI for the 45 days from Nov 1 2015 to Dec 15 2015 averaged 1361.3706 – above the warming line. The TSI average for the six days ending Dec 15 was 1361.5490, with a peak on the 13th at 1361.6943.

                The same story has repeated itself several times already this year, without fail.

                TSI variations are the most important driver of warming and cooling, followed by secondary UV and particle effects. I think albedo changes significantly during solar minimums, from less evaporation, letting more, but lower energy TSI (insolation) in the ocean, therefore sustaining heat content build-up during the minimum, that releases as TSI adds more energy faster during the rising phase of the next solar cycle, a phenomenon plainly evident in the SSN/SST image.

                Realtime and cumulative TSI variation (insolation) is the most important driver of warming/cooling.

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                Bob,
                “December 2015 was a prime example, because when TSI trended back up again over the warming line”

                This is total nonsense. You should look at the TSI actually received at the Earth that varies 70 W/m2 every year and reaches a maximum every year of 1408 W/m2 on January 1st or so.

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                Bob,

                I accept that more sunlight into the equatorial oceans produces more evaporation and more clouds along the ITCZ and in equatorial regions generally.

                However, more sunlight into the equatorial oceans requires a reduction in global cloud cover in the first place. Without a reduction in global cloud cover the observed TSI variations from the sun are insufficient to account for the global climate changes observed. It has to involve a change in global albedo as well.

                The way to resolve that chicken and egg conundrum is to have solar effects widen the equatorial climate zones by shifting the jet stream tracks poleward in the way I have described elsewhere.

                That poleward shifting reduces total global cloudiness and lets a greater proportion of the available TSI into the oceans.

                You will see increased evaporation and cloudiness around the equator but nonetheless global cloudiness is reduced because of the reduction in the length of the lines of air mass mixing along the jet stream tracks in both hemispheres.

                So. your observations may be perfectly correct but they do not represent the complete global scenario.

                In my view TSI varies a little but the effect is amplified by wavelength and particle effects in the stratosphere where the solar changes alter ozone chemistry differently at different heights and latitudes so as to alter the gradient of tropopause height between equator and poles which allows the tropospheric climate zones to slide to and fro latitudinally beneath the tropopause for an effect on global cloudiness.

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                As usual, Leif is focusing only on raw TSI and is ignoring the proposition that changes in global cloudiness alter the proportion of available TSI that is able to enter the oceans.

                TSI variations are a mere proxy for the more significant changes in global cloudiness and albedo.

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                “As usual, Leif is focusing only on raw TSI and is ignoring the proposition that changes in global cloudiness alter the proportion of available TSI that is able to enter the oceans.”

                Figure 1 in this long thread shows only TSI [and a wrong one to boot], so take your complaint to David.

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                David has made it perfectly clear.

                My complaint concerns you choosing to ignore it.

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                And that is why the title of this thread is
                “Solar TSI leads Earth’s temperature with an 11 year delay”

                Perfectly clear indeed. And perfectly wrong to boot.

                [Replacing the TSI in Fig. 1 with Leif’s reconstruction of TSI makes no difference to the suggestion of a delay, as you can see from the graph at this comment. – DE]

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                Well so it does, as a proxy for an amplifying factor as David has always made clear.

                I would like clarification of your previous comment.

                All that your revision achieves is to reduce the scale of TSI variations.

                It leaves the basic variations intact.

                How, then, does Fig 1 not fit your revision subject only to an adjustment of scale ?

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                Bob Weber

                Leif, I do know what you are referring to, the ‘true earth tsi”, also recorded daily by SORCE/LASP.

                2015 had the highest daily TSI average @1AU compared to the previous years since 2002. During the December TSI @1AU spike, when those days were above the annual average, the higher TSI values for those days helped bring up the yearly average. That’s true for all the days of high TSI @1AU for 2015. So if we attribute the warmth of 2015 to the high TSI at 1AU annual average, then what days of high @1AU TSI from 2015 should be ignored, because of the ‘true earth tsi’ data, as inferred?

                If TSI from 2015 caused the warmth in 2015, then every single TSI @1AU high spike during the year contributed to the warmth of the Earth. I’m saying the Earth responds to the TSI spikes @1AU, the real solar variation, every day. That’s what makes the Earth supersensitive to solar activity, at all time scales, on top of accumulation. I’ll illustrate that more in my paper.

                Leif, can you explain why the true earth tsi annual averages are different than the tsi @ 1AU annual average(s)?
                Doesn’t the orbital variation average out to a zero net change to TSI @1AU over a single year? For example, in 2011, the difference in the annual average is 0.3795, 18% of the min-max annual variation for 2011, and in 2015, the difference was 0.1756, 9% of the min-max variation for 2015. Those are big differences. Why?

                Considering that 2015 was a high TSI year and a warm year, that followed a few other high TSI years during the SC#24 max, can anyone inform us as to an alternative source of extra energy that remotely had a chance of competing with the sun that could counteract and render negligible the (relatively) higher TSI in 2015 and the years leading up to it, that at the same time, will soon have the power (more like the lack of) to cause SSTs to drop during the next solar minimum, as SSTs did during the last minimum, and do most of the time?

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                Bob,
                The yearly averages are the same. But the stable seasonal variation is 100 times larger than your ‘spikes’, so the latter are irrelevant.

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                Bob Weber

                I took a two hour look at True Earth vs 1AU TSI from SORCE, using annual calculations, and now conclude that true earth tsi is the goofiest data I’ve ever seen. Hopefully the table below formats like it looks to me in the editor.

                I removed incomplete TSI data years 2003, 2013, 2014, and 2016, leaving ten years, sorted below in order of highest to lowest 1AU TSI. The overall ten-year difference between TE and 1AU is shown next, with the % changes listed after the difference, calculated as the difference between the two divided by the following baselines, in order,

                1) the maximum difference between TE and 1AU TSI annual ten-year average variations, 2.7216
                2) the maximum difference 1AU TSI annual variations, 0.8938
                3) the maximum difference TE TSI annual variations, 2.4130

                Ten year aves: 1360.6943 1360.8515 0.1573 6% 18% 7%

                Similar calculations for each of the ten years show tremendous variation in these relationships:

                TE 1AU TE-1AU
                2015 1361.6077 1361.4321 0.1756 6% 20% 7%
                2012 1359.1946 1361.2413 -2.0467 -75% -229% -85%
                2011 1361.4547 1361.0292 0.4255 16% 48% 18%
                2004 1361.2204 1360.9192 0.3012 11% 34% 12%
                2010 1360.1976 1360.8027 -0.6051 -22% -68% -25%
                2005 1360.9032 1360.7518 0.1514 6% 17% 6%
                2006 1360.8230 1360.6735 0.1496 5% 17% 6%
                2007 1361.2459 1360.5710 0.6749 25% 76% 28%
                2009 1359.4863 1360.5565 -1.0701 -39% -120% -44%
                2008 1360.8094 1360.5382 0.2712 10% 30% 11%

                2012 TE TSI was the lowest! I correlated TE w/1AU and found a u-shaped parabola with an r^2 of .60; and found a better correlation of .95 between TE vs TE-1AU TSI. Does it make any sense? The “true earth” TSI is goofy, and I’m not using it, because I’m only interested in the actual solar variation, as expressed by 1AU TSI, data that does make sense!

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                Bob, I find this interesting:

                I watch the Earth’s evaporation every day, recording the images, tracking TSI and other solar indices – it’s so predictable and amazing to see it happen – low evaporation and clouds under low TSI vs high evaporation and more clouds under high TSI. In fact I’m putting together a video that demonstrates it.

                Leif gave the conventional response, that TSI at 1 AU is irrelevant to monthly events because annual variation in true Earth TSI is two orders of magnitude greater than variation in TSI at 1 AU.

                However what you might be observing is the effect of force X. (Will reintroduce force X in an upcoming post, or see the old blog posts. Force X is just the logical consequence of the delay: If TSI variation is too small to control surface temp, and there is a delay of one sunspot cycle between changes in TSI and surface temperature, then some force X that is half a full solar cycle behind TSI variation must be controlling surface temp. Given that temp variation due to albedo variation is much greater than temp changes due to TSI variation (post 10), force X would appear to act via albedo, perhaps like this. Btw, we show in old posts or the upcoming ones that that the effect of force X is about 14 times greater than the direct heating effect of TSI variations — it’s massive, and accounts for surface temperatures.)

                If your claimed link truly exists, then as Lief pointed out it cannot be due to the TSI itself. But your actor is connected to TSI, so it comes from the Sun, so it may well be force X in action. If so, you may have found the smoking gun.

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                Bob,
                There are also missing data in the years you didn’t remove…
                A single missing day can change the annual mean by 0.1 W/m2.

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                Bob Weber

                I’ll check it out Leif, thanks. 2011 had some missing days as I now recall.

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              Here I overplotted Figure 1 on the modern TSI [heavy black curve].
              I matched the curves in the left part of the Figure, showing the difference in the green box. Not just an adjustment of scale.
              http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-GN-and-Evans.png

              [Replacing the TSI in Fig. 1 with Leif’s reconstruction of TSI makes no difference to the suggestion of a delay, as you can see from the graph at this comment. – DE]

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              If you want to compare with temperatures you MUST use the TSI at the Earth, not at 1 AU. To compare with 1 AU is fine for the tiny, tiny variation of the Sun, but totally meaningless to compare with the climate.

              Because the variation of the true Earth TSI is so large it is very sensitive to how you do the averaging because the year does not have a whole number of days.

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                Bob Weber

                If you checked out the table I made here comparing TE TSI to 1AU TSI, you’ll see great variation in the relationship, and you’ll see that they don’t ever compute to the same average for any year, not even close.

                I just looked at the first 20 years of F10.7cm flux and compared observed flux to adjusted flux, which are always reported together, and they don’t vary by more than 0.01-0.35% from each other in yearly averages, where the adjusted values follow the 7% annual orbital variation curve like TE TSI is supposed to follow.

                SO, why is the TE-1AU TSI relationship so far off the orbital rule that adjusted F10.7cm follows?

                The TE TSI varies by 6.9-7% annually, year to year, like the adjusted F10.7cm flux, but the variations in the TE-1AU year-to-year are senselessly irregular, as my previously posted table shows.

                I won’t respond to this issue again Leif until I hear a coherent mathematically sound reason why TE and 1AU don’t correlate annually like F10.7cm observed vs adjusted flux do, at an r^2=.996, and why the variations in annual TE TSI averages are so extreme and out of sequence with the solar activity cycle and 1AU TSI.

                “To compare with 1 AU is fine for the tiny, tiny variation of the Sun, but totally meaningless to compare with the climate.” You’ll soon see why that viewpoint needs “adjusting” 😉

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    J Martin

    I read somewhere that that one shouldn’t use 11 year smoothing on an 11 year cycle. May have been Willis Eschenbach. I know nothing about statistics myself but try to follow as best I can.

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    ianl8888

    Completely O/T but relevant to an earlier thread:

    http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-35571868

    That should perk the US elections up – control of the balance of the US Supreme Court !

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    […] David Evans We’re launching headlong back into the New Science series with a major […]

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    handjive

    Another delay has been found …

    First, the missing heat goes into the the deep oceans.

    Second; the oceans go missing onto the land, causing sea level rise to ‘slow’.

    Finally: The heat manifests magically on the land from the evaporations of the missing oceans carrying the missing heat onto the land.

    This can take as long as the next post ad-hoc 97% science excuse, or homogenisation of raw data, which ever comes first.

    Hence the ‘delay’.

    Rud Istvan has fun with this latest garbage from the 97% settled science climateers @wuwt.
    . . .

    Gratz on another great post @jonova.

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    Farmer Gez

    Thanks David and Jo for your work. It seems to me that the oceans and their reaction to cycles frames our climate. I look at old synoptic charts from the 50’s and note the sheer amplitude of the frontal systems that effected SE Australia. Obviously such intense fronts drew in copious quantities of tropical moisture from the Indian Ocean and produced good general rain. I think the Tasman moisture feed is not much altered but very effected by ENSO.
    Would the cooling you predict impact the Antarctic system and fronts generated?

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    RB

    One thing that I found strange about the surface temperatures being more important than measurements of the lower or mid troposphere (because we live there) is that the extra heat trapped by absorption due to extra CO2 is in the upper atmosphere. That has to warm for the extra heat to warm the surface and then the deep ocean.

    The temperature gradient with altitude is set by the lapse rate (combination of dry and wet) and forms because of convection. The upper troposphere need not be warmer than the surface for it to warm the surface, merely warmer than given by the lapse rate.

    Firstly, because formation of the lapse rate depends on convection, it is much more likely that the upper troposphere could be warmer than it should be relative to the surface for a while but not the reverse. Hot air (less dense) rises. The difference between the surface thermometer measurements and TMT measurements is not only inconsistent with the Greenhouse Effect, its inconsistent with physics.

    The second point is that it should have been obvious that there could be an alternative way for the upper atmosphere to cool that is more rapid than convection transferring heat to the surface to get back the lapse rate (if downwelling/backradiation could do it, there would be no inversion layers forming at night).

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      Exactly RB. It seems obvious in retrospect.

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      Just-A-Guy

      RB,

      You wrote:

      The temperature gradient with altitude is set by the lapse rate (combination of dry and wet) and forms because of convection.

      The lapse rate is nothing more than a ratio that tells us how much the temperature drops per unit of rise in altitude commonly measured in kilometers. As such it is just a number, and so it does not and cannot set anything.

      The temperature gradient is caused by a change in atmospheric pressure. As you measure the atmospheric pressure higher and higher in the troposphere, the temperature drops lower and lower up until a short distance below the tropopause.

      The ratio of temperature drop to increase in altitude is the lapse rate.

      The lapse rate in temperature is caused by the lapse rate in atmospheric pressure.

      Google is your friend. Seek and you shall find. 😉

      Abe

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        RB

        Stephen Wilde has a link that explains it better.

        The adiabatic lapse rate is the result of a model. Packets of air rise or fall with out heat transfer to surrounding air. The gravitational potential energy as the air rises can only come from the heat energy of the air when going up. Loss of potential energy as the air goes down can do nothing else but become heat.

        The wet adiabatic lapse rate is the extra heat as water condenses, an amount that keeps the dew point at the temperature.

        What actually happens is that gases cool as they expand (PV work) and warm as they are compressed. The pressure difference is determined by gravity and air is a very poor conductor so its not a surprise that this simple model works.

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          Just-A-Guy

          RB,

          You wrote:

          Stephen Wilde has a link that explains it better.

          Ambiguous. Do you mean that Stephen Wilde can explain his hypothesis better than you can, or, that Stephen Wilde’s hypothesis can explain the observed lapse rates better than the explanation derived from The Ideal Gas Law? (Did you do the search and review the sources?)

          You wrote:

          Packets of air rise or fall with out heat transfer to surrounding air. The gravitational potential energy as the air rises can only come from the heat energy of the air when going up. Loss of potential energy as the air goes down can do nothing else but become heat.

          This is basically an elaboration on the ‘convection controls the lapse rates’ hypothesis promoted by Stephen Wilde. Are you aware that his hypothesis was falsified on several grounds in the comments to the thread that he linked to and in the comments to the article New Science 19? Konrad, Kristian, Lt. Cusper, Will Janoschka, David Cosserath, and myself, among others, (the ppl mentioned come to mind purely from memory. 😉 ) all took turns ripping Stephen’s proposals to shreds until there was nothing left of it. Have you read the comments on both of those articles?

          You wrote:

          What actually happens is that gases cool as they expand (PV work) and warm as they are compressed. The pressure difference is determined by gravity and air is a very poor conductor so its not a surprise that this simple model works.

          Internal contradiction. This description is the one based on The Ideal Gas Law that I mentioned earlier. Notice that in this description, there’s no need for convection to play a role in setting the lapse rates we observe in the troposphere. And Stephen rejects the concept of PV work as a valid form of energy transfer.

          So, please make up your mind. Do you accept this description of the mechanism that determines lapse rates or do you accept Stephen’s falsified hypothesis? You can’t dance at two weddings at the same time. 😉

          Abe

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            Just-A-Guy

            All false and misleading.

            That group of naysayers completely failed to falsify my description which is in accordance with the Ideal Gas Laws and does recognise PV work albeit as a valid form of energy transformation (KE to PE and back again) within a parcel of air which is rising or falling adiabatically.

            I have said that lapse rates are set by the decline in pressure with height which leads to the decline in temperature with height and convection follows as a result of density variations in the horizontal plane.

            I do not say that convection sets the lapse rate slope, rather convection responds to it.

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            RB

            This is basically an elaboration on the ‘convection controls the lapse rates’ hypothesis promoted by Stephen Wilde.

            No its not. Its just a description of the adiabatic lapse rate (the model on which the calculation is based on)

            I haven’t gone through Wilde’s hypothesis thoroughly and the comments. Reference to the link wasn’t an endorsement but a reference to the introduction that I believe Jo wrote. There should be no argument.

            I can’t see what is so hard to comprehend. There are two different things that are related. A model for a quantitative calculation and a mechanism by which it forms. That the mechanism should give the temperature gradient according to the model is an observation.

            As for Wilde’s hypothesis, convection doesn’t control the lapse rate so I’m not sure how you could have debunked it thoroughly, although I have to still go through the arguments carefully myself. I still picked up that there is variation in the actual temperature gradient in the upper troposphere because of convection and his hypothesis is based on this.

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            • #
              RB

              Not that well written on reflection.

              I’ll leave it as the lapse rate as air descends is the starting temperature at high altitude (and dry). For air that ascends, its the dry or wet, depending on conditions, lapse rate starting from the temperature at the surface. Many things affect that but the rate itself is only affected by condensation of water vapour.

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            • #

              RB said:

              “I still picked up that there is variation in the actual temperature gradient in the upper troposphere because of convection and his hypothesis is based on this.”

              That’s not right.

              The variations in the actual temperature gradient as compared to the purely adiabatic lapse rate are induced by the radiative capability of constituent gases and convective changes are a response to the resultant radiative imbalances but serve to neutralise them in the manner proposed.

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            RB

            This description is the one based on The Ideal Gas Law that I mentioned earlier. Notice that in this description, there’s no need for convection to play a role in setting the lapse rates we observe in the troposphere.

            I think I pointed this out to D Cotton. Its six of one half a dozen of the other. Strictly speaking, the adiabatic lapse rate is a calculation based on conservation of energy and some big assumptions but easy. Calculating the PV work done would be more thorough and complex but since the model works well, why bother.

            Both explanations require packets of air to rise and fall without transfer of heat to/from surrounding air in their calculation so I can’t see how convection is not important. Having said this, there should be a lapse rate without convection. Gases are discrete particles in voids that are relatively large. This, though would require a different calculation and i’m completely certain that it would be so slow to form that its irrelevant.

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      Just-A-Guy

      RB,

      Sorry. The last sentence got ‘lost in the sauce’!

      Search for ‘Ideal Gas Law’.

      Happy hunting. 😉

      Abe

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      • #
        RB

        Seriously? Its hard to write about the climate in 200 words or less. Don’t make a big deal about a few issues due to the brevity.

        I expected to get pinged on the last point.

        “its inconsistent with physics.”

        The surface could be warming without the troposphere warming if its becoming drier.

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    Leonard Lane

    Thanks Dr Evans, look forward to the next Articles. Very good work, and a lot of it!
    Some months ago in a comment, I asked about application of Laplace transforms in your analyses. Did you ever consider this, and, if so what did you determine?

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    • #

      Leonard, climate is pretty close to steady state, so Fourier transforms suffice. AFAIK, Laplace transforms aren’t going to help much.

      At the moment I am working on communicating the ideas without maths, in physical terms that climate-heads feel more comfortable with.

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        Mike

        Hi David. Economic factors are almost completely ignored or addressed. I find it amazingly bizarre that i have not been able to find any data written by climate intelligentsia about the said economic factors.

        More than half the worlds oil rigs shutting down in under one year. The Baltic Dry Index collapse and so on.

        Economic factors influence emissions of all kinds.

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  • #
    Brad

    David and Jo,
    Sent you a big box of chocolate for Valentines. I hope you enjoy them.
    Your work ethics are reassuring, glad to know we are not alone in the world. Honesty without bias is an endangered human trait.

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    macha

    The unfortunate scenario for predicting the future is it relies on specific factors remaining in place. If fear governments and the un-ipcc crew will continue to pursue the decarbonisation of society meme. This will be the hook they place their hat on to explain any cooling. I can hear the calls now….See? We did it.etc. The green machine success. Meanwhile all the other peoples money will have run out and the wolves will be baying at the doors of every pollie.

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    tom0mason

    Just a blue sky thought —

    If our sun was within the vicinity of a reflective device about 5.5 light-years away, then an approximate 11 year resonance could be set-up.
    Doubtful but then…

    Just a thought, now out of the box!

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    Rocky

    For those who do not want to live in Mud Huts .. the Tip Jar for Chocolates is a better option !

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    el gordo

    The cooling which began in the late 1940s was not caused by plane dimming, nuclear testing or aerosols, otherwise the Chinese Effect would have produced even more cooling, but that didn’t happen.

    Nicola Scafetta’s sine wave

    https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/scafetta_60-20.png

    10

    • #
      Mike

      In the life of an intelligentsia who looks at everything, 1940’s was the great depression that was followed by incredible money printing to boost the CO2 levels of course.

      From: https://mises.org/library/our-money-based-debt

      Marriner Eccles was the Governor of the Federal Reserve System in 1941. On September 30 of that year, Eccles was asked to give testimony before the House Committee on Banking and Currency. The purpose of the hearing was to obtain information regarding the role of the Federal Reserve in creating conditions that led to the depression of the 1930s. Congressman Wright Patman, who was Chairman of that committee, asked how the Fed got the money to purchase two billion dollars worth of government bonds in 1933. This is the exchange that followed.

      ECCLES: We created it.

      PATMAN: Out of what?

      ECCLES: Out of the right to issue credit money.

      PATMAN: And there is nothing behind it, is there, except our government’s credit?

      ECCLES: That is what our money system is. If there were no debts in our money system, there wouldn’t be any money.2″

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  • #

    […] into the New Science series with a major post By David Evans and Jo Nova Her Blog, Feb 13, 2016 http://joannenova.com.au/2016/02/ne… A TSI-Driven (solar) Climate Model Guest essay by Jeff Patterson, WUWT, Feb 8, 2016 […]

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    Greg Goodman

    (the smoother simply averages the values in a centered 11-year window; if the sunspot cycle was exactly 11 years such a smoother would remove all cyclic behavior).

    How many times… running averages do not “simple average” the data they distort it. Why add noise (distortions) to your data when you want to “smooth” it ? You still have annual scale noise left after you supposed 11y filter !

    You don’t have a specific fixed cycle to remove, so why not just use a proper filter. Use a triple running mean if you can’t work aside a spreadsheet on windows.

    http://climategrog.wordpress.com/2013/05/19/triple-running-mean-filters/

    http://climategrog.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/ssn_filters.png

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    Greg Goodman

    “with the exception of …. the temperature and 11-year-delayed TSI trend up and down mainly in unison”

    Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So are hand-waving, one eye closed correlations.

    I would agree that both generally “trend” upwards. Beyond that it’s doubtful. Mathematics provides means of check whether out mind is seeing what it expects or seeing tigers in the bushes.

    CORRELATION COEFFICIENTS

    How about quantifying the supposed relationship with some numnbers.

    Post correlation coeff for the two in your graph , figure 1. Then also detrend them and post the correlation of what is left.

    IMO it will not be enough to float the boat for your current incarnation.

    Best regards, Greg Goodman.

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    Greg Goodman

    The time constant of the low pass filter that mimics the thermal inertia of the Earth is ~1 to ~3 years

    You are confusing thermal inertia with the idea that ocean OVERTURNING currents will take any changes deep below the surface and bring them back up later.

    I’m not expressing an opinion about whether that is happening but you are confusing two very different things in using that argument to reject it.

    You have not shown it can not be happening.

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    Don Gaddes

    Extract from ‘Tomorrow’s Weather’ Alex S. Gaddes (1990) pp 18 -20;
    “According to Strahler, (Ref. No. 17,) the rotation rate of the Sun differentiates at a slower rate, from lower to higher latitudes.

    “It seems to me that we ought to be investigating the latitude of the sun which is rotating at the 27 day rate.

    The W Factor

    “What particular phenomenon is known to exist in this zone which could have any possible relevance? Is it possible that it is the vital zone from which our Earth’s climate is controlled?

    “Dr Harrington and I were agreed that (unknown) entity,(he named it the ‘W’ (weather) factor, appeared to be emanating from the sun.

    “He also agreed with me that, whatever is behind the emanation, is migrating in a retrograde direction relative to the sun’s rotation.

    Tidal Activity

    “The most likely candidate that I can think of at the moment is tidal activity, brought about by the gravitational influence of the planet; this influence would be quite capable of producing any number of different intensities of ‘pull ‘on the Sun and the effect would always produce retrograde tidal waves therein; furthermore, it would accommodate all the required time scales.

    “The above tidal effects would be reflected in the constant train of sunspot waves (the so-called 11 year cycles,) the frequency of which I’ve used as No. 4 constant.
    “It seems to me that the amount of consequent solar activity thus produced, would be proportional to the degree of tidal disturbance wrought by the gravitational ‘pull’ of the planets, from their given positions in their respective orbits.

    “The reason that the overall sunspot wave frequency remains constant is that the solar rotation and the motion of the planets remain constant.

    “It is noted, that it is the amplitude of the sunspot waves that varies, but the fact that over the 297.76 year solar cycle, the sunspot wave periods average out, makes the sunspot wave frequency constant at 11.028148 years,(the new value, see Fig. 3.) All of which seems to argue that whatever it is that is acting on the sun to produce the enigmatic sunspots, has a cyclic period of 297.76 years.

    “NOTE: If one multiplies the metonic cycle (18.61 years) by a 26.75 ratio, the result is 497.8175 years; a discrepancy of about 4.65 years, which throws my calculations out of kilter; ie. One cannot fit three 167.49 year tree-ring sub-cycles into 497.8175 years, which must happen to be compatible with the formulae,
    hence my preference for the 27 day ratio.

    “Attached also is a copy of pages 318-19 of Climate Change and Variability (Ref No. 18,) carrying tables setting out the results of much research into climatic cultural change.
    “When I held the figure of 1674.9 years, (the coincidence period mentioned above) and multiples thereof, up against the background figures of the above-mentioned tables, I was struck by the significant matching values.

    “It is likely that we will be in for heat-wave conditions during the summers of the next number of years that we are under the influence of the grand conjunction.

    “Due to the enormous gravitational pull on one side of the Sun, there ought to ensue a great tidal wave, travelling around the Sun (in the lower latitudes,) in a retrograde direction relative to the Sun’s rotation, at a velocity of nearly 4000 mph!”

    Ratios a Vital Part

    Despite the formidable name of the model, it is quite simple in principle. As the name infers, ratios are a vital part of the formula.

    In this case, the spin ratio between the Earth and the Sun is 26.75:1, which simply means that the Earth spins, or rotates on its axis, 26.75 times to the Sun’s once.

    I am far from fully understanding all of the ramifications of the ratios principle and its potential application in the future.

    There are four mathematical expositions relevant to the definition of the climate/weather cycles. These include formulas for the ¼, ½, ¾ and full Earth period cycles, (see Figs. 4, 5, and 6.) The ¼ Earth period cycles have already been dealt with.

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    Greg Goodman

    Few, if any, appear to have considered the delay might be in the Sun itself.

    This seems to be saying that there is a direct solar effect , which happens without delay in the Earth system ( which seems odd in view of the heat capacity ) but the delay is between what we measure as TSI proxies , ie stuff like sun-spot activity and what is REALLY happening in the sun to affect climate.

    So what we are seeing on earth now is not due to the current low cycle but something which happened 11y ago and the current cycle is irrelevant to current climate

    Occam’s razor an’ all, this is starting to sound very contrived and unless I’ve missed something all there is to substantiate the idea is a rather feeble “apparent” correlation from some poorly filtered data.

    Now again, I’m not against this new approach but it needs to be done credibly. So far it is looking far from scientific and based upon some rather improbable, totally hypothetical mechanism which has yet to be identified.

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    • #

      “This seems to be saying…” Well we’ve been trying to point that out in umpteen ways above. Like, how could we make it more obvious? Good to see you finally glimpse the main idea at last. Excellent. Now rather than repeat the reasons for why we came to this idea, we refer you to the above post.

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    Greg Goodman

    Jo says:

    A few researchers noted an esoteric correlation of long solar cycles with lower temperatures in the next solar cycle, but mostly those papers were left on the shelf, ignored. Dr David Evans’ notch-delay solar delay theory can explain this odd pattern.

    There is nothing esoteric about it. All solar cycle have slow rise and an even longer tail. They overlap each other to a degree so we never the beginning or the end of a single cycle. Always the overlap of two.

    We DEFINE the length of a cycle as the interval between two successive minima. So if you have weak cycle coming up the minimum will occur later and the previous cycle will be called a “long” cycle. This means cycle length between minima is a way of predicting a coming cycle being weak.

    Pretty simple stuff, not esoteric.

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    • #
      el gordo

      Maybe enigmatic, anyway I’m struggling with a well documented 62 year cycle.

      Starting at the maxima of 1879 followed by 1942 and 2002, with minima around 1910 and 1972, then I reckon its a good fit for some form of external forcing.

      From here its all downhill to 2034.

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      • #
        Greg Goodman

        There is a circa 60y pseudo periodicity. I don’t think you can say more than that. You don’t even say what data you think this ‘cycle’ is found in. ( don’t just say “temperature” ).

        I also suspect we may see cooling for about 10-15 years now. From here

        “its all downhill to 2034.”

        So if that does not happen, will you conclude that there is significant AGW which countered your deep understanding of climate?

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      • #
        Andrew McRae

        Yes, the idea of a recurring temperature forcing cycle of ~62 years was an assumption I was also convinced to make in my own climate model: http://i.imgur.com/jOLMXcP.gif
        From wavelet periodogram analysis of PDO and AMO proxy data I think it is pretty clear that the 62 year cycle is only a very recent thing and is not visible in proxies from more than 120 years ago. This could mean the proxies are not reliable, or it could mean the astronomical correlations are an accident and the temperature cycle length may change dramatically for entirely natural and possibly chaotic reasons during the next 30 years. Extrapolating it more than 30 years into the future (as I did two years ago) is fraught with uncertainty.
        My model also did not take into account the 11 year delay that David has found, which I think has already led to my model projection being a bit too cool compared to the last 3 years, though the gap would look worse if it were not for the slow thermal inertia of the model (e-folding time of about 26 years, which is at least 4x larger than the mainstream value from Schwartz 2007). And of course the recent El Nino just obscures hasty comparisons further.

        There are just so many approximations that one has to make to get any end result at all. Going through this type of exercise, even at the simple granularity of this model, gives one some sympathy for what the pro AOGCM modelers in CSIRO/GFDL/RuINM/IPSL have had to work through.
        I guess by 2025 I will find out how far wrong the prediction was. The climate game is a long game.

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          el gordo

          ‘I think it is pretty clear that the 62 year cycle is only a very recent thing and is not visible in proxies from more than 120 years ago.’

          —-

          Adriano Mazzarella and Scafetta

          Abstract

          ‘The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) obtained using instrumental and documentary proxy predictors from Eurasia is found to be characterized by a ~60-year dominant oscillation since 1650.

          ‘This pattern emerges clearly once the NAO record is time integrated to stress its comparison with the temperature record. The integrated NAO (INAO) is found to well correlate with the Length of the Day (LOD) (since 1650) and the global surface sea temperature (SST) record (since 1850).

          ‘These findings suggest that INAO is an excellent proxy for global climate change, and that a ~60-year cycle exists in the global climate since at least 1700.

          ‘Finally, the INAO ~60-year oscillation well correlates with the ~60-year oscillations found in the historical European aurora record since 1700, which suggests that this ~60-year dominant climatic cycle has a solar-astronomical origin.’

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            Andrew McRae

            I actually already had that paper in my CliSci document collection.
            Time-integrated? I don’t understand how that trick alone can help. It makes no difference on modern data…
            http://woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-amo/scale:170/mean:132/mean:60/plot/esrl-amo/integral/mean:60
            …you still get a 64 or 70 year period depending on which peak pair or trough pair you measure, about the same figure from integration or from simple smoothing, and they even look the same.
            So why would time integration make more difference on older data?? The difference is more likely because his data from Luterbacher isn’t using objective proxies only but also data from other human-authored documents. I’ve conceptually got no problem with there being an ongoing cycle, but it doesn’t have to be an ironclad fixed period, and I’m not sure how a 60 year period can be conjured out of proxy data because it doesn’t happen from simple wavelet analysis when I tried it three years ago : http://imgur.com/a/X1EZT
            That’s AMO proxy from two sources and a PDO from McDonald2005’s proxy. No ~60 year cycle. Where is it?

            So yes despite my enthusiasm 2 years ago for the fixed 64 year oscillation, I’m still struggling to find evidence for it today. I’ll have a look at Luterbacher’s paper later when I have time, but based on Scafetta’s description it hasn’t really helped me much yet IMO.

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    • #

      Greg, she meant the correlation between solar cycle length and the surface temperatures during the next sunspot cycle. See the post section entitled “Delay of One Sunspot Cycle to Northern Hemispheric Ground Temperatures”.

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        Greg Goodman

        Thanks, I realise that.

        “This means cycle length between minima is a way of predicting a coming cycle being weak. ”

        The corollary is a weak previous cycle will get cut short by a stronger following cycle and thus be called “short”.

        So what this observation is really saying is that decreasing solar activity will likely lead to cooling and increasing solar cycles will lead to warming. I don’t see that as either esoteric or unexpected.

        It may be that this was observed empirically by someone without it being explained in such terms but it seems fairly obvious and I don’t see any connection lags and notches.

        10

  • #
    Ian Wilson

    David,

    If a comparison is made between your smoothed 11 year delayed TSI and the smoothed temperature – there is a clear ~ 60 year oscillation between the two phenomenon. The Smoothed delayed TSI exceeds the smoothed temperatures between 1830 and 1890 (~ 60 years) and 1950 and 2010 (~ 60 years). In like manner, the smoothed temperature exceeds the smoothed delayed TSI between 1890 and 1950 (~ 60 years). I think what you are seeing is a ~ 60 year lunar cycle in world smoothed temperature that needs to be removed first before it is compared to the smoothed delayed TSI.

    In addition, you have not mentioned my paper:

    Can We Predict the Next Indian Mega-Famine?

    Abstract
    Catastrophic multi-year failure of the Indian monsoon has caused at least eight mega-famines in India over the last 1100 years.
    Historical data shows that seven out of the eight mega-famines have either started within ± one year of the year of greatest
    asymmetry in the Sun’s motion about the Solar System’s centre-of-mass, or 11 years ± one year after this event.
    The Sun is currently experiencing a maximum in the asymmetry of its motion about the centre-of-mass. Evidence is presented to
    show that there is almost a 1-in-4 the chance that there will be another Indian mega-famine in 2018-20. While the chance of
    such a catastrophic event occurring is small, it is large enough that the governments on the Indian sub-continent should
    take precautionary measures to confront this potentially devastating threat.

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      Greg Goodman

      Hi Ian.

      I agree , no one is going to get anywhere on identifying any possible solar signal until the lunar influence is recognised.

      This kind of one variable explanation is not enough. If it was that simple it would be clearly detectable.

      David’s empirical “notch filter” is simply evidence that there is not obvious solar signal. It is not a notch response because it is not a broad-band input signal. The only thing that can get removed is the only thing which is in the very poorly resolved SSN spectrum: the very broad circa 11y peak.

      All his empirical in/out spectrum is , is an upside down solar spectrum ie 1-solar. Sadly this whole notch thing is a careless misinterpretation.

      I don’t know whether you saw my recent article on Judith Curry’s site on N. Atl. ACE and SST:
      http://judithcurry.com/2016/01/11/ace-in-the-hole/

      the only thing they have in common is circa 60y and 9y.

      http://climategrog.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/ace_sst_spd.png

      I noted in the update that a combination of solar and lunar could produce the 60y periodicity:
      p1=9.1;p2=10.8;
      cos(2*pi*x/p1)+cos(2*pi*x/p2)

      It looks like this :

      https://climategrog.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/am_modulation_depth.png

      Note that it is the envelope which shows circa 60y ( 58 with those figures ), I do not have an explanation of why that would show up as the variation in surface temperature average ( which itself is a questionable quantity to be discussing ! ). http://judithcurry.com/2016/02/10/are-land-sea-temperature-averages-meaningful/

      Since there is a residual 9y peak ( often misread as solar when it lines up and ignored when it doesn’t ) that means that the lunar component is stronger than the solar and the circa 11y is not visible as such , it is blended into the 60y periodicity.

      So solar is there but simplistic, once variable spectral analysis probably will not detect it.

      when we understand lunar driven climate we will find the solar component. It is quite possible that the lunar component will not have any long term trend and solar may well be a lot of that.

      When we understand both of those we may get a first look at AGW. Until then it’s a fool’s game to pretend we know anything.

      Climate is not a one horse show.

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      el gordo

      Ian as you know India has just had twin monsoon failures and there are good reasons to expect more of the same over the next few years.

      http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X02005307

      There will be no mega famine but the stock market will take a hit.

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  • #

    GIGO.
    The TSI reconstruction you use [Lean 2000] is way obsolete. Here is a modern update [that not at all fits your Figure 1]

    [Replacing the TSI in Fig. 1 with Leif’s reconstruction of TSI makes no difference to the suggestion of a delay, as you can see from the graph at this comment. – DE]

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      • #

        I’d be surprised if Leif’s ‘flattened’ TSI data doesn’t fit since it retains all the same variability but simply on a reduced scale.

        It is the variations that matter rather than the absolute scale of them.

        Anyway, AFAIK David accepts that TSI alone is not the relevant variable but rather another variable for which TSI is merely a proxy.

        716

        • #
          Greg Goodman

          Agreed, the later part of fig. 1 is too steep. I suspect the latest ‘adjustments’ may work better than Lean et al.

          I find the idea of adding in the 11y running average of SSN onto SSN a strange an arbitrary way of producing a TSI proxy. I suspect it was an attempt to make a TSI index that fitted the temperature data.

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          Greg Goodman

          I’d still like to see some proper stats, like correlation coeff, rather than hand-waving claims like “tracking fairly well”.

          I also don’t see any proper refs to what either of these datasets are. Leif recognised one as Lean’s TSI, but I think a link to actual data would make the whole discussion more meaningful.

          What is this extended temperature proxy about?

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          • #
            Greg Goodman

            OK I’ve found some description of the data in part 21. However, no links to data. We have to do the leg work if we want the data and hope that we find the same thing as the author.

            Direct links to the data actually used would be appreciated.

            The combined spectra were each smoothed, then their ratio found.

            Please don’t tell me that you’re doing running mean on the spectra ! “Smooth” is not an adequate description of the method.

            Assuming a well-behaved low-pass filter is used, what is theoretical basis for averaging a frequency spectrum. Is this an established technique or Mannian style home-spun methods with no formal background or validation ?!

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            • #

              How come I have to keep repeating stuff for you Greg? “Direct links to the data actually used would be appreciated”. See project home page.

              Spreadsheet (Excel, 20 MB). Contains the notch-delay solar, all the data, and all the calculations. Programmed in VBA, the BASIC programming language that is part of Microsoft Office. Requires Excel to run the programming. [Last updated 31 Aug 2015.]

              Also see the old blog posts where this was first presented. Again, see project home page.

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          Greg Goodman

          One things for sure it play havoc with frequency spectrum. At least the >1y periods.

          I have not idea whether it is more accurate . or one ‘correction’ too many but it’s different.

          02

      • #
        Bob Weber

        Leif don’t you remember we talked about your model one week ago? I ran the numbers, and the percentage error of your model vs real 1AU TSI ranged from -30% to +20% in the years 2003-2015, completely unacceptable for anything. The 0.8938 figure, the range of TSI average annual variability for that time, is divided into the difference between actual 1AU TSI and Leif’s model TSI for each year to determine the % error. Who knows is this table will format…:

        Year 1AU TSI v2 SSN F10.7 GN Leif error % of range, 2003-15

        2003 1361.0292 99.3 129 5.39 1361.2104 0.181 20% 1361.432094
        2004 1360.9192 65.3 106 3.52 1361.0092 0.090 10% 1360.538247
        2005 1360.7518 45.8 92 2.6 1360.8985 0.147 16% 0.893846431
        2006 1360.6735 24.7 80 1.52 1360.7517 0.078 9%
        2007 1360.5710 12.6 71 0.79 1360.6335 0.063 7%
        2008 1360.5382 4.2 69 0.32 1360.5381 0.000 0%
        2009 1360.5565 4.8 71 0.4 1360.5564 0.000 0%
        2010 1360.8027 24.9 80 1.67 1360.7736 -0.029 -3%
        2011 1361.0752 80.8 113 4.8 1361.1496 0.074 8%
        2012 1361.2413 84.5 120 5.09 1361.1797 -0.062 -7%
        2013 1361.3587 94 123 5.78 1361.2495 -0.109 -12%
        2014 1361.3966 113.3 146 6.63 1361.3321 -0.064 -7%
        2015 1361.4321 69.7 118 4.94 1361.1642 -0.268 -30%

        After which, the next day, here http://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/02/08/a-tsi-driven-solar-climate-model/#comment-2140574 you basically endorsed this one (it seemed to me), ironically hosted on your site, http://www.leif.org/research/Kopp-et-al-New-TSI.png – did you forget 😉 Are you really promoting the proverbial TSI double standard? LOL!!

        If we could just locate the time series of the brown curve… then maybe, we could all be on the same page, finally, eh?

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        • #

          The numbers look pretty good to me. The values for 2015 and 2016 are still preliminary, pending an update of the Group Numbers so I’ll allow a slightly larger error there, as also for 2003 which is incomplete.
          My values are not measurements [as there are several different satellites that differ], but are derived from a relationship with the Group Number: TSI = 1360.43 + 0.24 GN^0.7, this allows me to go back several hundred years.

          Here are the details
          Year GN TSI Calc TSI SORCE
          2003.5 5.39 1361.210 1361.029
          2004.5 3.52 1361.009 1360.919
          2005.5 2.60 1360.898 1360.752
          2006.5 1.52 1360.752 1360.673
          2007.5 0.79 1360.633 1360.571
          2008.5 0.32 1360.538 1360.538
          2009.5 0.40 1360.556 1360.556
          2010.5 1.67 1360.774 1360.803
          2011.5 4.80 1361.150 1361.075
          2012.5 5.09 1361.180 1361.241
          2013.5 5.78 1361.250 1361.359
          2014.5 6.63 1361.332 1361.360
          2015.5 4.94 1361.164 1361.432
          2016.1 4.36 1361.103 1361.293

          Just like your numbers, mine change from time to time when I refine the relationship or get new data.

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            Considering that the uncertainty in observed TSI is of the order of 0.6 W/m2 as per LASP, my numbers look pretty good, with an average difference from the LASP SORCE values of 0.09 W/m2.

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          The brown curve is the result of a model run, based on the new sunspot series.
          My version is here http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-Based-on-GN.txt
          I recommend to use this version, at least in order to reduce the number of reconstructions floating around.
          Obviously, this series is a great variance with the obsolete one Evans is using.

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          • #

            Here is Figure 1, with the composite TSI from standard sources replaced by Leif Svalgaard’s reconstruction. Scales, data ranges unchanged.

            http://s3.amazonaws.com/jo.nova/guest/david-evans/22/delayed-leif-tsi-vs-temp.jpg

            Like Figure 1, it is suggestive of an 11 year delay.

            As Stephen Wilde and others have pointed out, it makes no difference because that inference was based on the turning points — so it ignores the rescaling and rebasing that Leif did that removes the increased TSI from the 1950s.

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            • #

              Thank you for doing things right.
              It is now abundantly clear that there is no correlation between TSI and Global Temperatures.
              One would expect a solar cycle variation of Temps of the order of 0.07 degrees due to the solar cycle variation of TSI, but such a variation would be washed out of an 11-yr average so would not show up on the Figure.

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                Leif,

                David has now shown that using your revised numbers makes no difference to his Fig 1.

                Having been defeated on that point you now switch to criticising Fig 1 on the basis that you interpret it differently.I think that is disingenuous.

                I see from Fig 1 that high TSI leads to progressively higher temperatures as more solar energy accumulates in the oceans from reduced global cloudiness as per my hypothesis (which you are familiar with) with a couple of blips due to volcanic cooling during the early 1800s and due to other factors in the mid 20th century.

                David suggests aerosols etc for the mid 20th century diversion from the warming trend but I think it was weak cycle 20 combined with a negative PDO which, for a short while offset the solar warming and gave rise to the cooling panic of the 1960s and early 70s. One must always take the PDO phase into account in discerning any solar effect on the system because sometimes the PDO offsets the solar effect (mid 20th century) and sometimes it enhances the solar effect (late 20th century).

                The late 1970s ‘Great Climate Shift’ which many have commented on was, in my view, a result of the PDO switching from offsetting solar warming to enhancing solar warming.

                The levelling off in the TSI trend (TSI merely being a proxy for the more powerful cloudiness effect) over recent years has led to the pause in global warming currently being observed by satellites.

                Cooling and increased global cloudiness should result from continued low solar activity if there is no recovery in cycle 25.

                Again, I emphasise that the cause of the solar induced warming is NOT the small TSI changes but rather solar induced reduction of global cloudiness as a result of changed jet stream behaviour.

                718

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                Furthermore, Leif, your comment only seems to refer to TSI variations within a single solar cycle which I believe are invisible anyway due to oceanic thermal inertia and in any event would be removed by the 11 year smoothing process.

                The point I take from Fig 1 is the gradual accumulation of warmth across multiple solar cycles which is readily apparent subject to that 11 year delay.

                I can’t believe that a man of your stature didn’t realise that.

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                tom0mason

                Leif Svalgaard

                “It is now abundantly clear that there is no correlation between TSI and Global Temperatures.”

                Really?
                Wow!

                So was any historical global temperature variation influenced by TSI?

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                AndyG55

                ““It is now abundantly clear that there is no correlation between TSI and Global Temperatures.””

                Well, not in your “adjusted” data.

                That was your intent, wasn’t it !!

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                What the new Figure shows is that the claim “Earth’s temperature seems to follow the pattern of rises and falls in solar energy” is false. That is all.

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                There is an accessible article in Sky & Telescope about the new official sunspot numbers:
                http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news/how-astronomers-count-sunspots15022016513/

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              • #
                tom0mason

                Or could it be that Leif Svalgaard manipulation of the data has generated the new Figure that now shows is that the claim “Earth’s temperature seems to follow the pattern of rises and falls in solar energy” only appears false.

                Whether this new view of the data is relevant to assessing the solar effects on climate, time, and not personal belief, will tell.

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                I think the Fig 1 version that includes Leif’s adjustments is just as good as the original Fig 1. To my mind Leif’s version may even be a better match.

                What can be seen in both versions is that the rise in global warmth was most likely an accumulating response to the higher levels of solar activity with a few blips caused by volcanoes, aerosols etc or the PDO phases.

                It pretty much tracks the recovery of both solar activity and temperatures since 1800 and is a much better fit than that with CO2 emissions.

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                The new sunspot series is the OFFICIAL data series.
                It is not made by adjusting anything, but by a complete re-assessment of the original solar observations.
                Here is the abstract of the peer-reviewed paper [in press] describing the effort:
                “We have reconstructed the sunspot group count, not by comparisons with other reconstructions and correcting those where they were deemed to be deficient, but by a re-assessment of original sources. The resulting series is a pure solar index and does not rely on input from other proxies, e.g. radionuclides, auroral sightings, or geomagnetic records. “Backboning” the data sets, our chosen method, provides substance and rigidity by using long-time observers as a stiffness character. Solar activity, as defined by the Group Number, appears to reach and sustain for extended intervals of time the same level in each of the last three centuries since 1700 and the past several decades do not seem to have been exceptionally active, contrary to what is often claimed.”
                My co-author is Ken Schatten who was co-author on the Hoyt & Schatten paper formerly used as basis for older reconstructions, e.g. Lean’s 2000.

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                Wilde: “To my mind Leif’s version may even be a better match.”
                If so, it would sense for Evans to replace the old Figure 1 by the new one.
                Which he should do in any event as it does not make sense to use an obsolete TSI reconstruction.
                We shall see if he has the honesty and integrity to do that…

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                I think that was uncalled for.

                Are you familiar with the term ‘curmudgeon’ ?

                http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/curmudgeon

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                Stephen, you are already making excuses for why Evans should not do the right thing…

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                Er, no.

                It was me who drew his attention to the desireability of doing it and he has shown his honourability by agreeing.

                You, on the other hand, are a pot calling the kettle black.

                There is no moral reason to favour either version over the other if the point is clear to some of us from both.

                Curmudgeon is as curmudgeon does.

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                There is a scientific reason to use the official record. Whether it is moral to use the correct science is something you should ponder. To me, the answer is clear, but perhaps my bar is higher than yours…

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                It was moral for David to use the science he was aware of and then it was moral for him to spend valuable time preparing a revised version based on your work for all to see even though it makes no difference to the point at issue.

                I suspect that my (and David’s) moral bar is way higher than yours has ever been or ever will be.

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                It is moral to update the Figure when the science shows that it should be [regardless of the interpretation]. But, as I noted, people seem to make morals to fit their pet views. Morality is shown by their actions, so we shall see…

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                The data in both sets illustrates the same point whether the Figure is updated or not.

                It would only be a moral necessity to update it if the older Figure were in some way misleading.

                It isn’t.

                You are adopting the position of a moral bully because you were caught out in the misleading way you tried to spin your objections higher up the thread.

                But I suppose you’ll never stop without the last word and your last word will always contain another emotional barb (sigh).

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                The old Figure and the very title of the post are very misleading. They claim that TSI [with an irrelevant and debatable delay] drives Global Temperatures GT. The old Figure could be interpreted as that because both TSI and GT increase more or less in step over the past 200+ years [disregarding the dubious explanation why that was the case 1945-1995, even with a specific sub-claim: “the warming signaled by the TSI”]. The more correct new TSI, based on the official new sunspot series, does not increase in step with GT, so the claim that GT follows TSI is plainly false. As simple as that. I will leave it to you to defend the morality of making such false claims.

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                was NOT the case in 1945-1995.

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                Well at least you are now trying to be more specific about your objection rather than wriggling about.

                TSI does not and cannot increase exactly in step with GT because of ocean oscillations sometimes offsetting and sometimes supplementing the real cause of GT variation for which TSI is only a weak proxy. It is that oceanic influence of the PDO in particular that gives upward stepping at 30 year intervals during a warming period and probably downward stepping at 30 year intervals during cooling periods.

                What we can see is that since 1800 the general trend of increasing solar activity is associated with a general trend in increasing GT in both data sets.

                Prior to 1800 we have substantial records showing that solar quietude is associated with more wavy, equatorial jet stream tracks with a cooling world whilst a more active sun is assocated with less wavy more poleward jet stream tracks with a warming world.

                So, what this boils down to is the way in which the two available data sets can be interpreted and NOT an issue as to which is the more accurate and in particular it is NOT a moral issue as to whether your preferred data set should be used. Those last two issues are personal to you and should not be allowed to muddy the dialogue.

                David has narrowed down the options to some factor that allows solar variations to affect global albedo some 11 years after TSI changes occur and I have submitted one of several possible ways in which that could happen.

                My solution ticks more observational boxes than the alternatives.

                So, by all means do keep us aware of your progress in solar studies but please do not claim to be the sole (wholly negative) arbiter as to how the sun interacts with our atmosphere. I appreciate that you may be well ahead of the pack with the former but believe you are now behind the pack with the latter.

                Best wishes.

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                “TSI does not and cannot increase exactly in step with GT”
                Nobody said anything about ‘exactly’. What is the morality of misquoting?

                “What we can see is that since 1800 the general trend of increasing solar activity”
                There has not been a general trend of increasing solar activity, in fact, solar activity has reached the same high level in every century since 1600. That was the conclusion, for example that we announced at the IAU’s general assembly in Hawaii last year http://www.iau.org/news/pressreleases/detail/iau1508/
                “The apparent upward trend of solar activity between the 18th century and the late 20th century has now been identified as a major calibration error in the Group Sunspot Number. Now that this error has been corrected, solar activity appears to have remained relatively stable since the 1700s”
                I will leave it up to you to defend the morality of ignoring this epochal and long overdue re-assessment of solar activity for the purpose of pushing a personal agenda and pet hypothesis.

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                “solar activity has reached the same high level in every century since 1600”

                On each such occasion the globe warmed and then cooled in the next solar downswing but since 1600 the system has been recovering from the Maunder Minimum so that each peak in each subsequent century led to a further incremental rise in global temperature even though those peaks were approximately the same height.

                The important feature is the length of the downswings relative to the length of the upswings and NOT the absolute height of the upswings.

                Thus there has been a general upward drift, albeit irregular, in both solar activity and GT since 1600.

                I will leave it up to you to defend the morality of ignoring the fact that your allegedly epochal and allegedly long overdue re-assessment of solar activity makes absolutely no difference to the proper interpretation of the available evidence about the sun’s effect on climate just because you have a personal agenda and pet hypothesis of zero solar effect on global climate.

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                “Thus there has been a general upward drift, albeit irregular, in both solar activity and GT since 1600”
                The point is that there has not been such a general upward drift. We can even restrict ourselves to after 1800 [to follow Evans] where the solar data is good.
                Let me repeat the conclusion:
                “The apparent upward trend of solar activity between the 18th century and the late 20th century has now been identified as a major calibration error in the Group Sunspot Number. Now that this error has been corrected, solar activity appears to have remained relatively stable since the 1700s”

                And this is not my personal, private, pet issue. This is the official stance of the World Data Center for Solar Activity. Ignoring it shows something about morality, doesn’t it?

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                Now, you are completely correct that since solar activity has negligible influence on climate, it does not matter which data series is used. But, what does matter, is the false claim that it does.

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                The point you and your colleagues seem to have overlooked is that once the first high upturn occurred after 1600 the level of solar activity averaged across both peaks and troughs was enough to add warmth to the climate system throughout the period since 1600.

                For the period prior to 1600 the level of solar activity averaged across peaks and troughs would have been low enough to allow energy to seep out of the syste.

                I can see that the peaks since 1600 are roughly the same height but the intervals between peaks are both less deep and less long since the Dalton Minimum.

                There is therefore a small upward slope in average TSI during the period. It is nothing like as steep as the previous data but it is still there.

                Unless you can demonstrate that there was no slope at all since 1600 when averaging across peaks and troughs ?

                Given how low solar activity was in 1600 I think you have difficulty in getting to the late 20th century with no upward slope at all.

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                Perhaps, it was a mistake to start at 1600. The early data before 1700 is poor and still debated [there is even suggestions that TSI during the Maunder Minimum may have been higher than today, since there were no dark spots to drag TSI down, but let that pass]. So start at 1700 [as the World Data Center did] or at 1800 [as David did]. Independent verification comes from examination of the so-called Waldmeier Effect:
                http://www.leif.org/research/The-Waldmeier-Effect.pdf
                “The Waldmeier Effect is the observation that the rise time of a sunspot cycle varies inversely with the cycle amplitude: strong cycles rise to their maximum faster than weak cycles. The shape of the cycle and thus the rise time does not depend on the scale factor of the sunspot number and can thus be used to verify the constancy of the scale factor with time as already noted by Wolfer (1902) and Waldmeier (1978). We extend their analysis until the present using the new SILSO sunspot number (version 2) and group number and confirm that the scale factors have not varied significantly the past 250 years. The effect is also found in sunspot areas, in an EUV (and F10.7) proxy (the daily range of a geomagnetic variation), and in Cosmic Ray modulation. The result is that solar activity reached similar high values in every one of the (17th?) 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, supporting the finding that there has been no modern Grand Maximum.”
                See in particular slides 25-28.

                Bottom line: the increase of GT since 1800 [to stay with David] does not follow TSI, the latter having not increased since 1800. Pretending that it does is not science. That ends this discussion.

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                Whether one starts at 1700 or at 1800 the fact is that, averaging across peaks and troughs, TSI (acting via an amplifying factor) was high enough to incrementally add warmth to the system at each subsequent TSI peak. Therefore it matters not if you have flattened the TSI slope completely since those dates.

                On the way down to the Maunder Minimum TSI was low enough to cause incremental cooling at each successive trough but the process reversed after the Maunder Minimun.

                There was lower solar activity and a cooler temperature in the Dalton Minimum.

                The cold around 1812 coincided with lower solar activity.

                The cool late 19th century also had a TSI trough.

                Low cycle 20 plus a negative PDO caused a cooling scare.

                THe peaks were generally associated with warmer spells.

                The late 20th century plus positive PDO caused a warming scare.

                Low cycle 24 put a stop to warming according to satellites.

                It doesn’t matter how low you squash the variations.

                Anything other than absolute flatness can have the required climate effect via the amplification factor so your work carries no fears for me.

                Furthermore there are many who are not convinced by your attempts to iron the solar record flat.

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                Just-A-Guy

                Leif Svalgaard,

                Please review my impression of your tactics in the comment below.

                Abe

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                AndyG55

                “Furthermore there are many who are not convinced by your attempts to iron the solar record flat.”

                If he hadn’t flagged it well before finding a reason for making the “adjustments”, people might find it more credible.

                A strong case of confirmation bias, which would do proud to Gavin, Tom Karl etc etc

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    tolip

    Thanks for an excellent education tangent!

    On the other side of the equation, 11 years ahead of the sunspots,,,
    Sky & Telescope 2011 9 12
    “Is the Sunspot Cycle About to Stop?” Pasachoff, Jay & MacRobert Alan M.

    The above article discusses ‘acoustic’ mapping of subsurface solar features.
    In the article it was ‘suggested’ that a solar jetstream might help predict activity in the following 11 year cycle. Evidently the latitude of the feature has some predictive qualities.

    They predicted a decline of the umbral magnetic field.
    http://www.leif.org/research/Livingston%20and%20Penn.png

    It did not decline in the manner depicted in the article but it also did not bounce back up as previous cycles had. It now appears as if it has the potential to resume it’s decline.

    I mentioned the article to Leif Svalgaard(IN a discussion@ WUWT) a few years ago and he did his best to shoot holes in the research because, at the time the umbral magnetic field looked like it was stopping it’s decline and at the time potentially going to increase during the current 11y cycle. It has not increased during the current cycle, as Leif suggested it would, and may have just ‘paused’.
    Other ‘experts’, not necessarily L.S., have revised down their cycle 24 predictions twice.

    My point in posting is that there may be a ‘there’ there.
    It’s possible there are layers of 11y cycles headed our way.

    Disclaimer: I’m a pre-undergrad, any clue I ‘may’ have may be ignorantly(by me) mis-applied.
    But, there’s always a ‘but’, TSI may not be the only/main driver.
    Earth may recieve some inductive heating electro-magnetically.
    The STS-75 Tethered Satellite mission provided a small visual sample of this type of process at work.

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      J Martin

      As there is maybe 6 years to the next minimum then there is time for the umbral magnetic field to move nearer the 1500 gauss level. It’s also interesting that while one solar pole has near normal magnetic intensity the other pole doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. http://www.leif.org/research/WSO-Polar-Fields-since-2003.png

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      That’s interesting, thanks Tolip!

      We’ll get into possible mechanisms in post 25. There are a few possibilities, though they may be linked.

      But this is new to me. The reasoning here suggests a force that affects the Earth’s albedo, originating in the Sun, that is not TSI, and somehow lags TSI by half a (22 year) cycle.

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        Clyde Spencer

        David,
        I don’t consider myself an expert in Fourier analysis — but I’m learning. At this point in time I have taken some BEST global average, high, and low temperature series and performed FFTs (1024 & 2048)on monthly and annual data of different lengths of time. What shows up consistently is a strong spike in power of about 21.3 years per cycle. The first-harmonic of about 11-years per cycle (actually 10.7)is notable but always much weaker than the longer cycle. If I haven’t made some kind of a mistake, and the longer cycle is more strongly correlated than the simple sunspot cycle, than a straightforward extrapolation would be that the sun’s magnetic field is modulating the Earth’s magnetosphere, with all the attendant implications for weather and climate variation. Have you considered the role of the sun’s periodic magnetic field?

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          Clyde: First a note of caution about applying FFTs. Out-of-the-box FFT packages introduce noise via windowing and zero padding, which can be significant in climate datasets without many cycles and with much noise. Also, the FFT doesn’t find the best frequency components, but only checks against predetermined frequencies, which further distorts the picture. See here.

          Yes, the 22 year cycle is much stronger in the surface temperatures than the 11 year cycle. You analyzed BEST, which I don’t have loaded into the spreadsheet with lots of climate data and the low-noise OFT. However, going to the “Transform Lab” sheet in that spreadsheet file and pulling out the cached OFT analyses, the thermometer surface records (back to 1850 or 1880) show:

          — HadCrut4: 21.4 years is 3rd strongest, 10.24 years is the 13th strongest component

          — NCDC: 20.51 years is 3rd strongest, 10.11 years is the 15th strongest component

          — GISSTEMP: 21.68 years is 4th strongest, 10.16 years is the 22nd strongest component

          I’d interpret this as saying the 22 year cycle is present in the surface temperature record, but the 11 year cycle is not.

          Btw, this is well known in hydrology. Google on “Will Alexander”, who studied water levels in African Rivers. There is a clear 22 year cycle going back 4000+ years (the Egyptians kept careful records on the Nile), but nothing much at 11 years.

          This confirms what you are saying.

          Yes, the implications for what is controlling surface temperature are strong.

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            Clyde Spencer

            David,

            I’ve been using the FFT option in Excel. It is pretty primitive (along with the directions)and doesn’t offer any kind of automatic windowing. I have been leery of zero-padding, so I have not used it. Althogh, after discovering severe ringing at the ends of the time-series when attempting a low-pass filter, I had considered trying zero-padding at the beginning and end so that I could just throw that part away.

            In the 1843-2013 run,with annual-average global land temperatures, the 21.3 cycle was the 5th strongest. In the 1929-2014 run, with monthly-average high temperatures, the 21.3 cycle was the 3rd strongest; that was also the case for the low temperatures. In the 1759 to 2014 run, the 21.3 cycle was also the 3rd highest. In all cases the nominal 11-year cycle is much farther down in the ranking.

            If you haven’t seen my article WUWT, you might want to peruse it: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/08/11/an-analysis-of-best-data-for-the-question-is-earth-warming-or-cooling/

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              Roy Hogue

              I have been leery of zero-padding, so I have not used it. Althogh, after discovering severe ringing at the ends of the time-series when attempting a low-pass filter, I had considered trying zero-padding at the beginning and end so that I could just throw that part away.

              Your zero padding at the beginning and end of the data acted as a windowing function, primitive perhaps but that was the effect.

              When you don’t have enough data to fill up the full required power of 2 input values, zero padding on one or both ends lets you run the FFT. Otherwise you can’t use it. If you’re interested in getting the correct amplitude of whatever “signal” is in your data you have to take into account that the output magnitude is reduced because of the zeros. But zero padding is essential in cases where you don’t have enough data. When I was doing it I had the benefit of an engineer with a lot better math (FFT) background than I had so even with zero padding we could resolve amplitude within 2 dB (very good performance). The lack of a good selection of windowing functions is a problem, however.

              Zero padding’s a good technique when you know what you’re doing.

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            Clyde Spencer

            David,

            I finally got around to reading the description of your OFT. It is eminently readable — even by someone like me who is not as mathematically sophisticated as I would like to be. I learned a few things. Therefore, it was a good day. Nice work!

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        • #

          Clyde, again using the OFT from that spreadsheet:

          — SIDC sunspots from 1749: Four strongest components are between 10.03 and 11.81 years, then 21.25 years is the 15th strongest component

          This seems to be saying the 11 year cycle is very strong, and the 22 year cycle is weak in the sunspots. The converse of the surface temperature. Curious.

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            Clyde Spencer

            Although, the link I provided talks about how the odd-numbered cycles are stronger than the even numbered 11-year cycles; that would give a 22-year cycle.

            I have long been critical of putting a lot of stock in using glaciers as a sort of ‘coal mine canary’ to support the claim of atmospheric warming. I think a better explanation can be found in cloudiness. If the sun is messing with the strength of the magnetosphere (which incidentally has declined in strength by about 10-15% in the last century)then it suggests re-examining the the Iris-theory, although it predicts an effect opposite to what is supposed.

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    Greg Goodman

    There is fundamental contradiction is citing other studies that claim to find correlation with a circa 11y lag and claiming that this supports the notch response hypothesis which says there is no 11y cycle. You can’t have it both ways.

    11

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    Don Gaddes

    While-ever this site remains ‘mired’ in the ‘ENSO Fantasy’, we will continue to have ‘smoothed’ values for non-existent ‘cycles’.
    Consider that the ’11 yr’ Sunspot Cycle is not a true cycle – rather it is a Sunspot Wave Frequency, dependant on Solar and planetary Orbital and Tidal factors. It’s value is 11.028148 yrs.
    The Lunar Metonic Cycle (18.61 yrs) is now in play,(2016.) It will exacerbate the effects of the current 5 yr world-wide Solar induced Dry Period, made up of various ‘Dry’ Cycles.(2018 will probably be ‘Dry’ as a result, though it should be ‘Wet’.)
    The next ‘Wet’/Normal period is 2020-2022 (Australia, as per Solar orbit.)
    The possible mitigating factor for these Orbital ‘Dry’ Cycles is volcanic and wind-blown Albedo – in Australia’s case,volcanic activity in the Indonesian Archipelago. ( As seen in the recent North-West to South-east movement of cloud and subsequent precipitation over the South-east, (axial spin.)
    The previous ‘Five Year Dry Period’ was 1997-2001 (Australia) The one before that, 1979-1983, etc. The next one will be 2033 (Australia.) Note, a repeat sequence of 18 yrs.)
    Note; Australia is one of the last countries on the planet to come under the influence of these cycles in their orbit.(America -7 months before, depending on longitude.)

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    John

    Cowards. Can’t debate the point so you delete my posts. Did I touch a raw nerve with the lecturer? LOL

    Denialists can’t cope with the truth so they try to hide away from it.

    Ocean Heat Content is increasing and even Hafield 2007 said it was suitable for inter-annual comparision, which is exactly what Levitus 2012 does.

    Don’t bother replying Joanne/Fly/Ed/David. You can’t handle a proper debate and will simply hide/edit my posts – so I won’t be back at your site ever again. I will inform other websites of your behaviour however, because I think that’s interesting in itself and says a lot about your lack of integrity.

    You go on about conspiracies of “data manipulation” and then manipulate the forums to hide the things that expose your weaknesses.

    🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂

    [Sorry that we can’t support you in your paranoia John. When you “inform other web sites” be sure that you include the whole truth about your inability to follow simple rules, use appropriate language and otherwise be worth our time. Adios. 🙁 🙁 🙁 🙁 🙁 🙁 ] ED

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    http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364682616300347

    “The impact of solar activity (F10.7) on tropical Pacific convection during the boreal summer (June-July-August, JJA) has been examined using reanalysis data, revealing a significant lagged (1–2 years) correlation between outgoing long-wave radiation (OLR) over the tropical western Pacific and the F10.7 index. The OLR anomaly over the tropical western Pacific and the maritime continent shows a dipole pattern during the 1–2 years following high solar (HS) years. Furthermore, the first mode of the empirical orthogonal function (EOF) analysis on the OLR with the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) signal removed is similar to the distribution of correlation coefficients between the JJA mean F10.7 index and the OLR with ENSO signal removed. The correlation and composite analyses of the OLR, velocity potential and vertical velocity reveals that this convection dipole pattern shows an eastward shift of the central position of deep convection, as related to the influence of solar activity over the tropical western Pacific. Further analyses show that the evolutionary process of the solar signal in the ocean-atmosphere system over the tropical western Pacific is consistent with the analyses of OLR, velocity potential, and vertical velocity. By modulating vertical air temperature, the solar signal in the tropical sea surface temperature (SST) may contribute to the triggering of a lagged convection dipole pattern.”

    That being a 1-2 year response it will apply once David’s solar effect kicks in some 11 years after the TSI change that signalled the coming solar variation.

    My view is that a change in TSI is followed some 11 years later by a change in the mix of particles and wavelengths from the sun.

    However, I think David has other possibilities in mind as well and like everyone else I must await a future instalment.

    614

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    Just-A-Guy

    Leif Svalgaard,

    Jo wrote in the OP:

    No way. Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) is not the cause of global warming, rather it is a leading indicator.

    And:

    The flickering signals from total sunlight are a clue that precedes some other change in the solar dynamo. We’ll talk about the possible mechanisms in future posts, because there are a lot of fields, fluxes and particles coming off the Sun that could potentially affect our climate.

    bold italics mine

    Dr. Evans wrote in the O/P:

    In the reasoning and observations above, the magnitude of the surface warming is great enough to be easily observed — so something either amplifies the direct heating effect of a change in TSI, or is a climate influence in its own right. In either case, there is a warming influence that lags TSI by ~11 years, and its magnitude is much greater than the direct heating effect of changes in TSI (see post 10).

    Note also the observed delay of ~11 years cannot be simply due to propagation of heat around the Earth because:

    •The delayed warming influence just mentioned is too large to be due to the direct heating effect of TSI.
    •The time constant of the low pass filter that mimics the thermal inertia of the Earth is ~1 to ~3 years (post 12) — so the global temperature reflects the new level of direct heating by the TSI much sooner than the ~11 years of the delay.

    So, when . . .

    You wrote:

    The old Figure and the very title of the post are very misleading. They claim that TSI [with an irrelevant and debatable delay] drives Global Temperatures GT.

    And:

    . . .so the claim that GT follows TSI is plainly false.

    . . .you’re not only conflating ‘drives’ with ‘follows’, you’re creating a straw-man in the process.
    The O/P clearly states that TSI is not driving Earth’s temperature. Full stop.

    You’re continued insistence that it does is just false. And you know this full well, unless of course, you failed to read the O/P or your reading comprehension is so weak that simple English is too much for you.

    You also keep referring to morality. Prove that you have some. Man-up, dude! Admit your mistake and bow out!

    Abe

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      Just-A-Guy

      Leif Svalgaard,

      Furthermore,

      You wrote:

      Bottom line: the increase of GT since 1800 [to stay with David] does not follow TSI, the latter having not increased since 1800.

      Because no one is claiming that TSI drives Earth’s temperatures but rather that variations in TSI correlate well with variations in Earth’s temperature ~11 years later, any discussion about trends, upward, downward, or flat are completely irrelevant.

      Your continued insistence that it does is a non-sequitur. It does not follow from the subject matter being discussed.

      Abe

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        It should be obvious that what is meant is that the variations of TSI does not correlate with the variation of temperature.
        And it should also be obvious that Evans plots not the variations of either but their values. You are shooting past the goal.

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      Well done Abe/Just-A-Guy, you put your finger on it.

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    Robin Day

    Cooling won’t be a problem for the warmists as they will simply continue to fudge the data……….

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      Stefan they may be correct. If the Hale cycle (22 years) largely controls surface temperatures, then there would be a necking using that methodology at right around 22 years.

      (Thought experiment: Suppose a cycle of exactly 22 years completely controlled the surface temperature and moved in a near-constant trend. Then you would get necking because any interval of 22 years would return you to exactly same point in the cycle, while different lengths would not.)

      Good find. I think this is supporting evidence for solar influence.

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