Massive swarm of earthquakes, small scale evacuation. El Hierro island, Canaries

Photo credit Wikipedia

Spanish National Geological Institute in Spanish showing the extreme activity, been thousands.

Article in Wired magazine science

“Evacuation of smallest Canary Island begins after earthquake ‘swarm’ sparks fears of volcanic eruption” — Daily Mail, UK newspaper

I expect this item will interest those working on a CME or planetary alignment linkage with earthquakes, or in this case volcanic activity.

h/t to malagaview who posted to Suggestions.

Sun has a flare for X rated movies

Figure 1

Image credit Catania sunspot group

Figure 2

Stanford WSO daily magnetic. Latest is here

As I expect sunwatchers are well aware the sun is going through a highly active phase, throwing out CME and X-class flares.

Roger Andrews: Sea level reconstruction from tide gauge data and a match with SST

Roger Andrews has computed an annual sea level time series which is mentioned in the previous thread. I’ve plotted the data so that it can be shown.

Figure 1

“Last year I constructed a relative global sea level rise series between 1900 and 2010 from scratch using 328 unadjusted tide gauge records from the PSMSL data base. When I compared it with the unadjusted global ICOADS SST series I got a remarkably close match (R^2 = 0.92 for annual means, with a 1C rise in SST corresponding to a 100mm rise in relative SLR).”

Temperature leading sea level

Figure 1

Recent Internet talk about lead/lag, ocean and so on tripped me into doing a quick rework of the temperature vs. sea level finding. This is of course all conjecture.

I’ve extracted what some might call a principle wave component from both datasets and these are very similar. As models I can time shift trivially. All the data shown has been normalised to the sea level data so they plot as one.

In hindsight I could have shown some earlier data. This is quite interesting and can involve Geosat and Church & White, all pretty much in agreement. Sea level did wobble during the 1980/90 but longer term the whole thing is what I call iffy.

If there is a temperature lead this is nice because it means we have a clue on what comes next with sea level.

Timing?

I think lead time is very vague. Previously I put this at about 4 years but that was based on a slightly different temperature dataset. Here is is a little over 1.5 years. None is a surprise for slow changes on short data.

Not detailing, all r2 > 0.9

The result is worse than previously, perhaps why is explained below.

High confidence in faster than light?

News is emerging from CERN / Grand Sasso of the results from a three year experiment where neutronos are sent from CERN to Grand Sasso, Italy, 730 km southeast. They think the neutrinos arrive 60ns too early.

Reuters article

Opera experiment page at Gran Sasso (in English, follow current and Opera)

EDIT: news item from Gran Sasso Â

EDIT PREPRINT OF PAPER HERE

Located east of Rome in an Appenine mountain.

Faster than light seems to come into the same category as news about creating a quieter vacuum by avoiding anti-matter intruding, a matter of phase.

Think I’ll go back to tending the roses.

[UPDATE 7th Oct 2011]

Letter at Arxiv.org, PDF available here

Preamble writes…

“The OPERA neutrino velocity result and the synchronisation of clocks
Carlo R. Contaldi
Theoretical Physics, Blackett Laboratory, Imperial College, SW7 2BZ, London, United Kingdom
(Dated: September 30, 2011)
The CERN-OPERA experiment [1] claims to have measured a one-way speed of neutrinos that is apparently faster than the speed of light c. One-way speed measurements such as these inevitably require a convention for the synchronisation of clocks in non-inertial frames since the Earth is rotating. We argue that the effect of the synchronisation convention is not properly taken into account in the analysis of [1] and may well invalidate their interpretation of superluminal neutrino velocity.”
h/t to The Register

Tim

Cloud albedo: what does it respond to?

There has been much discussion recently about clouds and feedback. The Spencer and Dessler debate, and the blog hosted science being done around the issue has captured a lot of attention.

Let’s take a look at the primary cause of the change in temperature over the last few decades. This graph is put together from two graphs which appeared on Skeptical Science, with a correction to the Y axis, which John Cook has two orders of magnitude too small. It’s been that way for over a year, despite two separate efforts on my part to get him to correct it. The data comes from two sources; the ISCCP international cloud project which uses weather satellites and integrates the data to produce a global series, plus data from the Earthshine project, which measures the amount of light being reflected from the Earth and bouncing back off the new Moon.

Al Gore: 24 hours of consenseless nonscience

Al Gore went to war

All on an autumn day

He gave us his facts

And turned on his acts

To scare the denialists away

Comical Al

Bart: Cloud feedback is negative – ocean response is around 4.88 years

I’m not sufficiently up on stats to really understand this, but I’m collating the relevant comments from Climate Audit and Roy Spencers site here, because it looks important, and moderation at CA seems to be impeding the flow of the conversation so it has become disjointed.

Is there anyone with a voice in these matters who could just do a cross spectral estimation of the two series and read off the phase relationship directly?

You cannot diagnose feedback by performing a linear regression on a phase plane plot when the driving input is all over the place and the phase response is nonlinear. As I explained on the last thread, and have written up here.

What I have found is significantly greater evidence that the feedback relationship is, indeed, negative, contrary to Dessler. The phase shift at low frequencies, which determines the sign of the feedback, is very clearly near 180 degrees. Saying an input is 180 degrees from the output is a long winded way of saying that the one is the negative of the other…I’m sitting back and watching people argue about techniques which are entirely unsuited to the problem in the first place. It’s insane.

 I need other knowledgeable people to become aware of the result and determine what the effect of a -9.5 W/m^2/degC feedback would be. I think, though, that the IPCC models require the overall feedback to be positive to get any significant warming, so it appears to me that this result could, potentially, kill CAGW.

There could be a valid criticism that the span of data is too short to have high confidence in the result. But, I would argue that the onus is on them to prove that the overall feedback is positive, because I think this establishes that the running assumption should be that it is likely negative.

.

Bill Illis: Clouds account for most of the variability in net radiation at TOA

Over on the Spencer Good, Bad and Ugly response to Dessler 2011 thread on WUWT, Bill Illis quietly drops this little bombshell:

Bill Illis says:

September 10, 2011 at 10:11 am

While we are having no luck finding a good correlation between clouds and temperatures in a feedback sense (the scatters are providing r^2 of 0.02) which indicates there is probably NO cloud feedback either way (and the IPCC calculates that positive cloud feedback might be half of the total feedbacks so that is very clearly in question now) …

There is a very interesting relationship between the Net Cloud Radiation levels and the Total Global Net Radiation as measured by the CERES satellite (which I don’t think anyone has looked yet being busy trying to find the temperature feedbacks).

I’m getting Cloud variability being a very large part of the variability in the total Global Net Radiation Budget – anywhere from 65% to 100% (with R^2 between 0.29 and 0.77).

First the (not really convincing but better) scatter using the CERES data (that Steve McIntyre and Roy Spencer made available).

And then the (much, much better) relationship over time.

Strange discrepancies in co2 measurement

The Japanese GHG measuring satellite GOSAT has been measuring GHG’s in the atmosphere since 2009

http://www.jaxa.jp/press/2009/05/20090528_ibuki_e.html

The website is here:

http://www.gosat.nies.go.jp/

The levels they are measuring for co2 seem to be a bit lower than results at Mauna Loa:

Here’s the Mauna loa reading:

and here’s GOSAT’s animated data over the last couple of years: