NASA Report: The Effects of Solar Variability on Earth’s Climate

H/T to ‘Catweazle’ for mentioning this report: nasa-sun-earth – on solar-terrestrial relations. A web summary is available here: http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2013/08jan_sunclimate/

Taster from the text:

In the galactic scheme of things, the Sun is a remarkably constant star. While some stars exhibit dramatic pulsations, wildly yo-yoing in size and brightness, and sometimes even exploding, the luminosity of our own sun varies a measly 0.1% over the course of the 11-year solar cycle.

There is, however, a dawning realization among researchers that even these apparently tiny variations can have a significant effect on terrestrial climate. A new report issued by the National Research Council (NRC), “The Effects of Solar Variability on Earth’s Climate,” lays out some of the surprisingly complex ways that solar activity can make itself felt on our planet.

Royal Society & NAS: Sun’s variations have played very little role in climate change

The Royal Society, in collaboration with the NAS has published a long document about the evidence and causes of climate change. Section’s 4 & 5 deal with the Sun. Count the misleading statements and omissions:

4. What role has the Sun played in climate change in recent decades?

The Sun provides the primary source of energy driving Earth’s climate system, but its variations have played very little role in the climate changes observed in recent decades. Direct satellite measurements since the late 1970s show no net increase in the Sun’s output, while at the same time global surface temperatures have increased (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Measurements of the Sun’s energy incident on Earth show no net increase in solar forcing during the past 30 years, and therefore this cannot be responsible for warming during that period. The data show only small periodic amplitude variations associated with the Sun’s 11-year cycle. Figure by Keith Shine. Source: TSI data from Physikalisch-Meteorologisches Observatorium Davos, Switzerland, adjusted down by 4.46 W m-2 to agree with the 2008 solar minimum data from Kopp and Lean, 2011; temperature data from the HadCRUT4 dataset, UK Met Office, Hadley Centre (larger version)

Loading The Dice

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Paul Homewood does some smart stats work to confirm what we feared. Ed Miliband is a plank.

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

A phrase we keep hearing over and over again, is that we are “loading the dice”. The idiot Miliband is the latest to jump on the bandwagon

“If you keep throwing the dice and you keep getting sixes then the dice are loaded. Something is going on.”

(BTW – he has referred to 2012 as the “second wettest winter on record”. In the UK, the winter of 2012/13 was actually the 28th wettest since 1910. (2011/12 was even drier). To think we’re likely to have this cretin running the country next year!)

It is easy, of course, to pick one month or one year and say how wet it has been. Just as it is easy for me to find other wetter episodes. But if there is any truth in “loading the dice”, we should see two things:-

1) An increasing trend in…

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NASA’s Kepler Mission: Announces discovery of 715 new planets

This’ll keep Oldbrew and me busy with the calculators  for a while. 🙂

The artist concept depicts multiple-transiting planet systems, which are stars with more than one planet. The planets eclipse or transit their host star from the vantage point of the observer. This angle is called edge-on.
Image Credit: NASA

NASA’s Kepler mission announced Wednesday the discovery of 715 new planets. These newly-verified worlds orbit 305 stars, revealing multiple-planet systems much like our own solar system.

Nearly 95 percent of these planets are smaller than Neptune, which is almost four times the size of Earth. This discovery marks a significant increase in the number of known small-sized planets more akin to Earth than previously identified exoplanets, which are planets outside our solar system.

The Kepler team continues to amaze and excite us with their planet hunting results. That these new planets and solar systems look somewhat like our own, portends a great future when we have the James Webb Space Telescope in space to characterize the new worlds.

Pause for thought?

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Anders is having a discussion about Ed and Tamsin’s nature article on the ‘pause’ in global warming.

...and Then There's Physics

There’s a cleverly worded commentary in Nature Climate Change by Ed Hawkins, Tamsin Edwards, and Doug McNeall called Pause for thought.

The article starts with

The recent slowdown (or ‘pause’) in global surface temperature rise is a hot topic for climate scientists and the wider public. We discuss how climate scientists have tried to communicate the pause and suggest that ‘many-to-many’ communication offers a key opportunity to directly engage with the public.

The article is a combination of an attempt to discuss the slowdown in surface warming (which they seem comfortable calling a pause) and the role scientists could play in communicating such things to the public. In general, the article is quite good and includes an interesting figure that illustrates how climate models do indeed predict such slowdowns, but don’t all predict them as the same time. Hence, ensemble averages tend to remove such variability.
Illustration…

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Typhoon Devastated Atoll Regrows New Islands Despite Sea Level Rise

H/T to Susan Fraser for this item from the NZ Herald. A nice antidote to the BBC bullshit about the Indonesian islands:

The images show the remarkable changes that have occurred in the Nadikdik Atoll, in the southern Marshall Islands, between 1945 and 2010. (Credit: NZ Herald)

New research has shown the remarkable rebirth of a Pacific atoll devastated by a typhoon over a century ago.

The University of Auckland study, published in the journal Geomorphology, highlights the dynamism of island systems of the Pacific over relatively short periods of time.

Ed Miliband: Pumping up the Rhetoric with Unparliamentary Language

In the punch and judy show Prime Ministers Questions today, Labour party Leader Ed Miliband used unparliamentary language in framing a question:

So, will you now clarify: are you happy to have climate change deniers in your Government?

John Bercow, leader of the house, should have intervened at this point to remind Miliband that the rules of the house don’t permit hate speech, but did not.

Dr Roy Spencer, a climate scientist who understands much more about Earth’s geophysical processes than all of the MP’s in the house put together, has had enough of this ugly rhetoric being tossed his way. He says from now on, he will fight back by returning fire with “global warming Nazi”.

Greenpeace Co-Founder Tells US Senate Earth’s Geologic History Fundamentally Contradicts CO2 Climate Fears

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Tory Aardvark picks up on Greenpeas founder Dr Patrick Moore’s story…

Tory Aardvark

Dr Patrick Moore was one of the co-founders of Green NGO, Greenpeace, for several years Moore was chairman of Greenpeace in Canada, until he became concerned at the political direction Greenpeace was taking, and left the NGO.

Moore is far from popular with his former NGO and other Greens, in January 2012 he spoke about the Green folly of wind power describing it as “a destroyer of wealth and negative to the economy.”

Then in July 2012 Moore caused more Green outrage and upset when he attacked the warming alarmists for their attempts to cover up the lack of warming for what was then 15 years.  “These people are either completely naive about the relationship between CO2 and plants or they are making this up as a way of  deflecting attention from the lack of warming for the past 15 years”, said Moore.

In August…

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Don’t Expect The Truth From The BBC

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Great information from Paul Homewood that people need to know to avoid being deceived by the stinking lying scoundrels at the British Bullshitting Service. This headline would be more accurate if it read ‘Sinking land threatens 1500 islands’

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-26337723

From the BBC:

As many as 1,500 of Indonesia’s islands could be under water by 2050 because of rising sea levels, it’s been reported.

In the capital city, Jakarta, the main international Soekarno-Hatta Airport could be below sea level as soon as 2030, with outlying districts turned into lakes, says Singapore’s Straits Times, quoting a report from Maplecroft’s Climate Change Vulnerability Index.

“This archipelago’s biggest threat is rising sea levels, where 42 million people living 3km from the coast are vulnerable,” Ancha Srinivasan of the Asian Development Bank says.

Twenty-four islands have already disappeared off the coast of Aceh, North Sumatra, Papua and Riau, according to official research, and experts are worried this trend could accelerate. Indonesia comprises around 17,500 islands, of which approximately 6,000 are permanently inhabited.

Would it surprise you to find that the BBC have not been telling you the whole story?…

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Lisa Goddard: Positive PDO – Natural variation “no-one really talks about”

Lisa Goddard of the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, Columbia University, Palisades, New York has a commentary article in Nature Climate Change today entitled ‘Heat hide and seek’ which caught my eye. In part it says this:

Natural variability seems to be capable of accounting for changes in ocean heat uptake of the magnitude experienced. Many recent studies point to the role of PDO in this recent hiatus. What is particularly compelling is that this period has also been one of negative PDO. Further suggestive evidence is that the last period with decade-scale trends in global mean temperature as weak as that experienced since the turn of the century occurred through the 1950s and early 1960s, which was another period dominated by very negative PDO conditions. This shows that hiatus periods are unusual but not unprecedented.

Mann made climate change

Climate scaremongerer, sock puppeteering internet bully and serial litigant Mike Mann is at it again over on Thinkprogress:

There is no doubt, when we look at the increased toll that climate change is taking in form of more devastating superstorms, more prolonged and severe drought, more extreme flooding events, decimated agriculture and livestock, and massive wildfires, that we are already feeling the adverse impacts of climate change.

Meanwhile, in the real world, 2013 was a wash for landfalling hurricanes, which are at a 50 year low, and Typhoon Haiyan turned out not to be ‘unprecedented’ after all, with a much higher death toll occurring in the 1897 storm which hit Tacloban.

BREAKING – Warning to Michael Mann: apologise for your lie or risk facing from me what you’ve done to Steyn

Fnordfn Oh dear, its open suing season. Mikey Mann hoist on his own petard may now face being sued by at least three people simultaneously.

Climatism

BREAKING via Andrew Bolt Blog :

Normally I do not sue, but this seems to me a special case.

Mann, the climate alarmist who gave the world his dodgy ”hockey stick”, is now suing sceptic Mark Steyn for mocking him and his lawyers have produced deceptive legal documents in his defence.

Mann has published an outright lie that defames me, and should face the same punishment he wishes to mete out on Steyn for mere mockery.

I do not lie and Murdoch does not pay me to do so. Nor has Mann singled out a single “lie” I’m alleged to have committed.

In fact, Mann is so reckless with the facts that his tweet links to an obvious parody Twitter account run by one of my critics, clearly believing that it’s actually mine.

Advice, please?

Warning to Michael Mann: apologise for your lie or risk facing from me…

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The Merchants of Smear

Watts Up With That?

The sanctioned punishment of climate skeptics becomes more than just a few aberrant ideas, and is following some historical parallels

First, I loathe having to write essays like this, but I think it is necessary given the hostile social climate now seen to be emerging.

Yesterday, WUWT highlighted the NYT cartoon depicting killing “deniers” for having a different opinion, today I want to highlight Naomi Orekses and Suzanne Goldenberg, who seem seem to like the idea of having climate “deniers” arrested under RICO act for thought collusion, all under the approving eye of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard.

Watch the video: 

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Ed Davey to blow £100m public money on greencrap technology

Ed Davey has lost the plot and is about to blow £100,000,000 of public money on a ‘Carbon Capture and Storage’ project. As you might expect, EU directives lie behind this lunacy. The recipients are Shell and SSE. The BBC has this:

Multi-million pound funding to help with design costs for a planned carbon capture and storage plant at Peterhead has been unveiled by the UK government.

Shell and Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE) are behind the scheme to transform the town’s power station.

It is one of two preferred bidders in a £1bn competition to encourage the development of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology.

The funding was announced by UK Energy Secretary Ed Davey.

Mark Steyn: Amphibious Albion

Reblogged from Mark Steyn’s website, an article on the UK floods. Buy one of his gift certificates if you would like to help give him a sporting chance of successfully countersuing the odious Michael Mann:

Amphibious Albion
by Mark Steyn

As non-British TV viewers may have discerned, the whole of the United Kingdom is presently underwater. Something to do with that rising of the oceans that Barack Obama promised to reverse?

Why, yes!

Mr Miliband says: “This winter is a one-in-250-year event” (yet it’s nothing like as wet as 1929-30 if you count the whole of England and Wales, let alone Britain) and that “the science is clear”. The chief scientist of the Met Office, Dame Julia Slingo, tells us “all the evidence” suggests that climate change is contributing to this winter’s wetness. (Why, then, did she allow the Met Office to forecast in November that a dry winter was almost twice as likely as a wet winter?) Lord Stern, an economist, claimed that the recent weather is evidence “we are already experiencing the impact of climate change”.

In fact, before the prophets of doom drowned out everyone else, the “consensus” was that flooding was nothing to do with “climate change”:

Jaime Jessop: Climate Wars – CO2 vs. Solar in the Battle to Lay Claim to Jet Stream Anomalies

Reblogged from Jaime Jessop’s nascent climatecontrarian site:

Climate Wars – CO2 vs. Solar in the Battle to Lay Claim to Jet Stream Anomalies
By Jaime Jessop – 23-2-2014
Mat Collins of Exeter University admitted to the world a week ago that the direct cause of the UK’s wet and windy winter was/is the North Atlantic Jet Stream. It has been directly responsible for the ‘conveyor belt’ of powerful storms which have hit the UK, one after another, in seemingly endless succession, since December 2013 all the way into February of this year. The rain precipitated by those storms has resulted in widespread river flooding.

In addition, a particularly deep depression which coincided with a very high tide on the 5th/6th December also resulted in fairly severe coastal flooding along eastern coastal areas. Nothing as bad as the devastating tidal surge of 1953 but that was more down to massively improved flood defences in the last 50 years. The Dec 2013 tidal surge was probably only a shade less menacing in terms of actual sea level rise than was the 1953 event. Severe gales and storm force winds have also driven huge waves over sea defences in Wales and the West Country, resulting in yet more localised flooding.

All this chaos due to the Jet Stream, due to the run of extreme weather caused by that Jet Stream. But, given the exhaustive news coverage and the opportunity for a propaganda coup, it was inevitable that the proponents of CO2 induced global warming would figure out some way to link in the storms with ‘climate change’ and, right on cue, up stepped Julia Slingo to claim that ‘all the evidence’ pointed to a link between the UK floods and ‘climate change’.

ren: How did the polar vortex lock?

Guest post from commenter ‘ren’ a friend from Poland with a strong interest in meteorology and some interesting ideas on the relationship between solar activity, cosmic rays, ozone levels and stratospheric pressure systems.

How did the polar vortex lock?
by ‘ren’ on 23-2-2014

In October 2013 there was a decrease in solar activity, as evidenced by the growth of cosmic rays at that time.

Paper: Evidence for distinct modes of solar activity

This solar reconstruction uses a combination of 14C and “archeomagnetic field models” (Licht) to show strong solar activity modality.

Fig 3 from paper

Evidence for distinct modes of solar activity
I. G. Usoskin, G. Hulot, Y. Gallet, R. Roth, A. Licht, F. Joos, G. A. Kovaltsov, E. Thébault and A. Khokhlov
A&A 562 L10 (2014)
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/201423391

Tony Thomas: Climate Science – How She is Done by Lewandowsky and Karoly

Investigative journalist Tony Thomas emailed me with a new piece he has written for Quadrant Online. It details how Stefan Lewandowsky and David Karoly along with some others have rehashed some old greencrap based on ancient dodgy climate and health models to scare Australian schoolkids with. An instructive read:

Tony Thomas

Climate Science – How She is Done

A widely touted report detailing the current death toll from rising temperatures — which aren’t rising at all, just by the way — is even more dubious than the provenance of the 14-year-old academic guesstimate on which the current alarms are based.

With the Australian Academy of Science’s climate team now re-writing its 2010 booklet on dangerous climate change, it’s time for a bit of investigation. The original, 24-page booklet went out to nearly a million users, mainly schoolkids and teachers, so the current re-writing team has a heavy responsibility to treat the climate controversies fairly.

Scafetta and Willson: “the ACRIM composite as the most likely and precise representation of 35 years of TSI monitoring”

Nicola Scafetta and Richard Willson have a new paper in press which contains the most thorough analysis yet of the intercomparison of the empirical ACRIM and modeled PMOD TSI series. It’s a comprehensive yet readable paper of high interest to all diligent climate researchers interested in determining the relative strengths of various climate drivers. It is also an important historical document for philosophers of science investigating the shift from observation based empirical solar science to model based  dogma underpinning preconceptions of the power of trace gases to control Earth’s surface temperature. The IPCC and Team Wassup’s Leif Svalgaard are not going to like it, and will therefore try to ignore it, thus further underminng their credibility.

ACRIM total solar irradiance satellite composite validation versus TSI proxy models
Nicola Scafetta & Richard C. Willson

From the paper:

PMOD TSI composite (Fröhlich and Lean 1998; Fröhlich 2004, 2006, 2012) is essentially a theoretical model originally designed to agree with Lean’s TSI proxy model (Fröhlich and Lean 1998). It relies on postulated but experimentally unverified drifts in the ERB record during the ACRIM Gap,and other alterations of the published ERB and ACRIM results, that are not recognized by their original experimental teams and have not been verified by the PMOD by original computations using ERB or ACRIM1 data.