Gerry Pease: It’s all downhill now for solar cycle 24

Gerry Pease has sent us a solar cycle 24 update:

It’s all downhill now for solar cycle 24. Cycle 24 Max (smoothed sunspot number 81.9) appears to have occurred in April, 2014:

Cycle 24 progress (last update December 1, 2014

Cycle 23 Solar Max (smoothed sunspot number 120) was in early 2000:

Solar cycles 23-24 (last update December 1, 2014)

Note the progression from cycle 21 to 24:

Graphical comparison of cycles 21, 22, 23 and 24 (last update December 1, 2014)

Similar cycles 12, 14, and 16 had lower peaks than cycle 24, and similar cycles 10, 12, 13, 14, and 16 all had earlier peaks:

Graphical comparison of cycles 10, 12, 13, 14, 16 and 24 (last update December 1, 2014)

Smoothed solar activity since April is projected to be successively lower each month.

Paul Pukite: Sloshing Model for ENSO

Scientist Paul Pukite has built a simple model involving Total Solar Irradiance , the Chandler wobble and the Quasi-Biennial Oscillation which does an impressive job of emulating the Southern Oscillation index from Darwin and Tahiti. Here’s the result:

 

Met Office, HadSST3, CRUTEM3, HadCRUT3, questions over gridded coverage

The UK Met Office / Hadley Centre (Met Office) / Climatic Research Unit (UEA) construct and publish global time series for temperature based on published 5 degree gridded. How this is derived from land meteorological station readings and ship board for sea surface temperature is unclear. The gridded to eg. global is a simple (cosine) weighted average which takes into account the variable area of a linear grid representing a sphere.

I have put together maps showing the data counts for decades over a world shore outline. These are provided as vector plots (master work), PDF, or for casual looks, PNG. The results are disturbing and particularly in the light of the Met Office producing 100 different versions of HadSST3. “Each of the following files is a zip archive containing ten realisations of the HadSST3 data set. There are 100 realisations in total.”

Do I detect obfuscation, flapping for distraction?

[update] Roger Andrews has pointed out this work ought to use HadSST2, my mistake. I’m not sure what to do about this, updating the files is not too difficult but is there a material difference? I’ve created new files and am looking at introducing the hadcrut4 data.[update]

Clam fossils study reveals 10,000 year history of El Niño

Clams [credit: Wikipedia]

El Niño and its twin La Niña are under the spotlight this year as climate-watchers hunt for signs of expected activity that seems to have gone largely missing in recent years if compared to, say, the 1990s.

Has the strength of these phenomena changed in modern times? Apparently not.

‘The charts created by the research team suggest that the ENSO cycle does not have a predictable cycle and also that it has not been increasing in strength over the course of the Holocene as others have suggested.’

Ed Hoskins: Analysis of the record of fossil-fuel CO2 emissions 1965 -2013

Guest post from Ed Hoskins MAarch (Cantab)  BDS (Lond).

The record of recent Man-made CO2 emissions:  1965 -2013

The following calculations and graphics are based on information on national CO2 emission levels worldwide published by BP[1]in June 2014 for the period from 1965 up until 2013.  The data is well corroborated by previous similar datasets published by the CDIAC, Guardian [2] and Google up until 2009 [3].  These notes and figures provide a short commentary on that CO2 emissions history.
The contrast between the developed and developing worlds is stark in terms of their history of CO2 emissions and the likely prognosis for their future CO2 output.

Figure 1

Since 1980 CO2 emissions from the developed world have shown virtually no increase, whereas the developing world has had a fourfold increase since 1980:  that increase is accelerating.

Laying the Points Out

tallbloke:

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Brandon’s take on the temperature record debacle

Originally posted on Izuru:

There has been a lot of hoopla about supposed problems in the surface temperature record recently. Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t seem to understand what the hoopla is actually about. I think the problem is people have focused too much on rhetoric and too little on actual information. I’d like to try to reverse that.

View original 1,359 more words

Ian Wilson: 18.6 year lunar cycle in high rainfall years in Victoria

From Ian Wilson’s Astro-Climate Connection blog:

The Moon’s orbit is tilted by approximately five degrees compared to the Earth-Sun plane. The net affect of this is that the strength of Lunar-tides at a given latitude on the Earth’s surface vary in strength over a cycle of 18.6 years. This 18.6 year Draconic cycle is also clearly evident in the small changes that take place in the rate of rotation of the Earth.

Head of Cabot Institute sticks to alarmist climate narrative

On Saturday My lady and I travelled with friends Ian and Susan down the Scott Polar Research Institute to a talk given by Rich Pancost, the professor at the head of the Cabot Institute at the University of Bristol. This outfit is comprised of a small team which co-ordinates cross disciplinary effort from other faculties at the University to help address the university’s ‘two big themes’ of environment and health.

Zombie Science: Gergis et al disinterred for remake

My thanks to Tony Thomas for giving the talkshop the exclusive of his take on this breaking news item:

Gergis findings re-surface – the Hockey Stick lives!

By Tony Thomas 31-03-2014

Hello again Hockey Stick, goodbye global Medieval Warming Period.

These are the conclusions of a multi-proxy 1000-year climate reconstruction published today (March 31) in Nature Climate Change, by Dr Raphael Neukom of the Oeschger Centre at the University of Bern, and Dr Joelle Gergis of the University of Melbourne.

Dr  Neukom   summed up for a University of Melbourne press release:

The study showed the ‘Medieval Warm Period’, as identified in some European chronicles, was a regional phenomenon. 

During the same period, temperatures in the Southern Hemisphere were only average. Our study revealed it was not a common climate event that many people have previously assumed.

The paper claims that in 99.7 percent of the results, the warmest decade of the millennium occurred after 1970.

The press release says,“And surprisingly, only twice over the entire past millennium have both hemispheres simultaneously shown extreme temperatures.

One of these occasions was a global cold period in the 17th century; the other was the current warming phase”.”[1]

Steinhilber & Beer: Prediction of solar activity for the next 500 years

H/T to Gerry Pease for alerting me to this paper from last year by Steinhilber and Beer which lays out a solar prediction from their analysis of their reconstruction of solar activity from proxy data.

Prediction of solar activity for the next 500 years
Friedhelm Steinhilber1 and Jürg Beer1
Received 18 May 2012; revised 18 February 2013; accepted 2 March 2013.

Recently, a new low-noise record of solar activity has been reconstructed for the past 9400 years by combining two 10Be records from Greenland and Antarctica with 14C fromtree rings [Steinhilber et al., 2012]. This record confirms earlier results, namely, that the Sun has varied with distinct periodicities in the past. We present a prediction of mean solar magnetic activity averaged over 22 years for the next 500 years mainly based on the spectral information derived from the solar activity record of the past. Assuming that the Sun will continue to vary with the same periodicities for the next centuries, we extract the spectral information from the past and apply it to two different methods to predict the future of solar magnetic activity.

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.

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.

P.A. Semi: Integration of Greenwich and USAF Sunspot area data with farside interpolation

Brilliant Czech researcher P.A. Semi has sent us the fruits of some considerable labour, which he has asked us to share with the Solar-planetary community. Since the venue at Pattern Recognition in Physics was axed by Copernicus (The Innovative Science un-Publisher^TM), he says he is not sure where to get this published, so the Talkshop it is for now. I will also add it to the repository I am building at ‘Solar System Science’, a new venture I’m setting up in collaboration with other researchers. Tim Channon will be interested in working with the dataset which can be generated from the resources Semi has provided, and I’m sure others will be too. Here’s a sample of the output:

Semi Writes:

Hello Tallbloke and others.

I’ve produced the Synoptic map of Sunspots 1874-2012 and Interpolated Sunspot Area, that allows to investigate sunspot record without smoothing, while removing the 27-day false signal of single-face problem another way – by interpolating individual Sunspot groups: if they can be matched on the next rotation, they are linearly interpolated to the new position and size, if they are not matched, they are interpolated in 17 days linearly to zero. This way, the far-side Sunspots are interpolated and the record does not need the usual monthly smoothing, that wipes away precise timings. (There still exists some single-face problem – the Sunspots, appearing on the far side first, are delayed until they get to the front side, and the 17-day fade-out makes a typical fade-out curves in the chart, but still better than if the group disappeared abruptly on the limb…)

Nicola Scafetta and Richard Willson: New paper linking short term solar variation with planetary periods

Congratulations to Nicola Scafetta  and Richard Willson on the publication of their new paper, made freely available by high impact journal Pattern Recognition in Physics :

Multiscale comparative spectral analysis of satellite total solar irradiance measurements from 2003 to 2013 reveals a planetary modulation of solar activity and its nonlinear dependence on the 11 yr solar cycle.

Anna Harper: Rainforest better able to withstand drought than models predicted

From the ‘Not as bad as we theorised’ department, a paper which finds that models of water cycling in rainforest over-estimated the effect of drought by a big factor. The paper is paywalled, but there’s a write up here which summarises. Worth noting that the paper emphasises this natural resilience operates best in undisturbed forest.

Journal of Climate 2013 ; e-View
doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-13-00074.1

Impact of evapotranspiration on dry season climate in the Amazon forest
Anna Harper*

College of Engineering, Mathematics, and Physical Sciences, University of Exeter, Exeter, Devon, UK, Department of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA
Ian T. Baker, A. Scott Denning, David A. Randall, Donald Dazlich, and Mark Branson

Department of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA

Abstract

Moisture recycling can be an important source of rainfall over the Amazon forest, but this process relies heavily upon the ability of plants to access soil moisture. Evapotranspiration (ET) in the Amazon is often maintained or even enhanced during the dry season, when net radiation is high. However, ecosystem models often over predict the dry season water stress. We removed unrealistic water stress in an ecosystem model (the Simple Biosphere model, SiB3), and examined impacts of enhanced ET on the dry season climate when coupled to a GCM. The “Stressed” model experiences dry season water stress and limitations on ET, while the “Unstressed” model has enhanced root water access and exhibits strong drought tolerance.

Euan Mearns: UK temperatures since 1933 – Part 1.

Repost of a repost by Clive best, shamelessly stolen because it’s so good. This adds to the several posts already here at th talkshop comparing sunshine hours to temperature regionally and globally. How long can the mainstream climate scintists ignore this growing body of evidence which demonstrates a link between solar activty levels, albedo cloud amount levels and surface temperature? H/T to A.C. Osborn

Posted on November 9, 2013 by Clive Best

This is a repost written by Euan Mearns and is an introduction to the work we consequently did this summer concerning cloud and CO2 radiative effects on UK temperatures. Two more posts will follow describing the radiative model in more detail.

Summary

• Terrestrial sunshine records provide an inverse proxy for cloud cover. Sunshine at surface means cloud free line of sight between the point on the surface and the Sun.
• We present concordant sunshine and temperature records for 23 UK Met Office weather stations. Data is available for a handful of stations from 1908 but it is only from 1933 that there are a sufficient number of stations to provide representative cover of the UK.
• Data from 1933 to 1956 is believed to be affected by air pollution from burning coal for home heat and power generation, therefore our main analysis focusses on the time interval 1956 to 2012.
• Both temperature (Tmax) and sunshine hours show cyclic variation, both showing a tendency to rise in the period 1980 to 2000 in keeping with global warming that has been documented in many studies.
• In the UK there is a high degree of covariance between sunshine and Tmax, sunny years tend to be warmer. The correlation coefficient (R2) between sunshine hours and Tmax is 0.8 whilst R2 for CO2 and Tmax is 0.66 (calculated on 5 year means). A significant portion of warming observed in the UK may be attributed to temporal variations in sunshine and cloud cover.
• This post presents a summary of the raw data in 14 charts. Next week we will present a combined net cloud forcing and radiative forcing model with the aim of quantifying the relative contributions of dCloud and dCO2.

Figure 1 Maximum daily temperature (Tmax, red, LH scale) and minimum daily temperature (Tmin, blue, RH scale) from the Leuchars weather station. The red and blue lines are annual averages. The black lines are centred 5y moving averages. Note high degree of co-variation between Tmax and Tmin. Also note how temperatures drifted higher during the 1990s and 2000s but recently are drifting down again, in keeping with the global temperature trend.

Solar activity lower in early-mid 1800’s: Strengthens case for Solar influence on climate

Here’s a new paper which looks at the group and Wolff sunspot numbers in the mid C19th. The authors find the Wolff sunspot numbers (WSN) prior to 1848 are too high, and need reducing 20%. This brings the Wolff sunspot number more into line with Group Sunspot Number (GSN). The full paper is available (for a short time) directly from A&A here (free signup required).

Inconsistency of the Wolf sunspot number series around 1848

Raisa Leussu1,2, Ilya G. Usoskin1,2, Rainer Arlt3 and Kalevi Mursula1

1 Department of Physics, PO Box 3000, University of Oulu, 90014 Oulu, Finland
e-mail: Ilya.Usoskin@oulu.fi
2 Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory (Oulu unit), University of Oulu, 90014 Oulu, Finland
3 Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam, An der Sternwarte 16, 14482 Potsdam, Germany

Received: 26 July 2013
Accepted: 23 September 2013

Abstract

Aims. Sunspot numbers form a benchmark series in many studies, but may still contain inhomogeneities and inconsistencies. In particular, an essential discrepancy exists between the two main sunspot number series, Wolf and group sunspot numbers (WSN and GSN, respectively), before 1848. The source of this discrepancy has remained unresolved so far. However, the recently digitized series of solar observations in 1825–1867 by Samuel Heinrich Schwabe, who was the primary observer of the WSN before 1848, makes such an assessment possible.

Roger Andrews: Experimental Fits of Forcings to Data

ANYONE LOOKING FOR THE EU SEED LAW PETITION CAN FIND IT HERE

I haven’t time to edit this properly, so I hope Roger Andrews will forgive me for just pasting his email into this guest post and lobbing in the images. Somewhere in the archives there’s a post From RA in which he used my cumulative solar technique to get some good fits too. I’ll link it  if anyone finds it. You’ve all seen data before, and know what to do…

Here are the results of the empirical models I ran five or so year ago, plotted on the three sets of figures linked to below and accompanied by a writeup, sort of.  The first set of figures allows for both anthropogenic and natural forcings. Results are presented for the 60-90N, 30-60N, 0-30N, 0-30S and 30-60S latitude bands and for the area-weighted global average of these bands. (There weren’t enough data to put together a comparison for 60-90S.)

Sublime Support and Ridiculous Rebuttal of Akasofu’s Natural Variation Paper

Back in May, MDPI’s new Journal, Climate, published a paper by Japanese researcher Syun-Ichi Akasofu entitled ‘On the Present Halting of Global Warming’. The paper proposes the idea that the recovery from the little ice age and the 60 year oscillation evident in the data not reproduced by climate models needs subtracting from the temperature history before the effect(if any) of additional atmospheric co2 can be assessed. This enraged several of the new journal’s editorial panel so much that they resigned. The Chief editor provided this reassurance and reasoning:

What we can disclose about the review process of the Akasofu paper, without violating the confidentiality of the review process, is that the manuscript was reviewed by three specialists affiliated to institutes or universities based in Europe and the USA. The reviewers were not from the same institution as the author and they have not co-authored papers with the author in the last five years…

We hope that this opportunity for debate will be taken up by members of the scientific community, and that Climate can facilitate vibrant discussion around environmental climate topics that can often polarize opinion, but are of vital importance for stimulating cutting edge research.

OHC, Cloud, and the infamous 2003 Data Splice between XBT and ARGO

Collected from Judy Curry’s site, some well informed analysis on Ocean Heat Content (OHC) and cloud cover variation by ‘Chief Hydrologist’ which should put us in mind of Peter Berenyi’s excellent analysis published here a couple of years ago:

 

Chief Hydrologist | August 28, 2013 at 8:57 pm |

In ARGO from 2005 to 2010 – the increase is about 0.3E+22 J/yr. This is pretty much consistent with CERES and SORCE over the period – with the changes all in shortwave. I would suggest that earlier ocean temp data – especially to 2000m – might be a little lacking and that the splice between the old and new data looks horrendously unlikely. I suggest that the planet is again cooling with more recent increases in cloud shown in the Palle and Laken paper.

Oceans gained energy to 1998 – pretty much in line with changes in ERBS net radiant flux. Which again was all in shortwave as a result of cloud radiative forcing.

http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/Wong2006figure7.gif.html?sort=3&o=129

The interesting bit however is the increase in cloud in the 1998/2001. Here it is in ISCCP-FD.

http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/SWupnotes_zps3f1ab841.jpg.html?sort=3&o=34

But it shows in Project Earthshine and ERBS as well. The 1976/77 shift shows in COADS – which again is consistent with ISCCP-FD