Post by icefisher on May 7, 2010 17:18:28 GMT
May 7, 2010 9:39:23 GMT glc said:
ICEFISHER:You seem locked into the black and white concept of warming or cooling. An excursion is any transit directed to outside of the cone of uncertainty whether it is a day long or a century long. Obviously, day, month, quarter, year, 3 year, 7 year excursions are unremarkable as they occur routinely in the record.
Could you define an “excursion”. I don’t believe there has been an excursion, since that would imply a prolonged period of observations which are outside the 95% error bars of the projected values. Nothing like this has taken place. Even 2008 temperatures remained well within the error bars.
If you are outside of the 95% error bars you consider the hypothesis failed.
What I have done here is invented a word to describe your analytical methods of calling out for example like in the post directly above this "According to Don Easterbrook we've been in a cold PDO phase since 1999, but we haven't seen any cooling - just a slowdown of the warming. Similarly the deepest solar minimum for a century has had no effect whatsoever."
First it helps to insert some dates for the second sentence. 2006 to the present works nicely.
Here you describe in extremely vague detail of a reduction in warming that post 2006 became more intense.
Mathematics understands an implication from that even if you don't.
To further understand the system you need to understand overcoming inertia like when the helm of a great ship is turned. A ship traveling along on a steady course is a term of art more than fact.
Fact is a ship chaotically lurches around the course. A small boat shows more dramatic lurching. That is happening as small waves to a big ship become big waves to a little ship and on the little ship the waves make the boat bounce off course often by 5 degrees or more even on a calm day, more on a rough day.
The rudder on a small ship is relatively bigger than that on a big ship. Thus while the big ship does not show big variations in course as it travels the rudder is less capable of turning the ship and is far more capable of being overwhelmed by the chaotic wave forces on the ship.
The result is the big ship turns more slowly and a big delay can exist before the ship begins to turn after the forcing from the rudder is applied as the rudder first must overcome the chaotic wave force that cancels out the rudder force and then turn the ship by applying a relatively light forcing compared to other vessels. Any vessel including the smallest of vessels have less responsiveness than a car on a highway as a result of the chaotic wind and wave forces on the craft.
I have been on the helm of even small ships and when making an emergency maneuver the air is sucked right out of you as you wait for the helm to be responded to. You got two turns on the gear driven rudder and the darned boat is still traveling exactly the same course for several very pregnant moments. Then when the ship starts to respond it responds like molasses ever so slowly the compass begins to creep. The ships I have helmed respond in probably a few seconds that seems like minutes but I have seen the difference between the small nimble 600lb boat and the 300ton vessel and can appreciate what it is like going up another couple of orders of magnitude to ocean going liners.
Now I don't dispute your argument entirely, I merely dispute your too early expectations.
Since we have no idea whatsoever what the chaotic forcing on earth are as long as the temperature remains level all theories except the chaotic theory are in danger.
And finally its the AGW theory in the most danger because we properly saw a flattening of warming with the shift in a single ocean system, but we have also seen that oceans were getting warmer globally for 4 more years 2003 before a slight cooling came on the scene on a global ocean average.
The final shoe to drop is the heat sink and what it does. . . .can it really take a thousand years as Hansen has suggested? I guess we might have to wait for our great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great grandchildren to answer that question.
May 7, 2010 9:39:23 GMT glc said:
The conditions for this solar minimum have been in place for several years. The defined minimum is simply a mathematical concept based on moving averages.
Irrelevant. There are numerous issues that have not been dealt with. First there is the rather steady underlying warming of about .5degC/century we have seen over the last 150 years. We don't know what normal is as a result.
But if you want some anecdotes that dispute your statement above the average monthly sunspot number post Maunder minimum is 52. Even with Svalgaards adjustments (if NOAA has not applied them to their data) aren't going to change the real average much.
Cycle 23 annual average of monthly sunspot activity stayed above average (a good 20%) until 2004, conveniently coinciding with the change in direction of the warming of the oceans. Hmmm, thats interesting huh? But that could be chaotic and merely coincidental. We know though its not CO2 as CO2 just keeps increasing.
May 7, 2010 9:39:23 GMT glc said:
Yesterday at 1:18pm, glc wrote:
Solar activity has not increased over the last 30 years - in fact, it's fallen - but temperatures have increased.
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Considering the mechanics of heat sinks warming or cooling is not dependent upon the trend in solar activity but instead upon the equilibrium state of the heat sink something we have no information on.
May 7, 2010 9:39:23 GMT glc said:
And this is the person who accuses me of focusing on a single year. If temperatures did start to fall again in 1963 due to the demise of the active solar cycle can we assume there is NO thermal lag. This is obviously what you are implying.
"Fall' might not be the right word if in fact the strongest solar cycle in the entire solar record is what it takes to get a quick response in the system. . . .one might hypothesize that to see significant cooling trend you will need at least 3 well below average solar cycles as the record has also suggested at the Dalton Minimum and again in 1878 to 1911.
I don't think the argument is anything like you like to characterize it as. Fact is we have seen immediate responses in the system rather consistently 1944 PDO change, 1957 solar record max, 1963 solar record max return to below average, 1976 PDO change, 1999 PDO change, 2004 solar minimum on top of PDO. Further the 1999 PDO switch is still only speculated. Some are arguing now for later. Looking at the PDO charts, 1999 is looking more and more like a temporary anomaly.
Like solar minimums you can really only be certain of a major regime shift a decade or more beyond. What we do see though are some instant effects on climate (or weather if you will)
There are probably others if you care to search for them. The fact is the atmosphere has far less heat content than the oceans thus it responds faster but since the earth is 3/4's water the atmosphere is also a slave to the change in the oceans.
To actually predict actual trends one needs to understand better what is normal, what is in equilibrium, and even to what degree the system has chaotic behavior. We simply aren't there yet.
May 7, 2010 9:39:23 GMT glc said:
You continually claim there is a solar-climate link, i.e. more activity leads to higher temperatures. However you are unable to estimate the thermal lag, but you are able to tell us that temperatures began to fall in 1963 because the active cycle (SC 19) was ending. Then, when I make the point that we have had weak solar activity for almost 5 years, you hide behind Nautonnier's chaotic system.
You are mistaken as to my position. I do not "claim" a solar climate link of a degree that is controlling. I have noted a healthy correlation of solar events to climate on earth but I do not consider that sufficient to claim it is the most powerful forcing related to climate change. In fact, if you look at the internal changes we have seen in the historical record its impossible to eliminate the big changes as being chaotic. In fact the long post on the Dutch site went into that in detail.
May 7, 2010 9:39:23 GMT glc said:
If the system is totally chaotic then it would be virtually impossible to determine a correlation.
Totally chaotic? There you go again with your black and white nonsense. Statistical tests designed to deal with chaos show a correlation to solar activity but not to AGW. So what does that mean? It means that it is likely to some degree solar activity affects climate on earth and that we don't have clue one from observations that AGW does. Nothing more nothing less.
May 7, 2010 9:39:23 GMT glc said:
If there is a true cause and effect link/correlation then it should be possible to predict (within reasonable confidence bounds) the effect of reduced solar acitivity. You have chosen not to do this which suggests you have no confidence in the claimed solar-climate correlation.
Not true. The chaotic element has not been ruled out as the primary control for 150 years of global warming. You like to claim no relationships when in fact some relationship exists where ever you chosen to point at. But you set arbitrary hurdles to enable yourself to ignore those indicators and claim no link. Thats quite wrong there fairly clearly is some link the question is how much not if it exists or not.
I have made a form of a prediction. I said that in five years if the very low solar activity continues and no cooling takes place the solar connection is in trouble. And likewise if it does not soon start warming on a "catch up" slope the IPCC predictions are likely to fall into that falsification territory.
I haven't ruled out any theory. AGW may be an issue. I am just of the opinion is that issues should become apparent in a negative way before taking action to reverse them and I am not going to get my pants in a bunch over .5degC/century warming if the long term trend continues.
You on the other hand seem overly eager to subscribe to somebody else making that decision for you. And to that I say look at Lysenko.
