UN: Sun plays significant role in global warming.

We all agree Total Solar Irradiance does not affect climate.
Weve had this discussion before and it was obviously a strawman argument then.
BUT YOU INSIST ON RAISING THE TSI STRAWMAN YET AGAIN.
Its not TSI, OK we get it.
IPCC will continue to use the same TSI is not significant,argument.
But do have to continuously lower yourself to their level of bullshit?

 

Tohachitu,
Interested in how ocean heat affects climate?
Heres one that will kick your butt.
Solar wind, Earth's rotation, ocean circulation and climate

 

Mojo, can you ever forgive me for not remembering Piers Corbyn's name? Of course I should have, and city parks will be installing his statue any decade now, if he hits the spot. Ah but that is irony and you have already announced that you don't do irony.

The sun does lots of things that are not well encapsulated in TSI, OK everybody? But of those things we are most interested is the net heat flux on Earth and where it goes, and how ocean heat can pop out back to the atmosphere. The oceans popped out heat in 1998 during that big ENSO and everybody noticed. What they may conclude from that pop is their own business.

But we ought to be addressing our attention towards the obvious trapping of outgoing IR, and how ocean sloshes admit that to the atmosphere, or not. And how solar cycles influence that, or not.

In re the latter, I absolutely don't want any of you to look at the next website link. Resist the urge!

Frank Hill: Future sunspot drop, but no new ice age | Space | EarthSky

Now, we are in solar cycle 24, and it will peak at Wolff 70 +/- pretty soon. After that we will have cycle 25, and it will peak at something. Now let's just say that we have a '70' and a '60' back to back - will this make us all ice-agey? Fair question. So, look at the last 150 years of solar cycles and see that around 1900 we had two weak cycles (I already posted it) and the air T did not crash (I already posted that also). That was with CO2 290 ppm +/- and now we are 400 ppm +/-.

I be not lookin' for ice over humanity unless cycles 26, 27, 28 can also get down. Predictions? Piers, speak up please and claim you park statues.

I did read the 2003 AGU abstract mojo posted and the butt-kicking if any might come from any paper the authors have published since. Is is my job to search for that, or you wanna do it? The latter would be my preference.

That the slowly increasing sun (we know it is but the deniers hope it ain't) will eventually push Earth out of the habitable zone. Adding CO2 to the atmosphere will hasten the change. Not-understood ocean sloshes will probably limit our ability to know when the bad things will arrive. Yet some hope to turn this important discussion towards the next ice age. One could perhaps imagine that they mean well.

But I will claim my park statue in this way: As we have taken the CO2 cycle out of the hands of photosynthesis and decomposition, there will be no more ice ages. Zip. Burning fossil C has taken them off the table. Milankovich's 1 watt will continue tugging at the skirt. The next (unpredictable) Maunder minimum will be opposed by a whole lotta CO2. The previous one was not. The previous one was about 2 watts/m2 down (please check my work)

Back to the thread title, the sun plays a role. Dangit, no! It runs the whole show! But on human-interesting time scales, other factors come into play. On longer time scales, the sun will cook us.

 

Is that the new scientific method? The experiment isn't like a chemistry experiment that is run in a lab. The experiment requires measuring instruments and lower numbers of sun spots. NASA thinks we will be running that experiment between now and 2021, and I am interested in the results. We have run the experiment that it is only ghg since the IPCC seemed to say so in 2001. Heat hasn't been nearly as high as the models predicted and predictions of ENSO and AMO have been poor. All I am asking is for you to have scientific method and have an open mind.

Did you hear me say mainly? I replied to your question - who you going to believe - skeptical science or Fox News. I chose neither as a source, but primary peer reviewed research. That seems to say both solar and ghg have significant impact. It would be nice if Fox was right about the leak and the IPCC going to follow the peer reviewed research in this report, but you quoted the chapter author as saying solar imput is negligible. You can look at your own charts that you posted to me. NASA seemed to say simple solar radiation had 20% the forcing of co2. The IPCC error bars on your other graph show that some research has it even higher. I think if you assume all changes in solar radiation have an instant impact then you can discount them, but the oceans seem to be heating slowly, contradicting the fast theory. Think about an electric oven. It continues to heat up even without you moving the dial. We need better information on how fast ghg and solar radiation changes work to comput how significant each is, but a large number of great scientists would reject out of hand that solar radiation is negligible.

Again never said that and never even thought it in the short term.

I kind of rejected your first graph, I wish you would read the others that you posted. I don't think they are the best, but you picked them and we can discuss what they mean.

Wow. Have you read the climate models for Austin? That's the only place I have real estate. Its doing better than most of the country. Why are you wishing all the good people here harm. We have too many people than water, but climate change isn't supposed to change our weather much. I have worked on water conservation initiatives. I have been part of the plan to increase renewables and close down the coal plant. You seem to think that questioning the assumptions of any dogma makes someone ready to get the hand of gaya. Haven't you been reading my posts?

 

Heres how the IPCC got their TSI data.
More Bullshit lies from your side.

THE HOCKEY SCHTICK: IPCC "Consensus" on Solar Influence was Only One Solar Physicist who Agreed with Her Own Paper

"Judith Lean, along with Claus Frohlich, are responsible for the scandalous rewriting of graphs of solar activity. Satellites showed that the TSI (measured in watts) between 1986 and 96 increased by about one third. Judith Lean and Claus Frohlich (authors of the single study noted above) "manipulated" the data. People who were in charge of the satellites and created the original graphs (the world's best astrophysicists: Doug Hoyt, Richard C. Willson), protested in vain against such manipulation. Willson: "Fröhlich has made changes that are wrong ... He did not have sufficient knowledge of (satellite) Nimbus7 ... pmode composites are useful for those who argue that global warming may be primarily due to anthropogenic causes.""

 

If TSI increased by a third, we'd all be dead by now. Whoever wrote this knows approximately nothing about the topic.

 

I guess what I find funniest about this thread is that, instead of talking vaguely about all supposedly large indirect effects of solar -- on clouds, on cosmic rays, via ultraviolet, via leprechauns -- there's a really simple way to address both direct and indirect.

All you need is some understanding of statistics and regressions.

Regression coefficients for the right-hand-side (predicting, exogenous) variables in a regression will pick up both direct and indirect effects of those factors. As long as the regression is reasonably well-specified, and the indirect effects themselves are not directly entered into the regression, you can use regression analysis to look for an upper bound on the total impact of changes in solar forcing, inclusive of indirect effects. You get no detail -- no physical model, no parsing of the effects into direct and indirect -- and as with any regression analysis, you are always subject to mistaking correlation with causation -- but you do get an estimate of total impact.

So, if there were really large solar effect, including all the indirect effects, it should a) be really hard to find a reasonable regression specification that generates a small coefficient for the solar variable or variables, and b) every or nearly every reasonable regression specification predict temperature as a function of the main known direct forcing variables (solar, GHG, particulates, ENSO) would have to show a large coefficient for the solar variable. In other words, while correlation is not causation, if there really is a large causative role for solar forcing, it should appear in most if not all competently done regressions explaining global temperature as a function of the main known forcings.

In fact, the reverse is true. BEST, for example, found that changes in solar forcing (however measured) had no measurable impact on goodness-of-fit in their regressions accounting for temperature change. And they are not alone. There's are several seemingly competent studies showing more-or-less the same thing -- that the impact of changes in solar forcing, both direct and indirect, appears small, particularly for the last half of the 20th century.

Between this statistical evidence, and the physics-based general circulation models, we have two completely different techniques, demonstrating that the direct effect (via the GCMs) and the total effect including all indirect effects (which would include any cloud or cosmic ray effects), appears to be small, again, particularly for the latter half of the 20th century.

This is all explained lucidly in the middle of this post below, along with a summary of the various other lines of evidence pointing to a small role for solar forcing in explaining global warming.
Solar activity & climate: is the sun causing global warming?

For those who don't know, the Wikipedia has this to say, about the blog referenced above:

Skeptical Science - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Skeptical Science has become a well-known resource for people seeking to understand or debate climate change, and has been praised for its straightforwardness.[11] Marine biologist Ove Hoegh-Guldberg has described it as "the most prominent knowledge-based website dealing with climate change in the world",[12] and The Washington Post has praised it as the "most prominent and detailed" website to counter arguments by global warming skeptics.[13] In September 2011, the site won the 2011 Eureka Prize from the Australian Museum in the category of Advancement of Climate Change Knowledge."

 

Mojo @45 , do you see any similarity between this and your earlier trashing of GRACE to monitor gravity/ice amounts/sea levels? Because I have to say, the song sounds the same. GRACE results seem to be getting better and better, as perhaps you have seen.

@41, I would rather say that total solar flux to the earth completely controls its energy balance, when absorption of outgoing IR does not change. When the latter does change (and it has throughout Earth's history), I guess we need a model to sort things out. Or perhaps you can suggest a better way?

Reduced to the trivial, w/o solar input, the Earth is an ice ball, and no amount of CO2 would prevent that.

With solar input, we have (may have) the option to dial in a preferred climate, and absorption of outgoing IR is one dial. I have already suggested that ebb and flow of oceanic heat flux is another dial, but we have no way to turn that dial.

All we can do is to decide whether to turn the absorption of outgoing IR dial down. If you believe that it is better to just continuing turning that dial up, it probably merits discussion.

 

Certainly every decent model shows significant solar forcinga in regression models. If you restrict it to less than 3 solar cycles though - 66 years, you will not see much solar variation. Cutting out areas of variation gives you a bad model for regression.

I think your big problem with this is the term significant. If you could come to terms with that term, you might find areas of agreement. I find you think significant must mean Large, which I am guessing you are using to mean more than 50%. Where most of the significant talik is 5%-25% of warming in the temperature record - 1880- 2012.

There are other very bad problems with using simple regression models with these terms. First of which is response time and cause and effect of ghg. All of the physical models seem to indicate that changes in solar forcings will cause a change in ghg. It therefore takes a time of many many years for its impact to temperature, and actually causes changes of ghg.

CR are not even modeled for cloud albedo in these. How would you expect to get regression coefficients? We know these models do a poor job on cloud albedo and ocean oscillations I would love it if we can use the data of this solar cycle to figure out if the albedo/CR theories are correct.

If you have an accurate physical model you would expect large solar forcings not to appear to be doing much in a simple regression model over that time period. The problem is the model does not handle the behavior, not that the forcings are small.

Absolutely but most of the decent models have changes of flux causing changes of temperatures which cause changes in ghg, which changes outgoing IR. That means positive feedback from changes to ghg sequestration.

I think you were trying to say that, but I was unsure with the way it was phrased.

 

Yeah but looks who is rolling in the cash!

 

I just read the OP. The sun causes warming. Wow. I hope so.

 

Al Gore approves that cartoon.

DBCassidy

 

I understand the difference between statistically significant and large. That's why I wrote "small" coefficient, versus "large" coefficient. If I had meant statistically significant coefficient, I'd have written that. As far as I can tell, you're the only one conflating "large" with statistically significant.

Regression doesn't mean that all the variables have to be contemporaneous. Regression models can and do include lags. These regression models -- of temperature on forcings -- include lags. They have to. A common result, for example, is that the peak effect of solar forcing, on temperature, occurs about a year after the forcing. Pretty much all these regression models reproduce that, and it is in good accord with the physics-based models.

For the rest, you seem misunderstand. Even a brief study of the skepticalscience reference might clear up some of that confusion. For the physical models, which are calculations, not fits to the data, you have to model the physical processes. By contrast, the advantage of a well-done regression analysis, as a complement to the physics-based models, is that you don't have to model the detail (e.g., cloud albedo). Your comment appears to commingle a criticism that applies to the physics-based models (calculation, not a fit to the data) with the with the regression approach (a fit to the data with no underlying physical model). For regression models of temperature on forcings the entire point --- as explained on skepticalscience -- is you needn't know the physical model to get an upper bound on the total effect, including indirect effects.

All of which, by the way, is irrelevant to the original posting. But with the posts above, looks like this one has gone entirely off the rails. So I'll leave it at that.

 

How do you do a accurate regression model that does lags for solar forcings in a time period of only 50 or 60 years where the Factor has been fairly constant? You need a longer period in which it is actually changing. You say that the models you are talking about do this, but I have not seen that. You presented the NASA regression with a significant period of time, and it shows strong correlation. Climate is defined over a 30 year period, a solar cycle is 22 years, and can be talked about in terms of 11 since polarity is ignored by many. You can not represent changes between 11 year cycles by modeling a near instantaneous change of 1 year. That doesn't include anything but the changes of the seasons on a hemisphere basis. Do you think you can honestly do that. The tittle is significant. 5%-25% is significant. Some think human caused ghg is only about 20% of current climate change. That is also significant. To find out if its 10% or 90% wouldn't you need to go back and see periods where solar effects are different?

In many models ghg lag solar warming by hundreds of years. I would not think that the change from the last minimum, the Dalton to the modern maximum, would have given all its feedback yet. The last 2 interglacials had sea levels higher than this all without any human contributed ghg from burning fossil fuels. How could solar forcings be considered insignificant in any model without it being predictive of accurate changes? Do you reject the current theory of the interglacials that increased solar radiation raises temperatures that then release sequestered ghg which raises temperatures more which then melts ice creating changes in albedo further increasing temperature. Does that all happen in one year?

 

No, Austingreen, I just have read some of the literature, and actually looked at some of the regression models.

I don't pay attention to the feedback from temperature to CO2 because its small, over the timespan and temperature change that I thought this thread was about (roughly, what the IPCC focuses on, warming in the last half of the 20th century).

Over the roughly 100,000 year cooling phase of an ice age, CO2 dropped by about 100ppm, and that drop accounts for about half the 4-5C or so cooling that occurred. Over the 10,000 year warming phase, that reversed, bringing CO2 up to the 280ppm or so pre-industrial-revolution average.

If you do the long division, you come up with about 20ppm/degree C. That naive estimate is within the range of more sophisticated estimates, e.g., here:
RealClimate: Good news for the earth’s climate system?

Probably the reason the naive estimate is OK is that the main effect is in the ocean, and you get about 10 - 20ppm increase in PCO2 for every degree C -- http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/106.htm -- so if you give it enough time to reach equilibrium, you'll get somewhere around that just from the warming of ocean waters.

And, in the current situation, the temperature-to-GHG feedback manifests itself as a slightly slower rate of uptake of CO2 by the oceans, than would have occurred in a world with equal atmospheric CO2 concentration, but constant temperature. (So don't net that out of the observed increase -- the observed increase is entirely man-made, the impact of the feedback is that the observed increase is modestly higher than it would have been, had temperatures not risen.)

So, historically, that's been the full impact of warming (total, not just solar) on CO2. Assuming that an ice age is a long enough period to look.

But, the data from the ice cores suggests that it takes quite a while for that to equilibrate -- much longer than (e.g.) second-half 20th century warming. The key word there is "slightly". We're raising temperatures fast enough that we're not going to reach equilibrium.

Anyway, this is again entirely off topic. Based on the best available science, if we weren't dumping CO2 into the air, we wouldn't be seeing any warming. So the slow-and-small temperature-to-CO2 feedbacks that may be underway now aren't due to increased solar heating (at least for second-half-20th century), they're due to GHG-caused global warming, manifesting itself as a slower uptake of CO2 by the main carbon sink, the ocean:
Climate change reducing ocean's carbon dioxide uptake (July 13, 2011)

I guess you can imaging some yet-unknown centuries-long mechanism that's somehow vastly more powerful than the one that drove the changes in the ice ages. And that has a yet-to-be-discovered basis in physics, and only operates now, not then. But imaging it doesn't make it so. For the known mechanisms that would apply to the late-2oth-century experience, it's hard to make the case that the rapid warming currently being experienced is due to slow and small changes in insolation occuring centuries ago. And, as with all alternatives, if you're going to posit that, you also have to explain why GHGs don't cause warming, else you end up with too much warming. Best available physics-based models say that you can't explain late-20th-century warming absent the buildup in GHGs. And you can with that buildup. Last IPCC report, they assigned less than a 10% chance that the observed warming was natural, the forthcoming report, that'll drop to less than 5%. It's one thing to imagine some alternative explanation, it's another thing entirely to find a solidly physics-based, empirically supported explanation. If somebody does that, there's clearly a Nobel waiting for them. I'm not holding my breath.

Addendum: Ah, I guess I should also say that we all know that not all ice age cycles are identical. It's not just a simple, identical repeat, because the orbit keeps changing. Prior boreal insolation peaks exceeded the current one (the Holocene thermal optimium). So it's not so simple to compare sea level then-and-now. E.g., the solar insolation chart here:
Ice Sheets and Sea Level in Earth's Past | Learn Science at Scitable

 

Chogan you missed the last time I disputed your BS theory.
I contend that CO2 level is only a result of Temperature.But Co2 level has little effect on temperature.
CO2 certainly has nothing to do with controlling Ice Ages and Interglacial periods.
Your BS theory states that something initiates temps to rise from an Ice Age.Then CO2 levels rise due to higher temps which in turn forces higher temps and higher CO2.
Eventually CO2 levels rise to 280ppm .
But what happens when the Interglacial is over and temps drop toward another glacial period?
CO2 levels follow temp by 800 years.
For 800 years CO2 levels are still rising while temps are now falling.
Then CO2 starts dropping.
Say CO2 drops to 260ppm.Before the interglacial period 260ppm supposedly forced temps to rise.
Now after the interglacial ,260 ppm allows temps to fall.Then 259ppm lets temps fall .Then 258ppm.
How does a specific CO2 concentration cause temps to rise before an interglacial , but the exact same CO2 level allows temps to fall after an interglacial?
After an interglacial CO2 has no forcing powers.
Thus its obvious that CO2 is not the driver of Interglacial /glacial periods.

 

Yeah, it's well established that the main driver is orbital changes -- the Milankovitch cycle. But without the carbon-cycle feedback, it's impossible to explain the size of the temperature changes. This is why Milankovitch was disputed, for close to a century -- the evidence on timing of ice ages was excellent, but the changes in insolation alone could not account for the depth of the ice ages.

I was responding to Austingreen. Austingreen was talking about the feedback from temperature changes to CO2. So I didn't say CO2 caused ice ages. In response to Austingreens' comments, I said that the feedback from temperature to atmospheric CO2, in the long run, amounted to about 20 ppm/degree C, if allowed to work itself out fully over time. Which it has not had time to do, yet, in the 20th century warming that is the focus of this thread.