Reply to Lockwood and Fröhlich – The persistent role of the Sun in climate forcing
Svensmark, H. and Friis-Christensen, E.
Danish National Space Center, Copenhagen, Denmark
In a recent paper (ref. [1]) Mike Lockwood and Claus
Frohlich have argued that recent trends in solar climate
forcing have been in the wrong direction to account for
“the observed rapid rise in global mean temperatures”.
These authors accept that “there is considerable evidence
for solar in°uence on Earth’s pre-industrial climate and
the Sun may well have been a factor in post-industrial
climate change in the first half of the last century.” But
they argue that this historical link between the Sun and
climate came to an end about 20 years ago. Here we
rebut their argument comprehensively.
By Lockwood and Frohlich’s own data, solar magnetic
activity is still high compared with 100 years ago. As
to when the recent easing of activity began, counts of
cosmic-ray muons at low altitudes were historically low
when the muon record-keeping ended in the early 1990s
(ref. [7]). That implies an increase in relevant solar mag-
netic activity continuing till that time. A scarcity of
muons can be linked to elevated global temperatures by a
reduction in low cloud cover (ref. [8]) and low cloudiness
was indeed at a minimum around 1992-93. By other so-
lar indicators, like those cited by Lockwood and Frohlich,
the minimum muon counts may well be a little higher in
the current solar cycles. That would explain the pause in
global warming evident in our Table as well as in Lock-
wood and Frohlich’s own Fig. 1e.
That would explain the pause in global warming ev-
ident especially in the ocean (Fig. 1) and the tropo-
sphere (Fig. 3). The continuing rapid increase in carbon
dioxide concentrations during the past 10-15 years has
apparently been unable to overrule the flattening of the
temperature trend as a result of the Sun settling at a
high, but no longer increasing, level of magnetic activity.
Contrary to the argument of Lockwood and Frohlich, the
Sun still appears to be the main forcing agent in global
climate change.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
“When the response of the climate system to the solar cycle is apparent in the troposphere and ocean, but not in the global surface temperature, ONE CAN ONLY WONDER ABOUT THE QUALITY OF THE SURFACE TEMPERATURE RECORD (my emphasis). For whatever reason, it is a poor guide to Sun-driven physical processes that are still plainly persistent in the climate system.”
And all this time we had the climate crusaders accusing Climate Audit of nit-picking on the lack of integrity in the surface temp data sets.
What a load of woo. Man, it must be embarrassing to be a denialist nowadays, have to latch on to this rubbish.
Some bits I thought were really great comedy:
After the removal of confusions due to El Nino, volcanoes etc. and also a linear trend [from recent tropospheric temp data].
Interesting…..you can fudge one data set so it matches another data set. Who would have thought? Note how the ‘confusion’ removals take place is unexplained – must be magic I guess. I didn’t know that 1980-1990 was really warmer than now if it wasn’t for those pesky internal climate variations!
Next:
As for the upward linear trend removed from Fig. 2
(lower), it is customary to attribute to greenhouse gases any increase in global temperatures not due to solar changes. While that is reasonable, one cannot distinguish between the effects of anthropogenic gases such as carbon dioxide and of natural greenhouse gases.
Actually one can determine whether the increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations is due to ‘natural’ or man-made emissions. Are the authors frauds or just particularly illiterate in regards to climate science? Who knows?
I’m sure there plenty more fun to be had with this one.
Hello Nexus,
I think that the comment re CO2 is correct.
There is a multiple inseperability problem here.
We know that the earth releases large quantities of CO2 naturally. For example, volcanic activity, and release from the oceans when sea surface temperaturer increases. So the first inseperability problem is to determine how much of the recently measured increases in atmospheric CO2 is due to natural causes and anthropogenic causes.
The second inseperability problem has to do with temperature. As measures are made of temperature over time, the problem here is to determine how much of temperature change is due to natural effects and how much is due to anthropogenic effects.
When the discussion moves from temperature to climate, the inseperability problem becomes far more complex.
The IPCC clearly states that its definition of climate change consists of a natural component and an anthropogenic component.
The climate change debate reduces to a simple equation of three variables:
T = N + A
T =total climate change
N =natural component of climate change
A =anthropogenic component of climate change.
The value for A can only be determined with accuracy and precision when T and N are known with the required accuracy and precision.
There is a lot of money being spent researching values for N and T, about $4bn per year if I remember correctly. Literally thousands of papers per year. Each adds a bit to improving the figures for N and T.
Given that the values for N and T are highly variable in the short to medium term, it is a very difficult mathematical and statistical problem to separate A and N. This is most important, because the best efforts of man can only be directed at A. Messing with N could portend disaster. In almost every case where people have tried to improve on nature, the result has been a major stuff up.
The UNFCC and the environmental lobby assume that the value for N is zero, and hence attribute all change to A. This is the basis for the alarmists claims of iminent disaster.
But we know that temperature has been rising since the last ice age, that sea level has been rising since the last ice age, that values for atmospheric CO2 have been changing over history. So this assumption that N is zero is insupportable.
Fortunately, as time progresses, understanding of T and N will improve, and will then give a good value for A which can then be used as the basis for good policy development.
Similarly, as improved values for T and N in atmospheric CO2 are known, the modellers can improve the ability of predictive models to generate estimates of A and N (climate)in the future.
Exciting and fascinating stuff. Hold your breath, watch this space.
PP – errr nope. There’s heaps spentg on T, N and A. There’s the whole literature of finderprinting and attribution.
But back to things solar.
Here’s some reecent work giving you statistical (not modelled) work on solar and CO2 and finding both active.
For the first time a globally coherent solar cycle response to the surface temperature has been established. Charles Camp and Ka Kit Tung report in Geophysical Research Letters (DOI: 10.1029/2007GL030207) that global temperatures oscillated by 0.2C during the high and low points of the cycle. The research uses satellite solar radiation and surface temperature gridded data from the last 50 years over four and a half solar cycles. http://www.amath.washington.edu/research/articles/Tung/journals/GRL-solar-07.pdf
The authors’ analysis also shows greater warming in the polar regions in common with climate model predictions.
In a yet unpublished but submitted paper, Tung and Camp undertake another analysis, without resorting to climate models, that give a climate sensitivity for doubling CO2 between 2.3 and 4.1C as a 95% confidence interval. http://www.amath.washington.edu/research/articles/Tung/journals/solar-jgr.pdf
Not bad for solar guys !!
What was that sound Luke?
The sound of crickets chirping?
Unfortunately, I think it is. Science on a web site dedicted to a scientific area of knowledge, and it goes completely unnoticed. Is the text is the wrong colour, perhaps?
“The UNFCC and the environmental lobby assume that the value for N is zero, and hence attribute all change to A. This is the basis for the alarmists claims of iminent disaster.”
No, it’s in the IPCC report, science done by scientists. http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/wg1-report.html
You should read it.
“The authors’ analysis also shows greater warming in the polar regions in common with climate model predictions.”
Except it’s only one polar region that’s warming at all ( supposedly even faster than we thought http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6615.html )while the other is cooling.
From what I’ve read , the Antarctic ISN’T behaving as predicted by the GCM’s.
“The Bureau of Meteorology’s Scott Power said there had already been a substantial decline in rainfall across most of eastern and southwestern Australia. “At the moment what we are seeing is a combination of human-induced climate change and a huge amount of natural variability, and it is very likely the temperature change is due to human intervention,” Dr Power said. “The rainfall decline in west Australia is most likely human and natural variability, but beyond that, you really need to know the relative contributions and we are not able to do that with any accuracy.”
The Australian ( Wednesday 3rd October 2007 )
It is a bit weaselly – the rainfall decline is MOST LIKELY non-AGW and AGW but we don’t know the relative proportions with any accuracy.
That means the AGW component could be negligible.
This is why so much of this debate comes across as presented to achieve an end rather than to inform.
We know that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are rising , we know CO2 is a greenhouse gas , we know therefore that reducing the AGW CO2 is a prudent safeguard – that’s enough surely?
Enough for reasonable people anyway……
The Antarctic seems to have it’s own micro climate to an extent, but the shelves are warming. That was predicted, but just as the Arctic warming more quickly than predicted, the Antarctic isn’t. Split the difference, it’s warming. The models are just trying to allocate the temperature and change, and that isn’t going to be exact. The temperature rise, as predicted, is happening and measured.
“the Antarctic ISN’T behaving as predicted by the GCMs” – gotta a reference for that Jim ?? sure?
AND you do have interesting Antarctic OBSERVATIONS like http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/upload/2006/03/science-turner-2006.pdf
The “iconic” Antarctic temperature trends are the large warming seen on the Antarctic Peninsula, which has had various repercussions including the collapse of several ice shelves (some documented in a previous post). Elsewhere, though, the pattern of surface warming is more complex – trends are smaller, and while more are positive than negative they are generally not significant – see this map. Contrary to what you might have heard, this is in general agreement with model predictions.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/03/significant-warming-of-the-antarctic-winter-troposphere/
Researchers say they’ve found puzzling correlations between changes in the sun’s output and weather and climate patterns on Earth. These links appear to rise above the level of misinterpreted data or faulty equipment.
“There are some empirical bits of evidence that show interesting relationships we don’t fully understand,” says Drew Shindell, a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.
For example, he cites a 2001 study in which scientists looked at cloud cover over the United States from 1900 to 1987 and found that average cloud cover increased and decreased in step with the sun’s 11-year sunspot cycle. The most plausible cause, they said: changes in the ultraviolet (UV) light the sun delivers to the stratosphere.
http://www.environmental-expert.com/resultEachPressRelease.aspx?cid=20909&codi=20225&level=0&idproducttype=8
And also worth noting what else was said in the same place …
To say that current warming trends are ‘all cosmic rays and no carbon dioxide is totally ludicrous, in the same way that people say that it’s all [human-induced] carbon dioxide and nothing natural. That is equally ludicrous,’ says Jasper Kirkby, a physicist who is actively exploring potential links between cosmic rays and clouds at CERN, Europe’s center for high-energy physics research in Geneva.
Last fall, solar physicists and climate scientists in the US and Europe reviewed the latest studies of changes in total solar irradiance driven by the 11-year sunspot cycle. They concluded that those changes are unlikely to have had a ‘significant influence’ on global warming since the 1600s. In particular, satellite measurements since the late 1970s showed changes too weak to have ‘contributed appreciably to accelerated warming over the past 30 years.’
The effect ‘is really small, unless you can come up with ways to amplify it,’ says Tom Wigley, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, who took part in the study.
The idea of a big effect on climate from cosmic rays is controversial. For instance, the team that studied sunspots and cloud cover over North America found that average cloudiness rose and fell with the sunspot cycle, but didn’t track with cosmic ray trends.
Still, a study published last year in Britain showed a small but statistically significant effect from cosmic rays, notes Rasmus Benestad, who specialized in solar-climate interactions at the Norwegian Meteorological Institute in Oslo. He is highly skeptical that cosmic rays play a big role in climate, he says. But, he adds, the phenomenon is worth exploring.
Dr. Kirkby and colleagues at several institutions aim to do just that. They’ve designed an aerosol chamber to test how cosmic rays might affect cloud formation and how significant the effect might be. ‘You really can’t settle the issue by more heated debate,’ he says. ‘You need experimental data.’
So if you get sunspots you lsoe cosmic rays?
What are they using for cloud data in 1900??
You’d have to be sceptical as they say ….
And gee how this research possibly going on given the IPCC controls the entire verld.
Typical IPCC meeting
The effect ‘is really small, unless you can come up with ways to amplify it,’
Just like CO2.
Too tired to check Lukey boy – but as I recall it was NASA data. Antartica is cooling.
The Sun-cloud link is established, whether it be indirect by GCR or direct by UV,which increases the effect of solar.:
http://folk.uio.no/jegill/papers/2002GL015646.pdf
S and F-C are limiting criticism to their own area of interest. They don’t mention the problem with L & F and ocean lag.
“Just like CO2.” rampant opinion that ignores empirical verification now from about 3 separate sources.
Sun-cloud link is not established as the cloud data aren’t up to snuff.
So I wonder which anti-AGW hypothesis will it be this week – hmmm solar torque, the Great Pacific Shift, undersea volcanoes, Milankovitch now, sunspots or cosmic rays. OK maybe it isn’t even warming at all. Actually it’s cooling. Hey we don’t know whether it’s warming or cooling. Hey you can’t even compute an average temperature. Hey but it was cold at my place last week. Hey it did or didn’t rain at my place last week. You can’t model the future anyway (except for contrarian models where this does not apply).
Eeeny meeny miney moo – catcha a hypothesis by the toe – if doesn’t validate let it go …. soo many denialists – so many hypotheses.
Yawn!
Yes Paul, Yawn…..
Mission accomplished.