As Kopp made clear, this "change" doesn't represent a change in the Sun's brightness, but rather reflects the correction of a design flaw in the previous generation of radiometers, which proved to be more susceptible to scattered light than had been thought.
Strange that you posted the smaller - totally illegible image
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makes it obvious that this 0.34% decline was the low point of a narrow spike. The full width at half maximum looks like about two weeks. Sunspots are, in fact, associated with higher total average irradiance from the sun, so this does misrepresent what actually goes on.
The article from which you extracted that image actually cites the
0.1% figure,
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which means that what you have flagrant misrepresentated the significance of the figure that you posted.
If you waited until that had happened, you'd find that the US economy had been damaged enough that it probably couldn't cope with a doubling of the price of energy (which it certainly could at the moment, much as it did in the aftermath of the 1973 oil crisis).
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Unfortunately for your logic, a small percentage can be a significant proportion of the seasonal change. There is a suggestion that the current loss of sea ice cover in the Barents and Kara Seas is responsible for the dramatic snow falls we had in Europe an on the east coast of North America last month. The weather may not share your intuitions about what constitutes a "significant" change.
Probably much too late to let us do anything useful about it.
Anything interesting enough to get published in the serious peer- reviewed literature - the Proceedings of the Nationl Academy of Science, Science, Nature or the like.
My criteria are those of somebody who was educated in science, and consequently takes expert scientific opinion seriously. I don't think that climatologists are infallible, but they are a lot more likely to know what is going on than anybody else.
The question for you then is do you refuse point blank to take any of the no-regrets energy saving measures at this stage? We actually made a better fist of dealing with the acute Opec induced oil shortage in the
1970's than we are doing with AGW. The longer term nature of the threat makes too many politicians disinclined to deal with it.
If the global average temperature returns back to its pre 1900 level or the CO2 content of the atmosphere spontaneously vanishes. Or if someone comes up with a convincing reason why the AGW component really took off in the last three decades of the twentieth century that does not involve GHG forcing. Plenty of skeptics have tried and all have failed.
If it was rising that fast then it would not stop until all the polar ice was gone! The most extreme predictions of climate change lead to "fast" sea level rises of about a metre per century. Seeing the permanent glaciers shrinking round the world is a strong hint.
Geological timescales are slow compared to human lifetimes.
Most scientists having looked at the data are convinced that AGW is real and that it will pose a significant threat on timescales of several decades to centuries. I wouldn't mind if the deniers bought insurance against their being wrong, but I object to the rest of us having to bail them out when the shit finally hits the fan.
You can bet your bottom dollar that politicians will blame scientists for not speaking up loudly enough when things finally do go pearshaped. The best chance the world has is if some important US lobby group like grain farmers get hammered by the consequences of climate change soon. Then and only then will the US begin to take the threat seriously.
The previous instrument had an absolute error of 0.33%. The sun's output didn't change by more than 0.1% over the period monitored by that instrument, which suggests that it isn't in the habit of moving around much.
An explanation of why you couldn't fin it for yourself might be more to the point. The web-site immediately offered a larger image when I clicked on the imgage that you posted.
Over the long term - more than a few days - the current measurments say that it is stable to within 0.1%. Technically speaking, this doesn't say much about the period before we could make this kind of measurement, but the sun doesn't seem to be any kind of variable star, apart from the very long term increase over billions of years as the sun itself evolves.
An isolated two week "spike" decline by closer to 0.17% (averaged over the whole width of the spike) in a context where we are discussing climate - which is to say year on year fluctuations - doesn't cut the mustard.
You are grasping at a very thin staw, and you went out of your way to obscure the nature of the the "changes" that you dug up.
More likely unemployed boss, after being sued for wrongful dismissal, not to mention lying about the significance of the aberrant measurements.
They are massively in debt because of the consequences of the sub- prime mortgage crisis - which owes nothing to the defects of socialism and everything to the defects of under-regulated free market capitalism. I know you like to blame it on the Democratic party, but it wasn't Democrat politicians who were making ninja loans to people who were never going to pay them back.
As for going deeper into debt - we'll see. Essentially all European governemnts expect to have got their budgets back under control in the next year or so. The situation doesn't look unsustainable here. The US has been running an unsustainable balance of trade deficit for the past couple of decades, so you are scarcely in a position to claim that Anglo-Saxon capitalism offers a better solution.
Germany doesn't need to print money - they can export manufactured goods, a skill the US seems to have lost.
Funny the original TSI is quoted as 1365.4 +/- 1.3Wm-2 the new figure is 1360.8 +/-0.5Wm-2. If the figures are meaningful then the new figure should be within the error bands of the earlier measurments. Or to put it another way the earlier measurment should be +/- 5Wm-2.
/quote
Disagreement among overlapping observations, as apparent in Figure 3, indicates undetected drifts that suggest the TSI record is not sufficiently stable to discern solar changes on decadal time scales.
/end quote
/quote
To determine long-term changes in the Sun?s output, which may have time scales extending much longer than the 11-year solar cycle, the TSI climate record requires either very good absolute accuracy or very good instrument stability and continuous measurements. To date, no TSI instrument has achieved the necessary absolute accuracy, and the TSI record relies on measurement continuity from overlapping spacecraft instruments
/end quote
So your conclusion is false. The "experts" say the TSI figures can't be relied on for decadal scale conclusions. Which means no one has a clue about long term TSI variation.
I didn't look for it. The smaller image was clear enough.
See above. Experts say you can't rely on the decadal trend in TSI.
/quote
The TSI averaged over the earth?s surface area and the amount not reflected to space:
1/4 ( 1 ? a ) * S
1/4 ? the ratio of circle through which radiation passes to the surface are of sphere. a ? albedo ( let?s use 0.3 even though nobody knows for sure)
So the comparison should be
0.25 * 0.7 * 4.6 W/m^2
or about 0.85 W/m^2
That?s still not negligible but not a doubler.
Interesting to note that 0.85 W/m^2 was the amount the earth was supposedly out of balance by per Hansen and Trenberth.
It should have been. But people do have this annoying weakness of not allowing for errors which they didn't recognise that they had.
So, where is your quote coming from?
It looks as if it is taken from
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If I can find it and post the URL, why didn't you?
You are indulging in text-chopping - which may expalin why you didn't post the URL pointing the whole paper.
The main point being made in the paper is that the new instrument is better than the older ones.
Your selective quotation is designed to make it appear that the earlier instruments don't say anything useful about decadal scale stability, when reading the paper as a whole suggests that what the authors intended to communicate was that a tighter constraint on the long term stability if the solar output - which their instrument offers - is desirable.
We've accumulated quite a lot of information on long term solar stability - which you would prefer to ignore - and better instruments will allow us to do better.
Looking at smoothed HadCRUT3, which increased by .518 degree C from 1972 to 2004, and probably about to come in as increasing around .525-.53 degree C from 1970 to 2010:
There is a visible periodic component. I have some determination that a sinusoid approximation of the visible periodic component in HadCRUT3 has a period of 64 years, with a peak at 2004 and a minimum at 1972, and peak-to-peak amplitude of .217 degree C.
That leaves .301 degree C from 1972-2004 and .376-.381 degree C from
1970 to 2010 after excluding this periodic factor. That is .0936-.0953 degree/decade.
This does indicate there is such a thing as AGW. However, the degree/decade figures trotted out by those making a case for AGW being a problem requiring government action tend to be much higher than .094-.095 degree/decade.
Government action against AGW is going to be very unpopular if AGW turns out to be overblown, even if existing but to a lesser extent than claimed by those saying we have to do something about it.
Two points here - it isn't sinusoidal and you have the period wrong but I am pretty sure there are significant components in the roughly 6 decade periodicity range. You should be able to see it better if you lowpass filter the Hadcrut data to remove the 11 year solar variation.
Problem is that no-one will stick their neck out on the basis of the relatively short datasets available.
However, adding CO2 at an ever increasing rate means we will have to do something sooner or later. I only favour the no regrets energy saving measures for precisely the reason that I think that a part of the very rapid late twentieth century warming was cyclical.
This seems to be born out by the recent slow down. If I am right then AGW is presently being nulled by the downside of the cycle but will pick up again and peak briefly in 2014 with the next alarming rise starting around 2040. This is a prediction of my own simple model.
I suppose we could insist that when sea level rises the oil companies compensate the owners for all their lost real estate. But by then oil will be a thing of the past - squandered in gas guzzling cars by people too myopic to plan for the future.
It seems we really haven't progressed in terms of forward planning beyond the Easter Islanders who wrecked their entire island environment by remooving every last tree and were in a very sorry state when Captain Cook found them. I don't find the idea of trashing the entire planet and praying for some alien visitor to come and put things right.
In the near future it won't be a problem, but what we do now will condemn the next generation to lose a great deal of fertile low lying land and heavily populated areas. If the oil companys are prepared to buy insurance against the damage they are inflicting on the planet then fair enough. Their own self interest says they play the big tobacco PR trick to keep the suckers smoking for as long as possible.
The climate is like a juggernaut you cannot turn it round on a sixpence (dime). What we do now will affect things for at a couple of centuries.
Taxes are just a means to an end. If petrol is dirt cheap then no-one cares about fuel efficiency as is evidenced by US cars awful figures.
You are comparing apples with oranges. And I suspect it is deliberate.
The instrument had a systematic baseline error of ~ 4W but its measurment noise on readings wa smuch lower than that. For the purpose of measuing the solar variability the baseline offset error doesn't alter the answers by very much - in fact well below the noise floor.
To put it into prespective the Earths orbit ellipticity is 0.0167 leading to a 3% variation in distance to the sun for perihelion and aphelion so the natural annual variation of insolation at the Earth is 6%.
The long term average is stable to 0.1% and in fact the 0.1% is the measured amplitude of the solar variability over the sunspot cycle. There is believed to be some instrument drift from aging of components in the harsh environment.
Sunspots on the active sun are almost always associated with bright faculae and the two contributions mostly cancel each other out. In fact on average the sun TSI signal is both brighter and much noisier when there are most sunspots at sunspot maximum. The correlation of TSI with Greenwich sunspot number is very striking.
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Of course it can. Did you never do any statistics courses?
Gaussian random noise you only have to take a few hundred samples to expect to see excursions of 3 sigma. A years solar observations would expect to see at least one 3 sigma event - actually since they are not truly independent daily measurement you have to wait a but longer.
There is a historical record of naked eye sunspots. Largely because it upset the ancients to see imperfections on the sun.
The junior engineer would be wise to leave a company that does not properly understand the difference between systematic calibration errors and noise. It is perfectly possible for a system with random noise at
0.1% on average to have excursions of 0.5% just very rare.
Exactly. They falsely claim an accuracy they don't have. Then people like you keep parroting that TSI variation is only 0.1% when the error bands are at least 3 times that.
With Hansen et al claiming the Earth is out of balance by 0.85Wm-2 then the odd 5Wm-2 here and there starts being significant.
I like to make you work. I hope you will learn something and realise you have a myopic view of climate.
Are you claiming that my quotes are misleading?
Or are you just trying to distract from the fact that TSI is not known well enough to be meaningful over decadal time scales?
It would be pretty bloody pointless making new instruments less accurate than the old ones.
Desirable? Necessary.
And it is more than a constraint. The errors in earlier TSI make them useless, unless you do GISS style data fudging.
A quick switch there from TSI to solar stability. They are not the same. As previously stated spectral variation is dramatic over the solar cycle, again a very recent discovery. UV in particular changes big time.
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/quote
However, there is a critical difference between the SIM and TIM, explains Jerry Harder, the lead SIM instrument scientist and a researcher at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado in Boulder. While the TIM lumps all wavelengths -- including infrared, visible, and ultraviolet light -- into one overall measurement, the SIM isolates and monitors specific portions of the spectrum.
Notably, this makes SIM the first space-based instrument capable of continuously monitoring the visible and near-infrared portion, parts of the spectrum that are particularly important for the climate. SIM also offers the most comprehensive view of the individual components that make up the sun's total solar irradiance to date.
Some of the variations that SIM has measured in the last few years do not mesh with what most scientists expected. Climatologists have generally thought that the various part of the spectrum would vary in lockstep with changes in total solar irradiance.
However, SIM suggests that ultraviolet irradiance fell far more than expected between 2004 and 2007 -- by ten times as much as the total irradiance did -- while irradiance in certain visible and infrared wavelengths surprisingly increased, even as solar activity wound down overall.
The steep decrease in the ultraviolet, coupled with the increase in the visible and infrared, does even out to about the same total irradiance change as measured by the TIM during that period, according to the SIM measurements.
Hansen says there is an energy inbalance of 0.85Wm-2 based on a reading that is wrong by 4.6Wm-2. OK it is claimed to be accurate to
+/-1.3Wm-2. This swamps the supposed energy inbalance don't you think?
I imagine that some climate models are going to have to be redone on the basis that the amount of TSI is pretty important to the calculations.
Yep, insolation changes through out the year. That might explain why it is wniter outside.
As I posted to BS:
/quote
Disagreement among overlapping observations, as apparent in Figure 3, indicates undetected drifts that suggest the TSI record is not sufficiently stable to discern solar changes on decadal time scales.
/end quote
Repeat: "that suggest the TSI record is not sufficiently stable to discern solar changes on decadal time scales."
/quote
To determine long-term changes in the Sun?s output, which may have time scales extending much longer than the 11-year solar cycle, the TSI climate record requires either very good absolute accuracy or very good instrument stability and continuous measurements. To date, no TSI instrument has achieved the necessary absolute accuracy, and the TSI record relies on measurement continuity from overlapping spacecraft instruments
/end quote
Repeat: "To determine long-term changes in the Sun?s output, which may have time scales extending much longer than the 11-year solar cycle ... To date, no TSI instrument has achieved the necessary absolute accuracy"
Them that know say decadal TSI is problematic.
Sunspots aren't what they used to be. Most of the current sunspots for cycle 24 woudn't have been seen in the past because they are small and weak.
The error was an error in the absolute accuracy of the radiometer, and seems to have come from not paying enough attention to sneak light paths. The claimed accuracy was over-optimistic, but the people involved listed all the error sources that they knew about, and one that they didn't know about turned out to be significant. It isn't the first time this has happened and won't be the last.
You want to translate this error in absolute calibration into an uncertainty about the stability of the sun's output, which is - to put it kindly - an intellectually untenable position.
I'm sure you'd like to think so.
No. You want to practice "selective quotation" and making it easy for people to read what you are quoting from makes it a little too easy for them to realise that you are being dishonest.
They are, as you ought to be able to understand.
If you had some kind of arbitrary precision in mind, and nothing less precise than that could be meaningful, this statement might make some kind of sense, though you'd need to have quoted your target precision before you made the statement.
If fact what we've got so far is enough to say that the sun's output doesn't vary much and nowhere near enough to expalin the current rise in global temperature. We'll have better measurements in a few years.
Perfectly true. But old instruments can often be accurate enough. The CO2 measuring hardware at Mauna Loa wasn't changed for at least 51 years - the Siemens Ultramat 3 nondispersive infrared gas analyzer with a water vapor freeze trap was still going strong in 2008.
For some arbitrary definition of useless, which you don't seem to be prepared to tell us about.
But there's not much UV radiation, and it doesn't seem to do anything beyond making its own contribution to warming the atmosphere.
You are making your usual song-and-dance about nothing, in the best tradition of the "merchants of doubt". The system was invented by the tobacco companies, and Exxon=3DMobil and the rest of the fossil carbon extraction industry took it over, along with a number of the people and organisation that had lied for the tobacco industry.
Here is another challange to your faith. New research is coming thick and fast at the moment.
/quote
A key belief of climate science theology ? that a reduction in carbon emissions will take care of the bulk of global warming ? has been questioned in a scientific paper released by the Environment Ministry on Monday.
Physicist and the former ISRO chairman, U.R. Rao, has calculated that cosmic rays ? which, unlike carbon emissions, cannot be controlled by human activity ? have a much larger impact on climate change than The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claims.
In fact, the contribution of decreasing cosmic ray activity to climate change is almost 40 per cent, argues Dr. Rao in a paper which has been accepted for publication in Current Science, the preeminent Indian science journal. The IPCC model, on the other hand, says that the contribution of carbon emissions is over 90 per cent
/end quote
Shucks, it's a non TSI solar effect.
/quote
The continuing increase in solar activity has caused a 9 per cent decrease in cosmic ray intensity over the last 150 years, which results in less cloud cover, which in turn results in less albedo radiation being reflected back to the space, causing an increase in the Earth's surface temperature.
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