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Bishop Hill Oct 19, 2015 Climate: solar Energy An announcement in Business Green
M and S, why do you do it? Are you believing that you are saving the planet, or merely encouraging your green customers to think how wonderful you are? Why are you involving children? (Don't answer that, I already know the answer).
Bishop Hill Apr 8, 2015 Children Climate: solar To paraphrase Ignatius Loyola: Give me child while he is still at school and I can make him think the way I think he should.
TM [LInk repaired]
Update 8.40am 12 April 2015
It is alarming to see that the Australians schools are at it too, in what appears to be a more organised way
See the article from Quadrant on GWPF
Bishop Hill Oct 16, 2014 Climate: solar A a new Climate Dialogue has just begun, this time looking at the effects of the sun on the climate. Here's the introduction:
According to the latest IPCC report, AR5, the influence of the sun on our climate since pre-industrial times, in terms of radiative forcing, is very small compared to the effect of greenhouse gases.
According to some more skeptical scientists such a small solar influence is counterintuitive. The Little Ice Age, the period roughly from 1350 to 1850, in which winters on the Northern Hemisphere could be severe and glaciers advanced, coincided with the so-called Maunder Minimum, a period of supposedly low solar activity. In their eyes, the sun therefore still is a serious candidate to also explain a substantial part of the warming since pre-industrial times.
Bishop Hill Sep 26, 2014 Climate: Sceptics Climate: other Climate: solar This notice of a meeting to honour the life and works of Nigel Calder has just been published.
Nigel Calder 1931-2014
Memorial meeting
Royal Astronomical Society
Burlington House
Piccadilly
London W1J OBQTuesday 2 December 2014 at 4pm
Followed by an informal reception 5-6pm
This is to let you know that we are arranging an hour-long programme of talks celebrating the life and work of the science writer Nigel Calder. Speakers are to be confirmed but will include his co-writer and friend Professor Henrik Svensmark. This event will take place on 2 December, which would have been Nigel’s 83rd birthday.
Further details, including how to reserve a seat, will be published on Nigel's blog on 11 November. In the interim, any enquiries may be made by phone to 07771 620433.
Bishop Hill Jun 17, 2014 Climate: solar I hope everyone is reading the series of posts by David Evans and Jo Nova about their new hypothesis on why variations in solar irradiance apparently have such a limited effect on the planet's temperature. It's probably fair to say that many sceptics have scratched their heads on this subject from time to time, but the team from down under have gone the extra mile, coming up with what is starting to look like a fascinating explanation, namely that there is a delay between the change in irradiance and subsequent changes in temperature. They hypothesise further that this may be something to do with changes in the Sun's magnetic field.
It's too early to say whether this all holds up of course, but I'm certainly going to be keeping a close eye on it.
Bishop Hill Apr 10, 2014 Climate: solar A new paper in Environmental Research Letters fleshes out Henrik Svensmark's cosmoclimatology hypothesis, by which the suns influence on galactic cosmic rays affects cloud formation on Earth. The paper attempts a theoretical quantification of changes in the numbers of cloud condensation nuclei that might be caused by changes in the cosmic ray flux:
The impact of solar variations on particle formation and cloud condensation nuclei (CCN), a critical step for one of the possible solar indirect climate forcing pathways, is studied here with a global aerosol model optimized for simulating detailed particle formation and growth processes. The effect of temperature change in enhancing the solar cycle CCN signal is investigated for the first time. Our global simulations indicate that a decrease in ionization rate associated with galactic cosmic ray flux change from solar minimum to solar maximum reduces annual mean nucleation rates, number concentration of condensation nuclei larger than 10 nm (CN10), and number concentrations of CCN at water supersaturation ratio of 0.8% (CCN0.8) and 0.2% (CCN0.2) in the lower troposphere by 6.8%, 1.36%, 0.74%, and 0.43%, respectively. The inclusion of 0.2C temperature increase enhances the CCN solar cycle signals by around 50%. The annual mean solar cycle CCN signals have large spatial and seasonal variations: (1) stronger in the lower troposphere where warm clouds are formed, (2) about 50% larger in the northern hemisphere than in the southern hemisphere, and (3) about a factor of two larger during the corresponding hemispheric summer seasons. The effect of solar cycle perturbation on CCN0.2 based on present study is generally higher than those reported in several previous studies, up to around one order of magnitude.
Bishop Hill Oct 28, 2013 Climate: solar 
Ice on the HudsonAfficionados of the "ice age now" hypothesis are going to be cock-a-hoop over Paul Hudson's latest blog post. The BBC man has been looking into the idea that the current very low levels of activity in the sun are going to cause us all to freeze and he seems to have found some support in the somewhat unlikely shape of Mike Lockwood:
Bishop Hill Aug 27, 2013 BBC Climate: Sceptics Climate: solar The BBC's Life Scientific strand today featured Joanna Haigh, the Imperial College physicist who studies links between the sun and the climate, although she is not above a bit of propaganda for the greens either.
The programme was excruciating. One reader emailed to say she'd switched off after hearing about two minutes of it. We heard about how much easier it is to predict the climate than the weather, with not even a question mark raised over the failure of the climate models to predict the climate in recent decades. There was a section that could best be described as a promotional podcast for the IPCC. And there was an extended section in which Haigh bemoaned the climate "deniers" closely followed by others in which she was lauded by a colleague for her outreach efforts to those who dissent from the climate mainstream and another in which she told us how hard she tried to be polite. The lack of self-awareness was almost comical.
Once again, the BBC has done a full-scale propaganda piece for the IPCC and the green movement. The spirit of the Cambridge Media and Environment Programme is alive and well within the corporation.
The audio, for those with strong stomachs, should be here in the next couple of hours.
Bishop Hill Dec 16, 2012 Climate: solar New Scientist covers Alec Rawls' leak of the AR5 draft, and more particularly the resulting focus on the solar influence on climate. The article can be seen here. Now solar is not really my thing, so I'm feeling my way here somewhat, but it seems to me that the New Scientist piece doesn't really address the argument made.
Rawls' case was based around the following statement from Chapter 7.
Many empirical relationships have been reported between GCR or cosmogenic isotope archives and some aspects of the climate system (e.g., Bond et al., 2001; Dengel et al., 2009; Ram and Stolz, 1999). The forcing from changes in total solar irradiance alone does not seem to account for these observations, implying the existence of an amplifying mechanism such as the hypothesized GCR-cloud link. We focus here on observed relationships between GCR and aerosol and cloud properties.
Bishop Hill Aug 21, 2012 Climate: Sceptics Climate: Surface Climate: solar Anthony reports an interesting new paper, which finds that cloud cover has decreased slightly over the last 40 years. It's not clear to me what impact this will have on AGW detection and attribution studies, but no doubt this will all come out in the wash.
Bishop Hill Mar 5, 2012 Climate: Models Climate: solar A new paper by Gareth Jones, Mike Lockwood and Peter Stott says that future reductions in solar output will have a limited impact on global warming projections, based on the output from their climate model.
During the 20th century, solar activity increased in magnitude to a so-called grand maximum. It is probable that this high level of solar activity is at or near its end. It is of great interest whether any future reduction in solar activity could have a significant impact on climate that could partially offset the projected anthropogenic warming. Observations and reconstructions of solar activity over the last 9000 years are used as a constraint on possible future variations to produce probability distributions of total solar irradiance over the next 100 years. Using this information, with a simple climate model, we present results of the potential implications for future projections of climate on decadal to multidecadal timescales. Using one of the most recent reconstructions of historic total solar irradiance, the likely reduction in the warming by 2100 is found to be between 0.06 and 0.1 K, a very small fraction of the projected anthropogenic warming. However, if past total solar irradiance variations are larger and climate models substantially underestimate the response to solar variations, then there is a potential for a reduction in solar activity to mitigate a small proportion of the future warming, a scenario we cannot totally rule out. While the Sun is not expected to provide substantial delays in the time to reach critical temperature thresholds, any small delays it might provide are likely to be greater for lower anthropogenic emissions scenarios than for higher-emissions scenarios.
I hope they have made suitable caveats about the validation (or lack of it) of their computer model's ability to project future global warming.
Bishop Hill Feb 11, 2012 Climate: Models Climate: solar Tom Chivers says he enjoyed his foray into climate a couple of days ago and has returned to the subject with a piece about Svensmark's cosmoclimatology theory.
...it's an interesting piece of research which adds to our understanding of atmospheric behaviour. As always, it's been leapt upon by "sceptics" who think all climate scientists are charlatans until those scientists say something they agree with, whereupon they're modern-day Galileos being placed under house arrest for heresy by the Church of AGW.
Bishop Hill Jan 30, 2012 Climate: MetOffice Climate: Surface Climate: solar Over the weekend there was quite a lot of interest in David Rose's article in the Mail, which addressed new figures from the Met Office which appeared to confirm a lack of any warming in the last 15 years.
The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.
The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.
Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.
Rose was also warning of further cold on the way, based on an assessment of Solar Cycle 24 and 25.
The Met Office have now responded, with a blog post that has a whiff of Bob Ward about it: "includes numerous errors in the reporting of published peer reviewed science". The argument seems to be that if you take decadal averages it is still possible to obscure the plateau in the temperatures.
Or words to that effect.
Bishop Hill Oct 12, 2011 Climate: solar This is an exciting time for solar physics, and its role in climate. As one leading climate scientist told me last month, it's a subject that is now no longer taboo. And about time, too.
The BBC's Paul Hudson
Bishop Hill Oct 7, 2011 Climate: solar Nigel Calder reports on a new paper that purports to rebut Svensmark's cloud hypothesis.
During recent years, so the story goes, the Sun has been weak, cosmic rays have been relatively intense, and yet the expected increase in low clouds has not occurred. On the contrary, we’re told, low cloud cover has remained relatively sparse. That’s according the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project, ISCCP, which pools data from the satellites of several nations.
However, the ISCCP data are apparently problematic:
The conspicuous downward trend in the ISCCP cloud data is almost certainly unreal. An expert view is that it results from changes in the operational status of the satellites from which the data are pooled.
In other words, the jury is still out.
Calder is very critical of the authors of the new paper - Agee et al - suggesting that they have cherrypicked the ISCCP figures rather than mentioning any of the other data sources, which tell a different story. He calls the paper "shoddy".
