The problem with the IPCC and those who place extraordinary faith in their questionable findings is this, they don't understand the sun. (Beyond the fact that they don't want the sun to be the driver because the IPCC has always existed for one and one reason only... to establish CO2 as a harmful gas that the US produces at a higher per/capita rate than any other country).
They just refuse to accept that the sun is the big player in our little neighborhood in the galaxy. Graph after graph shows incredible correlations between changes in solar irradiation and climate. But the problem is they (IPCC) can't quantify why. So they "round up the usual suspects" (like in the movie Casablanca) and that usual suspect is always CO2. As Cogitator points out regularly, the last 2 decades of he 20th century don't necessarily, when viewed at a close-up perspective, show a trend that explains the rise that observational temperature data purports to show. As you pointed out, the sunspot activity remained at a high level at the end of the 20th century, but they weren't increasing, while the purported observed temperature data continued to rise, particularly in the 1990's. Partly based on this fact, they ruled the sun out as the principle driver of 1990's temperature increases. The rest of their reason for denying solar irradiance variability is that they have concluded that while sunspots activity is higher than the past, they claim that ALL sunspot activity increase since 1750 amounts to a forcing of a mere 0.12 w/m**2. This, from page 5 of the 4th Assessment Report SPM from the IPCC:
Changes in solar irradience since 1750 are estimated to cause a radiative forcing of +.12 [+0.06 to 0.30]W/m**2, which is less than half the estimate given in the TAR (Third Assessment Report).
So they are saying that the combination of ALL the irradiance change since 1750 amount to just .12 W/m**2! The graph you posted earlier on Solar irradience for the past 400 years is useful for scrutinizing this finding from the IPCC. Keep in mind, it is NOAA data so detractors can't claim the data is from some denialist author. Now, notice that 1750, the date pulled out of a hat by the IPCC, is actually only slightly higher in irradiance than the Maunder Minimum, which was undeniably caused the Little Ice Age. In fact, according to that graph, the solar irradience was about 1364.3 Wm-2. This was a mere 1 Wm-2 greater than the Maunder Minimum irradience. Now look at the current irradience. It is about 1366.6 Wm-2. This is over 2 Wm-2 greater than in 1750. Now, you can't just compare his 2 Wm-2 increase since 1750 against the IPCC's estimate of 0.12 forcing, because the radiative balance equation involves dividing the TSI (Total Solar Irradience)by 4 and then applying an albedo scaling:
(2 Wm-2 / 4 ) * (1-a) where a=albedo (~0.3)
2/4 * 0.7 = 0.35 Wm-2
So I don't know where they get the +.12 Wm-2 in the AR4.
I think they understate the sun's effect by almost a factor of 3. And I think they fail to understand that the issue is not the troposhere and whether the sun has been warming the troposphere. This increased irradience has been warming the oceans, the 800 lb gorilla in the room. Oceans take a long time to warm. I think that the warming from the oceans has contributed to warming in the troposhere, and yes, some of that warming from the oceans has been trapped by some green house gas effects. The point is that the oceans mitigate warming from the sun with some amount of lag time through a heat-sink effect. This is why temperatures continued to rise even when solar irradiance leveled off in the last decade or 2 in the 20th century. I believe that is why now we are seeing a clear leveling off of the warming trend since around 2001.
As long as the IPCC and its followers continue to deny the impact of the sun, they will continue to push CO2 as the ONLY major driver. I think CO2 does have some measureable effect, but based upon the calculations I have seen and trust, I would put the contribution at only around 0.15 degC of the so-called 20th century rise of about 0.7 degC. The rest I estimate to be some combination of land-use change impacts on albedo and solar irradience increase, and to all of these combined would be applied a water-vapor feedback to bring us up to around +0.5 degC increase for the century. The rest of the discrepancey against the 0.7 degC figure I would attribute to observational error due to Urban Heat Island effect. The IPCC only allow for about 0.05 degC for the entire century for UHI. This is laughable. Go to the GISS website, and find their temperature data, click on an observation station of an urban area, particularly one that has seen extensive growth in the last half of the century. Then find a rural area nearby and you will likely see a dramatically different chart. The IPCC relied upon a study which examined Chinese observation grids and concluded that the UHI was nearly negligible (0.05 degC/century). It appears that the study was to determine if heat from urban locations, when averaged over the entire globe's surface, would not be significant. And from that perspective, they are quite correct. But that is missing the point entirely. It is not the negligle impact that urban heating has on the global average, it is the error in assuming that observations made in urban locations are representative of surrounding areas. They are not. But they they go on to use observation temperature grid data without correcting for the likelihood that the datapoints are artificially representative of concrete jungles, not the surrounding areas.
“The problem with the IPCC and those who place extraordinary faith in their questionable findings is this, they don’t understand the sun. (Beyond the fact that they don’t want the sun to be the driver because the IPCC has always existed for one and one reason only... to establish CO2 as a harmful gas that the US produces at a higher per/capita rate than any other country).
“They just refuse to accept that the sun is the big player in our little neighborhood in the galaxy. Graph after graph shows incredible correlations between changes in solar irradiation and climate. But the problem is they (IPCC) can’t quantify why. So they “round up the usual suspects” (like in the movie Casablanca) and that usual suspect is always CO2....
“I think they understate the sun’s effect by almost a factor of 3. And I think they fail to understand that the issue is not the troposhere and whether the sun has been warming the troposphere. This increased irradience has been warming the oceans, the 800 lb gorilla in the room. Oceans take a long time to warm...
“As long as the IPCC and its followers continue to deny the impact of the sun, they will continue to push CO2 as the ONLY major driver. I think CO2 does have some measureable effect, but based upon the calculations I have seen and trust, I would put the contribution at only around 0.15 degC of the so-called 20th century rise of about 0.7 degC. The rest I estimate to be some combination of land-use change impacts on albedo and solar irradience increase, and to all of these combined would be applied a water-vapor feedback to bring us up to around +0.5 degC increase for the century.”
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Awesome POST! Precisely. I agree competely and totally with your analysis of this post... probably could simply copy and paste it all here!
Also, CM: Thanks for the kudos, and for putting the graphics together. I see that the religionist/ alarmist amongst us has still not figured out how to respond to that “Inconvenient Truth” to coin a phrase... LOL.