Another cool prediction from the Force X duo from downunder: David Evans and Jo Nova

Today there's another in the current multi-year series from David Evans (archived here). I wonder if Jo's been on his back to produce something, anything at all, so she can fill their coffers. The article doesn't have anything new to add to what's been written in the multiple articles to date. Or not that I can see. This is article 22 in the current series, and there were eight articles in their first series. By my count that makes 30 episodes altogether so far, with precious little to show for it. They are now banking on a La Niña developing later this year or next, so they can drag things on a bit longer. (Their latest prediction is that massive cooling will start in 2017.)

In case you missed it, David Evans and Jo Nova are science deniers from Western Australia who make a living from gullible skeptics. David and Jo claim it's going to get very cold very soon because of an undetectable, mysterious, magical Force X that lives in the sun. I don't know if that's what they really think or if they know it's a big sham and are scammers. (Given they both claim some scientific education, the latter is quite likely. The fact that they have been stringing their fans along for so long without giving them anything much new makes it even more likely.)

To summarise, as I understand David Evans' "theory":

1. There's a force that comes from a flicker in sunlight every eleven years, which eleven years later has an effect on global mean surface temperature on Earth. 
2. Neither David nor Jo can explain what it is, how it works, how it could be detected, or why it hasn't worked yet:  "if only they had a mechanism" that could explain it.
3. "Theories" include, some simultaneously, that Force X makes the planet reflect more sunlight, Force X makes the sun supply less energy, or it could be some as yet unknown "field, flux or particles" coming off the sun that affect the climate. 
4. Jo and David know it exists because no-one has seen or heard of it. There's been no sighting or sounding. No-one has detected it (or it's supposed effect, except for David and Jo's wishful thinking). "The dog that didn’t bark" is how Jo describes it, presumably alluding to a Sherlock Holmes mystery.
5. When the sun has had a more active eleven year cycle, this Force X suddenly appears for an instant as flickers in sunlight, and warms the planet eleven years later.
6. When the sun has had a less active eleven year cycle (such as Solar Cycle 24), then Force X pops out again with flickers of sunlight, and eleven years later cools the planet.
7. They tell us that the delay might not be eleven years. It could be anything from eleven to 20 years. It depends on the length of the cycle that produced Force X. (Has there ever been a 20 year cycle?)
8. The force of Force X is 10 to 20 times as great as the change in solar irradiance, yet while normal changes in solar irradiance can be measured, this monstrously huge Force X can't be detected.
9. Since the peak in solar irradiance in the mid-1950s, Force X hasn't done much of anything, despite it's wondrous force.
10. However, with Solar Cycle 24 being even less active, Force X is bound to do something this time around. The 2020s will be colder than the 1980s, according to this "theory". That means that by 2030, the global mean surface temperature will be back to that of 1976 (see below).

David Evan's latest shifted goal post - it's going to get mighty cold, he sez

Another prediction from the rocket scientist from Luna Park, David Evans:

February 13, 2016 at 5:01 pm
Looking ahead a bit: cooler, possibly starting as early as 2017.

Regardless of which of the TSI datasets or reconstructions most bandied about that you believe, there was a fall off in underlying TSI around 2004. The length of the current solar cycle is around 13 to 14 years, so sometime around 2017 (or maybe a couple of years after) this should result in global cooling.

Prediction: There will be a sustained and significant fall in global temperature from about 2017 – 2022, of about 0.3 deg C. The 2020s will be cooler than the 1980s.

Here is David's latest prediction plotted. First the decadal:

Figure 1 | Decadal global mean surface temperature, with a prediction from David Evans. Data source: GISS NASA

For David's "cooler than the 1980s" to come to pass, by the end of the 2020s, the global mean surface temperature will have to be back to that of 1976, forty years ago. Below is the annual plot:

Figure 2 | Annual global mean surface temperature, with a prediction from David Evans. Data source: GISS NASA

What about his earlier predictions? How have they evolved over time? Turns out they have evolved even within a single article. Here are some of them:

To think that deniers complain if the global mean surface temperature observations are a teensy bit different from the model projections. Or if an expected ENSO event doesn't happen for a year.

A mysterious unknown mechanism that doesn't bark

Jo Nova explains, or thinks she does, or has decided to go along with David's bonnet's bee, even though she can't explain it:

The notch was “the dog that didn’t bark“, the big clue. Somehow at the peak of solar incoming energy, there was a sudden shift in the way Earth responds to incoming sunlight. The extra energy (which is very small but detectable with Fourier analysis) is reflected or not absorbed by the system. This is a screaming red flag that some important change is going on, through a mysterious unknown mechanism.

If there was a delayed action creating this notch filter pattern, further analysis showed that spookily, the delay was 11 years. Crikey, send up the fireworks — it was unmistakably the exact same length as the average solar cycle....

....At some point David realized, from the electrical analogy, that the timing was suspiciously precise. Because the delay was the length of a solar cycle, and the notches were synchronized to the Sun, the cause of the delay wasn’t on Earth — but inside the Sun. The delay was not a smeared out thing, but a literal delay — the effect due to a change in TSI only begins to act one sunspot cycle later, and quickly affects the surface temperature here on Earth.  The flickering signals from total sunlight are a clue that precedes some other change in the solar dynamo.  We’ll talk about the possible mechanisms in future posts, because there are a lot of fields, fluxes and particles coming off the Sun that could potentially affect our climate.

So if I get this straight, David Evans did some mathematical confabulations with data he tortured, and thinks he saw something after torturing the already tortured data some more. David's latest brainwave is that the "something":

• causes the Earth to change how it responds to incoming sunlight, causing more energy to be reflected back to space
• can't be anything that happens on Earth
• therefore it must be something that changes in the sun, however
• it doesn't affect the energy arriving at Earth or the energy coming from the sun, therefore
• it must be a "field, flux or particle coming off the sun" that affects the climate, which hasn't been detected and can't be explained.

It sounds as if David's not been able to move on much from his earlier musings, which was that his Force X, after a delay of the length of a solar cycle, magically both:

• changes the short wave energy reflected from Earth to space without changing the "heat of the planet", and
• changes the amount of sunlight arriving at Earth
• turns on the tap that controls how much energy the sun sends out and at the same time turns on the tap that controls how much incoming sunlight the Earth reflects back out, "without changing the heat of the planet". An all-powerful cosmic force, that one.

As David put it: it "works by modulating the albedo of the Earth, or the amount of solar radiation reflected straight back out to space without changing the heat of the planet, by clouds and ice and so on. Force X turns the tap that controls how much sunlight pours into the Earth’s climate system. This could be through UV, magnetic field effects, solar wind, or some form of electrical field."

In other words, neither rocket scientist David or Jo still has the first clue about how this non-shift in energy makes a huge difference to the energy in the Earth system. A shift so huge from an undetectable source, that the "effect on temperatures of changes in force X is 10 to 20 times as great as the immediate effect of changes in solar radiation"

David put up a chart that he said he put together from multiple sources, but it doesn't look right to me. Now I understand that there are lots of different versions of TSI floating about, but David seems to have chosen to lump them all together, and thrown in some sunspots, rather than pick one or two to show separately.

Here it David's chart. I've added a layer with TSI from Wang, Lean and Sheeley 2005. I've also modified the added layer by smoothing it with an 11 year moving average and shifted it forward 11 years, as David said he did. That means my TSI layer should be very similar to David's TSI-smoothed-delayed curve. But it's not. (Click the image to enlarge it.)

Figure 3 | David Evan's messy chart, overlayed with TSI data. The overlayed TSI data has 11 year smoothing (moving average) and is shifted up by 11 years to match David Evans' "delay". Sources: Jo Nova's blog with overlayed historical TSI data from Wang, Lean, and Sheeley (2005).via the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics

Here are some more charts, which highlight the differences between what David Evans has come up with and the sources I found.

First a chart with global mean surface temperature (GISTemp) and sunspots. It's animated to show what happens when you shift the sunspots forward eleven years. The delay doesn't affect the stark rise in surface temperature. Nor can David's notion explain why temperatures keep rising even when solar activity is on the decline (delayed or not).

Figure 4 | Global mean surface temperature and sunspots. The chart is shown with and without an 11-year "delay" in the sunspot data. Data sources: GISS NASA and SILSO

Then a chart with TSI and surface temperature, again using GISTemp, and again showing the data with and without any eleven year delay.

Figure 5 | Global mean surface temperature and Total Solar Irradiance (TSI). The chart is shown with and without an 11-year "delay" in the TSI data. Data sources: GISS NASA and TSI data from Wang, Lean, and Sheeley (2005).via the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics

I'd say that David has a lot more explaining to do, and he could learn a thing or two about charting while he's trying to come up with a new "theory". For one thing, it would be preferable if he:

• plotted one data source at a time, rather than lumping them all together
• provided the data he's using in an ascii file or spreadsheet
• showed the solar irradiance data as it is, as well as shifting it forward (if he has to do that)
• spent more time learning the bulk of the science as it is, rather than cherry-picking bits and pieces from contrarians he fancies.
• came to accept that the natural world doesn't change the laws of physics on a whim.

Nothing but more empty promises

Then there is another promise - sheesh, they do eke them out in dribs and drabs, don't they. Promises, promises:

This new theory can be tested soon. It’s falsifiable — unlike the carbon religion. More on that soon too. 

I wonder what Jo means by the "carbon religion"? She can't be talking about the various theories underpinning climate science, because they are falsifiable. On the other hand, if Jo and David hadn't kept shifting the goal posts, their "theory" would already have been falsified.

Jo's testing promise was immediately followed by another panhandling plea. Jo Nova and her partner David Evans have been drip-feeding the drips for almost two years, with precious little to show for it. That seems to be so that Jo can continue to con people into sending her money on the strength of a promise that one day they will find a way to prove that the science of the past two centuries is all wrong and there is no greenhouse effect.  The chance of that happening is less than the chance of a major ice age coming inside of the next 50,000 years.

From the HotWhopper archives

• Jo Nova's Solar Force be With You - if you're a wacko science denier - May 2015, with a list of solar acronyms and description of various sources of solar data.
• Denier Weirdness: Magical mysterious Force X and the Notch - June 2014
• Nova and Evans present ForceX: "It would be better if there was a known mechanism of course..." - June 2014
• Quote of the Day from David Evans, the Rocket Scientist from Luna Park - July 2014
• A memorial to "The Notch" - RIP - August 2014