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":

Jo Nova's Solar Force be With You - if you're a wacko science denier

...solar and volcanic forcings, the two dominant natural contributors of climate change since the pre-industrial time.

I was pointed to Jo Nova's wacky blog today. Jo Nova is the screen name of a born again science denier from Western Australia, who comes up with some of the more outlandish "theories" you'll see about global warming (ie crazy, unscientific nonsense of the wackadoodle variety).

She was waxing sarcastic about the influence of the sun on climate (archived here). Jo was trying to tell her readers that climate scientists ignore the impact of the sun on the earth. So I thought that while WUWT is deep in conspiracy theory land, I'd hit Jo's silliness on the head.

Disappearing "it's the sun" at WUWT

Every now and then, well just about every day, Anthony Watts provides evidence that supports what his good buddy, Willis Eschenbach, wrote about him:

"So it is not Anthony’s job to determine whether or not the work of the guest authors will stand the harsh light of public exposure. ... . Even if Anthony had a year to analyze and dissect each piece, he couldn’t do that job."

Today Anthony seems to have decided that a paper published in the Royal Society Proceedings  B will not stand the harsh light of public exposure. Or not at WUWT at any rate. It's getting a modest amount of exposure elsewhere - like at RichardDawkins.net and at livescience.com and at wunderground.com and at medicaldaily.com, and even at ChinaDaily.com.cn.

Anthony published an article by David "funny sunny" Archibald. For a change it was a fairly straight bit of reporting although I won't vouch for the WUWT diagrams.

Anthony had the WUWT article up for a while, attracting at least 58 "thoughts", but now it's disappeared. It could simply be a glitch in the WUWT system, of course. Someone might have accidentally deleted it. The evidence in favour of that is that Anthony's tweet about it was still up when I last looked.

The paper was about a study of people born in Norway between between 1676 and 1878. The abstract makes a strong claim, stronger than some might think is warranted. It states:

...we show that solar activity (total solar irradiance) at birth decreased the probability of survival to adulthood for both men and women.

If you're scratching your head at this point, it's because the wording is sloppy and imprecise.  What they meant to say was that people born at a time in the solar cycle when there was highest solar activity, had a decreased probability of survival to adulthood.

What the scientists are arguing is that when there is more sunspot activity then it affects pregnant women, and there is higher infant mortality. People born during solar minima will, on average, live about five years longer than people born during a solar max.

There are lots of ifs and buts etc. The authors found a correlation between solar cycles and survival, and they attempted to see if there was causation. They eliminated some factors and suggested it was because of "folate degradation during pregnancy caused by UVR".

These authors weren't the first to see a correlation between sunspot activity and human life span. There was a study in 1993 that found a correlation too. Except it wasn't to do with infant mortality, it was a study of adults.

Anyway, thought I'd just put it out there. Firstly because WUWT apparently decided it wasn't suitable for climate science deniers. (Is that because they think more sun is good for you, whereas this study suggests that less sun might be better - if you are poor and live in Norway?)

Also because it's the sort of paper that invites lots of scepticism, of the real kind - not the fake kind you get at WUWT.

(Also because, while I'm flat out on other things, I didn't want to totally neglect HotWhopper - and this didn't take long to write :D)

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Gine Roll Skjærvø, Frode Fossøy, Eivin Røskaft. "Solar activity at birth predicted infant survival and women's fertility in historical Norway" Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2014.2032 (open access)

Juckett, David A., and Barnett Rosenberg. "Correlation of human longevity oscillations with sunspot cycles." Radiation research 133, no. 3 (1993): 312-320. (paywalled here)

Someone needs to explain the seasons to Willis Eschenbach and Stan Robertson at WUWT

I started to write this article some time ago in response to an article by Wondering Willis Eschenbach (archived here). Today there's another article on the same topic by someone called Stan Robertson (archived here) so I figured I'd resurrect this. Stan's been featured here on a previous occasion.

The main question they are asking is: why doesn't Earth heat up more when it's closest to the sun, in January? The corollary they didn't ask is, why doesn't Earth cool down more when it's furthest from the sun, in July?

The main answer is: the tilt of the earth dominates seasonal variation, not distance from the Sun. For Earth that is. (It's different on Mars.) Plus - oceans.

This is a long and long-winded article, probably with too much repetition and a tad muddled. But I've spent enough time on it so click read on if you're up for it :)

Denier weirdness: Wondering Willis Eschenbach has a touch of the sun at WUWT...

Wondering Willis Eschenbach has a touch of the sun**. He is wondering if the sun can affect the temperature on Earth (archived here). He's been analysing the surface temperature to see if he can detect the effect of the solar cycle.

Now everyone here knows that the solar cycle does have a small impact on the amount of energy reaching the surface. The latest IPCC AR5 WG1 report states on page TS-21:

Satellite observations of total solar irradiance (TSI) changes since 1978 show quasi-periodic cyclical variation with a period of roughly 11 years. Longer-term forcing is typically estimated by comparison of solar minima (during which variability is least). This gives a RF change of –0.04 [–0.08 to 0.00] W m–2 between the most recent (2008) minimum and the 1986 minimum. There is some diversity in the estimated trends of the composites of various satellite data, however. Secular trends of TSI before the start of satellite observations rely on a number of indirect proxies. The best estimate of RF from TSI changes over the industrial era is 0.05 [0.00 to 0.10] W m–2 (medium confidence), which includes greater RF up to around 1980 and then a small downward trend. 

And elsewhere in section 5-8 :

Typical changes measured over an 11-year solar cycle are 0.1% for TSI and up to several percent for the ultra-violet (UV) part of SSI (see Section 8.4).

Willis can't find the signal because it's so tiny it's buried in the noise and he doesn't take out the other factors affecting surface temperature. (Nor would he read science. He prefers to try to figure things out for himself, which is why he gets into such a mess.)

Willis is a Gaia fan

Willis holds to a Gaia-style hypothesis, which he sets out as:

Which of course leads to the obvious question … why no sign of the 11-year solar cycles?

I hold that this shows that the temperature of the system is relatively insensitive to changes in forcing. This, of course, is rank heresy to the current scientific climate paradigm, which holds that ceteris paribus, changes in temperature are a linear function of changes in forcing. I disagree. I say that the temperature of the planet is set by a dynamic thermoregulatory system composed of emergent phenomena that only appear when the surface gets hotter than a certain temperature threshold. These emergent phenomena maintain the temperature of the globe within narrow bounds (e.g. ± 0.3°C over the 20th Century), despite changes in volcanoes, despite changes in aerosols, despite changes in GHGs, despite changes in forcing of all kinds. The regulatory system responds to temperature, not to forcing.

And I say that because of the existence of these thermoregulatory systems, the 11-year variations in the sun’s UV and magnetism and brightness, as well as the volcanic variations and other forcing variations … well, they make little difference.

Which is a circular argument. Willis doesn't say what causes the temperature change in the first place. In fact he's arguing that the earth is insensitive to forcing. Which would mean that there would be very little change in temperature and the earth would never get to any of his temperature thresholds.

Wild swings and roundabouts

But that's not what I'm writing about.  You may remember that Willis has often said (wrongly of course) that the surface temperature has varied by ± 0.3°C over the 20th Century and he's repeated that nonsense again today. He's never said where he's dug up that silliness from.  Here is a chart to show how wrong he is. The surface temperature just keeps on going up and up and up. It's not varying by ± 0.3°C at all:

Data source: NASA GISS

What's two degrees among friends?

Today Willis wrote the following:

The earth’s temperature swings on the order of 6°C peak to peak over the course of a year. Why would it not respond over an 11-year period?

Then he changed his mind (without admitting to it) and wrote something different:

Despite the presence of the “near-infinite heat sinks” of the ocean and outer space, the global temperature changes by 4°C or so over the course of the year. And the hemispheres swing much more than that, 6°C for the southern hemisphere and a 13°C swing for the northern hemisphere.

 Heck, what's two degrees Celsius between friends at WUWT :)

[I've deleted some text here because, as Arthur pointed out I did some analysis using monthly anomalies, not monthly temperatures, which of course wouldn't show up actual differences over the year. How dumb is that! The above point still stands. Sou.]

From the WUWT comments

There is an awful lot of nonsense in the comments as you can imagine.  However, the first comment is from a rational human being.  Nick Stokes is the first cab off the rank and corrects just one of Willis' errors in the quote and says:

May 24, 2014 at 1:46 pm
“I hold that this shows that the temperature of the system is relatively insensitive to changes in forcing. This, of course, is rank heresy to the current scientific climate paradigm, which holds that ceteris paribus, changes in temperature are a linear function of changes in forcing." 

The standard climate science view is not that the climate is insensitive to changes in solar forcing, but that no significant changes have happened. That, while the sun is indeed the energy source, it is a very steady source. So no stability mechanism need be postulated.

Adding quickly:

OK, I can hear the protests – I mean no big oscillations in solar output in the period Willis is looking at.

To which Willis Eschenbach weirdly responds (extract - removed Nick's comment):

May 24, 2014 at 2:03 pm
Dear heavens, save me from pettifogging lawyers. Nick, the standard view is exactly what I said it was—that changes in temperature are a linear function of the changes in forcing. If you don’t understand that, read up on the supposed “climate sensitivity”. It has nothing to do with the sun at all. w.

What is Willis on about - does he not regard the sun as a forcing? That would be truly weird. Nick Stokes can't figure him out either, from the look of it, and says:

May 24, 2014 at 2:25 pm
Willis Eschenbach says: May 24, 2014 at 2:03 pm “Dear heavens, save me from pettifogging lawyers.”

No pettifog here. Your proposition is that a lack of sunspot cycle in the data supports a “dynamic thermoregulatory system”. I say that there was no significant change in forcing in the first place, so lack of observed response does not support thermoregulation.

Blue Sky says:

May 24, 2014 at 2:34 pm
Willis Eschenbach creates a straw man and than destroys it. Stick a feather in his hat.

You'll enjoy this comment. RoHa says, quoting Willis:

May 24, 2014 at 6:35 pm
“Unfortunately, the dang facts got in the way again”

They often do. I’ve told you before,you should leave those things alone and stick to pure speculation.

Roy Spencer doesn't bother pointing out that Willis' whole article is about chasing a phantom, but is enjoying the to and fro and says:

May 24, 2014 at 2:45 pm
Willis, I’m always happy to see someone other than myself pi$$ off a bunch of people. :-)

Because the topic is the sun, Lief Svalgaard joins in from time to time as usual. At one point he says:

May 24, 2014 at 5:25 pm
DaveR says: May 24, 2014 at 5:13 pm Put another way…. because the earth climate is not responding to the 11-year sunspot cycle (which we know is creating variable energy output) there must be some equally offsetting effect in the interface between the two systems.

No, the more likely reason is simply that the variation of the energy output is too small to have any significant effect.

Roy UK begs Willis to give him a clue as to what is causing the remarkably rapid rise in global temperature and says:

May 24, 2014 at 3:14 pm
So its not the sun. And it ain’t CO2. What in the world is it? C’mon Willis give us a clue…
Or is it just something that we should not worry about?

Louis has a bright idea to counteract nonsense like CO2 or Milankovitch forcings and says cosmic dust caused the ice ages:

May 24, 2014 at 6:36 pmIf it isn’t Sun cycles that cause changes to the climate, what other causes could there be?
Astronomers say we are currently located inside a low-density zone that is about 10 times lower in neutral atoms than the average of 0.5 atoms/cc elsewhere in the Milky Way on average. So what effect would there be if the solar system passed through a denser medium, such as an interstellar cloud? Could a higher-density zone block some sunlight from reaching Earth or have some other effect?

After a search, I found the following comment at http://www.astronomycafe.net/qadir/q1372.html:

“When the solar system enters such a cloud, the first thing that will happen will be that the magnetic field of the Sun, which now extends perhaps 100 AU from the Sun and 2-3 times the orbit of Pluto, will be compressed back into the inner solar system depending on the density of the medium that the Sun encounters. When this happens, the Earth may be laid bare to an increased cosmic ray bombardment.”

Could passing through a cosmic dust cloud have caused ice ages in the past? If increased cosmic rays cause more clouds, couldn’t that cause cooling and possibly account for past ice ages? I have no idea one way or the other. I’m just throwing it out there because I haven’t seen any mention of such a possibility.

Our old mate, Roger Sowell talks about it being "prudent to act" (though Roger admits he knows bugger all) - and prepare for the ice age that cometh! (extracts):

May 24, 2014 at 4:12 pm
I agree that “it’s the evidence, stupid.” But, it is not the 11-year cycle that is the evidence of interest. the long-term solar cycles, of which we know very little, are the subject of interest, at least to me. They may or may not be regular cycles.

It is well-known that climate gets very cold when the sunspots disappear for decades on end. We have, as far as I know, no proven, accepted causal mechanism why the absence of sunspots causes the Earth to cool. There is the cloud and cosmic ray hypothesis, with cosmic rays modulated by the sun’s magnetic field.

Do we actually need a proven, causal mechanism before it is prudent to act?...

...In my May, 2012 speech to the chemical engineers in Southern California, I made the point that we have excellent correlations over hundreds of years that show weak sunspot cycles produce global cooling. ...

Mick draws an analogy and says:

May 24, 2014 at 3:59 pm
Willis, You can’t see the 100Hz AC if you stick a thermometer in the chicken soup coking on the hot-plate.

This doesn’t mean there is no oscillation of incoming energy, but the thermal inertia is acting as a low-pass filter…..

Also…. 0.5deg Celsius variation is significant for us humans, for our comfort. But looking at it in absolute terms, not much different between 300K or 300.5K ..about as much as in the Sun’s delta TSI ….me think.

(I hope my English is comprehensible enough…. apologize if it’s not, spell check struggle to understand my accent)

sabretruthtiger quoted Christopher Monckton (who joined the fray and opposed Willis), and sensibly, if somewhat incompletely, says that the sun (and volcanoes) would of course cause natural variation in climate (excerpt):

May 24, 2014 at 4:06 pm
...Nicely put, Mr Eschenbach put in his place somewhat.

Honestly there can surely be no other cause of natural variability other than the sun, it, along with axial tilt/proximity cycles can be the only causes of variability once electromagnetic and volcanic earth-based anomalies are discounted as the system is heat driven.

But what do I know, I’m not a climate scientist, Mr Eschenbach it would be extremely helpful if you could respond to Monckton’s assertions and give us an alternative to what drives natural variability.
Cheers

There is a lot of nonsense in the comments, which you can read here, if you've nothing better to do.

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** I couldn't find this on the internet, but in my part of the world having a "touch of the sun" means that a person has temporarily lost his marbles :D

Anthony Watts gets more than the sun wrong at WUWT

Anthony Watts of WUWT mocks another scientific study, this time one that shows something that won't surprise too many people. (Archived here.)

The Schurer, Tett and Hegerl paper, published in Nature Geoscience, finds that changes in solar radiation resulted in only small changes in climate over the past 1,000 years.  Volcanic eruptions had a bigger impact on climate than changes in incoming solar radiation.  From the abstract:

We find that neither a high magnitude of solar forcing nor a strong climate effect of that forcing agree with the temperature reconstructions. We instead conclude that solar forcing probably had a minor effect on Northern Hemisphere climate over the past 1,000 years, while, volcanic eruptions and changes in greenhouse gas concentrations seem to be the most important influence over this period.

This seems to be consistent with a 2006 paper by Ammann et al - from the abstract:

Smaller, rather than larger, long-term trends in solar irradiance appear more plausible and produced modeled climates in better agreement with the range of Northern Hemisphere temperature proxy records both with respect to phase and magnitude. Despite the direct response of the model to solar forcing, even large solar irradiance change combined with realistic volcanic forcing over past centuries could not explain the late 20th century warming without inclusion of greenhouse gas forcing. Although solar and volcanic effects appear to dominate most of the slow climate variations within the past thousand years, the impacts of greenhouse gases have dominated since the second half of the last century.

Anthony Watts confused NERC with NRDC

You want to know one reason for Anthony bagging the paper?  It's because he confused UK's Natural Environment Research Council, which funded the study, with the USA's Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).  Anthony wrote:

Note the “…was supported by the Natural Environment Research Council.” at the end. That alone makes me suspicious of the science presented because it looks a lot like “science for hire” when a blatantly political group like NRDC funds the study. 

Only the NRDC didn't fund the study, did it.  The UK, like Australia, has a number of R&D Councils some of which are funded wholly by government and some of which would be jointly funded by government and industry (such as on a government dollar for industry dollar basis).

Update: Ha ha - it looks as if someone corrected Anthony because he's made a few changes to his article now (original archived here and updated version archived here). BUT although Anthony deleted the section above, in one spot he only made a minor correction which now looks plain silly:

...another one-paper syndrome in the making funded by an NGO with a political mission to grab a headline. 

An R&D Council's mission is to support R&D.  They don't have a "political mission to make a headline".  What a plonker!

Anthony Watts confuses weather and climate

Then poor old Anthony goes and confuses weather with climate, writing:

Then there is: “…climatic fingerprints of high and low solar forcing derived from model simulations…”. IPCC Models haven’t been able to reproduce the last ten years; what makes them think they are worth anything 100-200 years ago?

Climate models are designed for climate, for multi-decadal timescales not ten years or less.  In any case, observations are still in the realm of model simulations.  It's not that hard to compare models with observations going back 160 years so they'd be able to figure out how close the models are to observations.  And there are proxy temperature reconstructions to see how models fare against global surface temperatures going back 1,000 years.

Anthony Watts wouldn't know an expert if he tripped over one

Finally, Anthony has a go at the lead author, Andrew P Schurer, writing:

I’m not so sure this fellow is fully versed on climatology. His papers up to 2011 were all about cosmology, then all of the sudden he starts publishing on climatology issues. One wonders if his previous funding dried up to make such a dramatic shift in study. 

Actually, Andrew Schurer has been publishing climate papers since 2011.  Five of his eight listed publications are directly related to climate and this one makes six out of nine.  The first was published in 2011.  He's only published three papers on galaxies, the last one in 2011. And is it such a dramatic shift?  I don't know but what I would remark on is that for a presumably young researcher he is doing very well, with publications not just in Nature Geoscience but GRL and JGR.  He has to be a whole lot more qualified than the so-called "experts" that Anthony promotes, like the potty peer Christopher Monckton, David "funny sunny" Archibald, Perennially Puzzled Bob Tisdale and Wondering Willis Eschenbach and Anthony "UHI disease" Watts himself.

As for Andrew Schurer's co-authors, Professors Simon Tett and Gabriele Hegerl, they would be known to many HotWhopper readers by reputation at least.

From the WUWT comments

Steven Mosher says:

December 23, 2013 at 9:46 am
one paper wonder?
what was it Einstein said?

Anthony Watts reply shows he doesn't know anything at all about the work of Albert Einstein:

REPLY: I’ll remind you of what you said to me at AGU discussing Robert Rhode’s poster. “models aren’t proof of anything, they are simply best guesses”. So here we have modeled (not observed) solar activity being curve fit to observed surface temperatures. I’m pretty sure Einstein would not be impressed. – Anthony

Eyal Porat "wanders" but doesn't wander as far as here or here and says:

December 23, 2013 at 9:51 am
I wander what volcanoes caused the LIA.
That was a 150 years stretch of mighty volcano activity…

Rob wants to see scientists find a correlation between sun activity and housing?

December 23, 2013 at 9:56 am
I’m Rob M too and I was just about to say that.
They are “fitting” sun activity to models rather than finding correlation between sun activity and realty.

Richard M seems to think oceans can force climate all by their little selves.  I guess he doesn't accept there was a medieval climate anomaly or a little ice age and says:

December 23, 2013 at 10:20 am
Sadly they ignore the single most important factor in climate changes … the oceans. From what I can tell solar changes tend to be of shorter duration which is also true of volcanoes. They won’t find great correlations with either one..

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Andrew P. Schurer, Simon F. B. Tett & Gabriele C. Hegerl, Small influence of solar variability on climate over the past millennium, Nature Geoscience, http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2040

Ammann, Caspar M., Fortunat Joos, David S. Schimel, Bette L. Otto-Bliesner, and Robert A. Tomas. "Solar influence on climate during the past millennium: Results from transient simulations with the NCAR Climate System Model." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104, no. 10 (2007): 3713-3718. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0605064103

It'd be the sun, if we could only explain it...

Stan Robertson, Ph.D, P.E, has written an article for Anthony Watts' blog WUWT (archived here).  His argument starts with these points:

1. Earth has warmed over the past century.
2. The addition of greenhouse gases probably contributed a bit.
3. The sun is likely to be at least partly responsible.
4. TSI isn't enough to explain the warming of the past 50 years.

The sun warmed indirectly?

So far so good.  It's the next bit that is giving Stan a spot of bother.  His reasoning continues (my bold italics):

The sun warmed the earth indirectly not directly and the proof is that TSI variations during the solar cycle are not sufficient to explain the variations in ocean temperature over a solar cycle.

He's done some number crunching and looked up papers by scientists and concluded:

• The average amplitude of TSI reaching the earth surface in all wavelengths would be about 0.09 watt/m2 (Sou: I think, but am not sure, that Stan means this is the amplitude of change over a solar cycle).
• Ocean surface temperatures oscillate with an amplitude of about 0.04 – 0.05°C during a solar cycle -Zhou & Tung (2010).
• For each watt/m2 of increase of TSI over a solar cycle, the ocean warms by 0.085°C - Zhou & Tung (2010).
• Producing sea surface temperature variations with an amplitude of 0.04°C requires a surface heat input of 0.33 watt/m2.
• The solar TSI variations that reach the earth’s surface are smaller than the 0.33 watt/m2 needed to account for sea surface temperature variations by a factor of 3.6.

I think that what he's trying to demonstrate is that the change in solar radiation over a solar cycle cannot account for the resulting change in ocean heat over the same cycle.  He worked out that it should require 33 watt/m2 but he could only find 0.09 watt/m2.  He probably made a mistake in his assumptions or his calculations.  He did go on a bit about going below the sea surface and  I'm not sure why he did that, but it could well be the source of his error - mixing up sea surface temperature changes with sub-surface ocean heat accumulation.  I didn't follow all that he did.  Radiative forcing is not my specialty.  If you want to see what Stan did in more detail, the archived article is here.

No, Stan, it's not the sun (and he is arguing for high climate sensitivity)

Whatever, Stan jumps to hypothesising about the cause of global warming and decides that "it's still the sun", he just has to figure out how it does it.  He concludes (my bold italics):

Although the estimated 0.33 watt/m2 that is required to explain the surface temperature variations is large compared to the amplitude of TSI variations that reach the surface, it is still only about two parts per thousand of the 160 watt/m2 of solar UV/VIS/NIR that reaches the earth surface. There are many possible ways in which the sun might modulate the surface energy flux to this extent. These include modulation of cloud cover and small spectral shifts in the energetic UV that might modulate ozone absorption or produce shifts of the effective sea surface albedo. It would seem to be a fairly direct radiative effect, rather than feedback, since it must vary in phase with the solar cycle.

In summary, my calculations based on energy conservation considerations imply that the sun modulates the ocean temperatures to a much greater extent than can be provided solely by its TSI variations. The great question that desperately needs an answer is how does it do it? It should be easily understood that solar effects would not necessarily be confined to cycles. More likely, the sun has been the driver of the large changes of temperatures of the Roman and Medieval warm period, the Little Ice Age, and the recent recovery from it without requiring large changes of its own irradiance. When we understand how the sun does this, we will have begun to understand the earthly climate.

I'm not sure what Stan means by "large changes of temperature...without requiring large changes of (solar) irradiance".  But if he's trying to argue that the recent decades of global warming were caused by the sun, he's wrong.  If he does think that only small changes in solar irradiance can have a large effect on global surface temperature then he's arguing for a high climate sensitivity, which goes against all that WUWT stands for.  His argument is also lacking in that he doesn't attempt to explain why, if it's mostly the sun, TSI would not act consistently.  For example, the world has warmed in recent decades whether TSI was increasing or not.

What is causing the earth to warm

Before getting stuck into the comments, it might pay to look at all the factors that are causing the earth to warm.  There's a nifty chart in the IPCC AR5 WG1 Technical Summary (page TS-91) showing all the components of radiative forcing from 1750 to 2011.  It's a bit small so I suggest you click the chart to enlarge it:

Source: IPCC AR5 WG1 Technical Summary

Fig TS.7: Radiative forcing of climate change during the industrial era shown by emitted components from 1750 to 2011. The horizontal bars indicate the overall uncertainty, while the vertical bars are for the individual components (vertical bar lengths proportional to the relative uncertainty, with a total length equal to the bar width for a ±50% uncertainty). Best estimates for the totals and individual components (from left to right) of the response are given in the right column. Values are RF except for the ERF of aerosol-cloud interactions (ERFaci). An additional rapid adjustment to aerosol-radiation interactions of –0.1 [–0.3 to +0.1] W m–2 is attributable primarily to black carbon (ERFari-RFari in Figure TS.6). CFCs= Chlorofluorocarbons, HCFCs= Hydrochlorofluorocarbons, HFCs=Hydrofluorocarbons, PFCs= Perfluorocarbons, NMVOC= Non-Methane Volatile Organic Compounds, BC= Black Carbon. {Figure 8.17}

From the WUWT comments

Solar scientist Leif Svalgaard has had a lot to say in the comments and, I think, has been enjoying himself.

lsvalgaard quotes Stan Robertson and says:

October 10, 2013 at 3:03 pm

The solar TSI variations that reach the earth’s surface are smaller than the 0.33 watt/m2 needed to account for sea surface temperature variations by a factor of 3.6 for this smallest estimate of sea surface temperature variability.

So, in normal science, that falsifies the assumption that solar variations are the cause.

lsvalgaard says:

October 10, 2013 at 3:23 pm
Hockey Schtick says: October 10, 2013 at 3:16 pm - For a start, here’s 50 papers describing potential solar amplification mechanisms

None of those explain how 3.6 times more heat reach the surface than the variation of what the Sun puts out…Otherwise the climate system would be a nifty energy producer: you put 10 units in and you get 36 out. I want one of those :-)

 lsvalgaard says:

October 10, 2013 at 4:01 pm
milodonharlani says: October 10, 2013 at 3:52 pm Science has historically been full of surprises & strongly-held certainties frequently overthrown by better analysis & discovery of more information.

I’m not discussing this in general [and this is all the other people trotting out their usual stuff], but let us stick to the article if this thread: it claims that 0.33 W/m2 input is required and notes that TSI only provides 3.6 times as little, or 0.09 W/m2. How can that work? what discovery awaits us that can provide 3.6 times more energy than supplied by the variation of TSI? The Sun cannot, the deep ocean might, or the calculation is wrong.

David Archibald says the heat is invisible, it's hiding, it's already there but our thermometers can't measure it:

October 10, 2013 at 4:10 pm
What if the heat is already there? Then it doesn’t have to diffuse. Cloud cover varies over the solar cycle. The oceans have an albedo of 5% so most visible light gets through and can get as far as 200 metres down.

Jim G says, it's humans running around releasing energy got from nowhere at all (not the sun), maybe jogging and doing push-ups and tossing all the released energy into the oceans (excerpt) :

October 10, 2013 at 4:13 pm
...How can the trace gas (0.039% of atmosphere) CO2 be the recognized cause of global warming while all of the energy released by human activities be ignored as a source of heat. The human race is one big UHI in some respects. More wars and a major plague would fix the problem. Just think how plants and wildlife would flourish without us pesky humans. Oh, wait. Who would plant the trees after forest fires, no fish and game department to help keep a wildlife balance, no more protection of endangered species from predation like sage grouse and raptors….never mind.

geran says the sum is bigger than the total!:

October 10, 2013 at 4:34 pm
And, once again, we cannot forget (exclude) all of the “products” supplied by our Sun. TSI is only one in the basket.

lsvalgaard says:

October 10, 2013 at 4:35 pm
Joe says: October 10, 2013 at 4:27 pm Because the measurements are at different places. TSI is measured at the top of the atmosphere, the energy “entering” the climate system is (essentially) at the bottom of it.

The article says explicitly: “Thus the average amplitude of TSI reaching the earth surface in all wavelengths would be about 0.09 watt/m2″ so is at the ‘bottom’

stuart L says:

October 10, 2013 at 4:53 pmWell how come CO2 is supposed to warm our planet, when it does not add even as much as 0.09wm/m2 to the budget

About Stan Robertson, Ph.D, P.E

Stan apparently retired in 2004 after teaching physics at Southwestern Oklahoma State University for 14 years and before he had a chance to learn about atmospheric physics. In addition to teaching at three other universities over the years, he has maintained a consulting engineering practice for 30 years.  All this makes him eminently qualified to write a blog article about climate for Anthony.  (If he'd studied and taught climate science or any related discipline, he'd never get a guernsey at WUWT.)

Two denier myths back to back are put down by the IPCC; while richardscourtney shouts in protest

I'm reading the IPCC's AR5 Technical Summary of WG1 at the moment.  I wonder how long it will take deniers to protest these two adjacent snippets from page TS-21.

It won't be "it's the sun"

The recent solar minimum appears to have been unusually low and long-lasting and several projections indicate lower TSI for the forthcoming decades. However, current abilities to project solar irradiance are extremely limited so that there is very low confidence concerning future solar forcing. Nonetheless, there is a high confidence that 21st century solar forcing will be much smaller than the projected increased forcing due to GHGs. {5.2.1, 8.4; FAQ 5.1}

Cosmic ray effect is too weak to influence climate 

Changes in solar activity affect the cosmic ray flux impinging upon the Earth’s atmosphere, which has been hypothesized to affect climate through changes in cloudiness. Cosmic rays enhance aerosol nucleation and thus may affect cloud condensation nuclei production in the free troposphere, but the effect is too weak to have any climatic influence during a solar cycle or over the last century (medium evidence, high agreement). No robust association between changes in cosmic rays and cloudiness has been identified. In the event that such an association exists, it is very unlikely to be due to cosmic ray-induced nucleation of new aerosol particles.

From WUWT

Anthony Watts has let his readers know the draft report is up (archived here).  Being the paranoid conspiracy theorists they are, they've decided "it's not science".  They not only "believe" it's all a giant hoax, they "believe" that on the issue of climate science, all 195 governments are complicit in the hoax and have put aside their multiple differences to fool the world into thinking it's getting warmer.

But 195 governments and all the world's scientists can't fool the astute readers of WUWT.  No way.  They are on top of the biggest and most improbable hoax in the past four billion years (or do they think it's only the last 6,000 years or whatever young earthers believe?).

richardscourtney shouts his deluded Lysenko conspiracy theory to the world of WUWT (punchline excerpts from a very long, very emphatic post archived here):

September 30, 2013 at 9:18 am

...The IPCC does NOT exist to summarise climate science and it does not.

...The IPCC AR5 is pure pseudoscience intended to provide information to justify political actions; i.e.Lysenkoism.

Richard