Carbon Off-setting an Expedition to the Antarctic

>“Large historical solar forcing” is anathema to the IPCC – they can’t allow it.” nope that’s just sledging – [link to figure, based on Meehl et al. (2004) that only goes back to 1900]

“Large historical solar forcing” refers to millennial scale. Meehl et al is century scale. The IPCC's radiative forcing methodology starts at 1750. The last solar Grand Minimum was 1645 - 1715 prior to 1750 (refer Coher's TAR TSI plot).

No CO2-forced climate model, including Meehl et al at NCAR, parameterizes a “Large historical solar forcing” of the magnitude found by Shapiro et al (2011) or anywhere near it. Neither does any start solar forcing parameterization when solar output was at 1645 - 1715 levels.

It was increasing solar activity that got GAT up to 1900s levels in the first place. It wasn't CO2 forcing (there was no CO2 uptick prior to 1900). Since the 1950s solar activity has been sustained at the highest level for well over 1000 years i.e. it was still forcing even though the level did not increase above the already ultra high level (a thermodynamic concept - see next).

Alec Rawls was trying to get this thermodynamic concept through to about a dozen solar specialist climate scientists, because they don't understand how heat input to a system raises temperature, by using a water-pot-on-stove-element/TSI-GAT analogy (got through to one or two I think). Basically, you just put the pot on the element, turn the element up, leave at the same setting, and the temperature of the water gradually rises. Same with TSI-GAT:

Cold sun (stove element Low), cold climate (pot water cool), 1645-1715 Maunder Minimum
Warm sun (stove element Med), warm climate (pot water warm) 1715-1790
Cold sun (stove element Low), cold climate (pot water cool), 1795–1825 Dalton Minimum
Warm sun (stove element Med), warm climate (pot water warm) 1825-1930
Hot sun (stove element High), very warm climate (pot water hot) 1950-2009 Modern Grand Max.

The main consequence of the consistently ultra high TSI from 1950-2009 was that ocean heat content (OHC) gradually increased i.e. by analogy, stove element set to "High", pot water temperature gradually increasing and pot water heat accumulating. This is the thermodynamic concept what Alec Rawls was trying to get through to the solar people in climate science but I don't think he succeeded.

But OHC in the upper Pacific (the earth's largest ocean) is no longer accumulating heat (actually cooling this century) i.e. without the sustained ultra high level of solar input that peaked around 1986 and although still high (relative to 1930) through to 2009, solar input has not been sufficient to maintain Pacific OHC (PDO just moves the heat around). Much of that Pacific ocean heat has been lost by current transport to the Indian Ocean which has been the only ocean accumulating heat this century, so much so that it has skewed the global OHC metrics. Idiots like Balmaseda et al (2012) that didn't do a basin-by-basin analysis don't know this of course (Bob Tisdale has done the analysis for them fortunately, but easy to see in the data). In other words, ocean heat accumulation is beginning to unwind starting with the upper Pacific.

Coher's link to Glassman holds the key to all this in his conclusion:

"And what is significant depends not on the source – the Sun -- but on the receiver – Earth. Moreover, because the problem is thermodynamic, and the medium, heat, has capacity but not inertia, temperature will not contain natural frequencies to resonate with a source."

Heat only manifests when radiation from the sun strikes an absorbing material like land or ocean where the absorption depends on radiation-material "tuning". Solar radiation has a heating effect on the ocean because it penetrates effectively to about 100m depth laying down energy over the entire tracklength (100m). LWIR from GHGs and clouds (DLR) only effectively penetrates the ocean surface about 10 microns, therefore DLR is not an ocean heating agent. All it does is aid evaporation at the surface (ocean cooling).

>“neglect natural variation e.g. oceanic oscillations.” nope they don’t – you argue about the adequacy but they don’t neglect these factors !

They do neglect those factors in the Assessment Report ensembles e.g. CMIP3/AR4 and CMIP5/AR5. Granted there are isolated modeling exercises that attempt to integrate oceanic variation but that is not the prevailing paradigm in CMIP ensembles. It has only really been Kosaka and Xie (2013) that has been able to mimic the 21st century PDO change of phase to negative and resulting temperature flatlining. No-one else has done that. Begs the question though (asked by Judith Curry among others): if the negative PDO phase post-2000 explains the flatlining, doesn't the positive PDO phase explain 1980-2000 warming that has been attributed to AGW?

Jo Nova has a good coverage of this farce as well. Funny coverage by some bloggers.

http://joannenova.com.au/2013/12/antarctic-ice-swallows-boat-media-spin/

TSI was shown in TAR at Figure 6.5:

http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/?src=/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/fig6-5.htm

Lean et al's conclusions match what Glassman calculated and matches temperature closely:

http://www.rocketscientistsjournal.com/2010/03/sgw.html

Courtillot sums up the solar influence and where IPCC modelling goes wrong:

http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com.au/2011/03/geophysicist-explains-how-sun-controls.html

Do u remember when
a silk-shirted coterie
from th U-N
created the I-P-C-C,
with a mission,
guv-uh-mint funded
ter discuvuh
the scientific risk
uv human-induced
climate-change?
Say if yer don't
find it does
this mean yer
funding goes away?