Here is another citicism of the recent Royal Society paper on solar influence on global temperatures. Prof. Brignell doesn't think much of the recent work. There is some satellite temperature graphs included which for some reason didn't copy. The graphs clearly show no warming in the Southern Hemisphere in the last 30 years, and very little in the Northern Hemisphere. This criticism cames from the blog "Greenie Watch."

More on the recent solar influence on climate

Prof. Brignell has taken up the cudgels in looking at the recent Royal Society paper by Lockwood & Froehlich that claimed to debunk the Durkin "Swindle" film.

Prof. Brignell specializes in mathematical analyses of physical data and finds a number of infelicities in the paper. I excerpt below the most pointed part of his comments, which, I am pleased to say, largely echo my own comments. See the full article for some interesting links:

When, as is the norm nowadays, zealots take over great institutions, they rob them not only of their integrity but also their dignity. It tells you something about the state of the world when the might of the once great Royal Society rears up in defence against a mere television documentary. John Ray’s Comment on the salvo prompted a closer examination of the ammunition.

Under pressure of time, your bending author has only managed a superficial read through of the paper in question, but a few observations seem to leap out.

The phrase “pre-industrial” in the first sentence does rather tend to give the game away in identifying the villains of the piece, or perhaps it should be read as “a message from our sponsors”.

When you have refereed a few thousand scientific papers in your lifetime, you develop antennae that alert you to the occurrence of the conjuror’s misdirection. One telltale sign is two pages of references, as here. Unless it is a review paper, most of them are almost certainly irrelevant and they simply serve to discourage too deep an examination into the nature of the argument. No one has the time or inclination to search out forty odd papers and examine them to see whether they are germane to the thesis being advanced. In this case the question is whether the sole driver of climate, the Sun, is responsible for a putative sharp increase in global temperature.

A prominent oddity is figure 2, an elaborate colour diagram that seems to be intended to establish that the running mean process exhibits a zero. What a combination of complexity and naivety!

For heaven’s sake! It is over forty years since the publication of Hamming’s classic instruction manual Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers. Even the more modest contribution by your bending author, Laboratory On-line Computing, is over thirty years old and shows that, by use of the z-transform, the exact frequency and phase characteristics drop out in about five lines of simple algebra. Although omitted for simplicity in our treatment of smoothing, the phase shows a reversal at each zero of amplitude. That is all the pretty coloured pictures of figure three of this paper illustrate. The whole point of having standard methods of linear signal processing is that we know exactly the properties of the individual techniques and do not need to keep repeating the analyses. As soon as you start creating ad hoc variations based on intuition, you create a situation of uncertainty and a great deal of labour for any potential critic (the Coppock method is a case in point). Anyway, what they seem to have done is scan the parameter of their process in order to eliminate periodicities in the range of 9-12 years. They could have done this by using a standard low pass filter or Fourier Transform methods, and in either case would come up against the uncertainty principle, as they must do here, but in a less clear way.

So let us take their findings at face value. They say that solar studies fail to predict a claimed sharp rise in global temperature. Well that is precisely what others of a more sceptical disposition have been saying, most recently for example David Archibald. The authors of this paper claim to be dealing with recent times, so they have the advantage of satellite data, which are more credible than the earthbound sort. Indeed the satellite data suggest that there has been no significant global warming since the strong El Niño year of 1998.
From Archibald:

But the paper in question chooses to ignore the satellite data and to show as its final figure the usual ground station data with a strong upward slope for recent years. For an explanation of that see How not to measure temperature. Number Watch has been frequently pilloried for item 6 in its ten facts about global warming, yet now that surface stations are actually being systematically investigated it is clear that there is a great deal of dubiety in those records.

So what does it all boil down to? They have gone round the houses with a great deal of razzamatazz to tell us something that appears to be generally agreed, that solar activity is in decline. They then contrast this with the dubious totem graph of surface temperatures and end up with the complete non sequitur that the CO2 sceptics must be wrong, which was the point seized upon with great relish and hysteria by the establishment media, led of course by the BBC. Fortunately, there is still the odd isolated cool head among the overheated mass.

Thus the Royal Society, which has throughout its glorious history received and published a significant proportion of the great discoveries of world science, finds itself hosting a cheap, opportunistic gibe at an honest attempt to popularise a return to traditional scepticism in science.

The case of the glaring plateaux

Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.Mark Twain

Here are two diagrams that have occurred in Number Watch in recent times.

Now it seems to your simple minded author that they both exhibit a rather outstanding characteristic, namely a plateau in the the data. In both cases the users of the data have behaved as though they were not there.
The first is the evidence (read to the bottom) on which the drug Vioxx was banned. Despite the fact that it is a logical impossibility for this to be anything other than a freak of statistics, the therapy was taken away from thousands of suffering people and millions of dollars were wasted.
The second is the claimed temperature of the surface of the earth. The users correlate this with the only measure of CO2 in the atmosphere that they permit; yet despite the fact that the latter follows a monotonic rising curve they do not attempt to account for the self-evident hiccup.
It all goes to illustrate Maier's Law.

Funny old world

Thus the Royal Society, which has throughout its glorious history received and published a significant proportion of the great discoveries of world science, finds itself hosting a cheap, opportunistic gibe at an honest attempt to popularise a return to traditional scepticism in science.