Dissed

You know you have been dissed, when the folks who created the procedure you used call you out on it. Nicky Scafetta and Dick Willson have been dissed. However, like all good stories this needs an introduction. One of the tragedies of solar astronomy, is that the launch of the replacement for the first total solar irradiance (TSI) monitor was delayed for two years. Accounting for what happened in the gap between ACRIM 1 and ACRIM 2 is the major problem in constructing a TSI record although there are others (google PMOD, IRMB and ACRIM). How to fill that gap using other observations is an issue as bunnies might believe.

Scafetta and Willson (open preprint) used a model called SATIRE-T. They found an increase in the TSI from 1986 and from that, in other papers, Scafetta ascribed a significant part of the global temperature increase to an increase in the TSI. Scafetta has been caught on tape selling this shinola.

In record time, a "comment" on Scafetta and Willson's ACRIM reconstruction, published in GRL earlier this year has appeared in December. Krivova, Solanki and Wetzlar calmly mentioned that Scafetta and Willson screwed up. A preprint is available at arXiv

Solanki and Krivova created a suite of models they named SATIRE to estimate solar irradiance from observations of changes in the solar magnetic field. Each model had a specific purpose. SATIRE S was designed to be used when there were direct, full disk measurements of the solar magnetic field in the photosphere. Changes in the magnetic field and images of the solar surface can be used to figure out the TSI. This is a good place to be, because it infers TSI with a minimal number of assumptions from a fair amount of useful data.

On the other hand, it is only in the satellite era (post 1974) that Rabett Labs had such information, so if Eli wants to go further back, say to the Maunder Minimum, all we got are observations of the sun, including sunspots, and another model is needed and that is SATIRE-T, T standing for Telescope. It is set up to look at longer period changes in TSI, on the decade to century time scales and is known to be less accurate on periods of months, but since all we have going back hundreds of years is sunspot evolution, it is about as good as it gets. Krivova, Solanki and Wetzlar point out that

Thus, by its very conception, the model by Krivova et al. [2007] employed by Scafetta and Willson [2009] is expected to be relatively accurate on time scales of days to the solar rotation and from the solar cycle to centuries, whereas its accuracy on time scales of several months to years is limited. This is exactly opposite to what Scafetta and Willson [2009] assumed.

Rather than the increase in TSI from 1986 that Scafetta and Willson found using the wrong model, SATIRE-T, Krivova, Solanki and Wetzlar find a small decrease when using SATIRE-S, but caution that the decrease is small, and only magnetic effects are considered by the models

The magnitude of this decrease cannot be estimated very accurately from such an analysis (and therefore such a ‘mixed’ composite should not be considered as a replacement of real measurements), but it lies between approximately 0.15 and 0.7 Wm−2 (0.011–0.05%) for different values of the model’s single free parameter. Note that irradiance changes due to non-magnetic effects, if any, cannot be revealed by either SATIRE-S used here nor by SATIRE-T employed by Scafetta and Willson [2009].

Now there are many (not Eli, the bunny would hasten to add) who might think that the wrong choice of model was made for some (unknown to Eli) ulterior purpose (which Eli would never even speculate about). Still, in this case it probably will not be necessary to demand the code from Scafetta but, in the nature of such things it has popped up in many of the predictable places. While it is not likely that many of the usual blogs would even consider doing so, Eli looks forward to the following eminent authorities amending their claims

Comments on Draft Technical Support Document for Endangerment

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A Carlin - US EPA internal document intended for …, 2009 - iwantmypartyback.org
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