Dr David Evans, 8 July 2014, David Evans’ Notch-Delay Solar Theory and Model Home
At the introduction to this series of blog posts, we said we’d release the spreadsheet containing all the data, model, and calculations. All in one file for Microsoft Excel. Thanks for your patience.
The model, data, code and calculations are here: Climate.xlsm (20Mb).
Containing 44 datasets, 33 sheets, 90+graphs, and 15,000 lines of code
New Here? See this summary of posts. Evans looked at TSI (total solar irradiance) and Earths temperature, and discovered a mysterious notch filter. That implies some kind of solar effect occurs with an 11 year delay — or one solar cycle after the TSI. He built a model. See the hindcasts, and the prediction of imminent cooling. See the replies to critics.– Jo
(Click to download the Climate.xlsm file. 20Mb)
Why Excel?
I chose to do all the work for this project, right from the beginning, in a single Microsoft Excel spreadsheet for pc. It’s not the fanciest or the fastest, but an Excel spreadsheet is the most ubiquitous, and one of the friendliest programming environments as well. It runs on most computers—any Windows computer with Excel 2007 or later, and possibly on Macs with Excel 2011 or later (in principle it should work, but could someone who tries it let me know if there is anything that definitely does not work on Mac please?)
The models use VBA code, the BASIC programming language that is part of Microsoft Office. There are buttons on the sheets to make models run and so on. You can inspect and run or step through the code; it is all totally open.
The main, long discussion paper is still to come. There is more to this series of blog posts. We don’t want to preempt what is coming, and it’s useful to keep the discussion focused.
Some random screenshots for those who want to oogle without the 20Mb download. (No, it doesn’t begin to capture the sea of data.)
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The optimization process by which we found the range of parameter values for the notch-delay solar model, and their most likely values, is complicated by the presence of many local minima. It is lengthy and was guided at hand at some stages, to trim the burgeoning number of possibilities in sensible ways. So at this stage we are also releasing excerpts from the main paper that define and describe the model, the total climate model, and the finding of the solar model parameters.
The spreadsheet was written for doing research—it is not a production version intended for consumers. It assumes the user knows generally what is going on. There are some descriptions and help, mainly in text boxes and comments (the red triangles in the upper right of cells—hold the mouse over the cell and the comment pops up).
People are welcome to make changes, but the only authorized copy of the spreadsheet will be at the download location above. Please send corrections or suggestions for changes to me at [email protected], and I’ll try to incorporate them (no promises about timeliness though, because it has been extremely busy around here since starting the blog posts, with a mountain of comments and so on to read and respond to).
An Open Source Software Project?
If there is sufficient interest, the spreadsheet can be turned into an open source software project. Does anyone know if GitHub is suitable for large Excel files? Software is usually built as many small text files but we have one large non-text file, so it is not clear that version tracking and differencing will work meaningfully. Also, if we go open source there is an administrative overhead for everyone.
Please note that any results you generate using the spreadsheet are not endorsed by me, and if you make graphs other than what is obviously intended in the spreadsheet, please take the “sciencepeak.com” label off them. (Please provide links back to credit the original work, without any endorsement implied, see below.)
Journalists and data?
By the way, this spreadsheet started life as an aid for journalists. The idea was just to have all the main datasets, with instructions on how to download them, and some pretty graphs as examples—to show journalists and news producers how to get the data for themselves.
Soap box time: True authority in science comes from the data. That was the point of the Enlightenment: reason and empiricism triumphed over superstition and abuse by church and state. People learned to trust data ahead of any human authority, and science was born. Empirical data became the highest authority in physics, chemistry, and biology.
However in modern climate science the mainstream media and most politicians go to the government climate scientists as their highest authority, not to the data. Sure the climate scientists show them some data, but only their favorite data—and for a theory to be true it has to agree with all the data. With the Internet it is easy to bypass the authorities and go directly to the data itself, but the old media isn’t doing that yet. Can downloading a file of numbers, reading it into a spreadsheet, and graphing it really be too hard for the media? Come on media people, I’ll show you how.
I was preparing this spreadsheet for journalists in late 2012 when David Stockwell convinced me to look for a low pass filter in the empirical transfer function, assuming the climate was mainly driven by solar radiation (TSI). All the data was there, so I built the Fourier transforms and analysis software right into the same spreadsheet, and got distracted from the journalist project.
By the way, I couldn’t find the low pass filter we were expecting, and I twice gave up on the project because the data analysis was definitely not finding the transfer function of a low pass filter (perhaps the TSI assumption was way wrong?). Then one day, on the point of abandoning it again, I realized there was a notch instead, which was unexpected and interesting.
Sharing and using the model
- Attribution — Please give appropriate credit to Dr David Evans, provide a link to the Notch-Delay Solar Project Home Page, and indicate if changes were made, with a brief description of the nature of all changes. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests David Evans or ScienceSpeak endorses you or your use.
- ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.
- Permission –– To use any part of this work in a for-profit project, please email [email protected].
- Cite as: Evans, David M.W. “The Notch-Delay Solar Theory”, sciencespeak.com/climate-nd-solar.html, 2014.
The world needs more independent science
This large work is offered freely, and has been entirely self-funded and funded through donations to Jo Nova’s blog. There are no government grants, and no UN programs paying for analysis like this. To all those who help make it possible we are more grateful that you can imagine for assistance and contributions of all shapes and sizes.
You can help support more independent scientific research at the Paypal Tip Jar or by direct deposit or cheque.
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Jo notes: I dislike group emails, and have not been able to thank every one personally, though I wish I could — I know most people would rather I write and research for public consumption instead. There are some direct depositors who deserve a mention: so thank you to Rodney, David M, Jules, Tom, Fay, Keith, Max, Bartels, Aaron, Phil, Fred D., W.E.B, Peter H, Peter K, Keith, Jim, Lawrie, M.J.B, Black Duck, W.B.C., Reed, I also owe one Peter C a letter in reply. Special thanks to MC, SB, BM, PF, GJ, PM, JD, DE, GB, VM, JP, TL, HC. There are too many good people to name. We’re grateful to every one of you. I still owe many emails!
Skeptics are winning, against all the odds, but there is still a lot to do, and if you’ve enjoyed the latest revelations, we’d be delighted to get your help so we can do more.
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About Dr David Evans:
David Evans, PhD, M.S. (E.E.), M.S. (Stats) [Stanford Uni], B.Eng, M.A., B.Sc. [Syd Uni] worked with Fourier analysis and signal processing, and trained with Professor Ronald Bracewell late of Stanford University. Evans main focus is researching mathematics (Fourier analysis, calculus, the number system, multivariable polynomials, and related topics). He consulted full-time for the Australian Greenhouse Office from 1999 to 2005, and part-time for the Department of Climate Change from 2008 to 2010, and was the lead modeler in developing FullCAM, the carbon accounting model that Australia uses for the Kyoto Protocol. Evans also produces the GoldNerds excel sheets that have become the industry standard for investors in precious metals on the ASX. He is available for contract work.
UPDATE: New version 1.15 posted Wednesday 2pm Perth time, hopefully fixes “clock” compilation problems on 64-bit Excel. Should now run on 32 bit and 64 bit Excel on Windows, and on Mac. Thanks to Mark Gutzwiller, DT Christensen, and Don Jordan in the comments below for a fix.