On Climate Audit’s unthreaded comment forum, David Archibald noted some interesting facts about the solar cycle lengths and upcoming Solar Cycle 24, and provided the graph above.
Solar Cycle 20 was slightly longer than average at 11.6 years. The average solar cycle length from 1643 to 1996 is 11.4 years. Now that Dr Svalgaard has mentioned it, let’s talk about Solar Cycle 21. It was short at 10.3 years and hot (it started at the same time as the PDO shift in 1976) and was followed by a solar cycle 22 which was shorter again at 9.6 years and hotter. According to Friis-Christensen and Lassen theory, Solar Cycle 23 should have been hotter than Solar Cycle 22, and it was, even thought it is going to be a long one at about 13 years. There is plenty of correlation, all in our lifetimes. As for the physics, Hathaway found a correlation between Solar Cycle Length and the amplitude of the following cycle.
As for Solar Cycle 23 being almost done with, those are comforting words but the observational data suggests otherwise. Jan Janssens does it best – a recent plot is above. That suggests that we have a year to go and that Solar Cycle 23 is likely to be 13 years long. This is 3.4 years longer than Solar Cycle 22 and thus with mid-latitude temperatures responding at the rate of 0.7 degrees C per year of solar cycle length, Solar Cycle 24 will be 2.4 degrees cooler than the one we are still in.
The Financial Post has a story (Our Quiet Sun) that is echoing much of what Archibald is saying, but is quoting from other sources:
The sun, of late, is remarkably free of eruptions: It has lost its spots. By this point in the solar cycle, sunspots would ordinarily have been present in goodly numbers. Today’s spotlessness — what alarms Dr. Chapman and others — may be an anomaly of some kind, and the sun may soon revert to form. But if it doesn’t – and with each passing day, the speculation in the scientific community grows that it will not – we could be entering a new epoch that few would welcome.
Joe D’Aleo did an essay on IntelliCast on the possible consequences of a Solar Cycle 23 running out to 13 years, using some of the same things Archibald is saying:
Looking back at the full record of sunspot cycles, we can see this general behavior of short active cycles and longer, quiet ones. Successive 11 year cycles are different in their magnetic fields and the 22 year Hale cycle has in the past been related to some phenomena such as drought. Longer term cycles are apparent when you carefully examine the data. Very obvious from the long term plot of the 11 year cycles is the approximate 100 (106) year cycle. There is also a 213 year cycle. The last 213 minimum was in the early 1800s. The turn of each of the last 3 centuries has started with quiet long cycles with mid-century shorter, higher amplitude cycles. The quietest period was in the early 1800s (the Dalton Minimum). The 100 and 200 year minima are due the next decade suggesting a quieter sun ahead.
I’ll take Global Warming any day of the week and twice on Sundays over a Little Ice Age.
You might also have quoted my response to Archibald’s misleading comments:
440 (DavidA):
This is what Jan Janssens actually said:
David also said:
You can’t have it both ways:
cycle 20 long, cycle 21 strong,
cycle 23 long, cycle 24 weak.
One more time: the length of a cycle is not a good predictor of the size of the next cycle. Hathaway’s ‘relationship’ comes about simply because cycles come in groups: several weak cycles together followed by several strong cycle. That produces a weak correlation between length and size, but not one that can be used for prediction, because it fails when it should count the most, namely at the transition from a weak to a strong group and from a strong to a weak group.
F-L postulated [as you do – although hardly a theory] that longer cycles were cooler, so the longer cycle 23 should have been cooler than 22 and it was not. You should assume that people check up on you before making unsubstantiated statements.
Anthony, I’m not sure I support the terminology on the last chart – hot sun / cool sun – and would prefer active sun / inactive sun instead. Though Its an excellent chart.
I think we need to think about ways solar magnetic activity may affect Earth climate and in addition to that we need to consider angular momentum / gravitational influences of the whole solar system and the impact that may have upon circulation within the Sun (sunspots) that may simultaneously affect circulation of coupled ocean / atmosphere system on Earth and upon Earth’s liquid core – that controls Earth’s magnetic field.
Variations in irradiance may also play a roll – just not yet measured by SOHO (?) – leading to a complex interplay of variables, not yet quantified, but which correlate with sunspot and Milankovitch cycles.
Like you, I am somewhat more concerned by the prospect of a cooling climate. It boils down to where you live – and I believe we will see some great skiing in Scotland in the years ahead. Shame about the old folks living in poor housing faced with escalating energy bills.
It would be interesting to see an overlaid temperature graph. Of particular interest to me would be the period 1940-1970 when we had a cooling period. If the solar cycles are driving the PDO, then there is a definite lag or inverse relationship. That peak in 1955 is right in the middle of the mid-century cooling period with a drop-off through the 80’s when it began warming again.
Good Morning and Thanks Anthony
I agree 100% about global warming versus global cooling. One of the most neglected aspects of the AGW debate is the benefits of a warmer climate versus that of a colder one. What saddens me most is that a colder climate is more apt to cause more severe weather than a warm one, yet the AGW proponents seem to have convinced the public that severe weather is all a product of global warming.
As a long time member of the Weather Underground site, which actively promotes “climate change” as being man made and obviously bad, I am often chagrined by the bias. However recently Dr. Masters posted a poll which basically asked whether or not global warming is natural or man made. Over 700 votes have been cast and a slight majority believe it is natural. Although not a scientific poll by any means, I find the result interesting for a couple of reasons. This is a site that actively promotes the IPCC doctrine even to the point of having special feature blogs on the subject and the people who are members of the Weather Underground (you must be a member to vote) are obviously for the most part weather geeks. I would surmise that they would have a better understanding of weather and climate than the general public.
Thanks for your wonderful site and have a great week
JERRY
You can see the longer term cycles quite clearly with some signal analysis: This is the basic data (blue, smoothed to 30 months), a long term running mean (green, 300 months) and a Fourier low-pass filter (red) at harmonic 8, selecting roughly signals longer than 30 years:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/sidc-ssn/fourier/low-pass:8/inverse-fourier/plot/sidc-ssn/mean:300/plot/sidc-ssn/mean:30
Most recent year’s raw data here (dynamically updated), for those who are tracking it month to month:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/sidc-ssn/last:12
… and, since PDO was mentioned, here is sunspots (red) vs. PDO (green), both filtered for cycles of 10 years and above, so showing the 11-year-ish SSN cycle:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1900/fourier/low-pass:10/inverse-fourier/normalise/plot/jisao-pdo/fourier/low-pass:10/inverse-fourier/normalise
Can’t say I see much connection there, personally, but with something with as much inertia as the Pacific Ocean, I’m not sure you’d expect to.
More then one cycle? How do we know the sunspot numbers from 1700 when many people back then still though we were the center of the uinverse and telescopes were still a rare item?
… and, just to prove that sunspot number is a fair guide to total solar irradiance (TSI), here’s the last 30 years of both, normalised:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1979/mean:12/normalise/plot/pmod/mean:12/normalise
(the TSI measurement I use doesn’t go back any further than that, which is why we use sunspots as a proxy)
But note that normalisation here hides the fact that the difference in TSI is quite small – here is TSI plotted by itself – note the scale on the left:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/pmod/mean:12
The total range here is about 0.1% of the total, so not much – but it’s a small change in one hell of a big space heater – Earth with no Sun at all would be 284K colder (yes, I know it’s not a linear relationship!)
“I’ll take Global Warming any day of the week and twice on Sundays over a Little Ice Age.”
I couldn’t agree more. I cannot under any circumstance get a True Believer to see that. They argue that the world’s 6+ billion population has caused the warming. It’s actually exactly the opposite. The warming has created an environment where 6 billion people could survive. We get another Little Ice Age, coupled with government carbon-trading schemes that turns the heat off in a lot of places, and the result is going to be a humanitarian disaster. It took parts of Europe until the early 20th century to recover to MWP population densities.
On the question of these longer-term cycles, I’m not sure I see much evidence for anything other than the 100-year one, but granted that is pretty significant.
Here are the Fourier magnitudes of the raw SSN data:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/sidc-ssn/window/fourier/magnitude/from:1/to:50
The major peak is of course the 11-year cycle around harmonic 22-24 (2008-1750=258; 258/22= 11.73; 258/24 = 10.75). There also seems to be a reasonable spike at harmonic 26, which would give some shorter cycles of around 10 years (258/26 = 9.92).
For the longer term cycles there’s a reasonable count at harmonics 2 and 3, which indicate a cycle at between 86 (258/3) and 129 (258/2) years. That’s as accurate as I can be with the current software I’m afraid (I know it needs improvement, not least in speed!). There isn’t enough data to speculate about anything longer than that; Mr Nyquist says so.
But there are some dogs that aren’t barking in the night here; in particular, for a cycle of 22 years you’d expect a peak around harmonic 12, and it just ain’t there!
Which is worse: to freeze to death and starve due to cold weather, or to freeze to death and starve because of government regulations to cure a non-existent problem ?
I think we are in the tank either way.
Lets not rush. Svaalgard could still be right but maybe this time both Chapman and him will be proved dead wrong (no pun intended -80C for next 200 years)… LOL
I think Jan Janssens really bring this point home with the following:
http://users.telenet.be/j.janssens/Spotless/Spotless.html#Evolution
It shows the current SC 24 – SC 25 transition line against prior trend data from 20th C vs. 19th C data. The current trend is unmistakably following that of the early 19th Century Dalton Minimum.
Looks to me like we’re witnessing two great natural experiments:
1. What happens if atmospheric CO2 doubles?
2. What happens if the sun goes quiet for an extended period of time?
The answer to No. 1 appears to be: “not very much”.
The answer to No. 2 will reveal itself in the coming few years.
I tend to think the sun is going to trump CO2 big time.
And I’ve posted this one before, maybe you’ve covered this before as well: SC 25 in 2020 is reasonably expected to be a half-amplitude cycle:
http://www.physorg.com/news66581392.html
I would expect this to be no momentary blip in the sun’s output. Solar grand minima last at least 45 years (Oort Minimum?) and up to 90 (Maunder). What is evidently a profound shift in solar regime has already been preceded by an ongoing TSI dimming since the mid-1990’s, contributing -0.1 degrC cooling effect (warmists have pointed to this as a masking effect).
The bottom line is what effect the lower UV & magnetic output will have on Earth’s climate. Sunspots introduce troposphere-warming UV flux during Schwabbe solar maxima. I’d expect that there’d be an equivalent effect on the seas,
In 2001, Shindell (NASA/GISS) modeled TSI role in the LIA & found that the lowered TSI of the Maunder Minimum would in fact have precipitated the LIA. He may have missed an important point however by failing to account for the preceding Sporer Minimum. But all the same, he acknowledges at least -0.3 degrC GST cooling & even more-profound inland cooling effects.
And Shindell’s study, circa 2001, did not include GCR/cosmic rays or magnetic storm flux, changes which may introduce a net cooling effect during solar grand minima from increased cloud cover & lost heating effect at the magnetic poles.
The warmists will claim this is only a reprieve, but by their logic it’d provide a significant offset against AGW. Were they to be realistic about their own claims, they’d concede it’d enable us to phase into a lower-carbon society more sensibly on a technological time table vs. a crash program that’d be counterproductive in terms of spare affluence. In terms of worst-case AGW scenarios, it’d buy 50 years of economic growth and technological development and a net reduction in the heat content of the ocean that future warming would again have to overcome.
A richer and more technologically capable civilization may not only be able to better afford to address warming, but may also be able to do it more cheaply and insightfully.
Either way, this diminishes the alarmist cant.
Also: From Benny Peiser’s: CCNet September 15 2006
=============
SCIENTISTS PREDICT SOLAR DOWNTURN, GLOBAL COOLING
New Scientist magazine, 16 September 2006 http://www.newscientist.com/unpwlogin.ns
“… Sami Solanki and his team at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany, have looked at the concentrations of carbon-14 in wood and beryllium-10 in ice as far back as back 11,000 years ago. …”It’s a boom-bust system, and I would expect a crash soon.”
“… the most recent calculations by Solanki’s team suggest that the sunspot crash could lead to a cooling of the Earth’s atmosphere by 0.2 °C …. as big as the most optimistic estimate of the results of restricting greenhouse-gas emissions until 2050 in line with the Kyoto protocol.”
“… “What might happen is that the sun gives the planet a welcome respite from the ravages of man-made climate change – though for how long, nobody knows. During the Little Ice Age, the fall in average global temperature is estimated to have been less than 1 °C and lasted 70 years. The one before that persisted for 150 years, but a minor crash at the beginning of the 19th century lasted barely 30. For now, we will have to keep watching for falling sunspot numbers. “The deeper the crash, the longer it will last,” Weiss says.
“There is a dangerous flip side to this coin. If global warming does slow down or partially reverse with a sunspot crash, industrial polluters and reluctant nations could use it as a justification for turning their backs on pollution controls altogether, makingmatters worse in the long run. There is no room for complacency, Svalgaard warns: “If the Earth does cool during the next sunspot crash and we do nothing, when the sun’s magnetic activity returns, global warming will return with a vengeance.”
The SIM (solar inertial motion) hypothesis is controversial – but it seems to have predicted what is happening now. If it is true, we are definitely headed into an extended period of low solar activity.
I would like for someone to explain a bit better this graph that David posted at Climateaudit: http://i261.photobucket.com/albums/ii42/rhaetian/TropicalTroposphere1995-2008May2008.jpg
What am I looking at in that graph?
What happens if you look at the integrated area under the sunspot curves instead of ‘the length’ and ‘the peak-height’?
Some of the longer cycles have lower peaks, some seem moderate – so the correlation (if any) might be more apparent when looking at the integrated area instead.
” According to Friis-Christensen and Lassen theory, Solar Cycle 23 should have been hotter than Solar Cycle 22, and it was, even thought it is going to be a long one at about 13 years.”
This is obviously backward, should be: Solar Cycle 23 should have been cooler than Solar Cycle 22. I make a similar mistake while commenting all the time, so I’m inclined to be understanding.
” ‘As for the physics, Hathaway found a correlation between Solar Cycle Length and the amplitude of the following cycle. So the physics is there also.’
You can’t have it both ways:
cycle 20 long, cycle 21 strong,
cycle 23 long, cycle 24 weak.”
Hathaway’s prediction for 24 employed the Geomagnetic amplitude following SC SSN max to directly predict the next SC SSN max. I believe Leif’s confusion followed Dave’s confusion; no one could sensibly use prior SC length to predict the next SC length and I see no hint of this in the CA thread.
The exchange between these two has become too acrimonious to be nearly as rewarding as a soliloquy by either.
“Some simulations for the months from May through August 2008 have shown that if the monthly R-values are between 5 and 10, a minimum around January 2008 will be reached. If the solar activity stays low and the monthly R-values vary between 0 and 5, the smoothed Wolfnumber will continue to decrease.”
The former is not obtaining, along with other measures, and solar activity is continuing to decrease. Smoothed values are great for symposia power-points but do not neglect daily raw data for near term behavior.
What is the cause of the current 5 year decline in OHC? Something changed sometime around 2003 or before, but what?
Shouldn’t OHC be the true measure since oceans are responsible for 80-90% of “global” warming?
What other than the sun can warm the oceans? What other than less solar radiation reaching the oceans can cool them? Volcanoes? Nope, can’t blame them. Clouds? Ok, why do they increase?
If oceans don’t warm, there can be no global warming.
Remember, OHC was the Hansen/Willis/Schmidt et al “smoking gun” in 2005. It may have been shooting blanks.
MattN
I was wondering the same.
Steve McIntyre sometimes has a habit of labelling his graphs poorly.
DR: What is “OHC”???
Hopefully, if it is a minimum, it is more like the Dalton than the Maunder. Otherwise, we’ll be having an immigration problem from the north rather than the south in the future.
Leif,
So, are we at the beginning of a change to a weaker set of cycles? If so (from reading your comment) do you believe this will result in a general cooling trend for an extended period (30 years or so)?
Chance Metz
“More then one cycle? How do we know the sunspot numbers from 1700 when many people back then still though we were the center of the uinverse and telescopes were still a rare item?”
I think you are mixed up a bit. The average peasant of the time could not even read, many more lived and died in complete ignorance. yet Galileo, Newton, Franklin etc. made dscoveries that laid the foundation of our modern society.
Science is not a concensus process. Individuals spearhead discoveries. Instead of making mockery of the past you need to perhaps realize that these men achived enormous breakthroughs during times when 90% of the population was completely ignorant. They, and others after them, recorded what they saw, and yes the universities and other organizations they worked at, have kept scientific writing and other records, from this time, and long before.
So, we have records, of temperature, weather, wind, rain, sun, sunspots, harvests, tree logging, etc, etc, etc, from hundreds of years ago. In some cases going back nearly a thousand years. These are useful and in this situation might provide critical information.