Solar Science Bipolar Disorder
Guest post by Steven Goddard
About once every 11 years, the sun’s magnetic poles reverse. However some high profile solar scientists reverse their own polarity more frequently.
The BBC reported Wednesday that Mike Lockwood at the University of Reading has established a statistical link between cold weather and low solar activity.
The UK and continental Europe could be gripped by more frequent cold winters in the future as a result of low solar activity, say researchers.
“By recent standards, we have just had what could be called a very cold winter and I wanted to see if this was just another coincidence or statistically robust,” said lead author Mike Lockwood, professor of space environment physics at the University of Reading, UK.
To examine whether there was a link, Professor Lockwood and his co-authors compared past levels of solar activity with the Central England Temperature (CET) record, which is the world’s longest continuous instrumental record of such data.
The researchers used the 351-year CET record because it provided data that went back to the beginning of the Maunder Minimum, a prolonged period of very low activity on the Sun that lasted about half a century.
“Frost fayres” were held on the Thames during the Maunder Minimum
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The Maunder Minimum occurred in the latter half of the 17th Century – a period when Europe experienced a series of harsh winters, which has been dubbed by some as the Little Ice Age. Following this, there was a gradual increase in solar activity that lasted 300 years.
Professor Lockwood explained that studies of activity on the Sun, which provides data stretching back over 9,000 years, showed that it tended to “ramp up quite slowly over about a 300-year period, then drop quite quickly over about a 100-year period”.
He said the present decline started in 1985 and was currently about “half way back to a Maunder Minimum condition”. More at the BBC
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His study was basically a rehash of what many others have done previously over the past few centuries, but he has the BBC’s ear – because in 2007 he prominently claimed just the opposite.
No Sun link’ to climate change
Tuesday, 10 July 2007
“This should settle the debate,” said Mike Lockwood
Similarly, in 2006 David Hathaway at NASA reported that the Sun’s conveyor belt had “slowed to a record low.”
May 10, 2006: The Sun’s Great Conveyor Belt has slowed to a record-low crawl, according to research by NASA solar physicist David Hathaway. “It’s off the bottom of the charts,” he says. “This has important repercussions for future solar activity.”
Then on March 12, 2010 he reported the exact opposite:
March 12, 2010: In today’s issue of Science, NASA solar physicist David Hathaway reports that the top of the sun’s Great Conveyor Belt has been running at record-high speeds for the past five years.
In 1810, the great English astronomer William Herschel established a link between sunspot activity and the price of grain in Europe – a proxy for climate. As far as we know, he never reversed polarity on that belief. Modern solar science is just coming around to what Herschel hypothesized 200 years ago.
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UPDATE: Full Lockwood et al paper at Environmental Research Letters here
Abstract. Solar activity during the current sunspot minimum has fallen to levels unknown since the start of the 20th century. The Maunder minimum (about 1650–1700) was a prolonged episode of low solar activity which coincided with more severe winters in the United Kingdom and continental Europe. Motivated by recent relatively cold winters in the UK, we investigate the possible connection with solar activity. We identify regionally anomalous cold winters by detrending the Central England temperature (CET) record using reconstructions of the northern hemisphere mean temperature. We show that cold winter excursions from the hemispheric trend occur more commonly in the UK during low solar activity, consistent with the solar influence on the occurrence of persistent blocking events in the eastern Atlantic. We stress that this is a regional and seasonal effect relating to European winters and not a global effect. Average solar activity has declined rapidly since 1985 and cosmogenic isotopes suggest an 8% chance of a return to Maunder minimum conditions within the next 50 years (Lockwood 2010 Proc. R. Soc. A 466 303–29): the results presented here indicate that, despite hemispheric warming, the UK and Europe could experience more cold winters than during recent decades.
Figure 2 from the paper:
- Figure 2. Variations since the mid-17th century of the following. (a) The mean northern hemisphere temperature anomaly, ΔTN: black shows the HadCRUT3v compilation of observations [17, mauve shows the median of an ensemble of 11 reconstructions (individually intercalibrated with the HadCRUT3v NH data over the interval 1850–1950) based on tree ring and other proxy data [18–23]. The decile range is given by the area shaded grey (between upper and lower decile values of ΔTU and ΔTL). (b) Average winter Central England Temperatures (CET) [5, 6] for December, January and February, TDJF. (c) The open solar flux, FS, corrected for longitudinal solar wind structure: dots are annual means of interplanetary satellite data; the black line after 1905 is derived from ground-based geomagnetic data [1]; and the mauve line is a model based on observed sunspot numbers [14]. Both curves show 1 year means. (d) Detrended winter CET, δTDJF, obtained by subtracting the best-fit variation of ΔTN, derived using the regressions shown in figure 3(b): the width of the line shows the difference resulting from the use of ΔTN = ΔTU and ΔTN = ΔTL prior to 1850. In all panels, dots are for years with δTDJF < 1 °C (the dashed horizontal line in (d)), colour-coded by year using the scale in figure 3(a). Data for the winter 2009/10 are provisional.”]
Ah Ha!
So the Sun, which has no effect on climate (says U.N), has an effect on climate!
I knew sooner or later science WOULD/WOULD NOT discover, the primary mechanism that DOES/DOES NOT affect the weather.
Now that we kNOW/DON’T KNOW what effect the Sun IS/ISN’Thaving on the planet, we CAN/CAN’Tset a new tax regime that WILL/WON’T save the planet from GLOBAL WARMING/COOLING.
Luckily we’vre prepared an army of useful idiots to beg the UN for a totalitarian government based on what we KNOW/DON’T KNOW, and can get
down to really screwing mankind over for having such a NEGATIVE/POSITIVE effect on the CLIMATE/ARTIC ICE/UNICORNS/FAIRIES…
Ah me,….when did science get so schizophrenic? I feel terribly Post normal.
man….this is fun stuff….i wish these cycles were quicker…i am so curious to see what is next.
” more research is needed” oh dear……….
If the sun continues to sleep, the next decade should be quite interesting. No wonder they are trying to rush through a carbon dioxide treaty.
A couple more winters like the last one, recovery of the Arctic sea ice and they will start talking “Oh my Gosh and Ice Age Cometh” the UN needs and international tax to protect us” ….. No I forgot they already changed it to the all encompassing “climate change”
If it does, it’s mechanism unknown.
“The Earth-facing side of the sun is blank–no sunspots.”
http://www.spaceweather.com/
….this sucker is nowhere near to being out of its minimum!! I think it’s broken but good!!
Hey, glad I like ice fishing!! Leif, where are you?
“It is not like the sun is warm or anything.” Al Gore is a short lecture to Barrack Obama.
We all know what’s coming next: “if it wasn’t for the decrease in the Sun’s activity we would all have been fried due to increased carbon dioxide emissions so a carbon tax is more urgent than ever.”
Who would ever have thought that ‘science’ could be so flexible.
Ouch! Dr. Lief is gonna have a lot to say about this. If the correlations are for real, but its not TSI, as Dr. Lief swears it isn’t… then WHAT?
Think electricity and plasma physics, and it becomes easier to explain.
pat (22:28:22) :
Al Gore’s sun may be cool, but the interior of his earth is millions of degrees.
I always suspected that that big yellow thing up there might have “something” to do with it getting hotter, and cooler.
See, us Mississippians can be “smart,” too.
CRS, Dr.P.H. (22:26:17) :
this sucker is nowhere near to being out of its minimum!! I think it’s broken but good!!
Well, a wee bit out 🙂
http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-SORCE-2008-now.png
Sun/Weather-Climate claims have always shown those contradictory tendencies, so luckily one can always explain everything, because either it goes one way and it fits [sometimes] or it goes the opposite way and that fits too [sometimes]. In another thread [that is dying down] we discussed the claim that there was a reasonable match between solar activity and temperatures. A specific example was brought out: Solanki sunspots causing Moberg temperatures. And indeed there is a correlation: sunspots ‘explain’ less than 4% of the temperature variability [thus not really something to write home about:
http://www.leif.org/research/Moberg-Solanki-Correlation.png
Loehle Temp vs. Solar activity [TSI] show even less correlation.: http://www.leif.org/research/Loehle-Temps-and-TSI.png
But, hey, there is good funding to be had when you can claim a connection the climate. I do it myself 🙂 e.g. line 222 in http://www.leif.org/research/Heliospheric%20Magnetic%20Field%201835-2009.pdf [which BTW is in the final stages of peer-review].
Landscheidt cycles. Old stuff – http://landscheidt.auditblogs.com/
Welcome to the 1800s, Dr. Lockwood.
A rat deserting the sinking good ship AGW!
OT a little. There was a rather large volcanic eruption in Iceland on Monday. Which may have a cooling effect, first upon Europe.
Too soon to say more.
Look! See Mike. See Mike run. Mike has seen the writing on the wall…
The BBC is suffering bipolar madness about this
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8615789.stm
Halfway down the page there’s a picture of the Sun with the caption “Solar activity has been in decline since 1985, says Professor Lockwood”. Directly under that the Beeb has the audacity, in the middle of an article, to link to “No Sun link’ to climate change” (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7327393.stm)
Normally related topics are linked to in the side bar, but not this time.
Steve, this is not worthy of you, at least regarding your implied criticisms of David Hathaway. Five years lapsed between Hathaway’s first report and the second and from reports available via a quick Google, much research has been done in the meantime. Not only that, but if the “conveyor belt” was slow five years ago, why could it have not sped up since then? If the normal cycle is ~11years, those five years represent almost a half cycle. Perhaps the surprise is that the belt speed is passing through record extremes, but let’s face it, measurements on which this work is based go back only to 1996, just over one cycle’s duration. It is surely a work in progress, not a definitive study.
Lots and lots of lag, Leif.
That, and the system is rather slow.
Think of how long it takes to stop an ocean liner or a freight train.
This is way worse.
If the Sun is oatmeal (sorry, my wife understands what you mean but I never got oatmeal…my loss) then the Earth is Heinz 57 climate sauce. If you added another ingredient, nobody would notice the difference.
Three years ago, Lockwood put the last nail in the coffin of his current theory.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8615789.stm
Yabut Hansen said 2009 was the hottest in 100’s of years!
Whether the sun is a root of this jet stream blocking / AO going negative I do not know, and am not qualified even to speculate. But one things does occur to me; using the CET as a solid reference for mild/cold winters/years without qualifying the data with the prevailing wind direction (which I assume we do not have) is pretty meaningless. But then even using a thousand or even 10,000 thermometers six feet off the ground to measure global temperatures is a bit of a joke, when there is as much heat energy in the first 8 feet of the ocean as there is in the whole of the atmosphere, and the time lag for the oceans to warm up a fraction of a degree must be decades. The best analogy for this I have heard is a doctor in A&E/ER trying to measure the patient’s temperature by dangling a thermometer an inch above his forehead.
Leif (the sun is constant) Slavgaard will be groaning, perhaps, but UV variability effecting the stratosphere, effecting the jetstreams is currently my favourite explanation as to why the weather is sensitive to the solar cycle. If the jetstreams (north and south) move closer to their poles during solar minimums then that would effect the Earth’s overall temperature (climate) as the total outgoing LW radiation changes. The jetstreams are the barrier between the cold polar air masses and the warmer air masses nearer the equator. LW radiation is non-linear as it varies withT^4. If the total mass of warm air changes then the total energy emitted by the Earth would also change so changing the Earth’s temperature over time.
I agree with Leif in the sense that that TSI variability is not sufficient to explain temperature changes on Earth. However there may be some kind of amplification going on here on Earth – volume of air masses or changes in cloud cover, or both.
Wikipedia has the following (good article) at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_variation
Changes in ultraviolet irradiance
* Ultraviolet irradiance (EUV) varies by approximately 1.5 percent from solar maxima to minima, for 200 to 300 nm UV.[42]
* Energy changes in the UV wavelengths involved in production and loss of ozone have atmospheric effects.
o The 30 hPa atmospheric pressure level has changed height in phase with solar activity during the last 4 solar cycles.
o UV irradiance increase causes higher ozone production, leading to stratospheric heating and to poleward displacements in the stratospheric and tropospheric wind systems.
* A proxy study estimates that UV has increased by 3% since the Maunder Minimum