Guest post by David Archibald
Three wise Norwegians – Jan-Erik Solheim, Kjell Stordahl and Ole Humlum – have just published a paper entitled “The long sunspot cycle 23 predicts a significant temperature decrease in cycle 24”. It is available online here: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1202.1954v1.pdf
The authors have found that Northern Hemisphere temperature changes by 0.21°C per year of solar cycle length. The biggest response found in the temperature series they examined was Svalbard at 1.09°C per year of solar cycle length. The authors also credit me with the discovery of a new branch of science. On page 6 they state.” Archibald (2008) was the first to realize that the length of the previous sunspot cycle (PSCL) has a predictive power for the temperature in the next sunspot cycle, if the raw (unsmoothed) value for the SCL is used.” I have decided to name this new branch of science “solarclimatology”. It is similar to Svensmark’s cosmoclimatology but much more readily quantifiable.
What we use solarclimatology for is to predict future climate. Professor Solheim and his co-authors have done that for Solar Cycle 24 which takes us out to 2026. Using Altrock’s green corona emissions diagram, we can go beyond that to about 2040: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/08/solar-cycle-24-length-and-its-consequences/
The green corona emissions point to Solar Cycle 24 being 17 years long, and thus 4.5 years longer than Solar Cycle 23. Using the relationship found by Solheim and his co-authors, that means that the 0.63°C decline for the Northern Hemisphere over Solar Cycle 24 will be followed by a further 0.95°C over Solar Cycle 25. That is graphically indicated thusly, using Figure 19 from the Solheim et al paper:
The last time we witnessed temperatures anything like that was in the decade 1690 – 1700. Crop failures caused by cold killed off 10% of the populations of France, Norway and Sweden, 20% of the population of Estonia and one third of the population of Finland.
As noted above, Svalbard’s relationship is 1.09°C per year of solar cycle length. That means that it is headed for a total temperature fall of 8.2°C. The agricultural output of Svalbard and the rest of the island of Spitsbergen won’t be affected though, because there isn’t any. The biggest effect will on some of the World’s most productive agricultural lands. The solar cycle length – temperature relationship for some localities in the northeast US is 0.7°C degrees per year, which is a good proxy for the latitude of the US – Canadian border and thus the North American grain belt. Newman in 1980 found that the Corn Belt shifted 144 km per 1.0°C change in temperature. With the temperature falling 5.2°C, the Corn Belt will shift 750 km south to the Sun Belt, as shown following:
The outlook for Canadian agriculture is somewhat more dire. I expect Canadian agriculture will be reduced to trapping beavers, as in the 17th Century.
The current cold conditions in Europe resulted in more than 300 souls departing this mortal coil, and has discomforted some millions. Solheim and his co-authors note “As seen in figures 6 and 7, the Norwegian and Europe60 average temperatures have already started to decline towards the predicted SC24 values”.
References:
Newman, J. E. (1980). Climate change impacts on the growing season of the North American Corn Belt. Biometeorology, 7 (2), 128-142. Supplement to International Journal of Biometeorology, 24 (December, 1980).
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Just like with the warming predictions of the warmist crowd, it will be interesting to see if this cooling prediction comes true.
I agree that the Sun is the primary driver of Earth’s climate but your projections are just as baseless and useless as the AGW crowd’s. Stick to the science and drop the doom and gloom! Let’s wait until Solar Cycle 24 has obviously peaked before guesstamating SC25 trend. You may be completely correct, but I doubt it, just as I’m skeptical of the AGW rants.
Bill
DA has been right about nearly prediction he made since 3 years ago on this site except the decline in global temperature for cycle 24 (I think it was 4C (if it was 0.4C he may be correct).
Hey this looks good. It seems to fit in nicely with the Chinese study which had cooling for the next 60 years or so.
Still you have to feel sorry for the Europeans and North Americans copping all that cold.
David
We should never be scaremongers like them.
Please.
And our EPA will probably still be retaining the ethanol mandate, increasing CAFE standards, and maintaining huge tax credits for the purchase of electric cars. DOE and EPA will probably still be putting roadblocks in the path of shale drilling and OCS development while Australia will still be collecting the carbon tax. Why? Because the IPCC will still be claiming that the severe and sustained drop in temperatures is a temporary aberration and catastrophic warming will come roaring back at any moment. Above all, the billions of dollars in government grants to warmist scientists would have to be maintained to advance the new premise that greenhouse gasses are causing the “temporary” pause in catastrophic global warming. The gravy train must be maintained at all costs…
That’s it. I’m off!
I am packing my bags and will see out my days in the warm sun of Australia where my daughter can look after me.
England is going to be a little uncomfortable if it has to rely on siezed frozen windturbines.
Humlum is the man behind the very informative website http://www.climate4you.com
Cold and colder… I’m moving South with the corn.
The current cold conditions are of 1980’s vintage which MIGHT indicate a drop of about 0.4 °C. That’s the difference in recorded and modified temperatures from UK Met Off 2006 to end 2011.
4 years 0.1°C/ yr. Yeh I know it’s rubbish, isn’t it.
Anybody wanting to guess the number of dead attributable to a relatively mild NYC January?
I love the way that if you add in the 2011 numbers it makes these predictions look even more ridiculous than they obviously are. Kudos for producing a testable prediction though!
Extended winter wheat and bison required
Same question as to the catastrophic warmists: at what divergence between your predictions and measurable data will you concede your hypothesis is wrong?
Climate strikes me as being a pretty poor candidate for catastrophe compared to all the others and even though I think cooling is probably a bigger threat than warming, I can’t see us returning to an ice-age in less than decades. Take the catastrophe out of climate – we’ll get a lot more science done.
As the AGW crowd long ago discovered, “gloom and doom sells”. If “the Archibald theory” should capture news and entertainment media attention, I foresee torches and pitchforks in the future for solar plant operators, a trash-burning pit in the yard of every politically correct homeowner, a federal buy-back program to get hybrid and electric vehicles off our roads and a federal tax credit for purchasing the new breed of coal-burning Sootmobiles.
Maybe these future cold predictions helps explain why a CBC show I watched last night called ‘Doc Zone’, with the episode title “Life Below Zero”, In the Windows Media Center guide write up said, “How Canadians could be affected by global warming.”, yet when I watched it, there was no mention of global warming or climate change in any way, shape or form (which would have made me sad, but instead the show ended up inspiring me 🙂 ).
http://www.cbc.ca/doczone/episode/life-below-zero.html
English is not my native language, but I humbly suggest ‘helioclimatology’ instead of ‘solarclimatology’.
Some sites I have visited have suggested the shift can happen quickly.
So my concern would be how fast grain production (food) could shift South.
Short or long cycles, Mediterranean city under 2 ft of snow this morning
http://www.vijesti.me/slika-519×316/vijesti/podgoricani-da-ne-izlaze-bez-prijeke-potrebe-opasnost-sa-krovova-slika-107528.jpg
The Danube has frozen over!
http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/02/09/european-cold-snap-freezes-danube-blocks-ships-in-port/
It’s frozen in six countries. Not that our tv channels are covering the events in snowed under Europe, barely a mention of the deep freeze conditions. Except Ireland, chilly and a bit drizzly, but no snow.
And Russia is pulling back on fuel exports to Europe because of greater demands for it at home:
http://oilandenergyinvestor.com/2012/02/energy-crisis-looming-in-the-european-deep-freeze/
If this is really where we are heading then the AGW global warming nonsense has to be destroyed and sensible measures taken to ensure reliable production of energy, enough of the tax payers being ripped off by wind and solar fraud promoted by our governments.
The “Corn Belt Shifts to Sun Belt” graphic is a bit silly. Agriculture depends on soils and terrain as much as temperature. Southern Missouri and Arkansas terrain is very much different from Iowa and Minnesota (Minnesota is the state partially obscured by the “Iow” label), and even under the most favorable conditions could never produce corn like their northern neighbors.
A model and forecasts I hope fail. This is a bad moment in time to confront terrible weather too.
The corn breeders during the 70’s and 80’s worked on developing strains of corn that would produce with fewer heat units, thus speeding the northward push of the corn belt, especially in Canada.
Let us hope that the big corn companies are keeping their bases covered and still have some skills and knowledge to work on growing corn in lower heat units. Hopefully the university research departments have continued development. But even if anyone is working on it, can they ramp up selective breeding fast enough? Maybe this is where some of those government dollars need to be going instead of helping the rich buy politically correct electric cars.
M.A.Vukcevic says:
February 11, 2012 at 6:39 am
Irregardless of the mechanism explanation, the shoe fits as far as the cooling goes. It was in the Literature all along, and now it’s in the daily news right in front of our faces. The very same writings tell us that, eventually, the cooling cycle will have run it’s course, leaving only the hard numbers as to how long/how deep and what can we do to ride out the storm.
Being prepared is never fearmongering.
Svalbard is an outlier. Should it be taken at face value? Cf. WUWT, 13 May 2010 shows clearly unsuitable siting of the weather station. Perhaps the researchers have appropriately adjusted the data? Son of a gun, I’d better go read the paper. : > )