Guest post by Matti Vooro
I fully support the findings of Jan –Erik Solheim , Kjell Stordahl and Ole Humlum and their very recent paper called The long sunspot cycle 23 predicts a significant temperature decrease in cycle 24 dated February 2012. The abstract reads:
Relations between the length of a sunspot cycle and the average temperature in the same and the next cycle are calculated for a number of meteorological stations in Norway and in the North Atlantic region. No significant trend is found between the length of a cycle and the average temperature in the same cycle, but a significant negative trend is found between the length of a cycle and the temperature in the next cycle. This provides a tool to predict an average temperature decrease of at least 1.0 ◦C from solar cycle 23 to 24 for the stations and areas analyzed. We find for the Norwegian local stations investigated that 25–56% of the temperature increase the last 150 years may be attributed to the Sun. For 3 North Atlantic stations we get 63–72% solar contribution. This points to the Atlantic currents as reinforcing a solar signal.
Before finding the above paper on WUWT, I had recently done a similar and slightly different analysis.
I took the Annual sunspot numbers for each year since 1900 and noted the solar maximums and solar minimums. I also noted all the years around the solar maximums that had sunspot numbers over say 60-70. These solar active periods around the solar maximums can last as many as 3-5 years . Then I lagged the data by 9 years. Then I looked at the global temperature anomalies Hadcrut3gl for the all the actual years and noted the associated and lagged sunspot numbers. I then added and noted the El Nino active years using the ONI index.
I discovered that global temperatures were rising during the years around the lagged solar active period around the solar maximum and they were down during the period around the lagged solar minimum. Also there were El Ninos at the beginning or during the lagged active sun or solar active or maximum period. In another words the sun really affects the atmosphere not in the same cycle but during the next cycle or about 9 years later . It would appear that the extra solar radiation around solar maximums, heats the surface waters of the major oceans especially the Pacific and Atlantic. The warm water is then transported by the ocean conveyor belt deeper into the ocean waters and down swelled and conveyed around the globe. It reappears as warm upwelling along the South American west coast [and other upwelling locations] and ultimately contributes to the warming of the EL Nino area Pacific waters and modifies the PDO spatial patterns or warming to put more warmer water along the west coast of North America .
Similar event happens in the Atlantic as indicated by the AMO. The longer solar cycles means fewer solar active periods or maximums and less heating 9 years later. A series of short solar cycles in a row will cause more frequent heating and the PDO and AMO will both turn positive or warm simultaneously causing what we now refer to as global warming. The extended global cooling happens when there are series of longer solar cycles with lower maximums. Co2 seems to have little or negligible effect on these large natural cycles. Natural cycles will always dwarf any minor warming from manmade greenhouse gases.
Thus our long term climate is all in the cycles of sun lagged about 9 [ 9-11]years later in its effect and interacting with the oceans which then in turn affect our atmosphere 9-11 year later.
Since we are now in the equivalent lagged year[2012-9=2003] and will next experience the solar effects of the decline of solar cycle #23 [the solar period of 2000 to 2008 ], we can expect cooler weather for at least 6 years plus another nine years after the next warming effect of the solar active period of cycle #24 [ maximum around 2013 to 2014.] So I see no significant warming for 20 years at least [2030 earliest]. This is what ocean cycles like PDO predict and what the 60 year climate cycle predicts but now we may possibly have one of many hypothesis of how the sun does all this.
The El Nino around 2009-2010 was the effect of the last solar maximum of cycle #23 [around 200-2001].
This brief article was meant to continue the debate about the exact mechanism of how our sun affects our global climate It does not answer all the questions and may pose others.
Related articles
- Solar Cycle 24 Length and Its Consequences (wattsupwiththat.com)
- Ap Index, Neutrons and Climate (wattsupwiththat.com)
- First Estimate of Solar Cycle 25 Amplitude – may be the smallest in over 300 years (wattsupwiththat.com)
- The quiet sun is getting a lot of attention. What are its effect on us? (fabiusmaximus.wordpress.com)
- New paper suggests sun may be headed for a Maunder minimum (wattsupwiththat.com)
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lucky there are a lot of people now living on earth removing the snow
otherwise earth could fall in the ice trap again.
Mayans used to have the same problems with fitting reality into Theory, but of course on a less informed level.
” It would appear that the extra solar radiation around solar maximums, heats the surface waters of the major oceans especially the Pacific and Atlantic. ”
Is the extra solar radiation referred to in this quote primarily due to the sun putting out more solar energy during the solar maximum or is it due to the sun’s increased magnetic fields more efficiently shielding earth from cosmic rays during the solar maximum, leading to fewer clouds reflecting sunshine back into space? [Svensmark has theorized that cosmic-ray muons create charged electrons in the atmosphere that promote the formation of molecular clusters. These clusters lead to the formation of more cloud nuclei, and thus more clouds, than would be the case if the muons were absent.]
Hey, no charts? 😀
In my opinion, solar activity and ocean cycles are like quantum theory and theory of relativity in physics – describing the same from different sides but nobody managed to fit them together yet.
It would appear that the extra solar radiation around solar maximums, heats the surface waters of the major oceans especially the Pacific and Atlantic.
Do you have evidence to support this?
I couldn’t find any.
I did find a paper that is relevant to the ARGO discussion. The intensity of the hydrological cycle in the tropics increases at solar maximum – more clouds and rain. Which indicates that surface water heating doesn’t occur (in response to increased solar radiation).
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/ccr/publications/vanloon_solar.pdf
If this theory will be verified in future, we will have a mechanism of climate prediction very useful and interesting.
Anyway, we will know the real driver (the sun) but we will still remain partially ignorant on all the other elements and their influence on the earth climate.
Matti: David Archibald had a post the other week on what looks to be an unlagged response between solar activity and sea level. In the comments, I offered a suggestion as to how it might be possible to square an unlagged sea level response to what seems to by a lag in the global surface temperature response of about a solar cycle, but I don’t know enough about ocean circulation properties to know if my suggestion has any plausibility. You seem to know about ocean circulation, so I’ll repaste my speculation here. Any thoughts?
The ocean process described in the current post is quite different, but maybe not incompatible?
I’m sorry but this statement is yet another version of the deeply unphysical “Trenberth downwelling of warm water process”. It’s wrong at every level.
The real warming process would be to take extra warm water from the subtropics and move it towards the poles. No “downwelling of warm water” required.
Apparently there are more volcanic eruptions at the solar minima, and since the long cycles are accompanied by prolonged low SS numbers and the volcanic eruptions lower the temperatures then there may be some sense to it, otherwise not.
It also can be shown that a cycle raise temperatures by 0.1C, then the effect of a long cycle would last longer so it would neutralise volcanic factor.
What do you suggest as mechanism for lowering the temperatures?
Alec Rawls,
You question is one I think that would interest Willis, he has one foot in the ocean and continually bathes the other.
Once you realise that the Sun can heat the Earth to much higher temperatures than the supposed minus 18 C and that the solar insolation is not the miserable 170 W/sqm average 24/7 then you realise the obvious truth – the atmosphere and oceans keep the Earth’s surface cooler than it would otherwise be because air heated by contact with the surface convects to the upper atmosphere and is replaced by cooler air and so on till the Sun sets.
The “greenhouse effect” as postulated does not exist and backradiation cannot heat the Earth’s surface as described – the turbulent convecting air and water evaporation act to reduce the surface temperature.
Anyone who has not been hoodwinked can see the simple truth of this and evidence exists to support the explanation. This evidence is the fact the Sun can heat the Moon’s surface to well over 107 C – even sans “greenhouse gases”. If the radiation that reaches the Earth’s surface is say half that of the Solar constant – a figure the IPCC regularly quote – there is no possibility of “backradiation” increasing the Earth’s surface temperature or atmospheric temperature also – the atmosphere acts to reduce the heating during the day – therefore no “greenhouse effect” as postulated.
At night there is no solar insolation but there is residual heat from the daytime stored in the land mass, the oceans and atmosphere. As convection slows down so does the rate of heat loss and as it radiates out to space the Earth spins and the cycle begins again.
The greenhouse effect does not exist and is an unnecessary complication to explain an incorrect way of viewing the so called energy balance.
Simple physics satisfactorily explains the surface temperature of Earth without any need for magical properties associated with trace gases.
But the IPCC Bible says we understand all the climate (“and then ye shall know that the lord your god is c02”) , so I dont know what variations in the sun have to do with earth temperatures.
For any one who doubts the impact of solar insolation on climate a student of mine undertook her doctoral work examining the historical evidence for the Kondratief cycle. She collected a number of proxies for economic activity including tin output from the Cornish tin mines from the early medieval period, battle fatalities from the 15th century and bread output from the manors of central England for the same period. There was no evidence of the 60-70 year cycle that kondratief proposed but there was a clear, medium strength cycle centered, if memory serves me correctly, around 11.4 years. The study demonstrated a close correlation with the sunspot cycle both to my satisfaction and to those of her external examiners. For a variety of reasons the research, whilst of the highest quality, was never followed up. However, those results collected some 20 years ago convinced me that although the variability in solar radiation as measured at the TOA might be small its impact upon climate, agricultural yields and the substitution of labour effort in the economy is very significant. Given this, we should be very worried about the consequences of a quiet sun on the climate and the potential loss of agricultural capacity.
Ref: Davies, G.M., (1995) Long cycles: with particular reference to Kondratfiefs, unpublished PhD, Hartley library, Southampton, UK.
I’ve studied the AMO in some detail (http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/theAMO-NAO.htm ) so I find your claim about 9 year delay a bit odd and in a conflict with the known data.
The AMO oscillates with the 9 year period (I attribute this to the lunisolar cycle’s oceans tidal effect, but have no proof), and since the SSN cycle is ~ 11 years two cycles drift in and out of phase. The effect is clearly shown in this illustration:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/GISS-spec.htm
but the phase coincidence (or the counter-phase) doesn’t correspond with either the warming or cooling periods.
Posted on February 13, 2012 by Anthony Watts
Guest post by Matti Vooro
The abstract reads: “Relations between the length of a sunspot cycle and the average temperature in the same and the next cycle are calculated for a number of meteorological stations in Norway and in the North Atlantic region. No significant trend is found between the length of a cycle and the average temperature in the same cycle, but a significant negative trend is found between the length of a cycle and the temperature in the next cycle.”
The relevant dimension here is a frequency [1/s = Hz], not ‘a cycle in (Earth) years’. For the purposes of lower frequencies we can make use of the frequency dimension [1/year = 1 Kp *)] which is a factor of 3.155569088.8 * 10^7 smaller than 1 [Hz].
*) Kp stands for Kepler.
It is well known from literature that the main frequency of the sun spots is 11.196 years^-1 or 0.0893176 Kp. This frequency is not involved in the spectrum of the global climate frequencies.
But if we take the shift of the sun spots as a frequency shift from the main frequency, then we can see a weak correlation between the frequency shift pattern and the global temperature.
http://www.volker-doormann.org/images/sun_shift_buent.gif
Science and logic include a conclusion of the premises, here a correlation of a solar function and the reconstructed global Earth temperature. I do not see any scientific conclusion in the paper but an ad hoc prediction tool of low quality, avoiding the correlation of frequency shift and temperature since 1600 AD.
Science is always looking for the truth. If it is evident that there is a connection between a solar function and the terrestrial climate, then the geometry and/or mechanism are the point of interest in climate science. Prediction tools may have its consumers, but I think the questions in climate science are more important then prophesy.
V.
This appears to me to confirm Piers Corbyn’s theory of a 22-year complete solar cycle with alternating periods of high and low world temperatures.
> This provides a tool to predict an average temperature decrease of at least 1.0 ◦C from solar cycle 23 to 24
Nice words. DA wrote the same, but wasn’t prepared to risk a bet on it. Are you?
Note: the pic you took from wiki is obsolete (I’ve removed it from there). The current prediction (http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/predict.shtml) is for a smoothed max of 96.
I have been proposing a possible mechanism for a while.
An active sun causes the polar vortices to intensify vertically but contract on the surface so that the surface pressure pattern shifts poleward.
A change in the balance of ozone destruction/creation above 45km seems the likely culprit.
The movement of the main cloud bands towards the poles allows a widening of the Tropical air masses and more sunlight into the oceans to skew ENSO in favour of stronger El Ninos relative to La Ninas.
The additional energy getting into the oceans intensifies the ITCZ and the additional convective uplift along the ITCZ causes stronger anticyclonic downwelling on either side to consolidate the widening of the Tropics.
The opposite occurs when the sun is less active.
Juraj V. says:
February 13, 2012 at 12:26 am
In my opinion, solar activity and ocean cycles are like quantum theory and theory of relativity in physics – describing the same from different sides but nobody managed to fit them together yet.
Soon science will have to consider existence of solar activity – oceanic circulation link, but not before nonsense of the CO2 and the musings about solar cycle length (in my view irrelevant) are exhausted, the Svensmark effect is real, but I wouldn’t think that it is strong enough to account for the MWP and the LIA.
In the North Atlantic possibility of the sun-ocean link appear to be very real as shown here:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CET-NAP-SSN.htm
Similar active process can be identified in the Pacific Ocean for the PDO and the SOI:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/A&P.htm
I’d be interested to see how Piers Corbyn weighs in on this, if he’s given to commenting at all.
To the best of my knowledge, he’s held as proprietary his method of providing long-range weather forecasting – for which his clients gladly pay a premium – predicated upon his interpretation of cosmological (extraterrestrial) influences.
Where does one start. This post is not worthy.
Henry@ZZZ
Henry@Philip Bradley
As all the balls now lie on my table the thing I would say is that it was the rise of maximum temperatures (that occur during the day) that caused the average temperature and minima on earth to rise. This implies clearly that the observed warming over past 4 decades was largely due to natural causes. Either the sun shone a bit brighter or there were less clouds. There are different theories on that. Looking at the differences between the results from the northern hemisphere(NH) and the southern hemisphere (SH), what we see is happening from my dataset is that more (solar) heat went into the SH oceans and is taken away by water currents and/or weather systems to the NH. That is why the NH is warming and that is why the SH does not warm.http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/henrys-pool-table-on-global-warming
Whether this theory is right or not, no-one can say. One thing that is for certain, time will tell
So, what is it about increased solar activity that just warms the north pole/arctic? Because that’s all it appears to be. The southern hemisphere has done almsot no warming, and Antarctica has done nothing but cool. I doubt we’ll see 1C *global* temp drop, just a 1C temp drop at that location in the Arctic. Is it the increased magnetic activity?
Connolley says:
“Note: the pic you took from wiki is obsolete (I’ve removed it from there).”
Well, aren’t you special, you [snip] censoring [snip]. What is the harm in leaving a picture, with a simple note that there is a more current one? Viewers can decide for themselves what is more relevant… if they are given the choice to decide.
Once someone dons a censor’s hat, they become insufferable totalitarian wannabes. No doubt Connolley got his butt kicked regularly in school for his pompous arrogance, and is now using his position to censor anything he disagrees with on Wikipedia [which has become a risible alarmist propaganda blog regarding globaloney warming] to extend his pseudo-science narrative of CAGW.
Isn’t it nice for Connolley that Anthony runs a censorship-free site? Even devious propagandists can post here. The downside for Connolley is that others can push back, and point out what he’s doing: deleting the posts of serious and sincere commentators, based solely on Connolley’s arbitrary and capricious whim. Despicable, no?