Weakest Solar Cycle In More Than A Century
The sun is almost completely blank. The main driver of all weather and climate, the entity which occupies 99.86% of all of the mass in our solar system, the great ball of fire in the sky has gone quiet again during what is likely to be the weakest sunspot cycle in more than a century. The sun’s X-ray output has flatlined in recent days and NOAA forecasters estimate a scant 1% chance of strong flares in the next 24 hours. Not since cycle 14 peaked in February 1906 has there been a solar cycle with fewer sunspots. –Paul Dorian, Vencore Weather, 30 April 2015
Overview
The sun is almost completely blank. The main driver of all weather and climate, the entity which occupies 99.86% of all of the mass in our solar system, the great ball of fire in the sky has gone quiet again during what is likely to be the weakest sunspot cycle in more than a century. The sun’s X-ray output has flatlined in recent days and NOAA forecasters estimate a scant 1% chance of strong flares in the next 24 hours. Not since cycle 14 peaked in February 1906 has there been a solar cycle with fewer sunspots. We are currently more than six years into Solar Cycle 24 and the current nearly blank sun may signal the end of the solar maximum phase. Solar cycle 24 began after an unusually deep solar minimum that lasted from 2007 to 2009 which included more spotless days on the sun compared to any minimum in almost a century.
Solar maximum
The smoothed sunspot number (plot below) for solar cycle 24 reached a peak of 81.9 in April 2014 and it is looking increasingly likely that this spike will be considered to be the solar maximum for this cycle. This second peak in the cycle surpassed the level of an earlier peak that reached 66.9 in February 2012. Many solar cycles are double peaked; however, this is the first one in which the second peak in sunspot number was larger than the first peak. Going back to 1755, there have been only a few solar cycles in the previous 23 that have had a lower number of sunspots during its maximum phase.
[Sunspot numbers for the prior solar cycle (#23) and the current solar cycle (#24) with its two peaks highlighted; courtesy Hathaway, NASA/ARC]
Consequences of a weak solar cycle
First, the weak solar cycle has resulted in rather benign “space weather” in recent times with generally weaker-than-normal geomagnetic storms. By all Earth-based measures of geomagnetic and geoeffective solar activity, this cycle has been extremely quiet. However, while a weak solar cycle does suggest strong solar storms will occur less often than during stronger and more active cycles, it does not rule them out entirely. In fact, the famous “superstorm” Carrington Event of 1859 occurred during a weak solar cycle (#10) [http://vencoreweather.com/2014/09/02/300-pm-the-carrington-event-of-1859-a-solar-superstorm-that-took-places-155-years-ago/]. In addition, there is some evidence that most large events such as strong solar flares and significant geomagnetic storms tend to occur in the declining phase of the solar cycle. In other words, there is still a chance for significant solar activity in the months and years ahead.
Second, it is pretty well understood that solar activity has a direct impact on temperatures at very high altitudes in a part of the Earth’s atmosphere called the thermosphere. This is the biggest layer of the Earth’s atmosphere which lies directly above the mesosphere and below the exosphere. Thermospheric temperatures increase with altitude due to absorption of highly energetic solar radiation and are highly dependent on solar activity.
Finally, if history is a guide, it is safe to say that weak solar activity for a prolonged period of time can have a cooling impact on global temperatures in the troposphere which is the bottom-most layer of Earth’s atmosphere – and where we all live. There have been two notable historical periods with decades-long episodes of low solar activity. The first period is known as the “Maunder Minimum”, named after the solar astronomer Edward Maunder, and it lasted from around 1645 to 1715. The second one is referred to as the “Dalton Minimum”, named for the English meteorologist John Dalton, and it lasted from about 1790 to 1830 (below). Both of these historical periods coincided with colder-than-normal global temperatures in an era now referred to by many scientists as the “Little Ice Age”. In addition, research studies in just the past couple of decades have found a complicated relationship between solar activity, cosmic rays, and clouds on Earth. This research suggests that in times of low solar activity where solar winds are typically weak; more cosmic rays reach the Earth’s atmosphere which, in turn, has been found to lead to an increase in certain types of clouds that can act to cool the Earth.
[400 years of sunspots with “minimum” periods highlighted; map courtesy wikipedia]
Here are the latest value for NOAA’s Space weather prediction Center, they are for March 2015. I expect an update this coming week. Note that the Ap index made a big jum in March, I expect the new values for April to be much lower.
More at the WUWT solar Reference Page: http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/solar/
The farside is busier: http://farside.nso.edu/
Sun has joined the far queu ? 😉
Over on the night side.
Mike, you mean the dark side of the Sun?
I heard the place is a Pitt…
It’s precisely what happened during the lead up to the maunder minimum. Sunspots existed, but they just all kept going quiet when they turned onto the earth-facing disk.
The record expanded floating “Ice Doughnut” and associated cloud cover surrounding Antarctica added to record snow cover over the US Northeast, Canada and Asia will set a new (lower) atmospheric temperature bar. This almost guarantees continuation of the atmospheric temperature “standstill” into its 19th and 20th years. The increased reflectivity at wavelengths that CO2 cannot intercept and re-radiate augers for temperature declines, even in the face of continual rising of CO2.
The game has changed!!!
Tom,
What you assert above makes sense given the data we have, except for this that you assert:
“The increased reflectivity at wavelengths that CO2 cannot intercept and re-radiate augers for temperature declines, … .” (you just above)
What evidence can you provide making it highly likely or even at all likely that CO2 can do ANY-thing to make temperature {earth’s surface temperature, I’m assuming} go up or down?
That there is a conjectured possibility of some change in earth’s surface temps based on the behavior of CO2 in highly controlled laboratory experiments does not seem, to me, to AT ALL lead to the conclusion that CO2 can cause any measurable change in the sea or land surface temps of the climate system called “Earth”.
What, in short, is the mechanism you are relying on to assert that CO2 is a driver of temperature on earth?
Thanks for the explanation!
Janice
for T ~ CO2: over last 19 years, r=0, r2=0 so not happening
that is simple correlation; have never seen anything to show there is a relationship,
but correlation assumes some equation exercise as opposed to some relationship
Bubba Cow,
What comes to linear fits,which I don’t like much, see the GISS from 1970:
https://tamino.wordpress.com/2015/04/30/slowdown-skeptic/
I really wonder how it can be so straight.
@ur momisugly Hugh
Any linear fit is straight. That’s why it’s called linear.
http://www.mathopenref.com/line.html
The mistake they are making over there is to apply a linear fit to non-linear trends. You can see the change in the trend in Bob Tisdale’s graphs in the “COMPARISON” section here:
https://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2015/04/15/march-2015-global-surface-landocean-and-lower-troposphere-temperature-anomaly-model-data-difference-update/ .
Moreover, even IPCC has acknowledged zero trend since 1998:
“Regardless, all global combined LSAT and SST data sets exhibit a statistically non-significant warming trend over 1998–2012 (0.042°C ± 0.093°C per decade (HadCRUT4); 0.037°C ± 0.085°C per decade (NCDC MLOST); 0.069°C ± 0.082°C per decade (GISS)).”
http://ipcc.wikia.com/wiki/152.4.3_Global_Combined_Land_and_Sea_Surface_Temperature
Saying “statistically non-significant warming” is a coy way of saying “no warming”.
I hope this is helpful.
Janice, you can’t be serious. You ask two questions. First, what is the mechanism. The mechanism is pure unadulterated radiative physics, and is described and computed in many, many papers and textbooks. The atmosphere is completely opaque in a band of wavelengths that are associated with the complex quantum structure of the CO_2 molecule and that are also well within the blackbody spectrum associated with planetary surface temperatures. The earth itself can pretty much only cool via radiation (just as incoming solar radiation is its overwhelmingly signficant source of heat). Of the incoming solar radiation budget, some is reflected back to space without causing any warming at all, some is absorbed by the atmosphere before it reaches the surface, some is absorbed by surface water — lakes and oceans — and some is absorbed by the land surface. This energy then takes one of many routes back to space to maintain an approximately stable dynamical equilibrium temperature. Some energy — quite a lot of the budget — escapes directly to space from the surface in wavelengths that are not absorbed by the atmosphere. Some is turned into latent heat as water evaporates and transferred to the atmosphere in that form. Some — again, quite a lot — is transported up by convection. Some is radiated away from the surface, absorbed by atmospheric CO_2, transferred almost instantly to the bulk atmosphere.
Heat in the atmosphere does not make a one-way trip to outer space. For one thing, the atmosphere carries heat down as well as up, and sideways as well as up or down. Today in NC is going to be much warmer than yesterday or the day before, not because the Sun suddenly became more efficient at heating today but because heat and humidity/latent heat absorbed elsewhere is going to be transported into the region. For another, it is a well-established, named principle in physics that a molecule’s absorptive cross-section equals its emissive cross-section, which means that those same CO_2 molecules that absorb LWIR from the surface reradiate it in all directions, including back towards the surface. So do water molecules (in a different band). So do other molecules, but they are usually in such low concentrations in the troposphere that they are basically perturbations on the combined H2O CO2 effect, where both the H2O and CO2 effect are highly variable with humidity and local emission/absorption of CO2 in a variety of natural and anthropogenic processes.
Eventually molecules in the atmosphere, which are constantly radiating energy in all directions, have a low enough density (density decreases with height) that photons that are emitted “up” have a nonzero chance of making it through to space without any further absorptions. The atmosphere cools in the sense of really truly losing net heat rather than transporting it around only in two places — at the surface, where at night on average the surface itself directly cools faster than the atmosphere immediately above it, and in the top kilometer or so of the troposphere (although this is complicated by water vapor, which can radiate from cloud tops much lower down straight on through if the upper troposphere itself happens to be dry). This radiative cooling occurs at temperatures (maintained by a mix of several nonequilibrium processes but predominantly convective turnover) determined by the adiabatic lapse rate and hence much cooler than surface temperatures. Since the rate of radiative heat loss in any given band is generally proportional to the fourth power of the temperature, this cooling proceeds much more slowly than cooling from the surface in the bands unblocked by greenhouse gases (during the daytime, too).
To understand how this “warms” the surface, it suffices to note that all heat transport mechanisms in physics are monotonic in temperature difference. As has often been pointed out on this list, net heat transport by spontaneous processes is from warm to cool, at a rate that strictly increases with the difference in temperature. The hotter a surface gets, the faster it loses energy to cooler air via conduction and convection, to cooler outer space (essentially at 3 K in all directions but directly at the sun or moon), to latent heat if it is wet and the air is dry. The cooler it gets relative to the “cold reservoir” it is losing heat to, the more slowly it loses heat in that channel. When the temperatures are identical, it is in thermal equilibrium and no longer loses net heat at all, although energy transfer continues in both directions at matching rates as the physics underlying the transfer doesn’t just “turn off”.
Anything that slows the rate of transfer at constant temperature differential shifts the dynamical equilibrium temperature. Your body, at rest, produces heat at a roughly constant rate, and loses it via conduction, convection, radiation, and latent heat/evaporation at the surface. If you are in a cold room, your skin surface temperature drops. In order to maintain your required body temperature, your metabolism has to increase heat production, which is metabolically demanding, which our brains interpret as discomfort. We then put on clothes to reduce the rate of heat transport to the colder room, which effectively raises the temperature at which our skin is in equilibrium my making its immediate environment inside the clothing a comfortable temperature and reduces the metabolic load.
If you heat your house at a fixed rate in the winter with all the windows and doors open and with no insulation in the attic, it will eventually establish a dynamical “equilibrium” temperature with its surrounding environment — warmer than that environment but quite possibly substantially colder than you would like. You can “warm” your house without changing the rate at which the furnace is producing heat by closing the doors and windows, insulating the attic, and hanging curtains. These things don’t produce heat — they simply slow the rate of heat transport from the inside to the outside, forcing the house to “warm” to a higher temperature to remain in dynamical equilibrium with the outside.
CO_2 and water vapor in the atmosphere work in exactly this way. If they weren’t there, the surface could radiatively cool every night straight through to space. Quite simply, it would lose energy using the entire blackbody spectrum associated with the surface temperature, not just part of it. Every night it would, all things equal, lose substantially more energy and hence cool more than it would without these gases. This effect is immediately visible and familiar to all of us, because we learn early on that dry, low humidity nights get cool much faster than humid nights. The diurnal temperature differential in the dry desert is much greater than it is in places with a higher average humidity. Water vapour is a greenhouse gas.
The same thing is true during the daytime. The surface itself loses heat much faster but it also gains it faster in the bands of sunlight that were partially blocked by CO_2 and water vapor, so the surface temperature on a dry day can be higher even as the air above it is generally cooler! The greenhouse effect isn’t the only thing moderating heat transport from the surface to outer space, but because the CO_2 linked part of the effect is global and comparatively constant in its mean effect, it is a very important one. Increasing CO_2 concentration slows the average, total heat transport from surface to outer space in one channel, and slowed transport “warms” a system that is constantly being heated and is in dynamical equilibribum with a fixed cold reservoir like outer space. In a highly dynamical, chaotic, self-organized system with many channels (like the earth’s climate system) one cannot easily predict how much warming will occur, because blocking one channel can cause another to reorganize to produce less blocking, as if your warmer house produced enough convective pressure to push open an otherwise closed window, but one can still state that on average one expects warming more than cooling and can even make an all-things-equal (no dynamically adjusting windows!) estimate of how much warming would occur.
The theory is, I hope this deliberately simple explanation makes clear, entirely sound, and every single aspect of the theory is backed up by numerous experiments. On to your second question — what is the evidence we have that this actually works, that the greenhouse effect warms the Earth, and beyond that that increasing CO_2 is differentially warming the Earth?
There are two independent lines of evidence. The first and arguably more important is direct spectroscopic evidence. We aren’t talking about invisible magic, here, we are talking about photons, about electromagnetic radiation! We can measure it! We do measure it! We can measure it directionally! We can measure it in each and every wavelength in the entire spectrum from x-rays through to radio waves! I would say (professionally speaking) that no aspect of nature is as well understood as the electromagnetic field, either classically or quantum mechanically. If you look at the spectroscopic data, there is absolutely no doubt that the greenhouse effect is real, because spectrographs of atmospheric radiation are a direct photograph of the greenhouse effect in action, blocking in the greenhouse bands to produce a net effect in thermal “equilibrium” with the temperature at the lapsed emission height when looking down from above the troposphere, and radiation that returns heat to the surface in precisely the greenhouse bands at temperatures in equilibrium with the surface layer of the atmosphere when looking up at night.
We don’t, in other words, infer a greenhouse effect from some complex explanation of causes that might or might not be right. This is a direct observation of the greenhouse effect in action.. You literally have to believe in magic or be so ignorant of physics that you can convince yourself that photons “know” the temperature of the object that they are eventually absorbed by to convince yourself otherwise, as the downward directed photons carry energy from the atmosphere to the surface and hence reduce the net rate of cooling which, as we noted above, causes an increase in the time averaged temperature (and does so with or without an active heat source).
The second piece of evidence is that we can predict, on the basis of the theory, approximately how much warming to expect as the atmosphere’s CO_2 concentration increases. The theory here is not exact, not because it isn’t well understood but because things happen in different parts of the atmosphere where conditions change and so we cannot use a comparatively simple description of the physics that works everywhere and have to approximate it in certain ways to make it computable, and then as noted there are feedbacks and interactions with multiple cooling channels that the estimate will not accomodate at all. The computations yield a range of possible answers instead of a sharp “answer” — a mean surface temperature increase that is logarithmic in the CO_2 concentration, so that every doubling of CO_2 increases temperature by a roughly constant increment. This is a very specific prediction (the functional form), but the increment could be anywhere from less than 1 C to as much as 2 C, and most people assume it to be ballpark of 1.5 C (line-by-line spectral tools will usually return a computed value in this range, as will analytical arguments).
This functional form can then be compared to the global temperature record to see how it works. Here is the result:
http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/Toft-CO2-PDO.jpg
This is the result of simply fitting the expected functional form to the HadCRUT4 temperature record.. As you can see, the fit works extremely well for a temperature increment per doubling around 1.8 C, well within the range of theoretically computed or estimated values! This does not, of course, “prove” the greenhouse effect, any more than Galileo “proved” that gravitational acceleration was independent of mass with his experiments, but it certainly is strong evidence in favor of the theory, not against it. It doesn’t show that the warming could not be “natural”, or that all or part of it could not come from other causes neglected in the simple model. Indeed, the second fit I present with the sinusoid strongly suggests the existence of neglected, possibly significant, physics! But even so, one cannot look at this and go “Aha! This data refutes the greenhouse gas theory!” or even “Aha! There is no reason in the data to think that the greenhouse gas theory is necessarily true!” Quite the contrary — it is pretty strong evidence in favor of the greenhouse gas theory, as measured/observed temperatures are in excellent quantitative agreement with the simplest predictions of the theory.
I hope this helps you avoid excessive claims in the future. Your argument that it cannot be proven that the warming over the last 165 years is caused by increasing greenhouse gas concentrations, while technically correct if you weaken the standard of “proof” enough, requires that it be weakened to the point where you openly ignore the excellent agreement between observation and theory in order to overtly reject the AGW hypothesis. Personally, I think that is unreasonable. Rather, there is strong evidence that it is correct. What is not well-supported by the evidence is:
a) A specific assertion for the total climate sensitivity, the increment in dynamical equilibrium temperature per doubling. Even given the high quality of my own fit to the data, by the time nonlinearities and feedbacks in the atmosphere and the not particularly believable nature of the HadCRUT4 global temperature estimates with some pretty obvious thumbs on the scales and statistically unbelievable magic carefully hidden within I’d believe anything from a few tenths of a degree C to around 2 C, and suspect that it will turn out to be very close to the central physical estimate of 1.5 C, probably on the low side, when all is said and done.
b) Any assertion of strong positive feedback from e.g. water vapor. This is the one thing that I think is “wrongest” in the GCMs and early assertions of e.g. Hansen. There is damn-all reason in my fit above to think that there is any positive feedback from water vapor, and there are some very good reasons to think that net feedback from water vapor is negative, not positive.
c) Any assertion that the observed warming is all, or mostly, from CO_2. A mere glance at global temperature estimates on longer time scales suffices to indicate that natural variation in temperature without the help of CO_2 is already on the scale of degree C over decades to centuries, making it almost impossible, even given a lovely fit like the one above, to be certain of one’s attribution of warming to CO_2. That’s why my lowball estimate for TCS is so low — we don’t know how much of the warming over the last 165 years is perfectly natural, e.g. recovery from the LIA, or warming from other non-Markovian aspects of the climate system. People can assert that they “know”, but they don’t, because nobody has a functional model for global average temperature that works over thousands of years. We don’t even have accurate enough data to make trying to build such a model realistic. We are, and will remain, in a state of borderline ignorance about this for decades to as much as a century before we get enough reliable data to begin to understand climate dynamics on decadal to century timescales outside of the greenhouse gas warming. Even my highball TCS could be low — it could be that the LIA was “supposed” to continue and start the next real glacial episode and end the Holocene, but CO_2 intervened. Some people think that already. In that case all-things-equal TCS could be, say, 3 C but 2 C of this expected warming was cancelled by an incipient ice-age, so that CO_2 saved the world.
This just shows that the climate is a complicated nonlinear problem in a very high dimensional space, one absurdly beyond our ability to quantitatively compute and one where we lack anything like the precise data needed to either start a computation or compare a result in either past of the future. Even a very good fit has to remain suspect when it assumes that everything else was irrelevant during the time of the fit because we have literally no good reason to think that everything else is ever irrelevant in the climate.
rgb
Thanks for this excellent summary of the physics of ‘greenhouse gases’. To say that I couldn’t agree more is superfluous as the physics is what it is.
I see RGB is here to explain in 50,000 words, or more, how he can bake a turkey in his freezer.
And, as if it could not get any funnier, I will likely be censored again!
You just can’t make this stuff up….
geran, I copied rgb’s entire comment and emailed it to several friends. Its the best explanation of “greenhouse gas” I’ve read. It should be sticky post on WUWT. Let me thank rgb for the effort and the clarity he brought to the discussion.
@ur momisugly rgbatduke…thank you very much for such a straightforward and clear explanation of the ghg atmospheric relationship. That was a bit of reading, but highly informative.
rgbatduke: “As you can see, the fit works extremely well for a temperature increment per doubling around 1.8 C”
Nice hypothesis.
Such a pity that the temperature increment per doubling isn’t around 1.8 C, isn’t it?
RGB, You said:
“Janice, you can’t be serious. You ask two questions. First, what is the mechanism. The mechanism is pure unadulterated radiative physics, and is described and computed in many, many papers and textbooks. The atmosphere is completely opaque in a band of wavelengths that are associated with the complex quantum structure of the CO_2 molecule and that are also well within the blackbody spectrum associated with planetary surface temperatures. The earth itself can pretty much only cool via radiation (just as incoming solar radiation is its overwhelmingly signficant source of heat). Of the incoming solar radiation budget, some is reflected back to space without causing any warming at all, some is absorbed by the atmosphere before it reaches the surface, some is absorbed by surface water — lakes and oceans — and some is absorbed by the land surface. This energy then takes one of many routes back to space to maintain an approximately stable dynamical equilibrium temperature. Some energy — quite a lot of the budget — escapes directly to space from the surface in wavelengths that are not absorbed by the atmosphere. Some is turned into latent heat as water evaporates and transferred to the atmosphere in that form. Some — again, quite a lot — is transported up by convection. Some is radiated away from the surface, absorbed by atmospheric CO_2, transferred almost instantly to the bulk atmosphere.
Heat in the atmosphere does not make a one-way trip to outer space. For one thing, the atmosphere carries heat down as well as up, and sideways as well as up or down. Today in NC is going to be much warmer than yesterday or the day before, not because the Sun suddenly became more efficient at heating today but because heat and humidity/latent heat absorbed elsewhere is going to be transported into the region. For another, it is a well-established, named principle in physics that a molecule’s absorptive cross-section equals its emissive cross-section, which means that those same CO_2 molecules that absorb LWIR from the surface reradiate it in all directions, including back towards the surface. So do water molecules (in a different band). So do other molecules, but they are usually in such low concentrations in the troposphere that they are basically perturbations on the combined H2O CO2 effect, where both the H2O and CO2 effect are highly variable with humidity and local emission/absorption of CO2 in a variety of natural and anthropogenic processes.
Eventually molecules in the atmosphere, which are constantly radiating energy in all directions, have a low enough density (density decreases with height) that photons that are emitted “up” have a nonzero chance of making it through to space without any further absorptions. The atmosphere cools in the sense of really truly losing net heat rather than transporting it around only in two places — at the surface, where at night on average the surface itself directly cools faster than the atmosphere immediately above it, and in the top kilometer or so of the troposphere (although this is complicated by water vapor, which can radiate from cloud tops much lower down straight on through if the upper troposphere itself happens to be dry). This radiative cooling occurs at temperatures (maintained by a mix of several nonequilibrium processes but predominantly convective turnover) determined by the adiabatic lapse rate and hence much cooler than surface temperatures. Since the rate of radiative heat loss in any given band is generally proportional to the fourth power of the temperature, this cooling proceeds much more slowly than cooling from the surface in the bands unblocked by greenhouse gases (during the daytime, too).
To understand how this “warms” the surface, it suffices to note that all heat transport mechanisms in physics are monotonic in temperature difference. As has often been pointed out on this list, net heat transport by spontaneous processes is from warm to cool, at a rate that strictly increases with the difference in temperature. The hotter a surface gets, the faster it loses energy to cooler air via conduction and convection, to cooler outer space (essentially at 3 K in all directions but directly at the sun or moon), to latent heat if it is wet and the air is dry. The cooler it gets relative to the “cold reservoir” it is losing heat to, the more slowly it loses heat in that channel. When the temperatures are identical, it is in thermal equilibrium and no longer loses net heat at all, although energy transfer continues in both directions at matching rates as the physics underlying the transfer doesn’t just “turn off”.
Anything that slows the rate of transfer at constant temperature differential shifts the dynamical equilibrium temperature. Your body, at rest, produces heat at a roughly constant rate, and loses it via conduction, convection, radiation, and latent heat/evaporation at the surface. If you are in a cold room, your skin surface temperature drops. In order to maintain your required body temperature, your metabolism has to increase heat production, which is metabolically demanding, which our brains interpret as discomfort. We then put on clothes to reduce the rate of heat transport to the colder room, which effectively raises the temperature at which our skin is in equilibrium my making its immediate environment inside the clothing a comfortable temperature and reduces the metabolic load.
If you heat your house at a fixed rate in the winter with all the windows and doors open and with no insulation in the attic, it will eventually establish a dynamical “equilibrium” temperature with its surrounding environment — warmer than that environment but quite possibly substantially colder than you would like. You can “warm” your house without changing the rate at which the furnace is producing heat by closing the doors and windows, insulating the attic, and hanging curtains. These things don’t produce heat — they simply slow the rate of heat transport from the inside to the outside, forcing the house to “warm” to a higher temperature to remain in dynamical equilibrium with the outside.
CO_2 and water vapor in the atmosphere work in exactly this way. If they weren’t there, the surface could radiatively cool every night straight through to space. Quite simply, it would lose energy using the entire blackbody spectrum associated with the surface temperature, not just part of it. Every night it would, all things equal, lose substantially more energy and hence cool more than it would without these gases. This effect is immediately visible and familiar to all of us, because we learn early on that dry, low humidity nights get cool much faster than humid nights. The diurnal temperature differential in the dry desert is much greater than it is in places with a higher average humidity. Water vapour is a greenhouse gas.
The same thing is true during the daytime. The surface itself loses heat much faster but it also gains it faster in the bands of sunlight that were partially blocked by CO_2 and water vapor, so the surface temperature on a dry day can be higher even as the air above it is generally cooler! The greenhouse effect isn’t the only thing moderating heat transport from the surface to outer space, but because the CO_2 linked part of the effect is global and comparatively constant in its mean effect, it is a very important one. Increasing CO_2 concentration slows the average, total heat transport from surface to outer space in one channel, and slowed transport “warms” a system that is constantly being heated and is in dynamical equilibribum with a fixed cold reservoir like outer space. In a highly dynamical, chaotic, self-organized system with many channels (like the earth’s climate system) one cannot easily predict how much warming will occur, because blocking one channel can cause another to reorganize to produce less blocking, as if your warmer house produced enough convective pressure to push open an otherwise closed window, but one can still state that on average one expects warming more than cooling and can even make an all-things-equal (no dynamically adjusting windows!) estimate of how much warming would occur.
The theory is, I hope this deliberately simple explanation makes clear, entirely sound, and every single aspect of the theory is backed up by numerous experiments. On to your second question — what is the evidence we have that this actually works, that the greenhouse effect warms the Earth, and beyond that that increasing CO_2 is differentially warming the Earth?
There are two independent lines of evidence. The first and arguably more important is direct spectroscopic evidence. We aren’t talking about invisible magic, here, we are talking about photons, about electromagnetic radiation! We can measure it! We do measure it! We can measure it directionally! We can measure it in each and every wavelength in the entire spectrum from x-rays through to radio waves! I would say (professionally speaking) that no aspect of nature is as well understood as the electromagnetic field, either classically or quantum mechanically. If you look at the spectroscopic data, there is absolutely no doubt that the greenhouse effect is real, because spectrographs of atmospheric radiation are a direct photograph of the greenhouse effect in action, blocking in the greenhouse bands to produce a net effect in thermal “equilibrium” with the temperature at the lapsed emission height when looking down from above the troposphere, and radiation that returns heat to the surface in precisely the greenhouse bands at temperatures in equilibrium with the surface layer of the atmosphere when looking up at night.
We don’t, in other words, infer a greenhouse effect from some complex explanation of causes that might or might not be right. This is a direct observation of the greenhouse effect in action.. You literally have to believe in magic or be so ignorant of physics that you can convince yourself that photons “know” the temperature of the object that they are eventually absorbed by to convince yourself otherwise, as the downward directed photons carry energy from the atmosphere to the surface and hence reduce the net rate of cooling which, as we noted above, causes an increase in the time averaged temperature (and does so with or without an active heat source).
The second piece of evidence is that we can predict, on the basis of the theory, approximately how much warming to expect as the atmosphere’s CO_2 concentration increases. The theory here is not exact, not because it isn’t well understood but because things happen in different parts of the atmosphere where conditions change and so we cannot use a comparatively simple description of the physics that works everywhere and have to approximate it in certain ways to make it computable, and then as noted there are feedbacks and interactions with multiple cooling channels that the estimate will not accomodate at all. The computations yield a range of possible answers instead of a sharp “answer” — a mean surface temperature increase that is logarithmic in the CO_2 concentration, so that every doubling of CO_2 increases temperature by a roughly constant increment. This is a very specific prediction (the functional form), but the increment could be anywhere from less than 1 C to as much as 2 C, and most people assume it to be ballpark of 1.5 C (line-by-line spectral tools will usually return a computed value in this range, as will analytical arguments).
This functional form can then be compared to the global temperature record to see how it works. Here is the result:
This is the result of simply fitting the expected functional form to the HadCRUT4 temperature record.. As you can see, the fit works extremely well for a temperature increment per doubling around 1.8 C, well within the range of theoretically computed or estimated values! This does not, of course, “prove” the greenhouse effect, any more than Galileo “proved” that gravitational acceleration was independent of mass with his experiments, but it certainly is strong evidence in favor of the theory, not against it. It doesn’t show that the warming could not be “natural”, or that all or part of it could not come from other causes neglected in the simple model. Indeed, the second fit I present with the sinusoid strongly suggests the existence of neglected, possibly significant, physics! But even so, one cannot look at this and go “Aha! This data refutes the greenhouse gas theory!” or even “Aha! There is no reason in the data to think that the greenhouse gas theory is necessarily true!” Quite the contrary — it is pretty strong evidence in favor of the greenhouse gas theory, as measured/observed temperatures are in excellent quantitative agreement with the simplest predictions of the theory.
I hope this helps you avoid excessive claims in the future. Your argument that it cannot be proven that the warming over the last 165 years is caused by increasing greenhouse gas concentrations, while technically correct if you weaken the standard of “proof” enough, requires that it be weakened to the point where you openly ignore the excellent agreement between observation and theory in order to overtly reject the AGW hypothesis. Personally, I think that is unreasonable. Rather, there is strong evidence that it is correct. What is not well-supported by the evidence is:
a) A specific assertion for the total climate sensitivity, the increment in dynamical equilibrium temperature per doubling. Even given the high quality of my own fit to the data, by the time nonlinearities and feedbacks in the atmosphere and the not particularly believable nature of the HadCRUT4 global temperature estimates with some pretty obvious thumbs on the scales and statistically unbelievable magic carefully hidden within I’d believe anything from a few tenths of a degree C to around 2 C, and suspect that it will turn out to be very close to the central physical estimate of 1.5 C, probably on the low side, when all is said and done.
b) Any assertion of strong positive feedback from e.g. water vapor. This is the one thing that I think is “wrongest” in the GCMs and early assertions of e.g. Hansen. There is damn-all reason in my fit above to think that there is any positive feedback from water vapor, and there are some very good reasons to think that net feedback from water vapor is negative, not positive.
c) Any assertion that the observed warming is all, or mostly, from CO_2. A mere glance at global temperature estimates on longer time scales suffices to indicate that natural variation in temperature without the help of CO_2 is already on the scale of degree C over decades to centuries, making it almost impossible, even given a lovely fit like the one above, to be certain of one’s attribution of warming to CO_2. That’s why my lowball estimate for TCS is so low — we don’t know how much of the warming over the last 165 years is perfectly natural, e.g. recovery from the LIA, or warming from other non-Markovian aspects of the climate system. People can assert that they “know”, but they don’t, because nobody has a functional model for global average temperature that works over thousands of years. We don’t even have accurate enough data to make trying to build such a model realistic. We are, and will remain, in a state of borderline ignorance about this for decades to as much as a century before we get enough reliable data to begin to understand climate dynamics on decadal to century timescales outside of the greenhouse gas warming. Even my highball TCS could be low — it could be that the LIA was “supposed” to continue and start the next real glacial episode and end the Holocene, but CO_2 intervened. Some people think that already. In that case all-things-equal TCS could be, say, 3 C but 2 C of this expected warming was cancelled by an incipient ice-age, so that CO_2 saved the world.
This just shows that the climate is a complicated nonlinear problem in a very high dimensional space, one absurdly beyond our ability to quantitatively compute and one where we lack anything like the precise data needed to either start a computation or compare a result in either past of the future. Even a very good fit has to remain suspect when it assumes that everything else was irrelevant during the time of the fit because we have literally no good reason to think that everything else is ever irrelevant in the climate.”
So, to summarize, it is not a topic you have thought about much or have a lot to say about?
@Janice.
You ask (paraphrasing” What mechanism can explain how CO2 could drive climate change?”
I find the explanation in Wikipedia to be reasonably clear, and consistent with the Science in College textbooks, and in my University courses in Physics and Physical Chemistry:
‘The greenhouse effect is a process by which thermal radiation from a planetary surface is absorbed by atmospheric greenhouse gases, and is re-radiated in all directions. Since part of this re-radiation is back towards the surface and the lower atmosphere, it results in an elevation of the average surface temperature above what it would be in the absence of the gases.
Solar radiation at the frequencies of visible light largely passes through the atmosphere to warm the planetary surface, which then emits this energy at the lower frequencies of infrared thermal radiation. Infrared radiation is absorbed by greenhouse gases, which in turn re-radiate much of the energy to the surface and lower atmosphere. The mechanism is named after the effect of solar radiation passing through glass and warming a greenhouse, but the way it retains heat is fundamentally different as a greenhouse works by reducing airflow, isolating the warm air inside the structure so that heat is not lost by convection.
If an ideal thermally conductive blackbody were the same distance from the Sun as the Earth is, it would have a temperature of about 5.3 °C. However, since the Earth reflects about 30% of the incoming sunlight, this idealized planet’s effective temperature (the temperature of a blackbody that would emit the same amount of radiation) would be about −18 °C. The surface temperature of this hypothetical planet is 33 °C below Earth’s actual surface temperature of approximately 14 °C. The mechanism that produces this difference between the actual surface temperature and the effective temperature is due to the atmosphere and is known as the greenhouse effect.
Earth’s natural greenhouse effect makes life as we know it possible. However, human activities, primarily the burning of fossil fuels and clearing of forests, have intensified the natural greenhouse effect, causing global warming.
What global warming?
@Idd
climate.nasa.gov
@ur momisugly ldd… warrenlb meant to say that human activities have added to the current global warmth.
Thanks for keeping us informed and presenting the current possibilities.
The correlations are strong between the colder temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere and the Dalton and Maunder Minimums. But at this point they remain correlations. What we don’t understand about the sun and climate would fill books. It will be interesting to see if Livingston and Penn’s projection that sunspots will no longer be visible after 2015 comes to pass. We may be in the midst of some very significant solar phenomena.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/06/02/livingston-and-penn-paper-sunspots-may-vanish-by-2015/
I think that there is a good chance that we will see the next minimum around 2018/19.
“What we don’t understand about the sun and climate would fill books.”
the size of the unknown is unknown.
you can see this by asking the question ‘ will it fill 1 book? or 1000 books”
The interesting thing about what is not known is that it is not known. Hence, it’s difficult to measure the size or extent of what is unknown. In fact, the whole concept of measuring the size or extent of what is unknown is confused. And appeals to how much we dont know carry no weight.. Take math. Look at all we know. And we know it really well. Now consider how many books would be filled with math we dont know. Interestingly , the size or extent or amount of what is unknown in math tells you NOTHING about the trustworthiness of what you do know. What you dont know cant be used to judge what you do know.
The weakest skeptical argument is an appeal to what we dont know. You can see how weak this argument is by applying it to other fields. Take the math we knew in 1900. Compare it to the math we know now.
The fact that we know more math now, tells you nothing about the soundness of the math known in 1900.
I wish skeptics would drop their bad arguments and come and debate the science
Mosh,
Most people [on either side] are scientifically illiterate and unable to debate the science, as is so clearly demonstrated on blogs like this.
What we don’t know could fill the universe.
@ur momisugly Leif.
So why waste your ******* time commenting here ?
It is not a waste of time to counter nonsense peddled by charlatans. It is, in fact, any scientists duty.
Mosh,
We don’t know what the sun is going to do. We make observations. We measure things. We assume the sun will do things it has done in the past.
I know that the scientifically literate have a lot of blanks to fill in when it comes to the sun. The scientifically literate surely know that is true. I was looking to use a ‘turn of phrase’ to express the idea that nobody has observed enough about the sun to do anything much beyond creating more questions.
I’m one of Svalgaard’s scientific illiterates. I didn’t come to debate the science. I merely pointed out we live in interesting times. …and urge upon the prophets a little humility. The more we understand about the sun and its driving force on earth’s climate, the more we ought to be humble – because we are pretty ignorant.
Is that a bad argument?
The more we understand about the sun and its driving force on earth’s climate, the more we ought to be humble
Yes, it is a bad argument, because it should be the other way around: “the less we understand, the more we ought to be humble”.
@ur momisugly Leif,
OK, just be careful you don’t topple off the pillar you built for yourself.
Cus the Illiterates are the only ones that know how to build one.
The illiterates deserve to be educated. Trouble is, most of them don’t want to. One has the same problem raising children.
Svalgaard says, “Yes, it is a bad argument, because it should be the other way around: “the less we understand, the more we ought to be humble”.”
I don’t think the scientifically literate are to the point they ought to be proud of how much they know about the sun and climate. That would truly be the other way around. Are you not just a little ignorant yourself.
Sheesh Professor, you are always telling people they don’t know as much as they think they do. I’m just your little echo chamber.
I don’t think the scientifically literate are to the point they ought to be proud of how much they know about the sun and climate
The scientifically illiterate seem to be proud of how little they know about the sun…
Teenagers, (and newly minted tweenagers) are known for hard headedness and trying out new ideas. There are several posters who have such a hard head. I have discovered, as an oldie, that only time cures this ailment. Not facts spoken clearly. Not observations or direct evidence. And especially not from the words of folks who have done the observations and collected the direct evidence. Pissing in the wind rises to the top of effectiveness compared to educational attempts made on CO2/Solar/Universe enthusiasts.
Svalgaard says, “The scientifically illiterate seem to be proud of how little they know about the sun…”
The temptation to prophecy afflicts them.
Mosh says: “… Take math. Look at all we know. And we know it really well. Now consider how many books would be filled with math we don’t know. ”
Obviously the number of books is countably infinite.
funny how often you give so much weight to throwaway statements of a post Steve – couldn’t you confront the substantive portions?
Williebamboo was simply stating he – and by implication – we – don’t have the all the answers yet – we can’t yet show causation between sunspot activity and certain temperatures – an honest statement – i see nothing evasive there – unless you’re claiming that this too is a settled science – if so – then talk science – instead of bad psychoanalysis
Smoosher is back… hoo-ray…
Steven Mosher: “I wish skeptics would drop their bad arguments and come and debate the science”
By the same token, sceptics wish AGW evangelists would drop their bad arguments and come and debate the science.
And stop messing with the data to try to make it justify those bad arguments,
Thx for the link….interesting to go back to 2008 note the papers forecast / prediction and review the comments…
The article implies that there are no sunspots but none of the graphs show that. What am I missing?
The graphs are monthly averages, so one spotless day isn’t going to cause them to flatline.
I like the tesis web site for a quick look at magnetic storms and flares on the sun as well as images.
Try this http://www.spaceweather.com/
I think the NASA folks are reporting the spot number at 13 today. That means one spot. Are there any cycles since 1800 where the spot number got that low as soon as the max as cycle 24 seems to be? Maybe no unprecedented but certainly rare?
If you look at their site at spaceweather.com, you will see that there was a day last year with no spots at all. This has been a weak cycle, but not uprecedented. The next cycle will be very interesting. Is this cycle an anomaly or a harbinger of things to come?
Thanks!
So this has happened only in Cycle 24 and the the preceding 23?
@ur momisugly cedarhill — http://www.solen.info/solar/ has historical graphics.
I’m sure humans are to blame. Sun spot deniers. /sarc
It is disappointing that the solar wind speed and density meters on the Solar Page are missing. Did they stop access because people were watching them that knew what they indicated?
NOAA has committed the unpardonable sin of changing the URL without at least having the old URL refer to the new. Here are the new place of the data: http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/ace-real-time-solar-wind
Maybe they don’t know how to do redirects…
That’s what the Administration should address. Urgently.
Holdren? How would he know?
this is the first one in which the second peak in sunspot number was larger than the first peak
Sigh, not so:
http://www.solen.info/solar/cycl14.gif
And as you can see, weak cycles often have large swings. In fact the sunspot number for April was 42% higher than for March.
In our prediction paper of more than 10 years ago http://www.leif.org/research/Cycle%2024%20Smallest%20100%20years.pdf
we noted that “Average space weather might be ‘‘milder’’ with decreased solar activity, but the extreme events that dominate technological effects are not expected to disappear. In fact, they may become more common. Two of the eight strongest storms in the last 150 years occurred during solar cycle 14 (Rmax = 64) [Cliver and Svalgaard, 2004], while three of the five largest 30 MeV solar energetic proton events since 1859 [McCracken et al., 2001] occurred during cycle 13 (Rmax = 88).”
thanks for the URL and you are correct – unpardonable
??technological effects = Rmax
sorry, I am unfamiliar
Hi, Bubba Cow,
Until an expert in statistics answers you, here’s some reading about “R” you might find helpful:
1. http://www.statsoft.com/Textbook/Multiple-Regression#cthe
2. In this paper by Dr. Svalgaard he uses “R” (if I’m reading it correctly) to show that correlation is not causation: http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/news/2010ScienceMeeting/doc/Session6/6.04_Svalgaard_Predict_SC24.pdf
Janice
Techno effects = solar blasts that knock out satellites and sometimes electrical grids on Earth.
Hi, Janice.
Oh, that R, got it. Also used it to respond to your question (me thinks)
Bubby I mean Bubbaa I mean Bubba (I left my typos in for fun — yes, I really made them!!),
I don’t think you understood my question to Tom above (and that is my fault for poor writing, no doubt). BUT, THANKS ANYWAY.
You likely understand “R” much better than I do, by the way!
#(:))
Janice, I did understand about the mechanism thing –
CO2 goes up and up and away and T:
goes down, then up, then “plateau” – was the up part that = CAGW stupid
higley7, to whom I have attended, can explain that CO2 (and H20 vapor = saturated during day, but it is always daytime to IPCC)
and with cooling at night = doesn’t fit
No, Janice, with “Rmax” Leif did not mean the correlation coefficient \rho or R, he meant the maximum sunspot number of the cycle. Since a correlation coefficient would be less than 1, it should be clear that Rmax=88 does not mean that.
Rich.
Thank you, Rich. I figured (wrongly!) Dr. Svalgaard multiplied it by some constant to get the high value. I’ll be more careful about my assumptions in the future — thanks — to — YOU.
#(:))
Your second peak is smaller than the first, Leif. It’s your third peak that’s larger than the first. So though your plot is interesting, it doesn’t of itself refute Anthony’s statement.
@Patrick Guinness Frank: Yes, but the *sigh* at the start of Leif’s comment was argument enough, surely. /sarc
http://www.leif.org/research/SC14-peaks.png
Really fatuous stretch, Leif.
David, you’re right about the patronizing sigh. It’s worthy of Gavin Schmidt.
Count yourself. Should be easy enough, no?
Your off-peak peak is just a tendentious stretch, Leif. Why not include the next peak down, or the next? Why not one from the descending side, too? You have many equivalent choices, all equivalently fatuous. Your evidence is merely evidence of you being pettifogging.
So global warming causes some extreme space weather?! /joking
[sarc] For sure, more CO2 make the atmosphere warmer, more water evaporates which is electrically conductive; this causes back-EMF to flow through the plasma bridge between the Earth and the Sun and it inhibits the Sunspots! It’s all in the Electric Universe theory, addendum 57-2[/sarc]
Paul, Revolutionary. That’s got to be worth a grant to investigate.
@ur momisugly Leif:
however, this is the first one in which the second peak in sunspot number was larger than the first peak. Going back to 1755, there have been only a few solar cycles in the previous 23 that have had a lower number of sunspots during its maximum phase.
Yes, it should have read, “this is the first one in over a century in which . . . ” And yet he does note that it is not, in fact, “the” first.
so?
Reblogged this on pdx transport and commented:
More indication that Al Gore’s scam is running out of time.
The real value is in showing how badly the sunspot cycle predictions have proven over time. Chase it down? Mere refinement. When the cycle spikes? See we told you so.
It will be interesting (and completely predictable) to see how a Carrington type event would be spun as being the result of the ever-nefarious Carbon Pollution… I can imagine this twisted tomfoolery, but I’m glad I’m not a part of it. But. come to think of it, if such an event did come to pass, no one would be able to hear exactly what was to blame for the chaos. Not up here in northern Vermont at any rate. (wood stove, sans electronics)
where in VT? just curious, I am in Northeast Kingdom – lovely day today – no CO2 from my woodstove, obvious electronics
Fairfield, East of St. Albans. Truly, it was a beautiful day. The winter we shared was somewhat brutal, eh? I drive a truck up into Quebec, and the -40 morning was memorable. Et vous?
Bubba! It’s around 9:30pm in Vermont and you don’t have the wood stove going yet?
#(:))
Bennett & Janice:
Beautiful day, I agree.
Of course, I should be expelling wonderful CO2, but something about the stove drawing when it is warmer outside than in? actually, just lazy on 1st real Spring day from Kirby
Kirby=Paradise, if you can pay the bills. Same with Fairfield. Could never move anywhere but further north as the Missus is Quebecoise. Note to other folks: Life is too short to live in a city. YMMV.
The sunspot cycle just ain’t what it use to be. Back in the days when l was a lad (1970s) “you got to see sunspots with just the naked eye. ln Feb 1978 we even got treated to two large naked eye sunspots which were next to each other. But now with this cycle “children are just not going to know what sunspots are”.
Haha! I wonder if that prediction will be any better than the “children are just not going to know what snow is” one. Probably not!
…“children are just not going to know what sunspots are”
Nice!
but they do know snow, don’t they?
If you were looking at sunspots with the naked eye back then, then I’m really not surprised you can’t see sunspots any more.
Well you got to see them at sunset through the haze.
Obviously he waited until night to have a look..
That’s what those rose-colored glasses back then were for!
During the recent partial eclipse visible from Arizona, I used a dark filter and a set of large sunspots were visible at that time with the naked eye. This article is a little hasty about the importance of an occasional almost blank face. Overall, the sunspot count may be only a little down from historic levels. The big deal is that they seem to hold their fire while facing earth and ramp up as we fall out of range. Most of the time this is true of the filaments, also.
But, except as a death threat to civilization through a truly massive CME, how important is that count? Isn’t a fall off in certain radiation frequencies the important thing with respect to global warming or cooling.? How about the collapsing magnetic field?
Are there any insights into why it has been so hot in March and April in Florida, the Bahamas, Mexico and central america this year? I have been trying to figure it out. Sunspots higher in March and April?
The heat is due to above normal thermal energy in the layer of air nearest the surface.
Now that is funny!
This weak El Ninio.
Same reason it has been cooler the last week: weather.
They call it mellow yellow.
Yikes, thank goodness Max will be along . . .
Willis Eschenbach previously posted here on the shakiness of the observational sunspot evidence for the Dalton and Maunder minima. Keep that in mind, and don’t overplay this hand. Sun must have something to do with climate. But the big local kahuna is ocean thermal mass. And AMO is turning negative. PDO already has. We agree on the continued lack of warming prognostication, less on the causal mechanisms. The best sceptical position, IMO, is to acknowledge uncertainty unlike warmunists. Science rather than ‘religion’.
absolutely: sun and ocean = really rather large factors
science rather than religion … or politics … and uncertainty, of course (well, to those of us wishing to be honest)
And he was wrong as the three coldest periods on CET are all during solar minima:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/06/23/maunder-and-dalton-sunspot-minima/#comment-1668036
AIR, Eschenbach only criticized the days with no sunspots, as many of them correlate with days when there was no observation while a zero was written in the record.
I was convinced he is blind as bat. No matter how many times that I showed him that the three coldest periods in CET are all in solar minima, he would not even respond. And that was after ridiculing me for using an accepted name for the Gleissberg Minimum of the 1880-1890’s.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/06/23/maunder-and-dalton-sunspot-minima/#comment-1667840
ristvan says: “And AMO is turning negative. PDO already has.”
The PDO has been positive for more than a year and strongly positive for about 6 months.
http://research.jisao.washington.edu/pdo/PDO.latest
excellent, thank you for the data
seems to be rare these days
so, what do you think bob? will the phenomenally low solar cycle activity work to overcome the natural warming effect of the positive PDO? or will the Shift to positive PDO overwhelm the cooling of the low solar cycle?
If the sunspot numbers from those past times were miscounted, where they counted too high, or too low?
Or are they simply not actual counts of observed spots?
If the numbers are observed spots, but the observations were not very thorough, is it likely that the reported numbers represent a minimum number for the periods in question?
Were the tiny spots that have been counted in more recent years, which are more like “sun specks”, counted in the past?
If the answer to either of the previous two question is yes, then this would mean that the current cycle is actually even more abnormally low than a comparison to those periods would indicate, is it not?
Too low in the past, but there have been cycles [around 1900, 1800, 1700] that were lower than the present cycle, which is therefore not that abnormal.
Ugh, I should not try to comment while watching people getting arrested on the news.
Garbled my point. Meant to say: If we are counting tiny spots now that were not counted in the past, and if the observations back a long time ago were spotty and/or used inferior equipment, then the very low numbers seen in cycle 24 are even more unusual.
We are using the same size telescopes [even the same physical ones] as 150 years ago. We are not counting more small spots [or specks] now. In fact, there are fewer small spots now than half a century ago. We are over-counting the large spots by counting each large spot more than once, see e.g. http://www.leif.org/research/Weighting-of-Sunspot-Counts.pdf
The good Dr. S would probably know best, but I suspect early data suffer from too few observers and too many clouds obstructing the view on too many days?
I’m not quite sure that Willis was correct about that.
Eschenbach provided some data with his article. You might want to show why you feel that he was not quite correct. Feelings don’t count for a lot on this website.
so there’s the experts standing on the marketplaces telling the bypassers they’re illiterate.
and then the IPCC on the hotline to the policymakers, not talking about illiteracy but giving straight advice.
guess what counts /for/ a lot.
____
Ernest Bush
May 3, 2015 at 8:49 am
… ‘Feelings’ don’t count /for/ a lot on this website.
____
that ‘Feelings’ – origin, citation?
____
some evidence for interrest on all sides of experts to prolong fruitless nitpicking.
Regards – Hans
Lucky we have more of this saturated trace gas in our atmosphere to keep us warm.
Great!
Now let’s draw a smiley face on it.
I’m pretty sure the sun is pure CO2. That would explain … well … everything.
Thanks Max for the laugh (as usual) but where is the cartoon to go with it ? An Al Gore faced Sun?
Co2 is invisible and as such is hard to show in a cartoon.
@goldminor, With Al’s ego? Me thinks he might be annoyed at you by making him invisible!
The F10.7 (fluxobserved) plot above that AW provided stops at April 6, 2015. About every 23 days F10.7 gets an uptick. Right now (May 02, 2015), it’s pretty quiet again at ~108 flux obs It’s probably headed back up again to peak in about 11 days to around 140-150.
But F10.7 is probably headed to consistently below 100 (fluxadjusted) by the end of the year, where it may remain until the Cycle 25 starts up in 2020-21. That says magnetic heating heat of the chronosphere will be minimal, which means low EUV.
There are those who suspect a F10.7 flux consistently below 100 leads to a cooling phase of Earth’s climate. We shall see. 2017 could be cold if that is true. Big IF.
The next winter in North America will be a record. The cold will be in Europe because AMO drops. Weak El Ninio will soon heat wave in the eastern US.
As suggested by Penn & Livingston’s research, there is a fair probability of a Grand Solar Minimum (GSM) occurring from solar cycle #25 (around 2022), providing the Umbral Magentic Field (UMF– the force that holds sunspots together) falls below 1500 gauss by 2022 (currently at around 2000 gauss and falling).
The Little Ice Age is attributed by many (not all) scientists to have been caused by four GSMs: Wolf, Sporer, Maunder and Dalton. There is compelling empirical evidence for this hypothesis, as the LIA’s start and finish corresponds closely to these four GSMs.
Moreover, the strongest 63-yr string (1933~1996) of solar cycles in 11,400 years also corresponds well to the 20th Modern Warming Period. It’s also interesting to note that global temp trends went flat from 1996, when these strong solar cycles ended in 1996.
Moreover, about 30% of ALL man-made CO2 emissions since 1750 have been emitted since 1996, with no increase global temp trends to show for it, which is damning to the CAGW hypothesis.
Should flat/marginal global temp trends continue for another 5~7 years, observed global temps will be 3+ standard deviations lower than CAGW hypothetical projections, which should be sufficient empirical evidence to disconfirm the CAGW hypothesis.
The Mother of All Ironies is that if the Svensmark Effect is confirmed, and a GSM starts from 2022 and global temps should fall 1C~2C as some scientists project, the tiny amount of actual CO2 induced warming (ECS=0.5C??) will help offset some of the negative impacts of a cooling planet.
We live in interesting times. It’ll be fascinating to see what happens to global temps over the next 5~7 years, and especially after the next solar cycle starts in 2022.
North East Canada remains a frozen.
Alert the media! 🙂
Also, Scotland has a warning out this weekend that includes 8 inches of snow. Britain is expecting a colder than usual May in some parts.
The PIOMAS project attempts to measure the “volume” of the arctic sea-ice. This is difficult and has been an elusive piece of data to obtain, and the PIOIMAS project is critisized for various reasons, but likely is our best attempt so far. I find the above graph interesting for it suggests the sea-ice has been thickening the past few years. (The current year is the red line.)
Of course, “average thickness” is a bit of a ridiculous concept, as the thickness of the ice varies greatly. The Laptev Sea, which exports a lot of ice due to winds howling off shore from Siberia, can have open water when it is -40°, and often has only a skim of ice less than a foot thick which will melt easily in the summer sunshine, but all that exported sea-ice tends to be carried by cross-polar flow and crunch up against the north coast of Canada, where the ice can be twenty feet thick.
https://sunriseswansong.wordpress.com/category/arctic-sea-ice/