Interesting article at the Arizona Daily Star (Tucson, home to Kitt Peak and other observatories). (h/t to Ric Werme)
Picture for illustration only – not from article
Sunspot cycle more dud than radiation flood
By Dan Sorenson
arizona daily star
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 05.19.2008
Many solar scientists expected the new sunspot cycle to be a whopper, a prolonged solar tantrum that could fry satellites and raise hell with earthly communications, the power grid and modern electronics.
But there’s scant proof Sunspot Cycle 24 is even here, let alone the debut of big trouble.
So far there have been just a couple minor zits on the face of the sun to suggest the old cycle is over and the new one is coming.
The roughly 11-year cycle of sunspot activity should have bottomed out last year, the end of Cycle 23 and the beginning of Cycle 24. That would have put the peak in new sunspot activity around 2012.
But a dud sunspot cycle would not necessarily make it a boring period, especially for two solar scientists with the Tucson-based National Solar Observatory.
Two years ago, William Livingston and Matt Penn wrote a paper for the journal Science predicting that this could not only be a dud sunspot cycle, but the start of another extended down period in solar activity. It was based on their analysis of weakening sunspot intensity and said sunspots might vanish by 2015.
The paper, rejected in peer review, was never published by Science. Livingston said he’s OK with the rejection.
“I accept what the reviewers said,” Livingston said. “‘If you are going to make such statement, you had better have strong evidence.’ ”
Livingston said their projections were based on observations of a trend in decreasingly powerful sunspots but reviewers felt it was merely a statistical argument.
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Wouldn’t all predictions about the strength of the next solar cycle be statistical in nature? Why would Science be able to publish predictions of an upcoming strong solar cycle?
“If a paper is rejected in peer review what do the authors normally do to publish their ideas?”
You need to understand. In Academia, you can’t publish a new idea unless you can cite several Authorities who have already said it.
RE: Anthony on Leif Svalgaard.
“Leif Svalgaard has stated at CA, attributing climate change to the sun is akin to “scientific fraud”.
REPLY: Hmmm. Quite a statement. I searched for it on CA but could not locate it. Can you provide a specific reference?”
Yes he used those exact words quoted. I did a thorough search at CA after seeing this thread but could not find it. Although Leif is given more freedom than most, It’s possible Steve M snipped it as he very much dislikes use of the word. The statement came after someone commented on sun spots, GCR etc. and the sun’s relationship to climate variability in general. It was pertaining to Sallie Baliunas & Willie Soon’s work on solar IIRC. For those who have been following his solar threads, possibly a Freudian slip, but he posted it nonetheless.
Perhaps it was not wise to post without references, but I know what I read.
It seems to me that the fact that the statistics make a strong point against the prevalent theory should have been very publishable. Something is wrong here. They should have been able to easily change from making a prediction to talking about the present trend and its extrapolation. Some of the most important steps in science come when we find out where the data disagree with theory. This knowledge helps winnow out bad theories and guides the theorists in improving upon the good theories, or if necessary replacing the old theory. Not publishing this information is inexcusable.
Sobering statistics.
Oort (1010-1050)
Wolf (1280-1340)
Spörer (1415-1534)
Maunder (1645-1715)
Dalton (1790-1840)
2008 ?
DeVries. (Rhymes with “freeze.)
Gleissberg . (Rhymes with “iceberg”)
RE: aaron on Pielke
Roger recently has been a thorn in the side over at RC on the subject of OHC, climate models and IPCC projections.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/05/what-the-ipcc-models-really-say/#comment-86500
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/05/what-the-ipcc-models-really-say/#comment-86506
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/05/what-the-ipcc-models-really-say/#comment-86546
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/05/what-the-ipcc-models-really-say/#comment-86711
Everyone should keep in mind, without OHC increasing, there can be no “global” warming. This is the weakest link in the AGW chain, and while the true believers were celebrating 2007 as the nth warmest year on record, the oceans were saying otherwise.
In 2005, Hansen’s “smoking gun” was proof positive for the anthropogenic connection to continuing relentless warming for the next millennium and beyond. Now RealClimate doesn’t seem interested in even doing a follow up.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/05/planetary-energy-imbalance/langswitch_lang/in
A notable quote:
[…] Sunspot cycle more dud than radiation flood Interesting article at the Arizona Daily Star (Tucson, home to Kitt Peak and other observatories). (h/t to Ric […] […]
To be fair to Lief, he has said repeatedly at CA that the sun cannot be the cause of the observed climate variation, unless the climate’s sensitivity to solar forcing is much greater than generally believed.
I.e, (my words), positive feedbacks are much larger than generally believed. A possibility he appears not to discount.
I am thinking the sunspot cycle can be predicted either through mathematical chaos theory or something more akin to measuring the energy of winding up a string that gets twisted and then allowed to unwind the other way at different tensions. We know that the sun rotates at different speeds depending on the lattitude being measured. The difference in rotation speed is what gets it all in a tangle and produces sunspots. Once it is as tangled as it can get it seems to slowly unwind back to an untangled state. Does it twist up the other way?. I don’t know. Do the different rotation speeds change in a cyclic pattern? I don’t know. The point is that anything that gets tangled up and then gets untangled can be worked out through mathematical equations in terms of energy produced. And if it goes through a pendulum like revving up and revving down as it twists and untwists, that can also be mathematically calculated or modeled (sorry about the M word). If scientists know about the twisting up, I am guessing that they are looking at mathematical calculations that have predictive value.
“Leif Svalgaard has stated at CA, attributing climate change to the sun is akin to “scientific fraud”.
Though Leif did use the words “scientific fraud”, the above is NOT what Leif said/implied. I also can’t find the section where he used the “fraud” word, but I distinctly remember the context that it was used in.
The general discussion was on the topic of the different TSI reconstructions (i.e. the Lean 2000, Wang 2005 and Leif’s recent own), and Leif stated that it is now accepted that TSI over the last century was a lot flatter.
http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-LEIF.png
Somebody then made a passing comment that Judith Lean’s 2000 reconstruction is used as the solar forcing component in the IPCC climate models, and is the key driver of the temperature increase early last century – to which Leif replied: if that reconstruction is still used NOW to account for the early twentieth century temperature change, then this is akin to “scientific fraud”.
Del (14:22:11) :
“Wouldn’t all predictions about the strength of the next solar cycle be statistical in nature? Why would Science be able to publish predictions of an upcoming strong solar cycle?”
Basically, “Yes,” and “It’s their
agendamagazine.”Statistics are generally one step away from hypothesis and theory. Think Gregor Mendel counting short and tall pea plants. It may be that Science wanted to see a paper that had both the statistics and an explanation of why the sun is producing that effect.
They may also have felt that other people were working on more theoretical papers. Certainly nothing has come along to let people predict cycle 24 with great confidence yet. (Or the end of cycle 23, for that matter.) They may have figured other journals like Icarus would be a better fit and other papers at hand were more along their preferred topics.
Or they’re just a bunch of AGW True Believers and figure since the science is settled, sunspots are just decoration.
At the time it may have been a sensible decision.
Svalgard has consistently posted on CA that TSI has varied so little throughout the record (going back to the Little Ice Age even) that it cannot possibly be responsible for very much of the temperatures changes over time.
While we thought solar irradiance declined somewhat/substantially during the Little Ice Age and increased in the 20th Century, Svalgard states that TSI has only varied by approximately the height and depth of a solar cycle over this time or about 1 w/m2. Svalgard states that previous studies showing changes of as much 4 or 5 w/m2 over the period are being rewritten now to conform with the lower variance estimates of just 1 w/m2. Even Judith Lean, probably the foremost expert in this field, has changed her estimates.
I myself, do not like how history is continually being rewritten in the climate science field and, obviously, the Little Ice Age and the lack of sunspots over 80 years is not a myth.
New Cosmic Ray paper from CERN
This looks really good, however, it is 44 pages long (only 32 if you skip the bibliography).
COSMIC RAYS AND CLIMATE
Jasper Kirkby
CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
Abstract
Among the most puzzling questions in climate change is that of solar-climate variability, which has attracted the attention of scientists for more than two centuries. Until recently, even the existence of solar-climate variability has been controversial – perhaps because the observations had largely involved correlations between climate and the sunspot cycle that had persisted for only a few decades. Over the last few years, however, diverse reconstructions of past climate change have revealed clear associations with cosmic ray variations recorded in cosmogenic isotope archives, providing persuasive evidence for solar or cosmic ray forcing of the climate. However, despite the increasing evidence of its importance, solar-climate variability is likely to remain controversial until a physical mechanism is established. Although this remains a mystery, observations suggest that cloud cover may be influenced by cosmic rays, which are modulated by the solar wind and, on longer time scales, by the geomagnetic field and by the galactic environment of Earth. Two different classes of microphysical mechanisms have been proposed to connect cosmic rays with clouds: firstly, an influence of cosmic rays on the production of cloud condensation nuclei and, secondly, an influence of cosmic rays on the global electrical circuit in the atmosphere and, in turn, on ice nucleation and other cloud microphysical processes. Considerable progress on understanding ion-aerosol-cloud processes has been made in recent years, and the results are suggestive of a physically-plausible link between cosmic rays, clouds and climate. However, a concerted effort is now required to carry out definitive laboratory measurements of the fundamental physical and chemical processes involved, and to evaluate their climatic significance with dedicated field observations and modelling studies.
1 INTRODUCTION
2 SOLAR/COSMIC RAY-CLIMATE VARIABILITY
2.1 Last millennium
2.1.1 The Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm Period
2.1.2 Intertropical Convergence Zone
2.1.3 Solar and cosmic ray changes since the Little Ice Age
2.2 Holocene; last 10 ky
2.2.1 Ice-rafted debris in the North Atlantic Ocean
2.2.2 Indian Ocean monsoon
2.3 Quaternary; last 3 My
2.3.1 Stalagmite growth in Oman and Austria
2.3.2 Laschamp event
2.4 Phanerozoic; last 550 My
2.4.1 Celestial cycles
2.4.2 Biodiversity
3 MECHANISMS
3.1 GCR-cloud mechanisms
3.1.1 GCR characteristics
3.1.2 Ion-induced nucleation of new aerosols
3.1.3 Global electric circuit
3.2 GCR-cloud observations
3.2.1 Interannual time scale
3.2.2 Daily time scale
3.3 GCR-cloud-climate mechanisms
3.3.1 Importance of aerosols and clouds
3.3.2 Marine stratocumulus
3.3.3 Lightning and climate
3.3.4 Climate responses
4 CLOUD FACILITY AT CERN
4.1 Overview
4.2 Experimental goals
4.2.1 Aerosol nucleation and growth experiments
4.2.2 Cloud microphysics experiments
5 CONCLUSIONS
Arnost has my quote correct. What I said was that to continue to use a decade-old TSI reconstruction when it produces a desirable result is fraud if there is general [and well known] consensus that the old values were too low. So, knowingly using an old dataset because it ‘fits better’ even though a modern [and better] dataset exists is akin to fraud. I don’t know how many times that must be said before it is clear. Now, the author [Hansen] could claim that he is not following the literature and that he didn’t know that the old reconstruction was obsoleted. If so, it was not fraud, just ignorance. But basing a paper on ignorance is not quite kosher either if you bill yourself as an expert. I know these words are strong, but the impact of Hansen’s work is also strong.
From Solar Physics (2007) vol. 245, p 247-249:
Did the Sun’s Prairie Ever Stop Burning?
Peter Foukal and Jck Eddy.
“This historical evidence may bear on reconstructions of total solar
irradiance (TSI) variation and its possible forcing of climate over
the past few centuries. It has been suggested, for example, that,
during the Maunder Minimum, TSI may have decreased sufficiently to
help account for the broad minimum in global temperature during the
coldest part of the Little Ice Age (Lean, Beer, and Bradley, Geophys.
Res. Letters, vol 22, p 3105, 1995). The mechanism suggested for this
large TSI decrease is a significant depletion of the bright magnetic
regions in the photosphere that are associated with spicule foot
points. To obtain a climatically significant TSI decrease, Lean Beer,
and Bradly proposed the disappearance not only of the bright network
structures associated with spicule foot points but even of the
faintest inter-network magnetic elements located within supergranule
cell centers. The historical eclipse observations described here seem
to require the presence of the bright network structures, and thus of
substantial solar photospheric magnetism during at least the last
decade of the Maunder Minimum. Hence, the red-flash observations would
argue against a climatologically important decrease in TSI during that
period of time.”
So it seems that there may even have been a circular argument in the old reconstruction of TSI, namely that it was “adjusted such as to account for the LIA”
The paper referred to by Ric:
COSMIC RAYS AND CLIMATE
Jasper Kirkby
in section 2.1.3 bases an estimate of the open solar magnetic flux [supposedly determining the variation of TSI] on an obsoleted 1999 paper by Lockwood et al claiming that the sun’s magnetic field had more than doubled [factor of 2.3] since 1900. Recent work by myself and Ed Cliver and by Lockwood’s own group [and also by two other groups] have reached the consensus that this more than doubling didn’t happen; that the sun’s magnetic field has changed a lot less [of the order of 25% or less]. So TSI has also changed a lot less. To Jasper’s credit he does mention that Lean’s old 1995 reconstruction of TSI is faulty and even shows a nice Figure 5 with the much less varying TSI of Lean 2002.
Dr Svalgaard
Science is not decided by consensus, but by results which lead to predictions. The way forward is to make predictions and open up your methods and data to inspection.
One day we will put out the sun
And drain the sky
The temperature decreases.
Watch the frozen seas, as my pulse go
down.
The king has lost its crown.
Cold sun, will never shine.
Freezing clouds, ready to fall.
Killing us all.
REPLY: Evan buddy, it’s late. Go to bed. I am. G’nite
Dr Svalgaard is maddeningly scientific in his approach …I have read each and every comment, ~3000 of them, on the Svalgaard threads at CA. While I think (and he admits this is possible) he may be wrong on some of his reconstructions or views, everything that he has stated and presented that I have seen is available for review on his website.
Leif challenges people to think about the physical model for a pet theory. And yet he appears to be cautiously enthusiastic when people or papers present physical explanations that move beyond a “what if” — toward expanding the science overall.
Anyway, this was what he stated about the article above …Tuesday at CA:
Yes and No. The Science paper was shorter [less detail] but had the extra speculation that we may be in for a Maunder Minimum. With cooling, and that is against the science that ‘is settled’ and so requires more proof [like the Potomac freezing over in July]. The detailed paper you refer to was accepted by Astrophysical Journal (Letters) and is solid work. I have his data up through March 2008, confirming the trend. It may be that the spots were are seeing for SC24 are so small and weak simply because Livingston is correct. That all spots will disappear in 2015 may be a bit of a stretch, but, hey, the Sun has done it before.
So if you missed the droll sarcasm above, being Norwegian+Danish+Swedish+French myself, it goes good with a bit of lutefisk, romegrot, and lefse …
but had the extra speculation that we may be in for a Maunder Minimum. With cooling, and that is against the science that ‘is settled’ and so requires more proof [like the Potomac freezing over in July].
🙂
I seem to recall reading somewhere that the Sun’s great conveyor belt had slowed considerably – “off the bottom of the charts” was the phrase I think.
Does this have any influence on sunspots and what are the consequences for the earth’s climate?
There is a very funny story on how Science rejected a proposed paper by two young post grads on the effect of removing the bursa of Fabricius on the production of antibodies in chickens.
Science refused to publish the article because “everyone” knew the immune system had only the humoral response. Glick and Chang proposed there was more to the immune system than just the production of antibodies in response to infection. That something more was the cell mediated portion of the immune system, the T-cells and so forth.
According to the theories of immunology currently in vogue, the chickens without antibodies should have gotten sick. But they didn’t. So something else must have been protecting the chickens.
In reality, Glick and Chang learned two things:
The bursa of Fabricius was responsible for producing antibodies in chickens (and all other birds)
and
There was another part of the immune system in chickens.
While the bursa of Fabricius had been discovered centuries before, no one knew what it did. This led many to label the organ as vestigial. In other words, we don’t know what this does, so it does nothing. How many of us would wish to do without the equivalent in our system known as B-cells? A similar story surrounds the thymus.
In any event, the two researchers finally got their paper published in the Poultry Science journal, sometimes I wonder if the Colonel perused that journal.
Funny is it not?
Science missed the opportunity to publish one of the most important documents in immunology because the reviewers refused to seriously consider the actual data from the experiments.
I also think it is funny because the reason given for rejecting an article because it was statistical. Aren’t the results of all experiments statistical? To be consistent wouldn’t Science have been compelled to reject the work of James Lind on scurvy because it was statistical in nature?
Eppure, si rinfresca
john A: Consensus here simply means that all groups have reached the same result by different methods using publically available data [World Data Centers]. The work of all groups has been published in peer-reviewed journals and discussed openly at scientific meetings and at open seminars at universities and research centers, in addition to being publically available on the web at http://www.leif.org/research.
My big problem with Leif is his use of double standards.
For example, he has no problem with assuming that water vapor is a strong positive feedback even though there is no science to back up such an assumption. (Indeed, the science that has accumulated shows at worst, a weak positive, if not an outright negative feedback).
On the other hand, he has declared that any use of cosmic rays in climate studies must be avoided until the link is proven.
There is much more data supporting CR’s then there is supporting positive feedback water vapor.
For all of you discussing OHC & the missing heat:
Here’s Hansen’s smoking gun page:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Study/HeatBucket/heatbucket3.html
Here’s his OHC chart:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Study/HeatBucket/Images/ocean_heat.gif
What I find curious about the OHC measurements: Hansen’s chart clearly shows the el Nino.
The chart implies a sudden acceleration of heat accumulation in the ocean in 1998. But to me that’s more of a metric of heat exchange, or an outpouring of heat.
Wouldn’t a huge event like the ’98 el Nino be a heat-exchange mechanism that resets Hansen’s trend line to a lower level?
Makes me think what the data are really might be somewhat the amount of heat being pushed back out by the oceans.