On Climate Audit’s unthreaded comment forum, David Archibald noted some interesting facts about the solar cycle lengths and upcoming Solar Cycle 24, and provided the graph above.
Solar Cycle 20 was slightly longer than average at 11.6 years. The average solar cycle length from 1643 to 1996 is 11.4 years. Now that Dr Svalgaard has mentioned it, let’s talk about Solar Cycle 21. It was short at 10.3 years and hot (it started at the same time as the PDO shift in 1976) and was followed by a solar cycle 22 which was shorter again at 9.6 years and hotter. According to Friis-Christensen and Lassen theory, Solar Cycle 23 should have been hotter than Solar Cycle 22, and it was, even thought it is going to be a long one at about 13 years. There is plenty of correlation, all in our lifetimes. As for the physics, Hathaway found a correlation between Solar Cycle Length and the amplitude of the following cycle.
As for Solar Cycle 23 being almost done with, those are comforting words but the observational data suggests otherwise. Jan Janssens does it best – a recent plot is above. That suggests that we have a year to go and that Solar Cycle 23 is likely to be 13 years long. This is 3.4 years longer than Solar Cycle 22 and thus with mid-latitude temperatures responding at the rate of 0.7 degrees C per year of solar cycle length, Solar Cycle 24 will be 2.4 degrees cooler than the one we are still in.
The Financial Post has a story (Our Quiet Sun) that is echoing much of what Archibald is saying, but is quoting from other sources:
The sun, of late, is remarkably free of eruptions: It has lost its spots. By this point in the solar cycle, sunspots would ordinarily have been present in goodly numbers. Today’s spotlessness — what alarms Dr. Chapman and others — may be an anomaly of some kind, and the sun may soon revert to form. But if it doesn’t – and with each passing day, the speculation in the scientific community grows that it will not – we could be entering a new epoch that few would welcome.
Joe D’Aleo did an essay on IntelliCast on the possible consequences of a Solar Cycle 23 running out to 13 years, using some of the same things Archibald is saying:
Looking back at the full record of sunspot cycles, we can see this general behavior of short active cycles and longer, quiet ones. Successive 11 year cycles are different in their magnetic fields and the 22 year Hale cycle has in the past been related to some phenomena such as drought. Longer term cycles are apparent when you carefully examine the data. Very obvious from the long term plot of the 11 year cycles is the approximate 100 (106) year cycle. There is also a 213 year cycle. The last 213 minimum was in the early 1800s. The turn of each of the last 3 centuries has started with quiet long cycles with mid-century shorter, higher amplitude cycles. The quietest period was in the early 1800s (the Dalton Minimum). The 100 and 200 year minima are due the next decade suggesting a quieter sun ahead.
I’ll take Global Warming any day of the week and twice on Sundays over a Little Ice Age.
RE: Paul Clark (06:10:32) :
The inverse fourier x-form is particularly disturbing. If you view slope as a leading indicator of a wave form break point / slate transition, we are in for some challenging times.
Leif Svalgaard:
🙂
OK, I confess. I went to Mephistopheles and bought the Earth some solar offsets. It’s my soul, but its a good bargain against humanity’s great original sin of CO2. I figured it’d be better to rule in a CO2 Hell than to serve in a Green Heaven. Besides I was going to hell anyway.
I’d love to get your impression on C. Shindell’s climate study of the Little Ice Age…
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NasaNews/2001/200112065794.html
http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/topstory/20011207iceage.html
His study claims a -0.3 to -0.4 degrC change in GST during the Maunder. That’s modest compared to a less than a 1 degrC decrease in GST mentioned by you or your colleagues last year.
Also you or your colleagues commented last year that the deeper the crash, the longer the trend. Janssen’s spotless days trend is admittedly a statistical trend match, but then we have the observed slowdown in sunspot group movement:
From PhyOrg (below)
“…According to theory and observation, the speed of the belt foretells the intensity of sunspot activity ~20 years in the future. A slow belt means lower solar activity; a fast belt means stronger activity.”
http://www.physorg.com/news66581392.html
Any sense of what magnitude downtrend or “crash” can be predicted by the implicit speed of the internal conveyor? Would the projected dip in SC 25 be already evident in some nascent trend in SC 23 – 24 transit?
Or is this all so on the bleeding-edge of science that it’s anybody’s guess!?
In any case, thanks for joining in with us knaves and apostates.
Bob: No need to show [to me at least] that it has cooled a bit and that the PDO has turned negative [and will probably stay so for another 30 years]. Solar activity goes in ‘cycles’, some short ~11 years, some longer ~100 years, perhaps some longer yet [we don’t know for sure]. Some of these coincide some of the time with climate ‘cycles’. It has become convenient to dump everything on the Sun: “If it’s not solar, what else is it?” Fact is that in 400 years of looking, no generally accepted mechanism has been found for how the solar activity influences weather or climate. There is no lack of ‘crackpot’ theories [and a very few ‘scientific’ ones but with no legs]. At a recent sun/climate meeting I asked one of the modelers [David Rind] why some of ‘modern’ theories [like cosmic rays] were not included in their models. The answer was that the purported influence had not been ‘quantified’, let alone physically explained except in the vaguest of term and hence could not be modeled. I would love that the Sun was the culprit [would make my line of work potentially lucrative], but I have not seen how it might work. You tell me, but not by appealing to “what else can it be”.
Hi all, just a lurker with nothing much to add, except maybe the observation that no-one really understands the earth’s climate, do they? And I keep hearing from so many that “the science is settled”. I wonder why.
the longer cycle 23 should have been cooler than 22 and it was not.
There is the bug, Mr. Svalgaard
That’s a statement which requires error bars, or confidence levels.
The only basis you can have to make that statement is whether you trust GISS and HADCRU’s definition of average world temperature for the early 20th century.
From what I have seen GISS and Hadcru past temperature measurements are variable, and move down at whim.
papertiger: Why is it that you do not require error bars on Archibald’s statement:
“According to Friis-Christensen and Lassen theory, Solar Cycle 23 should have been hotter than Solar Cycle 22, and it was”
but only on mine: “the longer cycle 23 should have been cooler than 22, and it was not.”
See for yourself:
Would you care to put error bars on your statement: “From what I have seen GISS and Hadcru past temperature measurements are variable, and move down at whim.”
Leif, you cleverly volleyed the question back to me. Let me rephrase: If it’s not solar, and if natural oceanic oscillations can only explain, let’s say, half of the drop in current temperatures, what else is driving them down so drastically?
papertiger: I guess the image wouldn’t show. My point was that the true difference between cycles 22 and 23 is the same for both statements regardless of error bars, and that FC-L’s ‘theory’ is simply misquoted by Archibald. It’s the other way around. Error bars have nothing to do with my pointing out that Archibald misquotes FC-L.
leebert: The Shindell 2001 paper was based on solar input [TSI] that has since been shown to overestimate the dimness of the Sun during the little ice age, so no wonder that they find a larger effect. The 1 degree change you quote is not my number.
According to the same Hathaway, cycle 24 should be one of the biggest cycles ever. His prediction is in line with that of Dikpati et al. who also predict a very large cycle 24. Other people [including myself] predict the ‘smallest cycle in a 100 years’ based on the observed variation of the Sun’s polar magnetic field. That we disagree is a measure of the ‘state-of-the-art’. As should be evident, SC 24 will be a good test and show which is the more fruitful path to take.
Very interesting stuff.
Bob: your “if natural oceanic oscillations can only explain, let’s say, half of the drop in current temperatures” is based on what? Assuming you have an explanation, how would you explain that the Sun is responsible for the rest? Maybe it is preferable to tweak your explanation of the first half to include the second half than to ascribe this second half to an unknown and unexplained solar cause…
Now that the sun is quiet and the magnetic field essentially turned off, wouldn’t the time to study the sun’s affects on climate be now? Not when cycle 24 turns the magnetic field back on, deflecting all the atomic particles we could be measuring? What groups do we have out there who are actively measuring the terribly quiet sun?
CERN has a recent paper out.
http://aps.arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0804/0804.1938v1.pdf
Would CERN be classified as of the crackpot theory realm or one of the very few ‘scientific’ ones with no legs? Are those the only possibilities? Isn’t that a false dilemma?
There are no other choices? None?
DG: as Kirkby’s paper states: “solar-climate variability is likely to remain controversial until a physical mechanism is established”. His paper is a level-headed review, and concludes that the jury is still out on this. One problem for the cosmic ray mechanism is that, at least on a time scale of less than millions of years, we can’t get more cosmic rays than we get now at no solar activity, so it is hard to explain large temperature drops in the past [or the future] in this way. And are there no other choices? I don’t know of any.
Pamela: the sun’s magnetic field is not turned off. The large-scale solar magnetic field is dragged out into interplanetary space by the solar wind. Even with no solar activity this interplanetary magnetic field is still there as a kind of ‘floor’ or background under which the magnetic fields does not fall. In numbers the field is now [at rock-bottom] between 4 and 5 nanoTesla [the Earth’s field is 10,000 times as large]. At solar maximum, the interplanetary magnetic field roughly doubles to 8-10 nT. There is intense activity concerning measurements of solar parameters by spacecraft and also on the ground.
Leif Svalgaard:
Hi Leif,
Thanks for the reply. I find your reply intriguing in that Shindell set a bigger drop in TSI to achieve the observed global cooling specifically for the Maunder Minimum.
Well. I could take that both ways in that it doesn’t particularly exculpate the sun then, either. In other words the thought that a lesser TSI decrease could still drive a climate trend like the LIA is – erm, well – cold comfort indeed. 🙂
Another possibility, OTOH, is that Shindell inadvertently overlooked other effects held over from the antecedent Sporer. Or perhaps wood-fuel aerosols prevalent at the time were more reflective than our contemporary observations would indicate.
Would it help explain the severity of the middle LIA in that the Sporer had already ushered in the deeper coolth of the Maunder, perhaps via already-lower OHC?
Either way, it may well that a minor decrease in TSI is required then to render a working climate model for the middle LIA, given other cooling factors that can also be applied.
It may be trite to say that manifold overlapping subtractive phase troughs were sure to line up eventually, ala Milankovitch, but then the odds of it raining somewhere in the Texas Panhandle eventually becomes “1.”
Sorry, my bad. I guess that was a statement by Weiss. Solanki was saying something in the range of -0.2 degrC. I’m really not looking for precision, regardless.
Again, not to turn your statement around, it’s hard to just set aside the apparent solar role in the LIA when there are other strong correlations between solar activity and climate found in mud core (net ocean productivity) and ice core data (C14 & Be10 if memory serves).
I’ll be thinking about whether this sets the bar lower for climate sensitivity to a solar dimming (or solar brightening). I feel it reasonable to speculate a bit, but to remind myself I am speculating.
IAC Shindell’s study was a nice first try but I hope it’s high time someone gave it another go with better constraints.
re: Hathaway & Dikpati
🙂
I don’t even know where you disagree! Or why! But, hey, since you’re scientists that’s part of your job description.
Well, as a layman I will just merrily suggest that Hathaway’s conveyor / SSG motion metrics can still be invalidated on SC24 with SC24 as a transition cycle while paradoxically validated on SC 25, claiming that inconsistency is a “good thing.”
Wouldn’t it be odd that the conveyor could slow so substantially w/out any other contemporary effects? After all, if Hathaway’s conveyor theory has any merit, unexpected perturbations during broader regime shifts could only be modeled properly after the fact. I surmise it’s reasonable for a model to be predictive until an equilibrium shift where suddenly parameters are out of scope for the model.
Makes me wonder though. I could imagine a whole-systems approach might entail the internal conveyor as well as the magnetic dynamo (but maybe not Landscheit’s astrology :-).
And after all these years of fluid dynamics research, it looks like it’s still hard to do. I remember watching a geofluid dynamics lab with a vat of Van Camps chili beans burbling in a basement at FSU in Tallahassee. Is solar plasma all that different?
Thanks again Leif.
Leif
I think it makes sense to expect most external flux parameters to have stable minimum baselines.
Seems to me the contemporary sun is like that as well, that it’s still warming the Earth even if it goes through periods almost devoid of UV- & near IR-emitting faculae. And the baseline for geomagnetic storms is, well, zero (with a quiet ionosphere & lousy shortwave propagation).
Just as with AGW isn’t this about a few gigawatts difference relative to the total petawatt-scale energy hitting the Earth or the terawatt-scale energy in the ionosphere during magnetic storms?
The Milankovitch mechanism appeals from the paleo record, but there are problems like unexpected glacial synchrony across the equator. Glaciation should start in one hemisphere 500 – 1,000 years later than the other due to Milankovitch asymmetric hemispheric bias and the equatorial thermal barrier, but they don’t. Instead both hemispheres have glaciated simultaneously.
A colder planet is a drier planet. And a drier planet is a colder planet until a base minimum is reached. Likewise a warmer world is wetter and a wetter world is warmer, until a maximum is met.
So it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity. Surprise, surprise! Deriving CO2 climate sensitivity from the paleo record seems like a long shot to me. Then again we’re toward the top of a Milankovitch max, & tho nobody’s claiming we’re ready to head into a Milankovitch cooling, hey, it might be time. I doubt it, but who knows?
Or, maybe it’s just a bunch of blue moons lined up out there somewhere beaming bozo rays into the Earth. It’d explain a great deal more far more quickly than all this endless climate trivia…. 😉
SteveSadlov: Be very careful about ascribing any meaning to the end-points after a DFT/IDFT transform – DFT requires that the signal is repeating and hence the end-points join up, so the marked drop at the end is mainly there to match the low numbers at the beginning.
To see this, compare these two curves:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/sidc-ssn/fourier/low-pass:8/inverse-fourier/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1778/fourier/low-pass:7/inverse-fourier
The green one starts from a year with a high SSN, so it ends on a high as well (I’ve adjusted the harmonic to roughly correspond to the change in data range).
I should flag this each time I produce one of these – sorry.
Ow! Brain muscle spasm! My “middle school teacher” observation of the cosmic ray data led me to conclude that the magnetic shield must be turned off in order for these particles to be hitting the measuring plates here on earth (and in spacecraft). Thanks for the clarification. But in lay terms, and since I don’t have the vocabulary necessary to speak of detail, would you say that for purposes related to earth, the magnetic shield of the sun in essence gets turned off because it is going somewhere else?
…and is the solar wind wind from the sun or is it more accurate to say that this wind is also universally cosmic in origin? What are the sources of this wind? Why is this wind sometimes weak and sometimes strong? I know why it is here on earth but what kind of pressure changes occur “out there”? Is the wind pulled or pushed? And can you help explain the twisting of the magnetic coils in the different sections of the sun? If these do twist, aren’t there equations that have been formulated regarding “twisting” mechanisms in general from the field of physical science? Finally, if the sun rotates at different speeds which theoretically is the source of the twisting, wouldn’t the sections from time to time, start together, much like a slightly off-timed set of windshield wipers? If watched long enough, the wipers set off in synch, if only for a couple of swipes. Couldn’t the sun do that too, for a couple of cycles or more?
So many questions, so little time. Is there a rosetta stone language program for this stuff?
leebert: Before ~2005, the various reconstructions of TSI had a large [several W/m2] drop back to the Maunder. This was put in there by the people (Lean and others) partly to match what they felt was needed to account for the little ice age, so there is a certain amount of circular reasoning here. What Shindell did was to show that that guess was not too bad. Unfortunately, studies of the Sun have shown that such a large drop in TSI is doubtful, so we are back to square one on that one.
Hathaway et al. and I et al. disagree on the size of cycle 24: very large or very small. The latest helioseismic observations may even show that there is no conveyor belt at all. At the latest AGU meeting just concluded there was this poster:
SP41A-07
TI: Solar Interior Meridional Flows using Zonal Modes from GONG
AU: * Leibacher, J W
EM: jleibacher@nso.edu
AF: GONG Program National Solar Observatory, 950 N. Cherry Avenue, Tucson, AZ 85719, United States
AU: Kholikov, S
EM: skholikov@nso.edu
AF: GONG Program National Solar Observatory, 950 N. Cherry Avenue, Tucson, AZ 85719, United States
AB: We present two different time-distance techniques to measure meridional-flow-induced travel-time differences. We use GONG zonal spherical harmonic coefficients ( m = 0 ) and longitude-averaged time series for the 1995 — 2007 time period. Both data sets represents isolated waves propagating only in the North — South direction. We demonstrate that it is possible to obtain travel-time differences with lower turning point about 200 Mm, which correspond to the tachocline region. We do not see any evidence of equatorward flow.
That is: the bottom part of the conveyor belt seems to be missing or at least not at depth where it was expected.
Treatment of fluid flows within the Sun is vastly complicated by the fact that the fluid is electrically conducting. In fact, our models have given up and prescribe the flow [called a kinematic dynamo to cover up our ignorance with fancy words].
All of this is very exciting and is part of the normal scientific advance on many fronts. This is not a time to despair; rather to exult. We just have to be aware that we don’t know much about the Sun-Earth-Planet System to make long-term policy, except that it is always good , regardless, to be prudent and not squander resources, etc.
” I think we are in for a few low cycles. … In my opinion, the Earth’s atmosphere will NOT cool dramatically [i.e. more than a tenth or two of a degree, if at all] as a result.”
I would concur-a wild guess is the best one can do. Anthony has blogged extensively on the problematic ‘Global Temperature’ so verfication will leave weasel room regardless and the TSI calculations (G&T) are pointless.
Leif and Dave A. (2 degrees) differ by an order of magnitude. June 2, 2008. Mark the tape.
The Canadians have been tracking solar magnetic activity since 1946. From their site: The 10.7cm flux is an acceptable proxy for solar energy output, ultraviolet flux, soft X-ray flux, sunspot number and area, and total magnetic flux.
Their data agrees that we are in a period of a very quiet sun.
http://www.drao-ofr.hia-iha.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/icarus/www/sol_home.html
pamela: The solar wind is simply the solar atmosphere boiling off into space because it is so very hot [a million degrees]. It drags the Sun’s magnetic field with it. The Sun is rotating [once in 25 days], so the wind coming from a particular point on the Sun is forming a spiral, like water drops from a rotation garden hose. The magnetic field thus has a spiral configuration. With increasing distance from the Sun this spiral gets wound tighter and tighter. The ‘wind’ is gusty and the wound and tangled magnetic fields impede the entry into the solar system of cosmic rays from the galaxy, so the stronger the wind and the field, the more cosmic rays are turned away. This whole process is most efficient when there are many sunspots so the will be a cycle in the cosmic ray modulation and also in the wind and magnetic fields that hit the Earth.
Hi Lief…
WRT to the LIA, TSI is dead. Long live TSI.
The conveyor belt is dead! Long live the conveyor belt!
Hmmm. I’m an inquisitive fellow, but the internet isn’t as informative on this stuff as I wish it were.
OK, careening off to another point of wild speculation …. [now hold your breath, here it comes] …..
Are aurora counted in TSI?
[ now if a muffled guffaw comes from other end of the ethernet packet, let me know, I like a joke! ]
OK, just bear with me for one more paragraph….
I’ve read that electrons from magnetic particle storms are purported to be quite warm, and a good particle storm brings in terawatts of energy into the ionosphere. And it’s my understanding that TSI is mostly just IR & UV bands, and that TSI can drop during big storms saturated from sunspots lacking visible faculae.
Which leads me to the (perhaps outrageous) question:
What percentage of would be IR (or NIR potentially advected into IR) that could warm the upper atmosphere? These particle storms last several hours and bring with them terawatts of energy. I wonder how much of it is heat?
It’s my understanding that 1 degr C of global warming equiv. to 1.7 gW/sec around the globe. But if solar storms are adding any amt of heat into the system, even a fraction of the terawatts of power I’d like to think that might be factored in to a broader model of solar influence.
I’ve also read there’s a So. Atlantic Anomaly in the magnetosphere that permits the Van Allen belt to drop into the ionosphere. Apparently it’s a radiation hazard for spacecraft. Another locus of particle energy injection?
Paradoxically I’ve read that cosmic rays may induce ozone-destroying NO2 that will rain down on the Antarctic and cause warming there (from a recent study). But if so for cosmic rays, then why not the same NO2 effect from highly energetic aurora particles?
As for the conveyor belt, well, Hathaway seemed so pleased with his SSG motion data. Really though, it seems that a convective layer ought to have a convective current! Does Jupiter have one?
OK, that was six extra paragraphs. If you’ve made it this far I’ll show you my gratitude by shutting up. 🙂
/leebert