From Australia’s Canberra Times:
NSW Treasurer Michael Costa is understood to be among a small group of Australian politicians and other opinion-shapers to embrace this notion.
It is wise to be sceptical of many Russian scientists and all politicians, so I have given this ”solar forcing” explanation of global warming little credence until I attended a forum at the Academy of Science earlier this year and heard it from a scientist of undoubted integrity and expertise in this area. A former head of CSIRO’s division of space science, Dr Ken McCracken was awarded the Australia Prize the precursor of the Prime Minister’s Science Prize in 1995. Now in his 80s, officially retired and raising cattle in the ACT hinterland, he is still very active in his research field of solar physics.
McCracken is adamantly not a climate change sceptic, agreeing that rising fossil-fuel emissions will be a long-term cause of rising global temperatures.
But his analysis of the sun’s cyclical activity and global climate records has led him to the view that we are entering a period of up to two decades in which reduced solar activity may either flatten the upward trend of global temperatures or even cause a slight and temporary cooling. In a paper given in 2005 to a ”soiree” hosted by then president of the Academy of Science, Professor Jim Peacock, McCracken said the sun was the most active it had been over 1000 years of scientific observation. This made it inevitable that its activity would decrease over the next two decades in line with historically observed solar cycles.
”The reduced ‘forcing’ might compensate, or over-compensate, for the effects of the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases,” he said. ”It is likely that there will be a cessation of around 20 years in the increase in world temperature, or possibly a decrease by 0.1 [degrees] or more.”
I put this to Dr David Jones, head of climate analysis for the Bureau of Meteorology’s National Climate Centre, whose overarching judgment is that the warming effect of fossil fuel emissions is an increasingly dominant factor on global temperature to the extent that it will not be slowed by lower solar activity.
After an email conversation, Jones said he and McCracken are in general agreement but differ on emphasis and one key judgment. ”Natural solar variability is potentially important, but the climate history and physics tell us that the probability of this factor sufficiently cooling the planet to offset the enhanced greenhouse effect is distinctly remote,” Jones wrote.
The main point of disagreement was McCracken’s view that the rate of global warming could be eased or reduced by a fall in solar activity. ”I have never seen a credible paper published using a climate model that shows this,” Jones wrote.
He points to recent data which indicates that global temperatures are probably rising faster than previously thought, raising the urgency of calls from climate scientists for political action to reduce emissions. Yet any uncertainty over the sun’s influence creates a lever that climate sceptics and developing nations will seize upon to stall such action.
If McCracken is wrong and temperatures continue to climb during a decade or two of low solar activity, the need for emissions reductions will be dramatically reinforced.
However, if temperatures do not rise over this period, steeling the political will for such action by all nations will be much more difficult.
The dilemma for the science sector is a classic: how to communicate uncertainty.
As McCracken rightly observed in 2005, a lull in temperature rises would provide a wonderful opportunity for political and technological effort to gain the initiative in the fight against climate change by turning global emissions around and thus hopefully avoid worst-case warming scenarios when the sun’s fires stoke up again mid-century.
But he also noted the risk that mainstream climate science, led by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, would be seen by its critics and others to have been ill-informed at best or misleading at worst, diminishing its credibility and eroding political commitment to emission reductions.
McCracken believes science should be upfront. ”I believe that we must state firmly that a cooling is possible in the near future, but that the warming would then resume 10-20 years hence,” he said via email. ”It will be very hard to argue for public trust if we say nothing about the possibility, and then try to argue our way out after it happens. Using an Aussie rules analogy, that would be like giving the climate sceptics a free kick 10m in front of goal.”
Australia is definitely entering a footy finals period, and the Earth may be entering a period where human-induced global warming slows temporarily. Many scientists will not be comfortable to consider this possibility, and even less comfortable that journalists canvas it, because in good faith they want nothing to deflect efforts to combat global warming.
However, I have always aimed to tell readers what they deserve to know, not what they may want to hear or what governments, scientists or interest groups would prefer they were told. This has earned me brickbats and bouquets over the years, as it should do, and as I expect it will on this occasion.
Simon Grose is Canberra correspondent for Science Media.
www.sciencemedia.com.au
You have to marvel at these AGW believers. Anything can happen to our climate and nothing disproves the AGW dogma — even 20 years of cooling. Now that is a true testament to faith. McCracken wants to innoculate the AGW conviction from falsifiabilty by having the scientific community acknowledge the possibility of an intermediate cooling period — but that warming will come back again in perhaps 20 years. What a racket.
If we are headed for cooling, one logically has to wonder what portion of the roughly 0.6 – 0.8 C of 20th century warming was caused by the upswing in this very same cycle. And as AW has demonstrated at surfacestations, surely a significant of portion of this warming is also a result of poor station siting / UHI and related factors. That leaves little room for a prominent role of CO2.
In fact, if one dissects the lower troposphere temperature record from 1979-2007, once can discern very little background trend from ’79 – 97. And again, very little trend from ’98-07. What one does see is an interesting temperature “step” starting in 1998, a step for sure but one that remains essentially flat after ’98. This hardly looks like the fingerprint of CO2.
OT, Anthony, are you planning a post on this:
http://www.astroengine.com/?p=678
a new paper on sun spots.
REPLY: I published on it back on June 2nd:
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/06/02/livingston-and-penn-paper-sunspots-may-vanish-by-2015/
Everybody else is just catching up. – Anthony
“He points to recent data which indicates that global temperatures are probably rising faster than previously thought…”
Any clues as to what this refers to?
“The main point of disagreement was McCracken’s view that the rate of global warming could be eased or reduced by a fall in solar activity. ”I have never seen a credible paper published using a climate model that shows this,” Jones wrote.
He points to recent data which indicates that global temperatures are probably rising faster than previously thought, raising the urgency of calls from climate scientists for political action to reduce emissions.”
Say what? Where is this recent data that “indicates global temperatures are probably rising faster than previously thought”??
Global cooling, BUT……
AGW theory will end up in Nature’s court, with a jury of open-minded scientists, and found guilty. Sentenced to the death penalty.
This is just ridiculous. Human GHG’s driving the climate warmer, yet nature will cool it. So WHO”S driving it?
I haven’t seen any climate licenses being issued to anybody.
My memory is weird. I remembered the graph you posted with the step change in October of 2005, but, the paper on the sunspots I didn’t remember at all!!
From Icecap.us:
Leif Svalgard noted on Solar Cylce 24 forum relative to this paper that “There was a tiny pore on Aug 22nd, 2008. Bill Livingston measured its magnetic field and tells me today that it was 1931 Gauss. You may verify for yourself that that falls straight on his projected line. BTW, he has many other data points now between the last data shown on the plot and this latest one, and they also confirm the trend.
McCracken certainly is a man of faith. CO2 causes the apocalypse, but the sun does too, and sometimes the sun can stop the apocalypse as long as it wants. If the apocalypse is stopped long enough, an even worse apocalypse will develop: the apocalypse of refusing to stop the apocalypse for an apocalyptically long time. Kill me. Also, how stupid is this Dr. David Jones? It doesn’t matter how many different global temperature datasets you look at. The world’s warming trend has come to a screeching halt at least and at most is significantly cooling(as long as you put it on a sneaky graph). He says data indicates the temperature is rising faster than ever. What data Dr. Jones? Or should I say, WTF?
”I have never seen a credible paper published using a climate model that shows this,” Jones wrote.
Is there a credible climate model on which to base a credible paper?
Flowers4Stalin (21:54:53) Fully endorsed, Flowers. You write everything I want to say in regard this bloke and his story, thank you.
And, yes, you should say WTF.
I like how global warming is going to stop just long enough for the solar minimum, or whatever we are entering into, to pass. Then it will be back to business as usual. How absurd! I thought we were more powerful than nature. What happened to the runaway warming GHGs were going to cause? Where’s my 3.5 degrees C rise in temperatures hmm? And if nature is strong enough to cancel out man’s warming, then she is also strong enough to override it. And where, oh where, is the evidence that for years seemingly nature has been just behind mankind as the leading cause of global warming. I want to see the mathematics. I want somebody to explain to me how man’s signal and nature’s signal are so similar that until one made a clear deviation there was no telling which was different, and with man’s activity being clearer and more well understood that it just somehow HAD TO BE us and not natural forces.
I’m beginning to think that AGW contortioning should to be an Olympic sport. Certainly there are enough competitors across the globe. And, hey, even at age 80 you can still compete with the young whippersnappers!
”Natural solar variability is potentially important, but the climate history and physics tell us that the probability of this factor sufficiently cooling the planet to offset the enhanced greenhouse effect is distinctly remote,” Jones wrote.
Dr David Jones, head of climate analysis for the Bureau of Meteorology’s National Climate Centre.
Okay, somebody remember that this guy said this. So if the Sun does stay as it is, and temperatures do drop, we can all say we told you so – right before they start congratulating themselves on all the new “green” technology developed that will undoubtedly attribute to the cooling of global temperatures – if they don’t first manipulate the data to correct for it.
OT, Icecap has an abstract and review of the Livingston, et al., paper as well, which are lighter reading.
Maybe its a Maunder after all. ‘Interesting times’ is looking positively anorexic as our forecast.
38 days without a sunspot – the recent activity which saw “proto-spots” around 21 August has not been officially registered as a spot number.
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ftpdir/latest/DSD.txt
This ranks us at 15 for the longest run of consecutive spotless days at
http://users.telenet.be/j.janssens/Spotless/Spotless.html#Period
”I believe that we must state firmly that a cooling is possible in the near future, but that the warming would then resume 10-20 years hence,” he said via email. ”It will be very hard to argue for public trust if we say nothing about the possibility, and then try to argue our way out after it happens. Using an Aussie rules analogy, that would be like giving the climate sceptics a free kick 10m in front of goal.”
Again, this is so absurd it’s laughable. Cooling is a possibility? I thought the solar activity causing cooling was at best “remote.” And if that is so, what is causing the “possible” cooling? You know, I don’t think that I can give much credibility to the idea that cooling is a possibility because I’ve also never seen a credible paper published that had a climate model showing THAT!
But there you go. There is the whole strategy. Get out ahead of it and say something like “we were expecting this, so it doesn’t change anything.” It reminds me of when I was a teenager. I was always saying “I know that” to my parents; they could never tell me anything I didn’t already know. And if I already “knew” it, that meant their opinions and judgments on the subject did not matter because I was right NO MATTER WHAT. Yep, that’s exactly what this reminds me of.
I believe this is a fine example of cognitive dissonance.
Or, to put it in the vernacular, cover your ears and sing, “la-la-la” as loud as possible and you won’t hear anything disagreeable.
Like I’ve noted before, the climate will likely cool for several decades, but AGW proponents will say it’s masking the warming. Then when warming again resumes, about the time the coming ice age prophets of doom are dancing about the maypole, the AGW theory will be resurrected. And so it goes…
If you compare actual temperature change to a projection Hansen included in a 1981 paper, the increase up to 2000 is near the upper range of his projection.
Perhaps claims that temperatures were rising faster than expected were based on an an analysis done around 1998 just after the super el nino, when temperatures may have been near the upper range of projections (i.e. above the expected average, but not above the expected range)
Hansen has claimed that if solar activity stopped dead – i.e. repeat of Maunder minimum, then co2 warming would be offset for 7 years. Uncertainties quoted in IPCC state that the solar influence may be 2 to 3 times as much as high as the average figure quoted. So unless Hansen figured the 7 years on the upper possible range for solar sensitivity, then maybe a 20 year pause in global warming is just barely possible if solar activity comes to a dead stop.
But I’d be willing to bet its very very unlikely.
“Global temperatures are probably rising faster than previously thought” and “I have never seen a credible paper published using a climate model that shows this”. Is the Australia where Dr David Jones lives on a different planet, one where climate models have a physical basis and some validity?
I don’t really want to comment on the various opinions, but I would like to say that Ken McCracken is a good friend of ours and is a fine scientist with a long record of outstanding research, so ad-hom comments and attacks are misplaced.
Yes folks, the global cooling is going to go away, just like the global warming went away!
The questions is before or after the next ice age!
One really harsh winter with global temps back to 1970s levels will end this fraud. The patience of the general public is far from infinite. People are already skeptical of carbon indulgences. A few inches of snow in Malibu and even the Hollywood crowd will turn.
Hopefully CAGW adherents will CONTINUE to deny that ANY cooling is happening. The more they shape charts to hide recent trends, the better. The more ground readings are proven to be adjusted upwards on average, the sooner people will doubt. More CAGW shrill rudeness and threats against skeptics will also help in finishing this. In other words, more of the same. The warmists have proven themselves too emotionally, professionally and financially invested to ever admit the possibility that the CAGW theory is flawed.
When enough people see that the seas have not risen, that polar bears are safe, that they have been propagandized for years… they’ll start looking for statues to topple. If CAGW measures have led to starvation, freezing deaths, ruinous costs, power outages and widespread privation, statues alone won’t do.
Someone will have to take the blame. Gore is too well connected, and isn’t a scientist. I’m betting on Hansen… when he called for jailing anyone who disagreed with him, he volunteered for this role. When the pendulum swings back, it will take a few victims.
The anger is already out there. I’m reminded of the old Chinese proverb, “If you don’t change the road you’re on, you’ll get to where you’re going.”
@ur momisugly Michael Hauber (23:20:08) :
Hansen has claimed that if solar activity stopped dead – i.e. repeat of Maunder minimum, then co2 warming would be offset for 7 years.
That sounds almost like a biblical reference …
IPCC spokepersons have attributed the apparent 8 year cooling to three things. 1, natural variability in the climate system, 2, volcanic activity, & 3, reduced solar ouput. Well, as I humbly understand it all, natural variability in the climate system is what the “sceptics” have been saying for 30 years, there has been no significant volcanic activity over the last 10-15 years, unless you include the Cheiten eruption in Chile which shouldn’t affect things for a year or so, & as for reduced solar output – a power source the IPCC has been denouncing & belittling in potency for 20 years, this really does take the whole incompetence & mendacity to new peaks! On another point, AR4 gave total radiative forcing at 1.66w/m², a little over 1% of the total greenhouse effect of about 149w/m², really scary, hey?
McCracken is responding to a definite groundshift here in Australia. AGW scepticism is getting a foothold in the mainstream media here so the self preserving strategies will begin to roll. Australian 60 Minutes did a sceptic piece a few weeks ago and some major newspapers are coming out as sceptics also. The tipping point they are suddenly worried about is the one where the MSM drops them like a hot potato. They are already uncomfortable with even gentle questioning – so how will they cope when journalists start calling them liars. Matty, Perth
”I have never seen a credible paper published using a climate model
that shows this,” Jones wrote.Fixed it.