No we aren’t talking pianos, but Grand Solar Minimums. Today a new milestone was reached. As you can see below, we’ve been leading up to it for a few years.
(Update: based on comments, I’ve updated the graph above to show the 2004 solar max by sliding the view window to the left a bit compared to the previous graph. – Anthony)
A typical solar minimum lasts 485 days, based on an average of the last 10 solar minima. As of today we are at 638 spotless days in the current minimum. Also as of today, May 27th, 2009, there were no sunspots on 120 of this year’s (2009) 147 days to date (82%).
Paul Stanko writes:
Our spotless day count just reached 638.
What is so special about 638? We just overtook the original solar cycle, #1, so now the only cycles above this are: cycles of the Maunder minimum, cycles 5 to 7 (Dalton minimum), and cycles 10 + 12 to 15 (unnamed minimum).
Since the last one is unnamed, I’ve nicknamed it the “Baby Grand Minimum”, in much the same way that you can have a baby grand piano. We would now seem to have reached the same stature for this minimum. It will be interesting to see just how much longer deep minimum goes on.
Of course it depends on what data you look at. Solar Influences Data Center and NOAA differ by a few days. As WUWT readers may recall, last year in August, the SIDC reversed an initial count that would have led to the first spotless month since 1913:
NOAA did not count the sunspot, so at the end of the month, one agency said “spotless month” and the other did not.
From Spaceweather.com in an April 1st 2009 article:
The mother of all spotless runs was of course the Maunder Minimum. This was a period from October 15, 1661 to August 2, 1671.
It totaled 3579 consecutive spotless days. That puts our current run at 17.5% of that of the Maunder Minimum.
By the standard of spotless days, the ongoing solar minimum is the deepest in a century: NASA report. In 2008, no sunspots were observed on 266 of the year’s 366 days (73%). To find a year with more blank suns, you have to go all the way back to 1913, which had 311 spotless days (85%):
The lack of sunspots in 2008, made it a century-level year in terms of solar quiet. Remarkably, sunspot counts for 2009 have dropped even lower.
We do indeed live in interesting times.
Has anyone link to global low cloud cover? The ISCCP shows data only up to mid-2007 http://www.climate4you.com/images/CloudCoverAllLevel%20AndWaterColumnSince1983.gif
I would like to see whether low cloud cover goes up per Svensmark theory. It did replied to few syn cycles quite well, but since 1995 it went gradually down by 4%.
This is only the beginning. Global warming is yesterdays news… they just haven’t realized it yet. Cold is something we should all be concerned about. Cold is here and is certain to cause problems into the future. Global warming should have been welcomed given the alternatives.
Enjoy the defeat of GWing fiction for a minute but keep your eyes on the prize… discovery and knowledge… answers.
I was wondering, if any of the other planets are showing signs of cooling? I know when it was getting hotter here on earth, other planets were showing similar symptoms… so are they changing along with us to cooling as well? Im sorry to ask that here.. but I cannot seem to find any info on this subject that is current.
On topic, while the sun is spotless, is the solar conveyor (i think thats what it is called) still on slow motion? I bet the butterfly graph is looking pretty funky about now as well:) Is anyone but me at least mildly amused that every sun speck is harkened as a sign of the end of the long minimum and hailed as the begining of an upswing in activity. It would seem like folks would get tired of saying it over and over and over. If the other planets are showing cooling trends as well it would definately tell our solar scientists that they are missing something important.. but the question is, would NASA tell us if it were happening?
” We do indeed live in interesting times “.This is the very essence of scientific inquiry, to took forward in anticipation to future scenarios whichever way they eventuate. Not to formulate a limp AGM premise, promulgate it world wide in the popular press and live in fear it being falsified.
It is clear that unless humans stop burning fossil fuels with immediate effect this lack of sun spots will result in a catastrophe for the human race.
I hope this isn’t the first comment on this post, being that it is off-topic. But I do believe the title and subject matter is of great interest to all who frequent this site. I stumbled across the link while casually browsing drudgereport.com:
TIDE TURNING: Sarkozy Appoints Outspoken Climate-Change Skeptic…
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a2b172ba-4a54-11de-8e7e-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1
Thanks again for all your work Anthony and associates!
JWatt
Off topic:
Was it just me, or do I recall correctly that we have been roundly criticized for thinking that UHI has a strong effect on on temps and temp measurements????? Well, it looks like the Obama Energy Secretary actually agrees with us…. he just doesn’t know it
Score one for our side.
oops!
Reply: I believe in the educational power of embarrassment, but I will now clean up the mess. ~ charles the paternal moderator
I see the red line continues from present on out to 5.5 years in the future. Are we predicting, perhaps?
to charles the “paternal moderator:”
You, sir, are a gentleman, and a scholar!
Reply: Sometimes things get caught in the spam filter and it’s a while before one of us puts on gloves and feels around down there to fish it out. Please be patient. ~ charles the moderator
“Speaking of the solar flux, today it dipped down to 66.7. This is the lowest it has been since March 18th.”
http://www.solarcycle24.com/
How low can it go?
Solar wind seems to be very quiet as well…
What was interesting about the recent sunspeck that lasted about a week, is that it was faint and not very well defined; but the spot that popped up in the southern hemisphere 2 days later was dark and organised but only lasted just over a day.
Today the flux dropped to 66.7 (lowest since March 18th).
I doubt though that this deep minimum is having an impact on the weather right now… there is a lag apparently of between 4 – 8 years, so to test the theory we will have to wait until at least 2012.
There has been much discussion about solar indicators (other than sunspots) which point to the minimum nearing it’s end. Unfortunately, we can only use sunspots to determine minimum to be fair, as 1800s, 1700s only used sunspot data.
The minimum of the late 19th/early 20th centuries does apparently have a name; the “Damon Minimum”. ( http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=58 )
Does a solar min = less powerful sun = less shielding of cosmic rays = more cosmic rays striking the earth = more cloud seeding = more clouds = more reflected sunlight = cooler earth?
At least according to some … or did I get something confused? If not, how much evidence is there for the cosmic ray / cloud seeding theory? Any evidence of more clouds?
I am guessing that commenters pointing out the 66.7 s.flux value will have Leif Svalgaard objecting, as this is the *un-adjusted* value, so the *adjusted* value is around 68! Were flux values adjusted in the 50s/60s??
Pkatt – I think the answer to your question would be the silver bullet to the complete issue of CO2 or Sun driven Global Warming/Cooling. Unfortunately I do not think we are going to get any definitive answer for a very long time. I have been reading this forum for a year or so and have yet to see any reliable consensus about the measurements of temperature here on Earth let alone the Solar System.
Does this mean we will have to paint our cities in Zebra stripes just to be on the safe side?
I’m surprised no over enthusiastic warmist has tried to claim that the lack of sunspots is down to – ahem – AGW…
@ 3×2 (01:47:34)
You must have read what the Eminent Chu has nigh-on decreed as reported in the Telegraph.co.uk article titled: “Obama’s green guru calls for white roofs” highly relevant to this particular solar topic. For laughs, read the comment section! Not necessarily sound scientific criticisms as much as sound humor!
JWatt
Very interesting times.
However, entrenched positions, professional reputations, whole departments very existances, are all powerfully supported, & it may be a long time before public acknowledgement occurs. In the UK it will be a string of half-witted politicos saying something along the lines of “oh well I never really supported that position personally…..”, etc. If it looks like the tap might be turned off, you make more washing to keep the flow going.
As to weather affects, deja vu, as Prof Mike Lockwood of Southampton Uni recently said, “if there was going to be any cooling affect then we would have seen it by now!” Talk about both feet & jumping. He hasn’t commented further to my knowledge, it would seem that the BBC has first to announce, an expert is consulted for comment, usually one from the “right” quarter. This 4-5 year malarky is from where precisely? How do we know that, as the Earth has cooled since 2002 a significant amount, by around 0.65°C, especially over the last two years as shown on WUWT & elsewhere, & appears to be continuing, so far, that this is not a direct affect of such an occurence of a low sunspot count? I doubt that anyone has investigated this phenomena in so much detail as now, so perhaps we should watch, listen, measure, record, & then analyse & present a conclusion, & not jump to one to save all in the above paragraph! I’d be interested to see if the Met Office publish another graph like they did a while back showing a warming trend still, although one or two did point out that their best fit line stopped toward the end of 2007, when we were in fact at around the end of 2008, which would have made a huge difference!
Keep up the good work, we in the UK rely on sites like these for reports of weather events around the world, hot or cold, as the BBC is riddled with eco-activist who only allow hot events to be ackonwledged.
I noticed on Number Watch the other day that Dr Vicky Pope was up to her usual tricks, claiming that wagtd in cities due apparently to something called the Urban Heat Island effect by 2100, which is as pointed out contrary to what the Met Office have implied in their previous comments when global surface temps have been questioned, that it is something they are aware of but it is of no significance. I wish they could make up their minds one way or the other. UHI is either significant or it isn’t, it cannot be both. Rather like her remarks about alarmism climate change reporting is not good for the global warming issue, when she & her colleagues have been at the forefront of climate alarmisim! Remember it’s always “worse than first feared!” which is surely against the laws of probability.
What is the basis for the red line on the graphic continuing into the future?
Lief keeps a very nice updated graph on the corrected flux, along with the Solar Magnetic Field, TSI and sunspots. I believe the flux has been corrected for a very long time, it just isn’t being reported by others that way.
The 66.7 measured/68.5 corrected reading @2000UT today was the lowest since March 18.
This can be one of several things going on.
One is that the flux is on a lower rise than has been apparent the last 2 months.
Another is that the flux will trace out a depression and continue back up into an even taller arch
Or that the flux ramped itself into a “Maunder-like” shoulder, only to decend back to baseline for who knows how long.
As for those wimpy spots, that is a factor that is not really corrected for either.
As for statistics, it is true that other cycles have had more spotless days.
It is also true that 1913 had a far superior quality of spots than either 2008 or so far in 2009.
Download the jpegs and flip through them for 1913:
ftp://ftp.ngdc.noaa.gov/STP/SOLAR_DATA/SUNSPOT_REGIONS/DEBRECEN/historical_solar_image_database/1913/
Then examine Cycle 24 Photo Timeline
http://www.solarcycle24.com/sc24.htm
You can flip through any of the other years from 1880 onwards.
Let them count their sunspecks, it’s merely academic.
And dont forget that the all recent spot counts include many Tiny Tims. If you take out the TTs, then the like-for-like comparisson would almost certainly mean that 2008 was way ahead of 1913.
FWIW, the white roofs idea would reduce temperatures. They can be 20 F or more cooler. Old pictures of the Los Angeles area pre AC shows lots of whitewhashed homes white or blue roofs.
I had been planning to paint mine white to reduce AC need this summer. Now that Chu has endorsed it, though, I may not be able to. I have a reputation for accuracy to uphold… and don’t want to send any unplanned messages of ‘conversion’ or political support…
We should respect Dr. Chu’s opinion and all don tinfoil hats to better reflect the suns rays. And wouldn’t tinfoil reflect the sun even better than white paint?
This reminds me of the Chinese government painting a mountain green.
From the “Blankest Years” bar chart. I notice the following:
1. Two of the ‘blankest’ years, i.e. 1913 and 1912, were at the start of the early 20th century warming period.
2. The warmest year in the US (1934) came just one year after 5th ‘blankest’ year (1933). A time when the world, in general, was warming strongly.
3. The least ‘blank’ year in the chart (1944) occurred just at the time the world entered a long term cooling phase.
Do you think we might be reading a bit too much into this SSN/climate correlation.
The FT wanted me to register – here is a link that just works…
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a2b172ba-4a54-11de-8e7e-00144feabdc0.html
Quote from HRH. “In so many ways we already are in the last chance saloon.”
It is a great pity that this person continues to demonstrate his non fitness to inherit. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8070131.stm
Hello…?
Where is Leif when you need him…
Glenn (00:48:29) :
“Speaking of the solar flux, today it dipped down to 66.7. This is the lowest it has been since March 18th.”
http://www.solarcycle24.com/
How low can it go?
It’s just trying to get down to 61 so it can match up with the prediction graph
Anthony: Why does your graph go to 2015? I would have thought it’d be more useful to use that space to show the previous 11 years…
REPLY: Its an 11 year window, but I can easily adjust it. – A
I urge all readers of this entry to visit the homepage of Prof Dr Cornelius de Jager http://www.cdejager.com/sun‐earth‐publications
and study carefully his more recent papers, especially those jointly authored with Professor Silvia Duhau of the University of Buenos Aires.
Professor Duhau is a distinguished and much accomplished Professor of Physics.
Dr de Jager is a grandfather of modern solar physics. Here is a small extract from his CV:
“He was general secretary of IAU (International Astronomical Union), president of COSPAR (Intl. organization for co-operation in Space Research) and president of ICSU (Intl. Council for Science). He founded and was first editor of the journals `Space Science Reviews’ and ‘Solar Physics’. He is member of various learned societies, among which the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Belgian Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Academia Leopoldina (Halle, Germany), the Indian Science Academy, Academia Europaea, etc. He received honorary doctorates in Paris and Wroclaw. He was recipient of awards and distinctions among which the Gold Medal of the Royal Astron. Soc. (UK), the Hale Medal of the Amer. Astron. Soc. (for solar research, US), the Jules Janssen Medal (for solar research, France), the Karl Schwarzschild Medal (for astrophysics, Germany), the Gagarin Medal and Ziolkowski Medal (space research, S.U.), the COSPAR medal for international cooperation, etc. He is honorary member of SCOSTEP, the international organization for solar-terrestrial physics.”
Study the papers for yourselves and carefully consider their analyses and findings. Listen attentively, but critically, to the science therein presented.
The white roofs are coming, only it won’t be paint…
Gary Crough: “how much evidence is there for the cosmic ray / cloud seeding theory?”.
I’m no scientist, but I would say there’s quite good evidence. See Palle, Butler, O’Brian document below.
First, I guess you have read Svensmark’s and Shaviv’s descriptions of the cosmoclimatology theory, but for others I can recommend it:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/338170/svensmark-2007cosmoclimatology
http://www.sciencebits.com/CosmicRaysClimate
–
Palle, Butler, O’Brian: “The possible connection between ionization in the atmosphere by cosmic rays and low level clouds”
http://www.arm.ac.uk/preprints/433.pdf
There’s correlation on >99.5 % significance level for GCR and low level clouds. The document you has this diagram:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3472/3374704163_299b77b5c9_o.jpg
–
About the usually mentioned critics against the cosmoclimatology and a strong sun-climate connection:
Warwick Hughes has a good post about the critics from Lockwood/Frolich and Sloan/Wolfendale here:
http://www.warwickhughes.com/blog/?p=153
Errors in Sloan/Wolfendale’s critics is explained by Tom Moriarty here:
http://climatesanity.wordpress.com/2008/09/05/applying-monte-carlo-simulation-to-sloans-and-wolfendales-use-of-forbush-decrease-data
David Archibald: ‘We are due for a de Vries cycle cooling event every two hundred and ten years, and actually even a Bond event because the last one of those was in the Dark Ages. And severe cooling over the next twenty years is now a certainty.”
Scientists proclaim climate change is natural
Thursday, 28 May 2009, 9:30 am
Press Release: Citizens Electoral Council
Scientists proclaim climate change is natural
As the Rudd government geared up its push for a CO2 cap-and-trade emissions trading scheme (ETS), which would annihilate what’s left of Australia’s collapsing physical economy, a public symposium last Sunday heard evidence from several leading Australian scientists that climate change is a natural phenomenon.
The symposium, ignored by the lying mainstream media, was held at Monash University and convened by Emeritus Professor Lance Endersbee. Several scientists identified hard evidence that severe cooling is the biggest climate challenge that we face—and its cause is entirely natural.
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Professor Lance Endersbee, former Pro-Vice Chancellor of Monash University, clearly pointed out that for thousands of years human civilisation has endured natural climate variation much greater than any climate change in the last century. When warm climate prevailed civilisation flourished such as in Ancient Greece, whereas cold climate led to crop failure and mass migration of people escaping the bitter cold, for example during the Dark Ages.
David Archibald, an expert in solar cycles identified the actual climate problem we face: “You haven’t seen any sign of the end of Solar Cycle 23 yet and the cooling over Solar Cycle 24 as a consequence may be as much as 2.8 degrees centigrade. We are due for a de Vries cycle cooling event every two hundred and ten years, and actually even a Bond event because the last one of those was in the Dark Ages. And severe cooling over the next twenty years is now a certainty.”
William Kininmonth, former head of the Bureau of Meteorology’s National Climate Centre pointed out that even if atmospheric carbon dioxide were to hypothetically double [an impossibility with forecast emissions and natural cooling—ed.], this would only provide 0.6 degrees centigrade of a warming effect—a small value when compared to the several degrees of historical natural climate change.
Professor Robert Carter blasted our government’s insane ETS proposal, identifying that it would cost average Australian families $3000 per year. And the climate outcome—an immeasurable temperature reduction of one ten thousandth of one degree! As Professor Carter said, “Not one newspaper in this country will publish those figures. Why not? Because the taxpayers—the second they knew that this was the cost benefit equation, they would completely reject this nonsense.”
Citizens Electoral Council leader Craig Isherwood today applauded the courage of the scientists to continue speaking out against superstitious fraud dressed as “science”, and called on the Rudd government to cease and desist from its threat to destroy the Australian economy:
“Make no mistake, Rudd’s ETS is not a mere political ploy to trigger a double dissolution; it will smash agriculture, manufacturing, and energy generation, and trigger a population dissolution,” he said.
“It will collapse the world into a new Dark Age—I call upon thinking people everywhere to join the fight against it.”
From: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO0905/S00369.htm
The word is getting out.
More supporting reportage at Intellicast this AM.
http://www.intellicast.com/Community/Content.aspx?ref=rss&a=149
This brings to mind the whole sunspot/cloud seeding from cosmic rays idea. We have had seemingly endless cloudy days here in Georgia the last few months. This after one of the worst droughts on record (I think, they may have hyped it a bit) the last few years prior. That drought has been busted. Makes me wonder.
Sonicfrog,
You just pointed out that one of hte major tenets of AGW- that CO2 is the main driver of climate- is untrue, and that the AGW leadership knows it.
If merely painting roofs and re-specifying road reflectivity would make that large a difference, then why in the !@#&#$^&*(!) heck are our ‘leaders’ insisting we spend the money they are ready to make us spend to solve this great crisis?
Dear Mr Watt,
I don’t think Mr Chu’s idea of increasing the albedo of the earth is such a foolish idea.
If sunlight is reflected as such back into the atmosphere there will be less radiation absorption by greenhouse gasses such as water, CO2 and methane.
On the contrary if the albedo goes down, the surfaces will capture sunlight and emit this absorbed energy back via longer wavelength infrared radiation. This longer wavelenght IR radiation is much easier absorbed by these greenhousesgasses and this absorbed energy is reëmitted as heat.
If the idea of Mr Chu is feasible, that is another question. But theoretically I think the idea is not bad at all ?
Or am I wrong ?
REPLY: I never said it was a bad idea, not sure how you came to that conclusion. White roofs in cities will help the UHI problem a bit. BTW the name is “Watts” – Anthony
Alex (01:31:44) :
I am guessing that commenters pointing out the 66.7 s.flux value will have Leif Svalgaard objecting, as this is the *un-adjusted* value, so the *adjusted* value is around 68! Were flux values adjusted in the 50s/60s??
About exactly 68.5. 🙂
Still, that’s a noticable decline from the ~75 it was at a couple of weeks ago. And CR flux has been climbing. The sun’s snoozing again.
I checked the SCORE page yesterday and TSI has definitely started to trend up.
The earth can turn into a giant snowball, the politicians will not be denied their TAX and RATION scam.
The white paint joke matches nicely withe the 1970s spread carbon black on the ice caps joke to stave off the ‘for sure’ coming ice age. The 747 was all the technological rage back then, so of course the public was wowed when they said that it would be used to do the deed. I wonder what would have happened if we had followed through with that nuttiness.
I am sure impressed with our new reliance on science in it’s rightful proper place.
but, but, but….
New Solar Cycle Prediction: Fewer Sunspots, But Not Necessarily Less Activity
http://www.physorg.com/news162653480.html
An international panel of experts has released a new prediction for the next solar cycle, stating that Solar Cycle 24 will peak in May 2013 with a below-average number of sunspots. Led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and sponsored by NASA, the panel includes a dozen members from nine different government and academic institutions. Their forecast sets the stage for at least another year of mostly quiet conditions before solar activity resumes in earnest.
“but the question is, would NASA tell us if it were happening?”
total ice coverage is increasing, not decreasing – and the various agencies involved haven’t seen fit to tell us about THAT yet!
Gary Crough – on the question of cosmic rays and cloud:
Svensmark managed to find a correlation with a 3% change over the solar cycle from peak to trough but only for low-level cloud and initially only for cycle 22; however, by using a slightly different method he found the same correlation over cycle 23, but was criticised for changing the method. It is not easy to see the correlations in ISCCP data for global cover, even when the cloud types are broken down – and it appears there is a latitudinal effect, as might be expected because the cosmic ray flux varies with latitude, as does cloud cover.
Another check on clouds can be made with data on albedo measured either from the CERES satellite or the ‘Earthshine’ effect at the Big Bear Observatory in Chicago (Palle and colleagues) – these two sources have recently been reconciled with each other, and show firstly a long term drop in albedo of about 5% through 1980-2000, and then a rise and what seems a steady level (but data do not go to the last year yet). Initially CERES data showed continuing drop in albedo (and hence cloud cover) whereas the Earthshine data showed a steep rise around 2001 – but the differences have been ironed out. It appears that low-cloud cover has continued to decline but mid and high level cloud increased in the last decade.
The effect on temperature is complex and there will be time lags. The complexity relates to the 70% of the planet which is ocean – this stores the extra SW radiation from the sun that gets through when the clouds are thinner, then recirculates and releases it in complex patterns that involve pressure oscillations like the PDO, but also prevailing westerly winds – recent analysis has demonstrated that the ‘global warming’ years on land (1980-2006) can be accounted for by heat transfer from the oceans (Compo & Sardeshmukha) the researchers found no clear greenhouse signal – other than the theoretical potential for the GHG effect to warm the oceans). Since 2007, land temperatures have fallen considerably, even in the Arctic.
There is evidence (Camp & Tung) that the single cycle variation (in TSI and any cloud effect) has a 0.2C effect on ocean surface temperatures without any timelag. I suspect this is mainly a cloud effect.
There is plenty of satellite data to show that in the 1980-2000 period there was an extra pulse of sunlight (SW radiation) to the surface and the only explanation is less cloud cover – and this radiation is 4-5x the power of the CO2 effect (as computed from theory – it is not evident in the data) in terms of watts/sq metre.
But this picture is further complicated by the unequal storage of heat in the oceans and the pattern of heat-loss which is driven by winds and cyclones (vortices that suck moisture and create clouds) – these are affected by the jetstream – which is in turn affected by the solar-minimum magnetic or UV status (Shindell at NASA) – and as cloud cover is spatially patterned, and heat stores spatially distinct also, then any major spatial shift in cloud (irrespective of percentage changes) can also come into play. For example – the North Pacific gyre stores heat over the 30 year warm phase of the PDO, and then gives it up on the westerlies into Alaska (which warms) – this knocks on to affect the Arctic ocean gyre, which weakens and sucks in warm water from the North Atlantic heat store (on a 25 year oscillation) under the ice which then melts faster in summer (there is also an increased Arctic cloud bank during this phase which insulates the Arctic seas and radiates IR onto the ice – melting it faster; when the PDO shifted in late 2006 (the heat store was depleted), Alaska cooled in 2007 and 2008, the Arctic gyre is recharged and in 2008, there was 9% more summer sea ice. The same thing should now happen to the North Atlantic heat store in the gyre south of Iceland – when that depletes, Europe will experience the same kind of cold winters as the US has just done- that cold comes down from the Arctic, and from a shift in the jetstream – which is also affected by a feedback from the cold waters of the north Pacific!
So – the whole pattern is complex – with several feedbacks, several mechanisms, oscillations and time-lags. That is why the global warming computer simulations have failed – they could not factor in either cloud feedbacks or ocean oscillations accurately enough, let alone the cosmic rays or UV or jetstream effects. The very latest attempt to factor in ocean cycles to the models, shows no expected warming for the next decade (and then it takes off driven by the ‘masked’ greenhouse effect).
The problem for the modellers is that though they have to admit that ocean cycles have the power to now dominate the GHG effect, they can’t admit that the 1980-2005 warming signal was also boosted by the warm phase of those cycles.
I deal with all of this in my book ‘Chill: a reassessment of global warming theory’ – which should be available from June 1st! And give all the full science references. Within the next week or so there should also be supplementary visual material on my website at ethos-uk.com
The eleven year window for the plot of the minimum doesn’t show the whole story. The maximum for cycle 23 was almost nine years ago now, late 2000. That we are 3 years beyond a ‘normal’ or average minimum seems more demonstrative of the present situation.
I actually think the spotless day count is low. I have been following the sunspots over on http://www.solarcycle24.com/ and the ones that have been identified in the last couple months i really doubt would be able to be identified without access to things like computer analysis of digital photography and Magnetogram images. I think we have tiny tim sunspots as well ad tropical storms and hurricaines.
pkatt (00:00:31) : re temp on other planets.
I’ve raised this question in an earlier post but didn’t get a bite. We must have some data on Mars going back to the 1970s and even earlier at least on the extent of the polar caps. Mars has been under surveilance for a few hundred years! Any astronomers out there? Events like the Maunder Minimum, Dalton Minimum etc might be definitively connected to cooling if there were any records of notable expansion of the the polar caps.
Regarding the SIDC sunspots, I remember after Hurricane Katrina, there were a few years that above normal forecasts were forecast and they were almost counting the raindrops to make them correct as hurricanes became postergirls/boys for AGW. Waterspouts were making news, a bit of a breeze with rain became “named” storms. It is particularly unseemly to see scientists (SIDC) rejoicing like rain dancers when a spot on their spectacles appears.
I had posed the question regarding the temperatures of the other planets in our system about a month ago and have been searching ever since. Some of the planetary sites I had previously found info on no longer exist. Obviously, I will post any info I am able to find. Perhaps someone on the inside, like the inimitable Dr. Svalgaard would be kind enough to point us in the right direction. I had written Dr. Hansen on the subject, but oddly enough got no response. Must have got lost in the mountains of correspondence he receives. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Even though I don’t have the credentials or the scientific background to make such an assessment, thereby nullifying my opinion, I still believe the sun is the main driver of our climate. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ “Dynamo Hum, Dynamo Hum, where is this Dynamo coming from”- Frank Zappa ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Love to quote Zappa, as he was one of the artist that Al and Tipper tried to censor. Extremely intelligent and eloquent, Zappa’s testimony had a great deal to do with the censorship panels lack of success. They did manage to get warning labels for lyrical content however, which is ok, IMHO.
pkatt (00:00:31) : re temp on other planets #2
It seems that Mars has been warming too! but don’t leap into the air. Planetary scientists blame it on changes in the albedo effect because of dust devils having blown dust away (to where?) darkening the surface and making it darker. They don’t go on to say that the plague of dust devils is itself a climate change.
so it seems the AGWers have taken over that branch of science too. Google it, there seems to be quite a few references. I think someone might profitably do a post on this. Some specialist who knows about past records on Mars observations
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/05/martian_warming/
One thing to keep in mind is that by the 17th Century the globe was already cooling since the 14th Century. The coldest decades of the LIA coincided with the Maunder Minimum. Of course, we’ve been warming since at least the end of the Dalton Minimum. The near 200 years of warming perhaps have come to an end.
Let us hope there isn’t a major volcanic erruption like the 1815 Tambora erruption.
The Damon Minimum is just a period of relatively low solar activity and is very typical and should not be compared with Grand minima…”Baby Grand” is probably an appropriate term as long as the difference is understood. The Sun follows a very regular pattern and our Sunspot records and proxy records show this trend, but many tend not to see it. The typical cycle is a slow rise from a “baby grand” situation of lowish activity which peaks about 60 years later, followed by a Grand minimum of varying strength which can recover quickly to decent levels of activity before gradually over the next 60 odd years decreasing back to the base of the “Baby Grand” situation. The only thing that varies is the strength of the grand minima which is not hard to predict.
I think this one will be more than a “Baby Grand” and we should start heading to the next bottom of the wave situation after SC26. The next decent period of high solar activity wont be here till about 2120.
pkatt (00:00:31) : re temp on other planets #3
And here’s another on warming on other planets and moons:
“Global warming on Neptune’s moon Triton as well as Jupiter and Pluto, and now Mars has some [scientists] scratching their heads over what could possibly be in common with the warming of all these planets … Could there be something in common with all the planets in our solar system that might cause them all to warm at the same time?”
Strange that we have all kinds of alternative excuses for substantial changes on other bodies in the solar system but ours is supposed to be stable and unchanging – these global warmers have been covering all the bases.
http://www.livescience.com/environment/070312_solarsys_warming.html
Alex (01:31:44) :
I am guessing that commenters pointing out the 66.7 s.flux value will have Leif Svalgaard objecting, as this is the *un-adjusted* value, so the *adjusted* value is around 68! Were flux values adjusted in the 50s/60s??
alright, adjusted all the way up to 68. Still pretty anemic.
Were the spots from last week cycle 23 or cycle 24? TIA
Now I’m recalling the casual comment by a leading scientist that this minimum was “nothing much to be concerned about – unless it extends well into 2009 or 2010”.
Wonder if he’s getting concerned yet.
I know that this has been mentioned before, but to repeat: has anyone attempted to normalize sunspot detection as done now to the pre-space-age detection limit? It seems that we should be able to come up with a reasonably robust criteria. For example, angular size, contrast, and duration. This should lead to a better, and scarier, comparison. I throw down the gauntlet.
We had a Parlor Grand in our house. It was enamel black and sang like a bird. Just in case you want to choose from a range of sizes as a title for minimum, here they are:
* Petite Grand – This is the smallest of the horizontal pianos. It ranges in size from 4 feet 5 inches to 4 feet 10 inches, it is indeed small but still powerful.
* Baby Grand – A very popular type of piano which ranges in size from 4 feet 11 inches to 5 feet 6 inches. Baby grands is a popular choice because of its sound quality, aesthetic appeal and affordability.
* Medium Grand – Larger than the baby grand at 5 feet and 7 inches.
* Parlor Grand – These ranges in size from 5 feet 9 inches to 6 feet 1 inch. The parlor grand piano is also called living room grand piano.
* Semiconcert or Ballroom – Next size up from the Parlor Grand piano, it is approximately 7 feet long.
* Concert Grand – At 9 feet, this is the largest of all the grand pianos.
Grand pianos are said to produce finer tones and has the most responsive key action.
Solar min? I just read this, this morning
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090527/sc_nm/us_climate_usa_sealevel_1
Greenland ice could fuel severe U.S. sea level rise
LOL
To continue those earlier comments and questions about “Global Warming On Other Planets Also Orbiting Our Sun”
The “solar global warming symptoms” – comparing 1950’s through 2005- that I remember seeing graphs about include:
Mars: Icecap reducing.
Jupiter: A second “Red Spot” appearing, and becoming stable
Saturn: Its first “red Spot” appearing
Neptune greater reflectivity
Triton: Increased albedo (Greater atmosphere reflections?)
Pluto and Charon: Both increasing “diameter” and albedo due to ice vaporizing
Someone asked:
“How low can it go?”
Why, the answer is obvious – To 42, of course!!!!!
“I think this one will be more than a “Baby Grand” and we should start heading to the next bottom of the wave situation after SC26. The next decent period of high solar activity wont be here till about 2120.”
So, how does this affect the climate? Cooling? Or nothing at all? If cooling, when and how much?
thanks,
Steve
Steven Hill, this media link talks out of both sides of its mouth:
“Greenland’s ice-melt rate has increased by 7 percent a year since 1996 but Hu said it is unlikely to continue. Still, he and his co-authors ran computer simulations that included this fast-paced melting, along with more moderate scenarios with ice-melt increasing by 3 percent or 1 percent annually.
Hu said it was hard to say whether the 7 percent annual increase could go on for the next 50 years but said it was possible since the current rate of increase in climate-warming carbon dioxide is higher than the high end of projections by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
(Editing by Bill Trott)”
Now that is MSM understated truth mixed with scare mongering at its best. Hu said it won’t likely bleed, the MSM says it could hemorrhage us to death.
Global emissions to leap 39 percent by 2030: US
WASHINGTON (AFP) – Global carbon dioxide emissions are set to rise 39 percent by 2030 as energy consumption surges in the developing world, notably in Asian giants China and India, the United States warned on Wednesday.
The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) said global energy demand would leap 44 percent between 2006 and 2030, fueled by a 73-percent rise in demand from non-developed countries.
The giants of the developing world, China and India, will fuel much of the growth as their economies continue to expand, EIA said in a report.
It projects carbon dioxide emissions — a major cause of global warming — to reach 40.4 billion metric tonnes by 2030, up from 29 billion in 2006.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090527/sc_afp/environmentusenergyclimateoutlook_20090527202457
Oh no Mr. Bill, we are all doomed! Here he comes to save the day! Obama, Obama, Obama! WooHoo Cap and Tax! When China owns the USA, I wonder if Obama can tell them what to do?
meant to add, looking at the chart of spotless years, if 2009 stays low it looks as though 2007 – 2008 – 2009 will challenge 1911-1912-1913 as the winning trifecta for lowest cumulative readings of the last 100 years. Will it top that run? 7 more months of data to go before we’ll know.
Steven Hill (06:56:22) :
“I think this one will be more than a “Baby Grand” and we should start heading to the next bottom of the wave situation after SC26. The next decent period of high solar activity wont be here till about 2120.”
So, how does this affect the climate? Cooling? Or nothing at all? If cooling, when and how much?
thanks,
Steve
The climate implications are not really my expertise Steve, but if we look at history I would suspect only some minor cooling for the next 20-30 years followed by milder temperatures assuming we dont have a hand in altering the natural cycle.
And yet, how many of the so-called micro-sunspots we have seen over the past couple years that have been counted, would have been detected with pre-satellite technology?
So the real relative current sunspotless days comparision with the Maunder and Dalton Minimums may actually be higher than what is reflected in these comparasions.
The really good news is that Global Warming may be over.
The really bad news is that Global Warming may be over, and we’re heading straight into the next ice age.
This is a comparison between the solarcycle minimum at 1911 and the current one that I found in the forum on solarcycle24.com. I have (for sure a bit clumpsy) added bars for the months December 2008 to April 2009.
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3305/3573328098_e10e913770_o.jpg
I think the comparison somehow was meant to show what we might expect of this minimum, but in the history of solar cycles I guess the SC 23 are sligtly longer than the SC 14…
Ron de Haan (04:38:06) :
David Archibald, an expert in solar cycles identified …….
Is David Archibald an “expert” in solar cycles?
….the actual climate problem we face: “You haven’t seen any sign of the end of Solar Cycle 23 yet and the cooling over Solar Cycle 24 as a consequence may be as much as 2.8 degrees centigrade…. And severe cooling over the next twenty years is now a certainty.”
Why is the cooling over solar cycle 24? When DA did his Solar Cycle Length/Temperature correlation he used the Butler & Johnson Armagh results. This implies that the 11-year mean centred on the year of solar minimum (i.e. 2008 or 2009) will according to David be 2.8 deg lower than the 11-year mean centred on 1996. There is simply no chance of this happening (we already have at least 5 years data). It’s a busted flush. David Archibald is simply making it up as he goes along.
I once created such a cool graph:
http://blog.sme.sk/blog/560/195013/armaghcetssn.jpg
Armagh = Irish observatory record, CET = central England temperature record
it is clearly visible, that when Maunder/Dalton minimum struck, it took one more decade until the temperatures went abruptly down. Maybe oceans were in warm phase then, slowing the fall down. Now PDO deep cold +AMO going cold + Sun minimum = pretty steep downfall expected.
Tar and feather, anyone? Instead those white roofs :o)
Mr. Derode,
You should study how greenhouses work a little bit more.
The issue with Chu’s idea is not that it is a bad idea. The issue is that falsifies the claims of the AGW promotion industry. The AGW position is that controlling CO2 and reshaping our industrial economy to minimize carbon is the *only* effective policy. The AGW promotion industry calims that UHI is not significant.
If Chu is correct, then both of those fundamental tenets of AGW are wrong.
And that means that the huge disruptions and expenses the AGW community demands are not required.
Apologies for the truncated post (if it got through). My computer fritzed and posted my post half done.
Regarding the many posts on warming on various planets and moons throughout the solar system, can anyone explain why Uranus has been cooling?
http://www.boulder.swri.edu/~layoung/eprint/ur149/Young2001Uranus.pdf
Thanks for the graph, Magnus. It seems that the drawn curve for 2007-2009 depends in part on future data, so that curve may be revised as we go.
Anthony: ‘It totaled 3579 consecutive spotless days.’
That count is not reliable because we did not have continuous coverage back then. Hoyt and Schatten are mistaken [as Ken readily admits] in equating ‘I have not a spot all last year’ with 365 days of continuous observations of no spots.
Alex (01:31:44) :
Were flux values adjusted in the 50s/60s??
As several commenters have pointed out the ‘observed’ value is not the correct measure of solar activity, that value is now falling because the solar distance is increasing. But, of course, with the recent spots rotating out of view F10.7 will be decreasing.
Roger Carr (03:15:29) :
Where is Leif when you need him…
Sleeping [CAlif time]
John Finn (07:20:59) :
David Archibald is simply making it up as he goes along.
This is no news.
Other ‘Davids’ have been accused of the same 🙂
Jurinko (07:24:30) :
I once created such a cool graph:
http://blog.sme.sk/blog/560/195013/armaghcetssn.jpg
Armagh = Irish observatory record, CET = central England temperature record
How do you justify grafting the Armagh record onto the CET record in ~1800. Central England temperatures were ~1 deg higher than Armagh
around that time.
it is clearly visible, that when Maunder/Dalton minimum struck, it took one more decade until the temperatures went abruptly down.
Except that temperatures didn’t actually go down in the Dalton Minimum. You made it look that way by using the temperature record froma relatively warm part of the UK (Central England) then using the temperature record from a cooler part of the UK (Armagh).
Maybe oceans were in warm phase then, slowing the fall down.
Then again may be nothing much happened at all.
Now PDO deep cold +AMO going cold + Sun minimum = pretty steep downfall expected.
How much would you be willing to bet on this outcome?
I have a devout Christian friend who says that he has been praying for the Almighty to deliver us from our wickedness as He did with the people of Sodom & Gomorrah (the origin of “fire and brimstone”), specifically, with an Ice Age and another 9/11-like attack.
Trying not to be too judgemental, I commented that that prayer sounded like the theologicial equivalent of an infantry officer calling for an artillery barrage on his own position.
He said “that’s all you can do when you’ve been over-run by the enemy.”
Interesting times indeed.
[cite] barry (07:32:24) :
Regarding the many posts on warming on various planets and moons throughout the solar system, can anyone explain why Uranus has been cooling?[/cite]
Axial tilt perhaps?
Regardless of current fall in S/F it’s still in an uptrend.
http://i599.photobucket.com/albums/tt74/MartinGAtkins/Solar-flux.jpg
Long ago I did a calculation on the change one could have by painting the roof tops of all the buildings white..and then I tried to figure out if we could build huge artificial white floating islands using empty plastic milk jugs, and then I tried to invent white asphalt… blacktop has always bothered me as a word. So with 6 billion people on the planet if we all wore a square foot of white cardboard on our heads how would the earths albedo change and can pasty white irish guys get carbon credits. Should I get carbon credits for buying sunblock.
But Barry: Look at Figure 5 in that study about Uranus temperatures: there are number of values from the 1989 study (“corrected” in this study), and very long blank spot in the record, and only two “measurements” (both from about the 1998 time frame!) in this study.
So, are two measurements taken ten years ago – that confirm essentially no change from 1979 through 1998 (an extremely hot year on earth!) – really valid way to claim that Uranus is NOT cooling NOW (2008 – 2009) compared to a 1995-1998 timeframe?
According to MIT models red 17 is a good bet.
Daily reader but no technological knowledge. Could you post the temps that followed each previous minimum and how long the temperature change lasted?
John Finn (07:20:59) :
Ron de Haan (04:38:06) :
David Archibald, an expert in solar cycles identified …….
Is David Archibald an “expert” in solar cycles?
….the actual climate problem we face: “You haven’t seen any sign of the end of Solar Cycle 23 yet and the cooling over Solar Cycle 24 as a consequence may be as much as 2.8 degrees centigrade…. And severe cooling over the next twenty years is now a certainty.”
Why is the cooling over solar cycle 24? When DA did his Solar Cycle Length/Temperature correlation he used the Butler & Johnson Armagh results. This implies that the 11-year mean centred on the year of solar minimum (i.e. 2008 or 2009) will according to David be 2.8 deg lower than the 11-year mean centred on 1996. There is simply no chance of this happening (we already have at least 5 years data). It’s a busted flush. David Archibald is simply making it up as he goes along.
John Finn,
I am sorry to say this but NOAA and NASA don’t do the job any better either.
At least Archibald makes an ‘out of the box’ thinking effort with fairly good predictions, which is much better than the consensus decissions made by the NASA panel.
We can only learn by observing and I personally don’t give a heck about personal reputations.
I just admire those who dare to make a stand, motivate their point of view and risc to be burried alive if they are wrong.
We are in a learningprocess don’t you agree.
“”” King of Cool (01:42:32) :
pkatt (00:00:31) :
I was wondering, if any of the other planets are showing signs of cooling? I know when it was getting hotter here on earth, other planets were showing similar symptoms… so are they changing along with us to cooling as well? Im sorry to ask that here.. but I cannot seem to find any info on this subject that is current.
Pkatt – I think the answer to your question would be the silver bullet to the complete issue of CO2 or Sun driven Global Warming/Cooling. Unfortunately I do not think we are going to get any definitive answer for a very long time. I have been reading this forum for a year or so and have yet to see any reliable consensus about the measurements of temperature here on Earth let alone the Solar System. “””
I’m under the impression that NASA has reported cooling on Mars, and I believe also Pluto; maybe some other planets. Not sure how they know this, but I have seen this topic raised many times particularly with Mars.
But changes in TSI are rather small about 0.1% amlitude over a sunspot cycle; at least as near as I can tell from the various published satellite numbers.
That in itself is not a major climate driver in my humble opinion. I’m sure it is interesting to solar experts like Leif, and to curious folks like me; but otherwise I think it is entirely inconsequential as far as earth climate.
I’m a believer in the Svensmark et al cosmic ray link; but I view that as a climate perturbation rather than a major climate driver; pretty much as inoccuous as CO2.
But that’s my opinion; based on the believable data I can find.
George
white roofs
Maybe he was misquoted in the newspaper I read, but what I found objectionable in Dr. Chu’s statement was not the idea, but the verb. “We could MAKE people paint their roofs white.” Not that he could suggest, or they could encourage, or even implore, but rather “…make…” There seems to be a lot of that going around.
“I think this one will be more than a “Baby Grand” and we should start heading to the next bottom of the wave situation after SC26. The next decent period of high solar activity wont be here till about 2120.”
So, how does this affect the climate? Cooling? Or nothing at all? If cooling, when and how much?
thanks,
Steve
Well Steve, according to many who have studied this it could mean fairly dramatic cooling. 2.2 degress C over the next decade or two.
Here are some links for you.
Weather trend data linked to solar activity. This article references IPCC as well.
http://www.321gold.com/editorials/hoye/hoye040909.pdf
This report was presented at the International Conference on Climate Change. It is a detailed look at the solar cycle, its correlation to global climate patterns and predicts fairly dramatic cooling over the next decade.
http://www.warwickhughes.com/agri/Solar_Arch_NY_Mar2_08.pdf
An interesting on-line interview with Paul Damon is here:
http://www.agu.org/history/sv/proxies/damon_interview.html
Presumably one must over look the annoying self-referential tendency among brilliant scientists (Damon apparently had numerous publications, as opposed to the few pieces that John Eddy wrote), but it’s hard to ignore his dismissive remarks about Eddy:
As to where one may see reference to “The Damon Minimum”, I don’t know. The first Google result for “Damon Minimum” is to this thread. The next is to Matt Damon.
Maybe Eddy’s legacy will be more profound.
George E. Smith (09:02:51)
I’m under the impression that NASA has reported cooling on Mars, and I believe also Pluto;
The temperature of Pluto is dominated by its orbital eccentricity, and its currently outbound. Its atmosphere is expected to condense out around 2016.
Part of the motivation for New Horizons was to get a mission there while it had an atmosphere, as we won’t get a chance to look at that again for a century or more.
In re; white roofs and personal climate responsibility,
I think the most effective personal anti-AGW device that would have the highest albedo would be, according to the MIT study:
If everyone who believes AGW is a pressing issue would wear one, I am certain the world could be saved.
Anthony,
who knows how acurate the sunspot count from 1661on was! If one person is using some Telescope with a contraption (to protect his eyes) he still would get blind ten years on.
Now with the satellites, we can resolve the tinest spot.
I agree with Leif above, we don’t really know what happened that far back.
They might have missed the tiny spots back then, which we actually would count.
Like the last one last week.
Therefore our current minimum could be longer, if we used the methods and tools from 1661…..
So why should we careabout a solar cycle that is the tenth weakest out of 24(or is it 23)?
Does anyone know what percentage of the earth’s surface is actually covered by roofs, of whatever color? I understand Anthony’s point that UHI distortions in temperature in heavily-populated places might be reduced by white roofs in those areas, but that’s not quite the same thing. Is there really enough roof surface on the planet that increasing their reflectivity could significantly affect global temperatures?
It would be lovely if somebody with more knowledge than I have would address whether there is any rational basis at all for this proposal . . . or if it’s actually as loony as it sounds.
Re white roofs, here in the UK the Department of Health are advising this too:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8057528.stm
It’s one of the survival tips they are recommending, should temps soar into the danger zone above 30 degrees C this summer.
“Other tips include identifying the coolest room in the house.”
How on earth did they cope in the olden days, when this advice wasn’t available?
Well, he better not make me paint mine. First off, I don’t think paint sticks well to asphalt shingles. Secondly, we pay for heat during our long winters, and I expect my dark-grey shingles help offset a little of that. Thirdly, winter is presumably over, but daytime temps here (in Eastern Massachusetts) have been in the 50s for three days; it’s the end of May, and I’ve got the blankety-blank furnace on!
/Mr Lynn
I think the relationship is a lot more complicated than SSN vs. Temp’s. I think that variations in both the amplitudes and frequencies of multiple Solar cycles coupled with changes in the amount of high-energy cosmic radiation reaching the lower atmosphere, orbital mechanics and other astrophysical phenomena will ultimately be found to correlate very well with long term climate changes.
The Earth’s climate changes appear to have occurred over multiple “nested” cycles…With the lower frequency cycles having the highest amplitudes and the shorter frequency cycles having lower amplitudes.
I don’t know of any terrestrial earth or atmospheric process that *should* behave in such a cyclical manner without a cyclical modulation of energy input. I doubt that the PDO “just happens.” That’s just not a scientifically satisfying answer to me. Astrophysics, on the other hand, is full of cyclical phenomena.
Oh my.
Not sure if this has been posted, but Pelosi had quite the statement to say while in China on cooperative combat of “climate change.”
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hLcZ2jQ4mu4rd7XlB3hetiVn1qbAD98F32AG0
“Every aspect of our lives must be subject to inventory.”
“Governments must make decisions based on Science.”
My God….
They are pushing hard, folks. I suspect some of these mad charlatans know the gig may be up soon, and this is their chance to grab as much money and control as possible, while the press covers for them over the next year or two with regard to temperatures and facts.
The dynamo is short-circuited. Ghost spots have been appearing and counted , I don´t know if according to ISO or ASTM, but surely with a lot of imagination.
It would be a good idea (for the INTERNATIONAL standards organization) to establish a new standard of counting by PIXELS related to image´s total number of pixels. I would suggest counting ONE SPOT when it covers an area of at least FOUR PIXELS.
It be be more interesting to see the # of spotless days in any rolling 12 month period since records began. Can your data be sorted that way? It would be more meaningful. The Jan-Dec ‘year’ is too arbitrary.
hareynolds (08:44:35) :
I have a devout Christian friend who says that he has been praying for the Almighty to deliver us from our wickedness as He did with the people of Sodom & Gomorrah (the origin of “fire and brimstone”), specifically, with an Ice Age and another 9/11-like attack.
Trying not to be too judgemental, I commented that that prayer sounded like the theologicial equivalent of an infantry officer calling for an artillery barrage on his own position.
He said “that’s all you can do when you’ve been over-run by the enemy.”
Interesting times indeed.
hareynolds,
This reminds me of an accident with an aircraft where the religious captain started to pray to Allah in stead of making efforts trying to fly the plane.
The plane crashed, nobody survived.
Praying won’t help in either cases.
All those desperate people…
hunter (09:29:36) :
Congratulations for your invention!, yesterday I suggested also a known way to make skins lighter in color through the intake of anthraquinone, so increasing our personal albedo. Both ideas could be complementary. 🙂
Here it is only the end of May and we only need 40 more spotless days to excede 1944 which had 159 spotless days. That would put 3 years in a row into the top 10, equaling the years of 1911-1913.
Mrs Whatsit (09:36:28) :
I will offer this on your questions:
“Does anyone know what percentage of the earth’s surface is actually covered by roofs, of whatever color? I understand Anthony’s point that UHI distortions in temperature in heavily-populated places might be reduced by white roofs in those areas, but that’s not quite the same thing. Is there really enough roof surface on the planet that increasing their reflectivity could significantly affect global temperatures?
It would be lovely if somebody with more knowledge than I have would address whether there is any rational basis at all for this proposal . . . or if it’s actually as loony as it sounds.”
There is very little roofed area compared to the entire globe, so painting roofs white will have very little direct effect on albedo. However, there may be some reduced energy consumption for air conditioning when/if roofs are painted white. The reduced energy consumption also reduces the exhaust heat from air conditioners, and the waste heat from fossil and especially nuclear power plants.
The flip side, of course, is that white roofs do not absorb solar energy in cold weather, which increases the heating requirements.
For what it is worth, my home in Dallas, Texas (a very hot summer area) was very hot and difficult to cool when it was new. I had an asphalt shingle roof of a medium brown color. I solved the cooling problem by adding attic insulation, installing wind-turbine roof vents, and blocking the sun’s rays on the west side by building a trellis for morning-glory vines. The vines had beautiful flowers, and made a nice green shade for the west wall. Another energy-saving technique is to shade the air conditioner’s condenser, so that direct sunlight does not hit it.
Mr Lynn,
I would rather be ‘made’ to paint my roof a lighter color and to have roads re-specified for lighter shades, than to be ‘made’ to do what our AGW friends are trying to make us do now and in the future.
John Finn (02:45:57) :
From the “Blankest Years” bar chart. I notice the following:
1. Two of the ‘blankest’ years, i.e. 1913 and 1912, were at the start of the early 20th century warming period.
2. The warmest year in the US (1934) came just one year after 5th ‘blankest’ year (1933). A time when the world, in general, was warming strongly.
3. The least ‘blank’ year in the chart (1944) occurred just at the time the world entered a long term cooling phase.
Do you think we might be reading a bit too much into this SSN/climate correlation.
———————
It is also possible that 1997 was that hot peak and that we might even have a very small cycle 24, if we get one… Conclusion, there is not pattern on previous cycle history to know what the sun will do next.
Mr. Lynn
I did the actual testing and a white container radiates less heat than a black container. If you have fewer hours of direct sunlight in the winter, than darkness, you would save energy with a White house.
OT For Anthony:
Sea level increase! http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090527/sc_nm/us_climate_usa_sealevel_1
RE : JP (05:58:29) :
“Let us hope there isn’t a major volcanic erruption like the 1815 Tambora erruption.”
I’d much rather take my chances with a cooling trend AND another Tambora then with the current crop of politicians in Washington and most of the statehouses.
To whom it may know it: If ghosts spots/one pixel spots were discounted or counted like the old good days, how many spotless days we should have by now?
David Corcoran (02:41:21) : “…And wouldn’t tinfoil reflect the sun even better than white paint?”
Actually, aluminum foil and tinfoil are not as reflective under some conditions as plain white paint. Especially if they’ve been out in the sun for a long time. But the real potential for white roofs isn’t for UHI reduction; they have a measurable effect on air conditioning loads for the houses beneath them. The benefits go on and on.
Sonicfrog (06:52:38) : “Someone asked: ‘How low can [solar flux] go?’ Why, the answer is obvious – To 42, of course!!!!!”
Don’t panic.
Mr Lynn (09:39:54) : “…I’ve got the blankety-blank furnace on!”
Yeah, our Los Angeles furnace came on last night, too.
Pamela Gray (06:44:46) : “…Petite Grand – This is the smallest of the horizontal pianos. It ranges in size from 4 feet 5 inches to 4 feet 10 inches, it is indeed small but still powerful….”
Dang. I always thought our Sohmer was a baby grand, but at 4’6″, I guess it’s only a petite. Can I include the bench? Or measure it on a sort of diagonal, like TV screens?
“Mrs Whatsit (09:36:28) :
It would be lovely if somebody with more knowledge than I have would address whether there is any rational basis at all for this proposal . . . or if it’s actually as loony as it sounds.”
As has been noted, the actual area of roofed property is insignificant as regards ‘warming’. I’ve seen mention that if the entire global population were given 1/4 acre, it wouldn’t cover Australia. (cite)
It would increase the energy efficiency of your home, both in Summer & Winter. In Summer by reducing needs for cooling and Winter by reduced heat losses.
DaveE.
Chris Kaiser (09:59:51) :
It be be more interesting to see the # of spotless days in any rolling 12 month period since records began. Can your data be sorted that way? It would be more meaningful. The Jan-Dec ‘year’ is too arbitrary.
Tomo Niroma, http://www.tilmari.pp.fi/tilmari6.htm Uses rolling data samples.
Dave Middleton (09:42:01) :
I think the relationship is a lot more complicated than SSN vs. Temp’s.
I’m sure – but has anyone yet found a relationship that doesn’t break down after about 5 cycles. Don’t you think it’s possible that the apparent short-term correlations between various solar parameters and climate are just coincidences.
DaveE,
Your point is well made, but only underscores the amazing thing that Chu has admitted to:
AGW is bunk.
If simply increasing the reflectivity on roofs and roads can impact climate as much as most of America’s car fleet allegedly impacts by way of CO2, then the problem, and its solutions, have both been masively misrepresented in the public square.
We already had this white roof conversation yesterday in the other story but if you want to learn more about roof colour and reflection/emission, take a look at http://www.fsec.ucf.edu/en/publications/html/FSEC-CR-670-00/
But remember that the colour you see are those that don’t get absorbed. When a surface reflects all the visible spectrum you see it as white… but it will most likely absorb other wavelenghts outside the visible spectrum (i.e. infrared, UV, etc).
And we just had the fifth warmest April, globally, in recorded history. (For some reason, this blog was too busy reporting data on individual countries which happened to be colder than average to report that the world experienced yet another warm spring. I guess we all do what we can.)
Was the Little Ice Age of the Maunder Minimum also so warm? Or maybe they don’t make ice ages like they used to.
“hunter (11:43:58) :
DaveE,
Your point is well made, but only underscores the amazing thing that Chu has admitted to:”
Which is no more nor less than intended. 😉
DaveE.
What is the basis for the red line on the graphic continuing into the future?
The vicissitudes of Excel, I imagine.
We seem to be back in the white roofs topic again.
I think it could be helpful, but it depends upon your local climate. How can we calculate the cooling in the summer v. the increased need for heating in the winter?
One poster asserted that the winter sun is too for a dark roof to make much difference. Yet I recall an experiment where Mr. Watts poured ashes on white snow and the snow melted in the sunshine, so perhaps the winter sun is not too weak.
I, like others, am waiting in anticipation too to see what low level cloud cover has done over the last 2 years. Certainly if one looks one step up in Svensmark’s theoretical cosmoclimatological (is that a word?) chain we are seeing some very interesting things:
http://tinyurl.com/mroryf
If Svensmark is right, I would expect to see low altitude cloud levels at there highest since satellite records began.
And wouldn’t tinfoil reflect the sun even better than white paint?
Yes it would. Which is why reflective metal roofs are common in Australia.
BTW, reflectivity and albedo are not the same thing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albedo
And reading Ray’s link (repeated below) galvanized steel (tinfoil looking, although tinfoil is aluminium) reflects most solar radiation.
http://www.fsec.ucf.edu/en/publications/html/FSEC-CR-670-00/
About 4-5% of the US land area is considered “urban”, but of course only a fraction of that consists of pavement or roofs. Decreasing sunlight absorption by buildings and pavement would have a negligible effect on global temperatures, but could have a significant local effect; and most of the US population lives in “urban” areas. Benefits would include lower summer air conditioning costs and reduced deaths from heat waves, offset by increased winter heating costs.
I don’t mind the concept of white roofs, but my eyes tear at the very thought of walking/driving along white pavement. Presumably there are other colors/coatings that would be nearly as effective but easier on the eyes.
skeptic:
Your assertion is in doubt as historical records are constantly revised downward.
See:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/04/08/rewriting-history-time-and-time-again/
Baby Grands aren’t much use anyway! The bass strings are too short, and have to be thickly spun with copper wire to make them heavy enough to produce a loud tone. This results in out-of-tune harmonics which make the pitch rather indefinite. Give me a good Bosendorfer Imperial any day (as long as it doesn’t cause an ice age)! (Wish I had the money to buy one!)
OK. Tell me THIS is off topic.
The latest albedo from earthshine:PALL¶E ET AL.: EARTHSHINE TRENDS 1999-2007
http://bbso.njit.edu/Research/EarthShine/literature/Palle_etal_2008_JGR.pdf
fig 2
albedo is increasing since 2000
It looks like WUWT has become a dominating factor in regard to skeptic climate news.
This is a must read, Global Warming Hoax Weekly Round-Up, May 29th 2009 http://dailybayonet.com/?p=1519
Especially the Clarkson test of the Toyota Prius!
skeptic,
I doubt it very much.
At this point in the AGW mania, the promoters have deeply compromised integrity of the data.
Mrs Whatsit (09:36:28) :
Does anyone know what percentage of the earth’s surface is actually covered by roofs, of whatever color? I understand Anthony’s point that UHI distortions in temperature in heavily-populated places might be reduced by white roofs in those areas, but that’s not quite the same thing. Is there really enough roof surface on the planet that increasing their reflectivity could significantly affect global temperatures?
It is simple to answer that. First 70% of the earths surface is water. For the rest, simply fly any path between the pacific ocean and the atlantic ocean in the US and look down (day or night). For that matter fly anywhere on the planet. You will see a very tiny fraction of the land on this planet is actually inhabited.
Regarding number of rooves and the area they occupy as a measure of improvement in albedo. I once calculated for my children and surprised myself that 90 billion people could fit into Lake Superior, each with a square metre to tread water in. Amazing what a small bundle of life on this earth can do!
Now what square meterage of shelter and workplace and other buildings do we need per capita? 10 square metres? That would be 6.5 exp 10 m squared. Earth is 500 exp 12 m squared. Rooves cover about 0.01%. Streets, highways, pathways, parking lots that could be lightened, what? Five times as much? Say to light grey so effectively albedo (equivalent white) would be area of 0.03%? How much cooler? A degree or two? It would be considerably less effective over the earth than the the solar irradiation variations. However it for life in the city it might be worth it, especially if we had a way to turn it black in winter.
For those that were asking, the date at the center od the red line graph is 1/1/2005, so no, the graph is not (yet) extending into the future.
to Willem de Rode (05:01:30) :
Re: my post of the article about the white roofs
You will notice that my post does not comment on whether the idea of painting roofs white was good or bad. I just wanted to bring it to attention. It sounds to me that it may very well reduce a household’s AC costs. But, in the context of it being said by someone of Chu’s belief system is worth critical analysis. Also: would we really want to redirect more heat into space if we really aren’t warming anymore?
Sorry for having a very similar name to you Mr. Watts. Won’t happen again!
Mark (12:27:09) :
Your link:
http://cosmicrays.oulu.fi/webform/query.cgi?startdate=1964/04/28&starttime=00:00&enddate=2009/05/28&endtime=22:05&resolution=Automatic%20choice&picture=on
It is just astonishing. But do these cosmic rays affect human brains?…If so it would explain many things….
Related to increased CR radiation in solar minimums:
http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:tGilnYP2lVAJ:mearim.cu.edu.eg/new/Babayev.pdf+cosmic+rays+human+brain&cd=8&hl=es&ct=clnk&gl=pe
5. Conclusions :Weak and severe geomagnetic storms affect the functional state (bioelectrical activity)of the human brain in a different way.Geomagnetic storms amplify the negative emotional background of an individual and can affect, for example, the brain of a driving person, thus increasing the risk of an accident. Parameters reflecting a state of vegetative sphere of a human being significantly differ and are dependent on the strength of geomagnetic disturbances. Heart rate dynamics (variations) of a human can be affected by space weather changes like variations in geomagnetic activity and cosmic ray intensity.Different types of geomagnetic storms (i.e., magnetic-cloud origin or caused by high-speed solar wind streams) affect cardio-vascular system in different ways.
“”” John Galt (12:23:45) :
We seem to be back in the white roofs topic again.
I think it could be helpful, but it depends upon your local climate. How can we calculate the cooling in the summer v. the increased need for heating in the winter?
One poster asserted that the winter sun is too for a dark roof to make much difference. Yet I recall an experiment where Mr. Watts poured ashes on white snow and the snow melted in the sunshine, so perhaps the winter sun is not too weak. “””
Well I don’t know where you live; most people live in the northern hemisphere, where actually the Winter sun is stronger than the Summer sun, since the earth is closer to perihelion in the Winter. That is one reason Antarctica is colder than the Arctic; because the sun is further away in Southern Winters.
And I would venture that in winter, the atmospheric water vapor is less than in summer, so the ground level solar irradiance would be higher than in summer (normal to the beam).
Of course flat roofs (rooves) would be less effective in the winter; but then I would think that one would want sloping roofs so that snows don’t stay on the roof, so with south facing sloped roofs, you could make white paint effective in winter, or summer.
Then you could use solar cells instead or thermal absorbers, and make use of the solar energy.
When I look at the earth with Google Earth all I see is blue (water) and green (land). It’s only when I zoom in to about 3 km that I can start seeing buildings but they are still specs compared to all the vegetation around.
That is easy to answer.
Roughly in the temperate zones people could survive on about 10 sq. meters of cultivation per head.
Taking a population of 100 billion people, about ten times the forecast maximum, they could, more or less, survive on ten times the area of Lake Superior.
Why not try the old calculation of three acres and a cow, per family of course.
This would feed them well and occupy perhaps10% of the land area in the temperate zones.
The only shortage of land, production and capital is that produced by corrupt politicians: the world can easily support a far vaster population tha we have now. And at a living standard better than that we, in the Western world, already enjoy.
Kindest Regards
“”” Adolfo Giurfa (13:07:43) :
Mark (12:27:09) :
Your link:
http://cosmicrays.oulu.fi/webform/query.cgi?startdate=1964/04/28&starttime=00:00&enddate=2009/05/28&endtime=22:05&resolution=Automatic%20choice&picture=on
It is just astonishing. But do these cosmic rays affect human brains?…If so it would explain many things…. “””
Well the neutrons plotted in that graph are probably high energy (MeV+) so they would go right through you without hitting much, most of the time.
But if they get thermalized, and slowed down to a few eV or less, then they could just wander round inside your brain for about 14 minutes; and then they would go POOoof !, and that wouldn’t be good; because now you would have a high energy proton crashing around in your brain boring a big hole.
Free neutrons are unstable and decay with a half life of about 14 minutes; it was only 12 minutes when I went to school.
George
gee, skeptic, so you agree, Aprils are getting cooler, not warmer !
stick around and expose yourself to some current climate science !
Mark:
http://tinyurl.com/mroryf
If Svensmark is right, I would expect to see low altitude cloud levels at there highest since satellite records began
It’s La Nina’s umbrella! She won’t sun tan this SH WINTER as NOAA predicts!
Rather than coincidences; I think they are indications that some convolution of multiple cycles is needed.
The Milankovitch Cycle is a convolution of several different cycles. The convolution of those cycles seems to fit the Pleistocene glacial-interglacial cycle fairly well.
Correlation doesn’t equal causation; but it gives you a good reason to look for a relationship. If I take the time interval between the Schwabe (11-yr) cycle minima and plot the inverse of the length of those intervals against the HadCRUT3 temperature data, I can get a fairly good correlation between those two curves. It appears that when the 11-year cycle “speeds up” we have warming…When it “slows down” we have cooling…to Schwabe Length vs. Temp,
I wouldn’t be surprised if some convolution of the Schwabe length with Albedo, TSI and SSN provided an even better fit to the temperature data.
Mark (05:02:53) :
I checked the SCORE page yesterday and TSI has definitely started to trend up.
Possibly because there are some active regions on the solar limb, causing the radiating area to increase slightly?
It seems to me TSI could come down again soon
http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-SORCE-2008-now.png
The 10.7 flux is interesting to watch these days.
John Finn (11:41:04) :
I’m sure – but has anyone yet found a relationship that doesn’t break down after about 5 cycles. Don’t you think it’s possible that the apparent short-term correlations between various solar parameters and climate are just coincidences.
Don’t you think it’s possible that the apparent short-term correlations between CO2 concentration and climate are just coincidences.
There, fixed it for you.
Carsten Arnholm, Norway (13:39:05) :
It seems to me TSI could come down again soon
http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-SORCE-2008-now.png
The 10.7 flux is interesting to watch these days.
Note that on my graph, TSI lags behind about a week, because of the way they do their quality control.
Carsten Arnholm, Norway (13:39:05) :
It seems to me TSI could come down again soon
Also note that when we have actual spots, TSI will have a local minimum when the spot is visible with enhancements on either side of that time. See 2008.25, 2008.38, 2009.36
It is well know and clear why this happens: the spot is dark and there are bright faculae on either side.
skeptic, actually this April is only the ninth warmest according to HadCRUT3 global, http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/hadcrut3gl.txt . And April 1878 was almost as warm, just 0.079 degrees cooler. February of 1878 was actually WARMER than February this year. And I am sure you know that both December 2008 and December 2007 were cooler than December 1939? And that December 2007 was just 0.04 degrees warmer than December 1877?
The whole year of 2008 was 0.301 degrees warmer than the whole year of 1878. You want to quarrel over a difference of 0.3 degrees Celsius, when the uncertainty in temperature measurements is at least 0.2? So maybe 1878 actually was warmer than 2008, and what this year will turn out to be.
Temperatures vary in a quite normal way over the centuries, nothing so far indicates that this century will be much different from the last, temperaturewise. If anything, it will probably be cooler.
@ Steven Hill
I noticed that in the article to which you provided a link at 06:47:50, the journalist mentioned “the Atlantic has a dense, compact layer of deep, cold water… ”
Has anyone here ever tried ‘compacting’ any fluid?
Re John Finn
<>
I merged them in 1809, when temps were roughly equal.
<>
One wonders why it was called Dalton minimum then? 😉 Armagh starts at 1796 right in the Dalton, 2,5deg C colder than in 2000.
http://www.junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/CETvsArmagh_long.html
<>
2 deg C change within 20 years is quite a lot, me thinks. AGWers are whining because of global +0.6 per century.
<>
After I will win the “arctic ice-free in 2013” bet.
My apologies if this has already been covered, but the on-going experiments at CERN, particularly the CLOUD experiment seems to be aimed at solving some significant unknowns…
“We therefore propose to test experimentally the link between cosmic rays and cloudsand, if confirmed, to uncover the microphysical mechanism. We propose to make the measurements under controlled laboratory conditions in a beam at the CERN Proton Synchrotron (PS), which provides an adjustable source of “cosmic rays”. The experiment, which is named CLOUD (Cosmics LeavingOUtdo or Droplets), is based on a cloud chamber that is designed to duplicate the conditions prevailing in the atmosphere. To our knowledge, cloud chamber data under these conditions have never been previously obtained.”
http://cloud.web.cern.ch/cloud/documents_cloud/cloud_proposal.pdf
I guess the green jobs are for the folks that will be painting roofs the correct color for each season…
Mark_0454 (09:06:31) :
white roofs
My roof is white for several months every year.
From Chu,
“If you look at all the buildings, and if you make the roofs white, and if you make the pavement more of a concrete type of color rather than a black type of color, if you do that uniformly, that would be the equivalent of . . . reducing the carbon emissions due to all the cars in the world by 11 years — just taking them off the road for 11 years,” he told a Nobel symposium in London.”
I not saying that Chu’s proposal is directionally wrong, I picked a white roof for my house many years ago believing that it would help keep the house cooler in the summer. What escapes me is that the benefits of his claim seems to be grossely exaggerated. If in fact he is correct, we could scrap Obama’s cap and trade and Obama’s other proposals to stop global warming. Since building my house, trees have grown to prevent the sun from hitting the roof in the summer, and I have increased attic venting so I don’t see how the color of the roof matters a hill of beans. Similarly all homes I have seen in the Northeast have vented attics, some use power vents and I can’t see how the roof color would have much effect. Are homes in California, Arizona, New Mexico, etc without vents and attics?
It appears to me that Chu’s claim is on the same order as Obama’s earlier claim that just keeping our tires inflated would save as much fuel as could be harvested for drilling offshore and ANWR. Of course that was either a lie or from a badly informed politician. It was never challenged by the MSM.
I would be interest in having some reference or calculation that would support Chu’s claim. Or is this more drivel from a former scientist now a politician that will say anything to please his boss.
Can anyone back up the claim the painting the roofs white will
“be the equivalent of . . . reducing the carbon emissions due to all the cars in the world by 11 years — just taking them off the road for 11 years,”
Chu should not get away with this comment without proof. I guess I’m a skeptic yet again on government claims.
I had a dream last night. In it, there was snow cover in coastal California, down to about 400 feet. That may be a bit overly dramatic versus what may actually be possible, even if the interglacial ends. Nonetheless, I increasingly suspect we are at the Beginning of Sorrows.
Looking back at these past solar minimum the globe should be 1-2C colder than present and cooling.
Sea level should be dropping fast.
Snow and glacial ice should be on the increase.
Instead we have one of the warmest starts to a year on record, April northern hemisphere snow cover at near record lows, sea level on the rise again (after a pause for La Nina), Arctic Sea ice at near record lows (and melting very rapidly ATM).
Anthony perhaps you might tell us….
Do you agree that it is most odd that we have such a significant solar minimum and yet the planet’s climate is so warm?
REPLY: “DJ” Do tell us, have you ever heard of lagged effects? Do tell us, does the ocean warm up or cool down immediately? When will you be coming out of the closet and put the full force of BoM behind your opinions? Until then, your opinion and questions are without much merit, except as troll food. – Anthony
Carsten Arnholm, Norway (14:24:28) : This not yet named solar minimum will paint all roofs white and some will collapse on some green heads.
DJ Do you agree that it is most odd that we have such a significant solar minimum and yet the planet’s climate is so warm?
That’s because you drank kool-aid! 🙂
There are entrpreneurs with courage to express their opinion in front of their establishment: I admire those kinf of people.
And how right they are.
The article sucks but the pictures are OK.
http://www.memphisflyer.com/SingAllKinds/archives/2009/05/27/burger-king-calls-global-warming-baloney
DJ,
You have no idea, and no proof at all of what you claim about solar minima vs. anticipated temps. Show us that in the last solar minima that temps were much lower. You actually do not know- and neither does anyone else- where in fact we are irt to this sort of solar event.
As to an allegedly warm starts of the year, you are pulling that off of AGW promotion sites and out of your…..head.
Arctic ice is up, snow in the NH for the past year is up, and if AGW believers are the first to point out that a particular weather event is never evidence of AGW being wrong, then so is one event or season proof that AGW is correct, either.
Leif Svalgaard (13:52:16) :
Also note that when we have actual spots, TSI will have a local minimum when the spot is visible with enhancements on either side of that time. See 2008.25, 2008.38, 2009.36
It is well know and clear why this happens: the spot is dark and there are bright faculae on either side.
Thanks for that, a good point, I see what you mean. With the tiny specks we have seen lately, I guess the effect should be very small or even not detectable.
Looks like NH ice is WAY OVER previous
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/NEWIMAGES/arctic.seaice.color.000.png
that is of course if we can rely on this data
You want dark streets and roofs if you live in a climate where you get snow. For example in Colorado (Denver), the snow melts very quickly on the streets and it is relatively rare to see roofs caving in from too much snow. Driving in snow is dangerous, and having it melt off quickly is a big plus.
Roger Sowell’s ideas work in both a non-snow and a snowy location – I too recommend them. Painting roofs in California, where I beleive Chu is from, wouldn’t hurt but it is not a pancea for everywhere. Lightening roads everywhere would be disastrous in icy/snowy areas. We get enough highway deaths, let’s not add to them with a half-baked AGW solution.
Politically, I do find Chu’s remarks to be curious in that they can be interpreted to mean that he is saying that there are other things that can cause warming besides AGW. Are we seeing the beginning of a change in public policy direction? I hope so.
Carsten Arnholm, Norway (15:03:49) :
Thanks for that, a good point, I see what you mean. With the tiny specks we have seen lately, I guess the effect should be very small or even not detectable.
You can see the little dip at 2009.36, so the effect is there, even if small. Back in 2008.25 the spots were much larger.
Violent Weather Hits Bordeaux !!!!!
Any chance this is related to the Baby Grand ?
This happened on May 19th around the same time so many cold records were broken in the USA>
Oops, here is the link !
http://www.winespectator.com/Wine/Features/0,1197,5083,00.html
Well the neutrons plotted in that graph are probably high energy (MeV+) so they would go right through you without hitting much, most of the time.
In water 2 MeV neutrons thermalize in about 5 cm (2 inches) with 19 collisions. So 3 or 4 inches in a body that is mostly water should do the job for neutrons in the 10 to 20 MeV range.
To keep that from happening to your brain may I suggest sleeping on your head with your feet in the air or sleeping under a water bed filled with borated water. Of course you then need to worry about the x-rays released when the neutrons are absorbed by B10.
Looking back at these past solar minimum the globe should be 1-2C colder than present and cooling.
—-
Based on What? That is pure conjecture and makes an assumption of warming that just does not exist based on the data.
—-
Sea level should be dropping fast.
—-
Sea level has been rising since the start of this Interglacial, why would it be dropping?
—
Snow and glacial ice should be on the increase.
—
Why? glaciers have been receding since the last Ice Age when they formed, so again why would they grow unless of course this is the start of a new Ice Age?
—
Instead we have one of the warmest starts to a year on record, April northern hemisphere snow cover at near record lows, sea level on the rise again (after a pause for La Nina), Arctic Sea ice at near record lows (and melting very rapidly ATM).
—
On what data are you basing the claim “one of the warmest starts to a year on record”, “April northern hemisphere snow cover at near record lows”,” Arctic Sea ice at near record lows (and melting very rapidly ATM)”?
—
Anthony perhaps you might tell us….
Do you agree that it is most odd that we have such a significant solar minimum and yet the planet’s climate is so warm?
—
see Anthony’s Response
M. Simon (15:53:35) : I was just wondering if those CR were causing some alterations in people so as to make them believe the world is warming, or even make some believe they are the chosen prophets of a “new age” era, or others to think changing the world into a “Brave New one”.
Who said astrology (cosmic rays´ version) was not real? 🙂
And going O/T —
Looks like the National Hurrican Center is all over this year’s first Tiny Tim.
Tropical Depression One is being monitored and NHC is saying: “The depression could become a tropical storm tonight or Friday…” If this happens it will be named Ana. This is the storm that developed off the coast of the Carolinas. They just can’t wait to begin handing out names. So there you have it. Get ready for Tiny Tim Ana.
@ Leif
To me, the most remarkable thing is the decreasing variance in the magnetic field on your updating plot. What do you make of it? Is it unprecedented?
Not exactly true. There have been periods of significant and rapid sea level change during the Holocene and sea levels today are about 2.2 meters lower than they were at their maximum height about 7000 years ago.
Also, as for temperature change, *if* this is some kind of grand minimum, it will take a considerable time for any changes in temperature to manifest. Remember how long the Maunder lasted and how long it took temperatures to change. The oceans store a lot of heat. Overall, the land temperatures will change gradually as the ocean does barring any drastic changes in jet stream that can cause any reality … including rising land temperatures when you have a global cooling. If the jet pushes southern air up over a continental land mass, you can record warmer temperatures using only land-based measurements when a large portion of the surface over the ocean is actually colder.
Give it a few decades.
Juraj V. (14:18:14) :
Re John Finn
I merged them in 1809, when temps were roughly equal.
They weren’t equal, but even if they were that doesn’t justify the merge. In the following decade Armagh temperatures were ~0.6 deg below CET, so you’ve actually created the dip. If you’d stuck with the CET record there wouldn’t have been one.
One wonders why it was called Dalton minimum then? 😉
Because it was a grand solar minimum, perhaps?
Armagh starts at 1796 right in the Dalton, 2,5deg C colder than in 2000.
I can only imagine you’ve arrived at this figure by selecting the ‘cold’ temperature in 1796 and comparing it with the ‘warm’ temperature in 2000. To show why this is not valid, compare the annual temperature in 1986 (8.58) with the annual temperature in 2002 (10.18). Using your logic, Armagh has warmed 1.6 degrees in 16 years.
2 deg C change within 20 years is quite a lot, me thinks. AGWers are whining because of global +0.6 per century.
There wasn’t a 2 deg C change in 20 years. There was hardly any change at all. As you point out, we haven’t got data before 1796, so it’s difficult to compare with earlier periods, but we have got earlier data for CET. These are the decadal averages for the 40 year period between 1780 and 1820:
So 2 of the Dalton decades were warmer than the 1780s and the final decade was ~0.1 cooler, though this decade did include the massive Tombura eruption in 1815.
John Finn:
You do realize you’re posting temperatures from the 18th Century and early 19th with .01 degree precision?
Don’t you cringe at the thought? No matter how much those numbers have been massaged and corrected you’d be lucky if those numbers were accurate plus or minus several degrees. This does not constitute evidence of anything except spurious accuracy.
Several years ago I had a new roof put on my house. I had the contractor put on the lightest color shingle he had in order to try to lower summertime temperatures in the attic of the house.
The change from black to light gray made a significant difference in attic temperatures. I wish I had made some temp measurements before and after, but I didn’t think of it at the time.
The Colorado sun can be intense, especially in August when we go dawn to dusk without any cloud cover.
Jim Papsdorf (15:43:25) :
Violent Weather Hits Bordeaux !!!!!
Any chance this is related to the Baby Grand ?
This happened on May 19th around the same time so many cold records were broken in the USA>
Jim,
No, this was a small but active low pressure area and a cold front that colided with a relative warm air mass, a perfectly normal event that happens once in while.
The big hail is caused by Cumulonimbus clouds that develop at the boundery of the cool and the warm air. Cumulonimbus clouds generate strong vertical air currents, up drafts and down drafts, in a relative small area.
A small hail corn can be transported up and downwards several times and when it collides with undercooled water droplets it grows and grows.
In the end it get’s to heavy and it falls to the ground.
This perticular front caused a lot of damage over a relative large area from France, Germany, Belgium and The Netherlands due to lightning strikes, heavy wind gusts, strong hail and rain.
There is no link however with any grand or baby grand minimum.
Carsten Arnholm, Norway (14:24:28) :
> My roof is white for several months every year.
Let me guess, white roof -> cold month, dark roof -> warm month. Chu was right!
Was the Little Ice Age of the Maunder Minimum also so warm? Or maybe they don’t make ice ages like they used to.
Consult your literary record….all of it.
Then re-ask the question.
Did more areas warm or cool?
If agriculture in an area is designed for X, and it gets Y, it usually fails.
Cooler crops in a warmer climate will wilt, and warmer crops in a cooler climate will fail to ripen properly.
Choose your poison.
Which way is the climate now shifting, for the globe and for any given region?
As for this topic, we do have a Baby Grand Minimum, and we don’t know how big or small it will grow to.
Would it be good advice to measure your current posts against on the possible future debate between solar scare mongering and the more reasonable trade wind, oceanic oscillation, weather pattern variation crowd?
I just checked in with Physorg.com and it’s annoying. Why don’t they just admit they don’t know [snip] is going on with the sun. Instead, they say the consensus prediction is….. blah blah blah. I suppose admitting they don’t know [snip] is going on means their stupid and may jeopardize their ability to obtain grants from the government.
Oops…. meant to write “they’re” not “their.”
Those of us that are “true” deniers call it the Gore-Hansen Minimum.
I’m curious about the Greenland ice melting. Apparently Greenland was once warmer than now and there was a Northwest Passage which says Arctic ice was somewhat melted. How much did the ocean level rise when that happened? Is there data on this? It seems at least one of the coastal cities of that time would have noticed a major increase in sea levels. Does that make sense?
Ric, I get it! Global Warming damage can actually mask itself as Global Cooling damage. The amount of snow I had in my backyard eventually killed the lawn. Looks just like it was killed by heat and drought. Turns out that mold can kill a lawn under long lasting snow. And we had very long lasting snow in Pendleton.
I have said before and caution again that whilst the CET record is valuable because it is consistent to itself and goes back a long way it cannot be relied on because the area is small, and it had by the standards of the time large coal burning conurbations around its periphery and the then greatest industrial coal burning iron making heart in the world at its centre in the Black Country. By the late 1700’s they were burning about 10 million tons of coal a year for iron making alone and probably as much again for the secondary casting and finishing trades not to mention other domestic and commercial use. within the area of the CET: which quite literally turned the country black: and it did not recover from this pollution for over one hundred years.
This figure might seem puny today given our modern energy needs but but it was concentrated in a tiny area by modern standards and without even the simplest means of dispersing either the waste heat or the pollution such as the tall chimneys: which became the hallmark of the coal fired age in Britain.
The CET is perfectly reliable, it simply cannot be used as being representative of general temperatures in the UK from about 1750 on, although the proportionally the concentration of coal burning became dispersed the increase to about 150 million tons year by around 1880 this does not begin to compare with the sheer concentration of fuel use in the Black Country of one hundred years earlier.
Until modern Japan and the City of Tokyo nowhere on earth has ever consumed such enormous amounts of chemical energy in such a small area. Or had the resulting temperatures so carefully recorded.
Kindest Regards
DJ (14:38:12) :
Looking back at these past solar minimum the globe should be 1-2C colder than present and cooling.
Sea level should be dropping fast.
Snow and glacial ice should be on the increase.
Instead we have one of the warmest starts to a year on record, April northern hemisphere snow cover at near record lows, sea level on the rise again (after a pause for La Nina), Arctic Sea ice at near record lows (and melting very rapidly ATM).
?? Did you really mean to use the word “lows”?
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm
Regarding the solar heating of our syste’s planets and moons v Uranus cooling
Robert van der Veeke
“Axial tilt perhaps?”
If so, could heating of the other planets and moons likewise be a result of their respective dynamics, rather than the sun?
Robert A Cook
“and only two “measurements” (both from about the 1998 time frame!) in this study”
The other planets and moons have similar sparsity of data points and specific, uncorrelated time periods. And yet we’re prepared to make blanket statements about solar system warming for these. Seems to be an inconsistent application of rigour here.
“So, are two measurements taken ten years ago – that confirm essentially no change from 1979 through 1998 (an extremely hot year on earth!) – really valid way to claim that Uranus is NOT cooling NOW (2008 – 2009) compared to a 1995-1998 timeframe?”
Seeing as the period referenced is one that shows a very strong warming signal in the earth system (sunlight takes 2 hours to get to Uranus), with 1998 being the ‘hottest year on record’, that would seem to invalidate the hypothesis that the sun is the dominant case of temperature change in the solar system.
I’ve found little discussion on the possible causes of warming of celestial bodies in our solar system on truth-seeking climate blogs, apart from a blanket assumption that the sun did it. The studies examining each espouse in-system changes being the cause (for Uranus, too). And I think we’d be going to far too suggest these scientists have fallen prey to Earth climate warming group think. If the skeptic community looked at this in more detail, I’m reasonably confident we’d come to the same conclusion you did – not enough information. And until we do that work, I don’t think this is a good argument for us to promote.
@jeez
John Finn will kick a dead horse until it rises from the dead. Rather than research for evidence around the world during the Dalton Minimum, it is much more self gratifying to cherry pick one station in Europe and ignoring others. A search engine and library helps.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=dalton+minimum&hl=en&lr=&btnG=Search
It is not unlike those claiming the MWP wasn’t real and the Vikings didn’t actually “settle” in Greenland because it was all that warm.
Greenland Ice – Never mind. I think I found what I was wondering about.
http://cei.org/pdf/ait/chXIV.pdf
KBK (16:27:09) :
To me, the most remarkable thing is the decreasing variance in the magnetic field on your updating plot. What do you make of it? Is it unprecedented?
The solar Mean Field [MF on the plot] is a measure of low-latitude coronal holes near the center of the disk. These usually disappear at of just after minimum as the active regions that keep them alive die out and instead begin to form at higher latitudes. So, this happened in the past as well, their magnitude perhaps a tad smaller, but that is in concert with the generally lower sunspot number this time around. When the MF begins to increase we know FOR SURE that the old cycle is dead, and that is why I have it on the plot. Solar minimum happens at different times for different measures of activity.
Have you seen this paper from Archibald?
http://www.nzclimatescience.org/images/PDFs/archibald2007.pdf
In reality, he knows the world has warmed and he even believes in the warming effect of CO2, the only problem posed to the IPCC is that the greatest warming effect is from the first 20 PPM and at current levels 1 additional PPM of CO2 only warms the Earth by about 0.001 degrees, he even overlays the warming effect of CO2 increase over the predicted temperature curve and it looks to be small to me and natural variations will easily overtake it.
Oh dear god…
http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/?rn=3906861&cl=13707821&ch=4226721&src=news
“New psychological territory for all of us.” So many interpretations to that statement.
Don Shaw (14:31:3): I share your interest in somebody doing the math on Chu’s claim about painting roofs white (and roads gray?) being equal to 11 years of automotive CO2 emissions. Here goes a rough guess. Factoid #1 (from google “CO2 auto emissions”) is that cars in Europe emit about 160 g/km of CO2. Conservatively let’s guess there are 100 million cars in Europe and they each go about 20,000 km/year. That’s 160 g/km x 20K km x 10exp8 = 3.2 x 10exp12 kg. Suppose the US is about the same, and Rest of World is the same again. Unclear if Chu’s proposal is to fix the whole planet right away? But on the high side (global) we need to offset about 10 x 10exp12 kg of CO2 through this roof-and-road business. Even if we take the target as only 10% of this (because my guesses are so bad) you still need to hope the Chu Treatment can offset 1 x 10exp12 kg of CO2 auto emissions. Oh, wait: I forgot. He said it would equate to 11 years of such emissions. So even on the low side we’re back to 10 x 10exp12 kg. Well, how much IS that? Wikipedia says the total tonnage of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere is about 3 x 10exp15 kg. …So Chu is claiming that 11 years’ worth of car emissions is about equal to 1/10 of 1% of atmospheric CO2. Possible, I suppose.
What doesn’t seem possible is that painting roofs white is going to make an equivalent dent in the “problem.” …I hope others with better data and math will improve on this guess. And make a start on how much, realistically, could be saved with paint etc. I would think, nothing close.
At last someone who can be believed (apart form D Archibald) predicted in 2006
http://icecap.us/index.php/go/new-and-cool/next_solar_cycle_late_and_likely_to_be_a_dud_the_implications/
crosspatch (16:35:20) :
Sea level has been rising since the start of this Interglacial, why would it be dropping?
Not exactly true. There have been periods of significant and rapid sea level change during the Holocene and sea levels today are about 2.2 meters lower than they were at their maximum height about 7000 years ago.
—–
I stand corrected. Thank you sir!
I am ashamed because I even knew this but in my haste to condemn I contracted foot in mouth disease. Thank you for your tact in pointing out I was a “wild eyed denier” ranting away!
There is a lesson in there somewhere.
Colder oceans cause rapid temperature extremes. This could be why cold decades and centuries do not have correlative data on a global scale. If the jet streams reacted back then the way they do now when oceans are cold, your neighbor across the valley could be soaking in the nearby mountain stream trying to stay cool (if indeed there was any water in the stream) while you are stoking the fire trying to stay warm.
The 1995-96 extremes were brought on by an El Nino followed by a rapid La Nina. http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/special_summaries/96_1/. Both events were strong and resulted in record rains and then record snows, followed by record freeze and then record thaws. The jet stream started in its Southern track, went North where it did its loop de loop, and then ended up South again in a Pineapple belt. SST’s demonstrate rapid changes in front of jet stream meandering. Everything fit. If any one day (or two, or ten) was used to cherry pick temps across the globe in 1995-96, you would definitely find it difficult to assign anything on a global scale.
The fascinating thing about that year was that global warmers were loud and proud about it all being caused by fossil fuel consumption. And that was before 1998. By then, many AGW’s were embarrassed enough by their stupidity regarding 1996 that they were not as loud and proud of the spike we experienced during the El Nino of 98. It was at that time that they began to realize that the PDO can fry our brains or freeze our butts within 24 hrs as well as in 20 to 30 year time spans. It is the die hards that keep telling us the sky is falling. Maybe that is why it is so hard to get them to do their homework. We are dealing with a rather dull class after all the smart ones moved on.
Argghhhh….
Wattspot will be due, it isn’t a Guest Spot article.
Here we go
“PRESTO FROM SIDC – RWC BELGIUM Thu May 28 2009, 1201 UT
Solar activity is very low and it is expected to remain so in the coming days. Geomagnetic activity is expected to be quiet with possible unsettled periods due to, what seems to be, the arrival of a fast solar wind stream from the southern extreme of a coronal hole situated at high northern latitudes. A shock was detected by ACE and SOHO at 04:21 UT followed by a compression region, the solar wind speed is close to 450 km/s.”
— http://www.sidc.be/
Crisis of the Revolutionary Era
Harvest Fluctuations and Grain Prices in England
1799-1800 Famine Years
1808-1812 Bad Years
1816 Year without a summer
Source: Henry Phillips-Brown and Sheila V. Hopkins, A Perspective of Wages & Prices (London, 1981) 59.
The years 1814 to 1818 were extremely harsh winter and cold wet summers.
In the northern US in 1816, it was the year without the summer.
Killing frost occured in every month, and Ohioans referred to it as 18 hundred and froze to death. New Englanders called it the Mackerel Year.
Only grain imported from Ukraine, Turkey, Egypt and America saved Europe from starvation.
Source: The Great Wave, David Hackett Fischer pg 155
All this in the mild-mannered Dalton.
3×2 (01:47:34) :
Does this mean we will have to paint our cities in Zebra stripes just to be on the safe side?
Ohhh – that’s good – an impertinent and timely wit. :-).
Stephen Brown (14:09:48) :
@ Steven Hill
I noticed that in the article to which you provided a link at 06:47:50, the journalist mentioned “the Atlantic has a dense, compact layer of deep, cold water… ”
Has anyone here ever tried ‘compacting’ any fluid?
Just before I reported to my submarine, they performed exactly this experiment. Seems that when you try to compress water in a diesel engine, you get minimal compacting of the water and three broken pistons, two broken connecting rods and two bent ones, a bent crankshaft, and a warped block. I saw the pictures of the tear down. It was impressive. These are about 8 inch pistons and the face was snapped right off of the skirt.
I’m sure we can all rest assured that those little pimple sun specks that we need to circle in photos from SOHO to direct people’s attention to them would have been seen in 1913 telescopes–even on cloudy days.
“”gerrym (00:15:47) :
It is clear that unless humans stop burning fossil fuels with immediate effect this lack of sun spots will result in a catastrophe for the human race.””
If we would only just paint all our roofs white and wear white clothes we could avoid all of it!!
http://motls.blogspot.com/2009/05/steven-chu-will-paint-world-white.html
Can I take bets on if Steven Chu would buy ocean front property in Nebraska?
Gary Crough (01:27:06) :
Here’s some evidence :
Owen Hughes (19:31:58) :
Don Shaw (14:31:3):
See http://www.drroyspencer.com/
for his take on this.
“” King of Cool (01:42:32) : Pkatt – I think the answer to your question would be the silver bullet to the complete issue of CO2 or Sun driven Global Warming/Cooling. “‘
Nope! No silver bullet for the alarmist, politicians, and that whole farrago! That werewolf doesn’t die from the silver bullet. As Roy Spencer has said, paraphrase, maybe the only thing that will stop global warming is a long cold streak.
“”Putting him in charge of scientific research would be tantamount to “giving the finger to scientists”, said Nicolas Hulot, France’s best-known environmental activist.””
Ok, I don’t have a problem with it.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a2b172ba-4a54-11de-8e7e-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1
(h/t von Stauffenberg (02:53:07) : , 😉 )
Perhaps Deborah Zabarenko is fond of environmental magic – the type you find in mushrooms?
Leif Svalgaard (19:10:18) :
“KBK (16:27:09) :
To me, the most remarkable thing is the decreasing variance in the magnetic field on your updating plot. What do you make of it? Is it unprecedented?”
The solar Mean Field [MF on the plot] is a measure of low-latitude coronal holes near the center of the disk. These usually disappear at of just after minimum as the active regions that keep them alive die out and instead begin to form at higher latitudes. So, this happened in the past as well, their magnitude perhaps a tad smaller, but that is in concert with the generally lower sunspot number this time around. When the MF begins to increase we know FOR SURE that the old cycle is dead, and that is why I have it on the plot. Solar minimum happens at different times for different measures of activity.
How is the split decided? high latitude and low latitude? last month there were coronal holes from the center up to high latitude. Is it instrumental or human decision?
repeat with correct italics. I had greek fonts on and the system does not recognize iota for i 🙂
Leif Svalgaard (19:10:18) :
“KBK (16:27:09) :
To me, the most remarkable thing is the decreasing variance in the magnetic field on your updating plot. What do you make of it? Is it unprecedented?”
The solar Mean Field [MF on the plot] is a measure of low-latitude coronal holes near the center of the disk. These usually disappear at of just after minimum as the active regions that keep them alive die out and instead begin to form at higher latitudes. So, this happened in the past as well, their magnitude perhaps a tad smaller, but that is in concert with the generally lower sunspot number this time around. When the MF begins to increase we know FOR SURE that the old cycle is dead, and that is why I have it on the plot. Solar minimum happens at different times for different measures of activity.
How is the split decided? high latitude and low latitude? last month there were coronal holes from the center up to high latitude. Is it instrumental or human decision?
Is it really wise to think that painting your roof white will change global temperatures?
Maybe some underestimate the size of the earth…..
DJ (14:38:12) :
Do you agree that it is most odd that we have such a significant solar minimum and yet the planet’s climate is so warm?
Define so warm?
I might well be that the optimal average temperature is still to low, periods of time in the past suggest so! Only a AGW believer who drank the coolaid will go with the claim that it is TO warm and that there is TO MUCH CO2 in the atmosphere.
Both temperature and CO2 content have in my opinion not properly been measured in the past, still even if it was than it is still is no indicator if the current temperatures are to high, because periods of time in the past suggest the other thing, there have been times that the CO2 content and temperatures have been much higher than the present day, yet it did not cause a runaway effect because of passing a climate tipping point.
“” Mrs Whatsit (09:36:28) : Is there really enough roof surface on the planet that increasing their reflectivity could significantly affect global temperatures?””
I think of it this way :
No cities can be seen from space, let alone a house. Maybe if we put all the houses and buildings side by side in a giant square you may be able to see that from space, but it would just be a small square. To think that if that small square was white or black could alter global temperature is silly.
“If there’s a wind it must mean that someone is blowing.”
p.s. I’m not saying it couldn’t have a slight effect on UHI.
I still think that the name “Gore Minimum” has the best ironic ring to it!
I think we all can see that not enough thought by Steven Chu was put in to this white roof thing.
No one has mentioned that not all roofs are on an angle to catch direct sunshine. For example there are houses in the Arctic and Antarctic circle where sun light doesn’t hit at an angle to make as much a difference as roofs near the equator. My illustration of all roofs side by side in a square would have to take that in to account. Which means the square would have to be smaller than the actual size of all roofs on earth. Or, the size of the square could be actual size if you did the math and found the perfect location on earth to put it so the energy absorbed/reflected by it that would equal the energy absorbed/reflected by all roofs on earth in their current locations—either way you do it I think common sense will tell you that the color of your roof means nothing for global temperatures.
Video of sunlight striking the earth at different angles throughout the different times of the year :
Looks like what everyone suspected. Will Nature withdraw this paper now? or at least issue a “correction”. Otherwise it will remain as a “dark nail” in their coffin for time immemorial LOL. Thank you Ryan for your exhaustive analysis and effort put into this. Its the only way these guys are going to be convinced
By Ryan here
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/05/28/verification-of-the-improved-high-pc-reconstruction/
Ad verbatim conclusions
“This fits with the qualitative observation that the Steig method seemed to spread the Peninsula warming all over the continent, including into East Antarctica – which by most other accounts is cooling slightly, not warming.
CONCLUSION
With the exception of the RegEM verification, all of the verification statistics listed above were performed exactly (split reconstruction) or analogously (restricted 15 predictor reconstruction) by Steig in the Nature paper. In all cases, our reconstruction shows significantly more skill than the Steig reconstruction. So if these are the metrics by which we are to judge this type of reconstruction, ours is objectively superior.
As before, I would qualify this by saying that not all of the errors and uncertainties have been quantified yet, so I’m not comfortable putting a ton of stock into any of these reconstructions. However, I am perfectly comfortable saying that Steig’s reconstruction is not a faithful representation of Antarctic temperatures over the past 50 years and that ours is closer to the mark.”
I just found this on the Drudge Report and am terrified! AGW is killing people right now!!
http://www.forexyard.com/reuters/popup_reuters.php?action=2009-05-28T222242Z_01_LS1002309_RTRIDST_0_CLIMATE-HUMAN-EMBARGOED
What’s happening with the MDI Magnetogram? It has been two days that it is not changing when all the other images of the sun have changed? http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/realtime-update.html
No one has pointed this out yet, but Steven Chu is supposed to be concerned with ‘climate change’ not ‘global warming’. His ‘paint everything white’ could only help for global warming.
Chu is not up on the latest iteration.
He’s right—blackboard paint!!
O/T
From the UK telegraph
World’s leading scientists warn climate change is as great a threat as nuclear warfare
The threat of climate change is as severe as nuclear warfare, according to an emergency summit of the world’s Nobel Laureates.
The group of Nobel winners, together with Prince Charles, issued a memorandum which declared the best chance of stopping catastrophic climate change is to keep the predicted temperature rise at or below 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F).
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/5401597/Worlds-leading-scientists-warn-climate-change-is-as-great-a-threat-as-nuclear-warfare.html
It’s probably just bad reporting but…I know this is pedantic but surely the easiest way to keep a predicted temperature down is to use a different method of prediction.
Very nice explanation of cosmoclimatology in this YouTube series :
Qt RealClimate found this:
“RealClimate is temporarily down for maintenance. We are sorry for the inconvenience.”
Maybe Lubos was right back in April:
http://motls.blogspot.com/2009/04/realclimate-abolished.html
May I suggest an examination of the CEOs of the major “White Roof Paint” manufacturers for their affilliations to members of government. [/cynicism]
VG, thanks for that 2006 Clilverd et al paper.
In 2006 the sun was behaving ‘normally’ and NASA’s preictions of a supercycle 24 were being issued to the public. Yet Clilverd et al, although going against consensus at the time, expected a cycle 24 of peak +- 50 ,now appear to be correct.
They must be doing something right!
*predictions
Clilverd et al are correct (so far) in that they expected a weak cycle 24 with a delayed start, which is exactly what is currently happening, and therefore their prediction of low sunspot max for sc24 is becoming a likely event to occur.
the answer would be in summer/winter is a sort of substance that once an electric current is passed through it it changes colour. 😉 in winter its dark to absorb what heats there, white to reflect it when its too hot..
why not put solar panels on the roof, get energy less use of coal power.. wouldnt be as obtrusive.
how much would that help?
Wow two stories make this a a big day (on this site) for death knell of AGW
1. Svensmark vidoes
2. Ryan debunking of modeled antarctic warming
Leif,
do you agree?
http://www.physorg.com/news162653480.html
“Go ahead and mark your calendar for May 2013,” says Pesnell. “But use a pencil.”
“Skeptic” commented above about this April being the 5th hottest ever. Some time ago I read an interesting statistic about record hot months, using GISS data, as I had got tired of hearing alarmist news about records actually NOT being broken (5th warmest means it is NOT the warmest). In my statistic, each month whose anomaly was bigger than those of the same months in the previous 10 years counted as +1, and when the opposite happened, i.e. the month being the coldest among the same months in the previous 10 years, they counted -1. I checked all anomalies since 1970. This is what I found out:
1) Before the 80’s, cold records were normal. However, during the 80’s (1981-1990) a huge warming seemed to take place. The decadal average was of 3 record hot months per year, i.e. months which would create news like “this April was the hottest April in the last 10 years”. There were zero 10-year-record-cold months.
2) In the 90’s (1991-2000) the average dropped to just 1.9 10-year-record-hot months per year, and the Pinatubo led to three 10-year-record-cold months in 1992.
3) Since 2001, the average has again dropped to only 1.25 10-year-record-hot months per year. It seems to me like there is still some warming, but the speed of the warming is every time SLOWER, NOT FASTER. Another proof of this is that, during all the 80’s and the 90’s, it took a Pinatubo event to create any 10-year-record-cold monthly temperature. However, since 2001, we have had 3 such record cold months, in August 2004 and in January and February 2008. Furthermore, with April 2009 we have been already 2 full years without getting ANY 10-year-record-hot month, and with two 10-year-record-cold months in the middle, which means that the average is negative for the last 2 years or more (actually, since February 2007). You can only compare the length of this (hot) recordless time with the huge La Niñas of 1999-2000 and with the Pinatubo itself, but at no other time since 1985 have we seen 2 full years without any 10-year-record-hot month. However this time we don’t have either huge volcanic eruptions or extremely long and strong la Niñas to prevent hot months from happening. And, in fact, CO2 is increasing faster than in the previous events.
I think this looks like the beginning of a cooling trend.
jeez (17:31:17) :
John Finn:
You do realize you’re posting temperatures from the 18th Century and early 19th with .01 degree precision?
Don’t you cringe at the thought?
I’m happy to use them to the nearest half a degree if you like in which case there is still no change as each decade averaged 9 deg C.
No matter how much those numbers have been massaged and corrected you’d be lucky if those numbers were accurate plus or minus several degrees.
Nonsense. The CET is a long standing record and from there is high confidence in it’s relative accuracy from ~1772.
This does not constitute evidence of anything except spurious accuracy.
It was good enough to be used by an earlier poster. It’s also good enough to be used by David Archibald – who also used the Armagh record. Are you somehow saying that Armagh is accurate but CET is not. What about Uppsala – and other similar long term records. If the long term records are in dispute – could you answer this:
What evidence is there that periods of low solar activity coincide with low global temperatures? Surely you’re not relying on paintings or literature or someone reporting that “it’s a bit parky this winter”.
Make sure that pencil comes equipped with a heavy-duty solar-powered eraser.
DR (19:05:16) :
@jeez
John Finn will kick a dead horse until it rises from the dead. Rather than research for evidence around the world during the Dalton Minimum, it is much more self gratifying to cherry pick one station in Europe and ignoring others.
Ok – pick another station. They all say the same. Now, due to the sparsity of measurements at that time, it’s possible that the stations available ‘miss’ the great Dalton cooling but that’d be a bit unlucky.
Incidentally I’ve used the stations (CET, Armagh, Uppsala etc) to argue against the hockey-stick. There is clearly no dramatic uptick in ~1900 as portrayed by the H-S, so I’m not being one-sided here.
A search engine and library helps.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=dalton+minimum&hl=en&lr=&btnG=Search
No it doesn’t because I’m not denying the existence of the Dalton Minimum. I accept the Dalton Minimum was a period of low solar activity. My argument is that it didn’t have the impact on the global climate that is generally assumed.
It is not unlike those claiming the MWP wasn’t real and the Vikings didn’t actually “settle” in Greenland because it was all that warm.
The vikings were in Greeenland for several hundred years. Are you saying that there were no periods of low solar activity during that time.
If, and it’s a big IF, the Dalton minimum was cooler than, say, the mid-18th or mid-19th centuries, then it’s clearly not by much – a couple of tenths at most, so even if we are entering a Dalton-type minimum this just means we might go back to typical ~1980s/1990s temperatures.
Anyway I’m off to put the shorts on and get outside before it gets too hot. I can’t say I’ve noticed too much weakening in the sun’s output in the last week or so.
Alex (01:10:20) :
Clilverd et al are correct (so far) in that they expected a weak cycle 24 with a delayed start, which is exactly what is currently happening, and therefore their prediction of low sunspot max for sc24 is becoming a likely event to occur.
But unfortunately they dont know why they are right.
There is no evidence of yesterday’s temperature today. Just observations and written records. You cannot re-measure yesterday’s temps today.
There is no evidence, indeed !!
anna v (21:44:12) :
How is the split decided? high latitude and low latitude? last month there were coronal holes from the center up to high latitude. Is it instrumental or human decision?
Nature’s decision. The Mean Field measurements look at the Sun as if it was a star, i.e. with no spatial resolution at all. Since we 1) measure the line-of-sight magnetic field [what the Zeeman effect gives us] that falls off in strength as your go towards the limb, 2) get the most light from the the center of the disk, because the intensity also falls off as you go towards the limb [‘limb darkening’], and 3) often find opposite polarities near the limb [e.g. polar regions with opposite fields], these three effects conspire to heavily weight the data towards disk center. The MF comes for 90% from the central portion of the disk out to 1/2 solar radius [or 1/4 disk area]. The coronal holes we have seen lately are small and have little magnetic flux.
Pierre Gosselin (02:21:07) :
Leif, do you agree?
http://www.physorg.com/news162653480.html
We said in our prediction paper http://www.leif.org/research/Cycle%2024%20Smallest%20100%20years.pdf :
“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).”
rbateman (04:23:41) :
There is no evidence of yesterday’s temperature today. Just observations and written records. You cannot re-measure yesterday’s temps today.
There is no evidence, indeed !!
If this is intended for me, I’m afraid I’ve missed the point.
John Finn (03:53:34)
you write: ” IF, the Dalton minimum was cooler than, say, the mid-18th or mid-19th centuries, then it’s clearly not by much – a couple of tenths at most, so even if we are entering a Dalton-type minimum this just means we might go back to typical ~1980s/1990s temperatures. ”
I understand your logic, but i think you should respect solar influence a little more… also in the Dalton.. :
http://www.klimadebat.dk/forum/vedhaeftninger/wheatprices.jpg
With the same logic what would you say about the maunder minimum?
That we would go back to 1970-80 temperatures, or?
But did the thames freeze over in the 1970-80? No.
K.R. Frank Lansner
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AKD (19:22:28) :
Oh dear god…
http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/?rn=3906861&cl=13707821&ch=4226721&src=news
“New psychological territory for all of us.” So many interpretations to that statement.
************************************************************
I could only listen to the first few minutes before barfing… the hubris of the AGWers is breathtaking. Catastrophists come every century and we have ours today.
Here’s a winner from NASA/NOAA. Let me summarize. Blah, blah, sunspots, blah, blah, another prediction, blah, blah, we have no idea what’s going on…
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/29may_noaaprediction.htm
I am not educated in climatology… but this is my favorite website by far. I love watching the experts duke it out on here. What could I possibly contribute? It is so entertaining to watch the experts sift through the data and postulate. Awesome!!! You guys -n- gals are sooo impressive.
On the ‘white rooftops’ thing… it seems so silly to me. Again: What do I know? It just seems so far-fetched, and it doesn’t ad up to an uneducated guy like me. Here’s a question: Why do the AGW’s spend so much time preaching to the choir? Everyone with a predisposition to bite off on Global Warming doesn’t need to be shoveled all of this. If they want to convince the other side… why don’t they just say something like “white rooftops will fight terrorism.. or save money on energy”? It’s simple marketing.
The obvious solution for all is to have a roof that adapts with the seasons. Ebony and Ivory… why can’t we all just come together? Hehe.
This Baby Grand thing is a very interesting development. I have turned many friends on to this website, and I can’t wait to see the winner. Are we all going to burn up or freeze over? My guess is, we’ll starve from taxation for trying to fix the climate before 2% up or down ever comes.
Frank Lansner (11:58:01) :
John Finn (03:53:34)
I understand your logic, but i think you should respect solar influence a little more… also in the Dalton.. :
http://www.klimadebat.dk/forum/vedhaeftninger/wheatprices.jpg
Apart from the fact this proves very little, I suspect close analysis might
might see the relationship crumble. For a start we know there was regular famine in France during Louis XVI’s reign which preceded the Dalton Minimum when soalr activity was relatively high.
With the same logic what would you say about the maunder minimum?
That we would go back to 1970-80 temperatures, or?
But did the thames freeze over in the 1970-80? No.
Frank
The reasons the Thames froze over more readily during the LIA were twofold, i.e. (i) Winters were hasher back then. (ii) The Thames was wider and shallower, so flowed more slowly.
However, the Thames didn’t freeze any more frequently during the Dalton Minimum than it did during any other period. There are dozens of recordings of the Thames freezing over long before the Dalton Minimum, some even from the time of the MWP. There does appear, though, to be some confusion the issue of “Frost Fairs” – which took place on the Thames. The first recorded Frost Fair was in 1608, but one of the most spectacular events was in the winter of 1813/1814 which was, of course, during the Dalton Minimum.
But 1813/14 wasn’t a particularly cold winter overall though it did have the coldest January in the CET record. As far as a complete winter (Dec-Jan-Feb) is concerned, 1962/63 was much colder. Average CET temperature for 1962/63 was -0.33 ; Average winter temperature for 1813/14 was +0.43.
Call me crazy here, but I couldn’t help but notice some dates on this chart:
1911\
1912 >Escalation to World War I
1913/
1914– World War I begins [not on chart]
1923 Roaring Twenties begins in Earnest.
1933 Ten years later and the 20’s is forgotten in the depths of the great depression.
1944 WWII is in full swing, beginning with the Battle of Monte Cassino. Berlin would fall that year.
1954 A year earlier the Korean Conflict had ended with an armistice and has just begun to build itself.
Years from then on to now: the sun builds itself up in activity during the war and the years shortly before and after.
2008 We elect Obama to office. What now?
http://www.spaceweather.com/ is resorting to UV from the STEREO BEFORE to light up some activity. Yes, it may be a sunspeck and yes, we will know in a few days.
But, it is almost with desperation that this “cycle 24 solar activity” is reported.
John Finn, thanks for answer.
I recently made this writing here at watts:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/04/11/making-holocene-spaghetti-sauce-by-proxy/
– My graphs fig 4 and 10 did in fact not show much of a Dalton minimum.
However, look at fig 11, the wood graphs show quite a significant Dalton minimum. Signals seems to be a little mixed concerning Dalton minimum.
K.R. Frank
No.
The Thames above London Bridge was much wider and slow flowing than today and was further obstructed by London Bridge, but the first written record we have of the Upper Thames freezing over is 1316 by a monk at Blackfriars who simply described it as a ‘great wonder’ but says little more.
The first frost fair was held in the winter of 1535 and is well recorded not least because the King, Henry 8, was treating with Aske over the northern revolt called Pilgrimage of Grace. We know that the Thames froze to the point at which could support people and horses, the King and his court galloped across a number of times, and that peddlers and traders set up stalls and booths on the ice. It remained frozen for over a month.
Kindest Regards
Pierre Gosselin (02:21:07) :
That story looks like the same event as covered in
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/08/noaa-swpc-solar-cycle-24-prediction-update-released-may-8-2009/
Leif had several things to say there.
Someone sent me a pointer to a Slashdot article about the the RAFOS floats and the thermohaline circulation, I sent him back
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/15/uh-oh-50-year-old-ocean-thermohaline-model-sinking-fast-climate-models-may-be-disrupted/
WUWT is ahead of everyone!
For the last two thousand years, we have had a de Vries event every 210 years on average, except for the Medieval Warm Period which missed one. The last de Vries event was the Dalton Minimum which started in 1798. That was 211 years ago now so the next one should start with the start of the next solar cycle, whenever that is. The last two thousand years of data suggests that there is a 90%-odd chance of getting one. We would have to be living in a special time to miss out.
Here is another item of essential study for the discussion going on here. It is Dr Nicola Scafetta’s presentation of evidence for natural climate change to the EPA on 26 February this year here-
http://yosemite.epa.gov/ee/epa/wkshp.nsf/vwpsw/84E74F1E59E2D3FE852574F100669688#video
or if that doesn’t work, you can find the link on his University web page here-
http://www.fel.duke.edu/~scafetta
under scientific conferences and presentations.
Please note that his ppt pdf is 76 pages and takes several minutes to download.
A brave Galileo speaks authoritatively before the Inquisitors!
A comprehensive account
“”a jones (16:44:23) : It remained frozen for over a month. “”
You might like this :
“Blackfeet Indians predict the return of ‘many glaciers’ to Glacier Park”
http://cdapress.com/articles/2009/05/23/columns/columns06.txt
David Archibald (19:16:13) :
For the last two thousand years, we have had a de Vries event every 210 years on average, except for the Medieval Warm Period which missed one. The last de Vries event was the Dalton Minimum which started in 1798. That was 211 years ago now so the next one should start with the start of the next solar cycle, whenever that is. The last two thousand years of data suggests that there is a 90%-odd chance of getting one. We would have to be living in a special time to miss out.
Your data coincides with mine, the MWP is certainly one out of the box. The 210 year period can be very common especially during centuries with low angular momentum. My data suggests a 172 year center but very often the full quota of solar downturn is not taken which can lengthen the period to over 200 years as we see today. This is a serious challenge to the Babcock theory which relies on a random number generator (crap shoot) to explain downturns and modulation. Its near impossible for a random process to give us the observed cyclic solar history, and it can never predict grand minima like we can today.
But 1813/14 wasn’t a particularly cold winter overall though it did have the coldest January in the CET record. As far as a complete winter (Dec-Jan-Feb) is concerned, 1962/63 was much colder. Average CET temperature for 1962/63 was -0.33 ; Average winter temperature for 1813/14 was +0.43.
Playing with statistics.
You can have Year X and Year Y, for example, with the exact same median temp.
One will have a Jan/Feb av. or 20, and a Jul/Aug av. of 80.
The next one will have a Jan/Feb av. of 10, and a Jul/Aug av. of 90.
They are far different, but you can hide this with cherry picking of statistics, which tells you nothing of the change between the two.
For the real deal, you have to bore right down into the actual data.
When was the last killing frost, when was the first one?
How many growing days were there, and did the crops planted fall within the window?
The literary record says that things were quite horrid.
You have access to the records, glad to hear it. So, put on your muck boots, get in there, and find out why.
I can’t help but wonder if this quiet sun has anything to do with the colder than average spring temperatures we have been experiencing in Canada.
No, that would be too obvious.
There must be something more sinister at work.
Elizabeth (21:11:31) :
I came across this when searching for the deVries event David Archibald was talking about above.
Regional tropospheric responses to long-term solar activity variations
Perhaps Canada is one of those places where rapid climate events occur.
The article is a pay-for, and with my meager wage, I had to settle for the preview page.
And wouldn’t tinfoil reflect the sun even better than white paint?
Yes it would.
I recommend the hats.
This not yet named solar minimum
It’s got to be the Ad Ho-Minimum.
(Whoever made that one up deserves the Nobel Beauty Prize.)
rbateman (22:01:09) :
Elizabeth (21:11:31) :
I came across this when searching for the deVries event
Perhaps no coincidence that ‘vries’ is the Afrikaans [derived from Dutch] word for ‘to freeze’. 🙂
The New Solar Cycle Prediction from the NASA is rather funny, they predict the cycle will be mild or weak, but at the same time, they warn us for potential huge disasters:
“Even a below-average cycle is capable of producing severe space weather,” points out Biesecker. “The great geomagnetic storm of 1859, for instance, occurred during a solar cycle of about the same size we’re predicting for 2013.”
The 1859 storm–known as the “Carrington Event” after astronomer Richard Carrington who witnessed the instigating solar flare–electrified transmission cables, set fires in telegraph offices, and produced Northern Lights so bright that people could read newspapers by their red and green glow. A recent report by the National Academy of Sciences found that if a similar storm occurred today, it could cause $1 to 2 trillion in damages to society’s high-tech infrastructure and require four to ten years for complete recovery. For comparison, Hurricane Katrina caused “only” $80 to 125 billion in damage.”
I guess nowadays you need to spread doom and gloom if you want to keep your budget.
Just Want Truth… (19:45:46) :
Loved the article you liked to. I think we ignore many indigenous peoples’ oral history at our peril.
rbateman (21:04:54) :
The literary record says that things were quite horrid.
The literary record says that “thing were quite horrid” at othere times – not just during the Dalton Minimum.
You have access to the records, glad to hear it. So, put on your muck boots, get in there, and find out why.
Let me get this right. You’re asking me to find out why the temperature record doesn’t match with your theories about the effect of the Dalton solar minimum on climate? Well, well – and there’s me thinking it was just the AGWers who questioned the data when it didn’t fit with their theories.
Face it – there was nothing remarkable about the Dalton Minimum. There were some cold winters and probably some miserable summers. But there have always been cold winters and miserable summers in the UK – believe me. Apparently Napoleon discovered the Russian winter could be brutally cold during the Dalton Minimum. But the Germans discovered the same thing ~130 years later.
Rereke Whakaaro (21:39:45) :
Yet another Kiwi posting on WUWT? Te na koe.
If you are in NZ, Rereke, you will know that it’s a bit nippy. We’re beginning to think that the Goracle has made a sneak visit.
It’s still a day off formal winter and we are bracing for our fourth snow event of the year this weekend (which is Queen’s Birthday holiday). Some ski fields are opening a fortnight early with mega snow. Only the availability of staff made the opening so late.
Even NIWA – the Voice of IPCC Global Warming in Aotearoa (supposedly our dispassionate met and climate service) – has forecast a cold start to winter. Of course, later warm spells will make it an ‘average’ season.
I can’t remember so much sustained rain and I certainly cannot recall four snowfalls, albeit brief, even before winter began. Four for a winter would be a lot. My Maori neighbours have a lot of ancestral knowledge and they are piling up the firewood. So am I!
Anthony, the personally signed Report arrived during the week; thank you very much indeed. Not hard to ‘stay cool’ at the moment.
Kia kaha.
Afrikaans is ‘n pragtige taal! , and a very proudly S.African language!
Speaking of southern hemisphere,,Here in SA there was snow in the Free State side of the Drakensberg in the beginning of April which is very unusual, and snow has once again returned to the Ceres valley in the Cape, it was actually on the tv news last night. “Hundreds flock from Cape Town to Ceres to see the snow”
No global warming mentioned though…
The La Nina of last year was most definately felt here, with record snow and cold and now even the weaker La Nina is showing up in the weather.
It appears though that a weak El Nino is forming which could bring some warmth and dry weather here.
Purakanui (03:52:55) :
Careful – the Maori may have decided to stock up because the long range weather forecasts are calling for a cold winter. The Weather service may be calling for that because they note the Maori are piling up the firewood. 🙂
Real-life incarnation of that Aussie joke?
John Finn says:
“Face it – there was nothing remarkable about the Dalton Minimum. There were some cold winters and probably some miserable summers. But there have always been cold winters and miserable summers in the UK – believe me. Apparently Napoleon discovered the Russian winter could be brutally cold during the Dalton Minimum. But the Germans discovered the same thing ~130 years later.”
Thank you John. By your inestimable logic, we can now ignore whatever warming and ice melt there may have been between 1979 and 1998 because there are always miserable winters and summers and decades and centuries, and epochs…
Glad to see you joining the denier side!!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
“”Elizabeth (21:11:31) :
I can’t help but wonder if this quiet sun has anything to do with the colder than average spring temperatures we have been experiencing in Canada.
No, that would be too obvious.
There must be something more sinister at work.””
That’s cute Elizabeth. 😉
I liked it.
Let me get this right. You’re asking me to find out why the temperature record doesn’t match with your theories
Not even. The literary record of the years I gave are not a theory. They are recorded history and published.
Face it – there was nothing remarkable about the Dalton Minimum.
Prove your assertion. Quote your data that says the Dalton was unremarkable in that crops did not fail. Prove that grain did not get imported into Europe to counter the shortages.
If, as you say, the Dalton was unremarkable and the same as 1941, this should be a cakewalk for you.
Your source(s) on this:
Do you have one or more you would like to share here that everyone can see?
and there’s me thinking it was just the AGWers who questioned the data when it didn’t fit with their theories.
Again, John, the literary record is not a theory. AGW certainly is. Causation has not yet been proved mechanism-wise as to Grand Minimum -> Climate Awry. Netiher has it been disproved. The Dalton is likewise not a theory.
The people who recorded both records had no agenda that is known today.
They were writing down what they observed.
Two things were observed: Crop failures/unusually adverse weather, and a long drought of sunspots/low cycles.
Ellie in Belfast (02:33:42) :
I agree Ellie. Clearly, to me, there is high value in these histories. One I find interesting is about Lief Erikson, his brother, Ming Dynasty soldiers, and their travels during what we now call The Medieval Warming Period. It is thought that Lief Erikson’s brother was killed in a skirmish in Canada near the Atlantic Coast with ‘Canadian Indians’. But after seeing drawings of the ‘Canadian Indians’ in a documentary on The History Channel I could see the Indians looked very much like they were dressed in clothes from the Ming Dynasty. It could be that soldiers and explorers from the Ming Dynasty traveled along Canada’s Northern Coast and met Vikings on the East side of Canada.
If these ‘Canadian Indians’ really were from the Ming Dynasty then it would be more evidence that it was warmer than now during the Medieval Warming Period and not colder—which is what the Mann Hockey Stick (the graph that even Steven Chu uses) shows.
Wallace (12:11:46) :
No Wallace and Gromit impersonators here!! I think that’s in the rules!! 😉 I love Aardman claymation (save for the listless 2001-2006 DreamWorks years) !!
Haha! Nicely said kuhnkat!
Here is a strange Wikifact about the Dalton minimum with regards to a poet’s inspiration for his poem “Darkness” (by Lord Byron):
“1816, the year in which the poem was written, was called “the year without summer”, as strange weather and an inexplicable darkness caused record-cold temperatures across Europe, especially in Geneva[3] where Byron claimed to have received his inspiration for the poem, saying he “wrote it… at Geneva, when there was a celebrated dark day, on which the fowls went to roost at noon, and the candles were lighted as at midnight”.[4] The darkness was (unknown to those of the time) caused by the volcanic ash spewing from the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia (Vail 184). The search for a cause of the strange changes in the light of day only grew as scientists discovered sunspots on the sun so large that they could be seen with the naked eye.[5] Newspapers such as the London Chronicle reported on the panic:
“ The large spots which may now be seen upon the sun’s disk have given rise to ridiculous apprehensions and absurd predictions. These spots are said to be the cause of the remarkable and wet weather we have had this Summer; and the increase of these spots is represented to announce a general removal of heat from the globe, the extinction of nature, and the end of the world.[6] ”
A scientist in Italy even predicted that the sun would go out on July 18″
– taken from Wikipedia : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness_(poem)
Strange,,, even back then the idea that the sun had an influence on the weather was ridiculed by the media…
John Finn (03:18:18) :
There is no correlation between immediate temperature change and solar activity. It may of course be a leading indicator but that has yet to be shown.
http://i599.photobucket.com/albums/tt74/MartinGAtkins/SSN-HAD.jpg
Purakanui mentioned getting in his firewood. I already have over a cord in stock…I blew through about 4 cord last winter, far more than previous winters. I had my fire going steadily for 7 straight months. I live in Colville, WA, about 49 degrees north, and the snow is still present on our peaks above about 5000 feet. The reason I mention that is David Archibald’s “infamous” (marvelous) paper last year where he asserted that the crop line will fall south 100 or so KM over the NA continent. I happen to see that already. Our area has fruit trees, winter wheat, and the likes, and the farmers are very concerned (anecdotal) about how late this “break up” arrived. True, drought conditions seem to be prevalent, but people forget that the 3 Gorges Dam, as a HUGE strange attractor, has massively altered the jet streams all about the planet… masking a lot of changes.
Purakanui
G’Day Bro
Purakanui:
Mike Pickett:
I have just this minute looked out of my window in Wellington, New Zealand, and it is snowing.
This is only the second time I have seen snow in Wellington (the last was about 15 years ago), and it does not settle. But seeing that it is not yet officially winter here, I would consider this to be a moderately significant event.
Better get a few more chords of wood cut, you guys …
Just Want Truth… (10:42:16) :
In my rush to get my car to the shop I wrote that comment ( Just Want Truth… (10:42:16) : ) poorly. But the basic idea is there—there is evidence that shows it was warmer on earth during the Medieval Warming Period than now.
Interesting video showing what magnetic fields look like: click
kia ora from another Kiwi…
Rereke Whakaaro (14:37:05) :
“Better get a few more chords of wood cut, you guys …”
(Robt waits for the melody and harmony of music from those falling chords of wood down south ….)
…
Just Want Truth:
“But the basic idea is there—there is evidence that shows it was warmer on earth during the Medieval Warming Period than now.”
If you look at even the most rapid AGW sites who are still trying to prop up the hockey graph, you will see that their “temperature graph” – particularly when it included many different sources – ALL come together (the error bars are shortened) during the MWP. They (typically) spread out the temperatures GREATLY across the period of the little ice age – then “average” their final temperature plot as “flat” by using only the highest of all extrapolated temperature proxies during the LIA.
But the extremist’s MWP is ALWAYS almost at, near, or only slightly above today’s temperatures with very, very little error margins and no differences between all the different proxies. Somehow, nobody – not even the most prejudiced observers – can find ANY evidence that the MWP did NOT occur by “finding” low temperatures ANYTIME during the period.
“Rereke Whakaaro (14:37:05) :
Purakanui:
Mike Pickett:
I have just this minute looked out of my window in Wellington, New Zealand, and it is snowing.
This is only the second time I have seen snow in Wellington (the last was about 15 years ago), and it does not settle. But seeing that it is not yet officially winter here, I would consider this to be a moderately significant event.
Better get a few more chords of wood cut, you guys …”
I lived in Wellington for 9 years, never saw snow as it was, and is, usually too windy and too near the coast. Saw frost in still areas up the Hutt valley, Wairarapa and snow on summit of the Rimutaka Hill road (At the top there was a wind genny supplying some power for the cafe there, had to be pulled down because…wait for it…it was TOO windy, which is fairly normal for that region).
Coldest winter in the UK in 30 years, heavy snow and record lows in Canada and the US, snow in China, Saudi Arabia and first snow in 100 years in Iran. And now, Australia and New Zealand bypassing autumn, not collecting $200, and going straight to winter (It’s winter, officially, June 1st) before winter starts. Hummm…..
“2008 We elect Obama to office. What now?”
Reap the whirlwind.
Our outstanding debt owned by investors stood, at the end of 2008, at $6.4 trillion. This year, one of deep recession, we will add $3.25 trillion, four times last years total and a good deal less than next year’s lump.
China began the year owning $2 trillion but now owns $800 billion, replacing its 30 year notes with 2 year notes, i.e., they expect inflation. Our Federal Reserve had planned to buy only $300 billion, having purchased $700 billion in troubled mortgage-backed securities.
The rising interest rates required will raise mortgage rates and soak up all the capital available frustrating business expansion. Oil is headed up another 15% or so, together killing any hope of recovery near term. Foreclosures and bankruptcies will follow unemployment further skyward.
Tax revenues have crashed, 40% off 2008. A Federal sales tax is now entertained.
The AMO has followed the PDO negative in near synchrony last seen in the late 1920’s which ushered in cornbelt drought. Just in time for the bailout of ethanol producers!
Now add national healthcare and hefty energy taxes to curb consumption.
We are in the very best of hands.
Rereke, Ayrdale: Kia ora from a snowy Dunedin.
Ric – if the local guys believed the earlier forecast, they would know that this was going to be a warm winter. But they didn’t and we all have heaps of wood (just as well – the snow came as advertised). Now we have a new forecast and I think we know who is following the lead of whom.
Prove your assertion. Quote your data that says the Dalton was unremarkable in that crops did not fail. Prove that grain did not get imported into Europe to counter the shortages.
I don’t need to I just need to show there were crop failures during other periods. The Irish potato famine in the 1840s, for example, which caused mass starvation and forced large scale migration. You’re surely not suggesting that food shortages only happenened during the 30 year period of the Dalton Minimum??
John Finn please address a jones re: the uselessness of CET, on which your entire case rests.
An observation on the bar graph. Note that 1911,1912 and 1913 are all listed, with the number of spotless days increasing each year. Also listed are 2007 and 2008, with 2008 being worse (more spotless days) than 2007. My bet would be that 2009 will have more spotless days than 2008 and then things improve a bit in 2010. Probably seeing a pattern here where none exists, but stil… Cheers –
gary gulrud (08:15:30) :
John Finn please address a jones re: the uselessness of CET, on which your entire case rests.
Firstly, my case doesn’t entirely rest on the CET record. Armagh shows similar fluctuations to the CET record over the past ~200 years as does Uppsala. There is a paper by Butler & Johnsons in which the records are compared. This alone invalidates A.Jones’ criticism of the record.
However, the idea that the CET record is in some way contaminated by the industrial activity in the Black Country in the late ~1700s is fanciful to say the least. The CET might be a relatively small region, but the Black Country (reputed the birthplace of the industrial revolution) is a tiny pinprick by comparison. What’s more I can find no evidence that any recordings were done within 20 miles of the Black Country region (Wolverhampton, Walsall, Dudley).
Despite the increase in industrialisation in the late 18th century, the CET region was still largely rural (much of it still is). This included huge areas of Warwickshire and Worcestershire which are relatively close to the “Black Country”, as well as Oxfordshire, Herefordshire and down through the Cotswolds into Gloucesterhire and Somerset.
AJ was right about one thing 10 million tons of coal a year is puny, and it could not possibly have any sort of effect over an area the size of the CET. A few other points:
(i) The origins of it’s name are not clear. (ii) Industry in the Black Country was concentrated in the mid to late 19th century, i.e. well after the Dalton Minimum. (iii) Industrial activity did not “turn the country black” – just the immediate area. As I read AJ’s post I realise there’s no point in continuing there are so many issues with with it. AJ has completely failed to appreciate the comparative area sizes of the “Black Country” and the Central England region.
I would be interested to know if AJ lives in the UK. If so – perhaps he could explain how a small part of the (now) West Midlands region could possibly represent an area which is, roughly speaking, bounded by London in the south, Manchester in the North and Bristol in the South West.
In addition to my previous post (response about Black Country). The map shown in the link below gives a rough idea of the size of the “Black Country” relative to the CET region.
http://www.blackcountryobservatory.co.uk/partners.asp
Notes
1. The CET region is broadly defined by a triangle with points Pt 1(Manchester), Pt 3 (London) and a point (not marked) near the Bristol Channel. The Bristol Channel in the narrow inlet which separates Cornwall/Devon (in the South) from Wales (to the north).
2. The Black country is represented by the orange speck and includes the towns/cities of Wolverhampton, Dudley, Walsall and, the one I forgot earlier, Sandwell.
I just found your blog on a google search. And linked to your blog in my comments.
I put the same chart in my economics blog this morning in an entry entitled “Martin Feldstein says Cap and Trade is all cost, no benefits.”
Howard Richman
http://www.tradeandtaxes.blogspot.com
Those commentators from NZ may be interested in their National climate centres press release RECORD LOWS MAY.
The Climate In May: Cold!
Tuesday, 2 June 2009, 2:23 pm
Press Release: NIWA
NATIONAL CLIMATE CENTRE Tuesday 2 June 2009
National Climate Summary – May 2009: Early start to winter. Lowest May temperatures ever in many locations and double normal rainfall for most of South Island
• Temperature: Well below ave/rage over most of the country; many areas experiencing lowest recorded May temperatures.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/SC0906/S00003.htm
John Finn (16:34:50) :
but the Black Country (reputed the birthplace of the industrial revolution) […]
(i) The origins of it’s name are not clear. (ii) Industry in the Black Country was concentrated in the mid to late 19th century,
As a descendant of several generations of blacksmiths might I point out that wrought iron and sponge iron were black and that is why folks who worked iron were called blacksmiths and that maybe this is why an area dedicated to black metal making and blacksmithing might be called Black Country?
So me, it’s blindingly clearly obvious that the place up to it’s eyeballs in blacksmiths and smithies would be called Black Country. But then again, I’m biased…
So me, it’s blindingly clearly obvious that the place up to it’s eyeballs in blacksmiths and smithies would be called Black Country. But then again, I’m biased…
But to me, as someone who lives less than an hour from the “Black Country”, I happen to know there is (or was) some dispute as to how it got it’s name. A number of local historians believe it was due to exposed coal seams which gave the area a ‘black’ appearance. Whatever the reason, the name seems to originate some time before the mid 19th century when it became an industrial powerhouse.
Thanks Maksimovich…duly noted and blogged.
In our country (the Netherlands) we have a speedsskating compettion on ice over a distance of 200 km that happens once in aproximatly 11 or 12 years and the fact is that most of them happend during a solar minimum. Last year it almost happend and in 86, 87 and 96 where the most recent stronger winters. if you add the fact that since the 50’s de sun is more active you can’t go around it as a respected scientific guy