Guest Post by David Archibald
NASA’s David Hathaway has adjusted his expectations of Solar Cycle 24 downwards. He is quoted in the New York Times here Specifically, he said:
” Still, something like the Dalton Minimum — two solar cycles in the early 1800s that peaked at about an average of 50 sunspots — lies in the realm of the possible.”
NASA has caught up with my prediction in early 2006 of a Dalton Minimum repeat, so for a brief, shining moment of three years, I have had a better track record in predicting solar activity than NASA.
The graphic above is modified from a paper I published in March, 2006. Even based on our understanding of solar – climate relationship at the time, it was evident the range of Solar Cycle 24 amplitude predictions would result in a 2°C range in temperature. The climate science community was oblivious to this, despite billions being spent. To borrow a term from the leftist lexicon, the predictions above Badalyan are now discredited elements.
Let’s now examine another successful prediction of mine. In March, 2008 at the first Heartland climate conference in New York, I predicted that Solar Cycle 24 would mean that it would not be a good time to be a Canadian wheat farmer. Lo and behold, the Canadian wheat crop is down 20% this year due to a cold spring and dry fields. Story here.
The oceans are losing heat, so the Canadian wheat belt will just get colder and drier as Solar Cycle 24 progresses. As Mark Steyn recently said, anyone under the age of 29 has not experienced global warming. A Dalton Minimum repeat will mean that they will have to wait to the age of 54 odd to experience a warming trend.
Where to now? The F 10.7 flux continues to flatline. All the volatility has gone out of it. In terms of picking the month of minimum for the Solar Cycle 23/24 transition, I think the solar community will put it in the middle of the F 10.7 quiet period due to the lack of sunspots. We won’t know how long that quiet period is until solar activity ramps up again. So picking the month of minimum at the moment may just be guessing.
Dr Hathaway says that we are not in for a Maunder Minimum, and I agree with him. I have been contacted by a gentleman from the lower 48 who has a very good solar activity model. It hindcasts the 20th century almost perfectly, so I have a lot of faith in what it is predicting for the 21st century, which is a couple of very weak cycles and then back to normal as we have known it. I consider his model to be a major advance in solar science.
What I am now examining is the possibility that there will not be a solar magnetic reversal at the Solar Cycle 24 maximum.
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Geoff,
interesting, but because the earth’s mass won’t change, I assume we’ll get more tsi at the mid points between aphelion and perihelion than with a rounder orbit. So what would the difference in TSI be overall?
Richard (03:44:16) :
Explain to me what huge change of insolation takes place in that short period, due to any change in the Earth’s orbit, to pull the Earth out of a glaciation and cause those huge increases of temperatures?
Not my area of study, but following from what Geoff said and thinking on my feet, how about the gradually increasing insolation after the greatest orbital elongation doesn’t make much difference until the icecaps actually melt enough to expose the ground and open sea. At that point, albedo rapidly diminishes, heat rapidly enters the high latitude summer oceans, and the air temp shoots up.
Don’t forget the ice core studies are done near the poles. It might be a different story about the speed we come out of ice age at in the tropics. What do the tropical ice cores say?
tallbloke (23:37:26) :
Fascinating ani-gif Leif. What are the units?
They are ‘goobs’ 🙂 Why does that matter to you? Actually nanoTesla, where one tesla is the magnetic induction that generates a potential of one volt in a conductor of length one meter when moving at a rate of one meter per second, but I fail to see how that can be of any importance…
Nice article here on some experimental physics which confirms a theory about potassium in the earth’s core
The geomagnetic field would decay if there was not a continuous energy supply of 10^13 Watt [or 1/100,000 of what hits the surface from the Sun] available to maintain it. This energy comes from the core slowly cooling, whereby the heavier iron freezes
out and sinks to become the inner solid core. Sinking in a gravitational field releases energy [drop a brick on your foot if you doubt this] and that is what keeps the field going.
tallbloke (23:57:05) :
The earth spun faster from 1910-1930 and 1970-now. Perhaps this action forces mobile radioactive elements closer together nearer the surface…
The LOD is mostly controlled by the climate [not the other way around] that changes the moment of inertia of the atmosphere and the oceans at they heat and cool. A sealevel rise will thus slow down the Earth [like a spinning ice skater stretching her arms out]
tallbloke (02:47:50) :
the variation of TSI is so small that the effect is less than a tenth of a degree and therefore hard to see in the naturally noisy temperature record.”
Disputable, but a least you are using an expression with a wider set of error bars on it now. 😉
not that I know of. S-B’s law that not changed. It also holds for gray bodies and the Earth and for the Sun. It is wrong to think that the body has to be black.
The graph I showed Richard has a ~0.15C variation in SST between solar max and min.
For a limited time and you don’t know how much of that is due to the Sun.
This equates to about 0.3C in air temperature
Except that such a change is not seen in air temps.
the relatively small overall increase in TSI over the C20th
Except that there has not been any small overall increase in TSI over the 20th century. TSI now is where it was 108 years ago.
Richard (02:49:58) :
Is it not true that solar insolation changes, due to changes the Earth’s orbit, are also very small? And that the energy changes that the Earth receives due to this are comparable to the cyclical or other observed changes in Solar irradiance?
No, the changes in insolation are huge. As an example, the change from January to July is a hundred times larger than that from solar max to solar min.
tallbloke (02:47:50) :
Disputable, but a least you are using an expression with a wider set of error bars on it now. 😉
Me: “It also holds for gray bodies and the Earth and for the Sun. It is wrong to think that the body has to be black.”
The increase of temperature of a black lump of coal and a white snowball to a change of radiation falling on them is the same for both [if you put them out in space like the Earth is].
Leif Svalgaard (07:34:32) :
Richard (02:49:58) :
Is it not true that solar insolation changes, due to changes the Earth’s orbit, are also very small? And that the energy changes that the Earth receives due to this are comparable to the cyclical or other observed changes in Solar irradiance?
“No, the changes in insolation are huge. As an example, the change from January to July is a hundred times larger than that from solar max to solar min.”
Yes and the percentage change in insolation from day to night is infinite. But the change insolation from Jan 2008 to Jan 2009, due to any change in the Earth’s orbit is not very great? That is the change we are talking about. Like with like.
What is the percentage change in insolation every 100,000 years, due to the change in the Earth’s orbit? From what I have read not very much. But every 100,000 years for the past 700,000 years the Earth has been pulled into and yanked out of ice-ages.
You also said that the ice-ages were “nothing to do with the sun”. A change in the radiative input from the sun due to a change in its orbit does have something to do with the sun.
Geoff Sharp (04:06:18) :
Our orbit is close to round at present but will slowly elongate to a more elliptical orbit in about 90000 years. When this happens the aphelion point (furthest distance from Sun) the Earth will receive about 30% less TSI than we currently experience.
That is not what I have read. The change in insolation due to variation of the ellipse is ~0.2% around the mean and in the 100,000 year cycle it is negligible.
Change in seasonal insolation due to tilt and precession varies by ~10% about a mean value. But that is at 41,000 year cycles at high and mid latitudes.
Leif Svalgaard (07:50:00) :
The increase of temperature of a black lump of coal and a white snowball to a change of radiation falling on them is the same for both [if you put them out in space like the Earth is].
That doesnt sound right, But I will give it a think after work.
Richard (12:33:06) :
But the change insolation from Jan 2008 to Jan 2009, due to any change in the Earth’s orbit is not very great? That is the change we are talking about. Like with like.
No, that is not important [as it is indeed small]. What is important is the change from January to July which is 90 W/m2 or about hundred times larger than the solar cycle change. Now, why is that important? It is because the date when we are closest to the Sun varies, which means that in Northern winter we get more heat from the Sun now than if we were closest to the Sun in July, in which case the Northern winters would be much more severe. That is what makes the glaciations [and also that the tilt of the axis changes making seasonal changes larger].
Leif Svalgaard (07:50:00) :
The increase of temperature of a black lump of coal and a white snowball to a change of radiation falling on them is the same for both [if you put them out in space like the Earth is].
It doesn’t matter if it’s a lump of coal, a snowball or a red herring. None of them resemble the earth and it’s myriad ways of storing and shifting heat around within it’s system.
As for the LOD question, some say it’s primarily the momentum exchange between atmosphere and crust, others (including Dr Richard Gross of NASA say it’s currents under the earths crust. There are many uncertainties, and this is another it would seem.
I wish you would stop being categorical about uncertain issues, you’re too positivistic to make a good sceptic. 😉
tallbloke (13:11:28) :
It doesn’t matter if it’s a lump of coal, a snowball or a red herring. None of them resemble the earth and it’s myriad ways of storing and shifting heat around within it’s system.
And all of that is internal to the system and has no bearing on the radiation budget: what goes in. must come out over time.
As for the LOD question, some say it’s primarily the momentum exchange between atmosphere and crust, others (including Dr Richard Gross of NASA say it’s currents under the earths crust. There are many uncertainties, and this is another it would seem.
If you would only read the literature you would find that the LOD has many components. Currents [not electrical, but material flows] have effect no matter where they occur. And the internal crustal ones move VERY slowly and erratically.
I wish you would stop being categorical about uncertain issues, you’re too positivistic to make a good sceptic. 😉
You seem to subscribe to the AL Gore maxim that if one does know anything, everything is possible. I go with what we know, and anything we propose has to be consistent with what we know.
tallbloke (13:11:28) :
You seem to subscribe to the AL Gore maxim that if one does not know anything, everything is possible. I go with what we know, and anything we propose has to be consistent with what we know.
tallbloke (13:11:28)
Much as I respect Leif and admire his style and encyclopaedic knowledge about solar matters I do think you have pinned down what it is about his contributions that I find somewhat frustrating.
However, I would say he is too negativistic rather than positivistic about alternative possibilities where there is clearly a current lack of adequate scientific knowledge.
In situations where the known science really is not sufficient the only way forward is by way of leaps of imagination which can then be tested against new observations.
Mind you I do often find Leif very helpful in sorting wheat from chaff by identifying clear flaws in imaginative leaps, especially in matters of relative scales of various phenomena.
Sorry Leif, not intended as a personal barb, merely a point of view.
Leif Svalgaard (14:20:12)
“I go with what we know, and anything we propose has to be consistent with what we know.”
On the face of it that must be right but with respect I think you are unrealistically confident about that which we think we know.
Stephen Wilde (14:23:54) :
“I go with what we know, and anything we propose has to be consistent with what we know.”
On the face of it that must be right but with respect I think you are unrealistically confident about that which we think we know.
Then, I’ll clarify, I think I know rather well what we [that is ‘me’ in this context] don’t know and therefore cannot use as basis for sweeping statements.
Leif Svalgaard (14:07:42) :
And all of that is internal to the system and has no bearing on the radiation budget: what goes in. must come out over time.
‘over time’ being the important qualifier in this statement. And when, as it often is, the time period is half a solar cycle it can mask the true energy difference between solar max and min.
If you would only read the literature you would find that the LOD has many components. Currents [not electrical, but material flows] have effect no matter where they occur. And the internal crustal ones move VERY slowly and erratically.
I already know it has many components, which is why I made use of the word ‘primarily’ in what I said. I’d love to see a comprehensive set of calcs for the energy quantities involved in
(i) The change in the speed of the rotation of the earth by 1 mS-1
(ii) The effective radius change component of atmosphere/ocean energy exchanges involving a change of LOD equal to (i)
(iii)The effective radius change component of a shift in subcrustal currents involving a change of LOD equal to (i)
The longer term larger magnitude shifts are not due to atmosphere/ocean exchanges, or we’d have no wind/constant hurricanes after a few years.
Here’s what Dr Richard Gross of NASA says:
“The annual changes in the length of the day,” says Gross, “are caused mostly by the atmosphere — changes in the strength and direction of the winds, especially the jet stream. The Sun warms the equator more than the poles. That temperature difference is largely responsible for the jet stream. Seasonal changes in that temperature difference cause changes in the winds and, hence, the length of the day.”
The longer patterns in changes of the length of the day can last for decades. “These are caused by processes within Earth’s core,” says Gross. “The core is a fluid. Its motion generates Earth’s magnetic field. Changes in its motion can change the rotation of solid Earth. Observing the magnetic field at the surface gives us an idea of how fluid is moving within the core. These changes in the fluid motion inferred from the magnetic field match the longer period changes we see in the length of the day.”
What other multidecadal changes can we think of? Oceanic cycles, runs of high and low solar cycles, changes in the direction of the wandering magnetic poles, rises and falls in global temperature.
So, as I said, length of day, geomagnetic field, solar open flux, and somewhat more controversially, motion of suns equatorial plane relative to solar syatem barycentre, all tied up in a chain of causation and terrestrial feedback loops with atmospheric angular momentum, ocean movements and cycles, global temperature, magnetic pole shifts and weather.
Stephen Wilde:
I would say he is too negativistic rather than positivistic about alternative possibilities.
Positivism was (is?) a school of scientific thinking which this statement pretty much exemplifies:
anything we propose has to be consistent with what we know.
Which is fine, but Leif doesn’t seem to understand how harmonic feedback can amplify signals and give high gains to small inputs. It’s perfectly standard physics, but seems to be a step too far. He will quite rightly insist I go and do the calcs and come back with something he can denigrate and have fun at my expense with.
Fine, in my own time. It would be nice if would at least accept their possibility though. It might spur me on to get the calculator hot again.
tallbloke (15:19:05) :
Which is fine, but Leif doesn’t seem to understand how harmonic feedback can amplify signals and give high gains to small inputs.
My main issue with this is that the result is not observed [i.e. all the correlations are so poor that they carry no significance]. And you cannot get more energy out of a system than you put in. I know of no solar, atmospheric, planetary, stellar, or galactic phenomenon that has a harmonic feedback that amplify the a small input. Show me one.
Leif Svalgaard (15:43:29) :
And you cannot get more energy out of a system than you put in. I know of no solar, atmospheric, planetary, stellar, or galactic phenomenon that has a harmonic feedback that amplify the a small input. Show me one.
Energy is conserved, but redistributed. So for example, a small decrease in cloud cover leads to much more insolation and heat retention by the oceans which get’s recirculated. It’s an entropy reduction happening within a larger energy environment. Instead of the heat being lost to space, it gets into the earth climate system and does the rounds of increasing atmospheric angular momentum, which may then transfer to the crust as an angular momentum exchange, perhaps further accelerating a change already trending that way due to high solar activity via another mechanism like the changing of sub crustal currents. It may also lead to el nino later on, further reducing cloud cover in a vital part of the earth environment.
Think of the sun as the mains electricity supply, the earth as an oven, and the clouds as the thermostat which control the mains supply. What sets the thermostat? Maybe it’s proportional to the input, but maybe it operates through multiple bouncebacks between ocean and atmosphere which amplify the signal in ways which limit the feedback beyond a certain level, depending on humidity, seasonal TSI flux etc etc.
It ain’t simple, that’s for sure.
Aha!
http://www.geos.ed.ac.uk/research/geospace/presentations/pub_store/finlay_060830.pdf
Thanks for the GUFM1 tip Leif. 🙂
Gunnite, God bless and the Goddess.
tallbloke (16:53:18) :
I know of no solar, atmospheric, planetary, stellar, or galactic phenomenon that has a harmonic feedback that amplify the a small input. Show me one.
Energy is conserved, but redistributed. So for example, a small decrease in cloud cover leads to much more insolation and heat retention by the oceans which get’s recirculated….
Your examples are not of harmonic feedbacks. As I said I don’t know of any and you haven’t shown me any. All you have done is talking about knocking about existing energy. The signal does not get larger and larger and there is no ‘gain’ in signal-theoretical sense. As an example of unsound argument, you said “Instead of the heat being lost to space, it gets into the earth climate system and does the rounds of increasing atmospheric angular momentum,” It does not increase angular momentum, it increases temperature, stuff expands and changes the moment of inertia [not angular momentum which is conserved], and so on. Sloppy, vague, and oversimple use of fragments of knowledge do not cut it.
Leif Svalgaard (12:53:33) :
Richard (12:33:06) :
But the change insolation from Jan 2008 to Jan 2009, due to any change in the Earth’s orbit is not very great? That is the change we are talking about. Like with like.
No, that is not important [as it is indeed small]. What is important is the change from January to July which is 90 W/m2 or about hundred times larger than the solar cycle change. Now, why is that important? It is because the date when we are closest to the Sun varies, which means that in Northern winter we get more heat from the Sun now than if we were closest to the Sun in July, in which case the Northern winters would be much more severe. That is what makes the glaciations [and also that the tilt of the axis changes making seasonal changes larger].
why is that important? It is because the date when we are closest to the Sun varies
Yes but by how much?
And what has the change from January to July which is 90 W/m2 or about hundred times larger than the solar cycle change got to do with it?
Some excerpts from here: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/view.php?id=38353
..we do not know the exact relationship between the changes in the Earth’s orbit and the changes in climate..
The ice ages have come and gone the last 20 million years and for the last few million years we know with reasonable accuracy how often they come.
In the period before about 1 million years ago the ice ages occurred around every 40.000 years, then it happened suddenly that the period changed so that it became circa 100.000 years between ice ages. It is a mystery because nothing changed in the behavior of the Earth’s orbit 1 million years ago.
What follows are his conclusions from this, which I regard as rubbish
Leif Svalgaard (22:57:12) :
TSI is most likely not lower now than at previous minima.
Leif Svalgaard (23:50:02) :
“PMOD has been drifting lower with respect to SORCE which is the basis for making the statement I made.”
PMOD may have been drifting lower with respect to SORCE, but SORCE data you have pointed me to has itself has been going lower since 2002.
You had nothing to say about this.
Also couple this with Satellite temperatures trending down since 2002.. coincidence?
Richard (03:44:16) :
“.. the recovery to interglacial conditions occurs in one big step.” Explain to me what huge change of insolation takes place in that short period, due to any change in the Earth’s orbit, to pull the Earth out of a glaciation and cause those huge increases of temperatures?
You havent.
I will stick with my hunch that we are in for a cooler period the next few years. And also that small changes in the received radiant energy from the sun for whatever reason, changes in irradiance, or the Earth’s orbit, or solar wind has large impacts on our global climate.
PS The increase of temperature of a black lump of coal and a white snowball to a change of radiation falling on them is the same for both [if you put them out in space like the Earth is]. doesnt sound right to me. A black body will absorb radiation and white ice reflects it, as is well known. The black body will get hotter. If you had built a solar water heater you would know this.
tallbloke (04:26:33) :
Geoff,
interesting, but because the earth’s mass won’t change, I assume we’ll get more tsi at the mid points between aphelion and perihelion than with a rounder orbit. So what would the difference in TSI be overall?
Eccentricity is one factor and along with it come other changes like different orbit velocities due to Kepler’s Laws. The Earth spends longer at the aphelion and less time at perihelion etc. I did read a good paper on it but cant put my hands on it, but I will keep looking.
In the meanwhile here is a good presentation with lots of graphs etc on the Milankovitch Cycles which ends stating the Earth’s insolation is 30% higher now than the last ice age.
http://www.landscheidt.info/pdf/milankovitch.pdf
Richard (21:21:23) :
“why is that important? It is because the date when we are closest to the Sun varies”
Yes but by how much?
All the way through the year, all dates are eventually visited as the line between the closest and farthest point rotates about the Sun.
Some excerpts from here: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/view.php?id=38353
..we do not know the exact relationship between the changes in the Earth’s orbit and the changes in climate..
The key word is ‘exact’. We know in large measures how it works.
PMOD may have been drifting lower with respect to SORCE, but SORCE data you have pointed me to has itself has been going lower since 2002.
Because both of them vary with the solar cycle
Also couple this with Satellite temperatures trending down since 2002.. coincidence?
They were trended up the last time TSI was trending down.
“.. the recovery to interglacial conditions occurs in one big step.” Explain to me what huge change of insolation takes place in that short period, due to any change in the Earth’s orbit, to pull the Earth out of a glaciation and cause those huge increases of temperatures?
You havent.
Try the effect of CO2 being driven out of the oceans by the increasing temperatures and together with increasing water vapor adding to the warming.
PS The increase of temperature of a black lump of coal and a white snowball to a change of radiation falling on them is the same for both [if you put them out in space like the Earth is]. doesnt sound right to me. A black body will absorb radiation and white ice reflects it, as is well known. The black body will get hotter. If you had built a solar water heater you would know this.
The black body is already warmer. If the radiation increases 10%, the temperature will increase 2.5%, no matter if the body was black or white.
Leif Svalgaard (22:30:26) :
Richard (21:21:23) :
“why is that important? It is because the date when we are closest to the Sun varies”
Yes but by how much?
“All the way through the year, all dates are eventually visited as the line between the closest and farthest point rotates about the Sun.”
Let me get this straight. The variation you are saying is important is the variation of the “Northern winter” distance from the sun? “..that in Northern winter we get more heat from the Sun now than if we were closest to the Sun in July, in which case the Northern winters would be much more severe.” Are you saying that if the distance of the Sun is greater than it is now, we will receive less radiative energy from the sun due to this greater distance, which will cause the ice ages?
How the variation of insolation (which is due to the tilt of the Earth’s axis) from summer to winter which varies every year, and from day to night, figures in this I dont see.
Are you saying that if the distance of the Sun is greater than it is now in the Northern Winter, we will receive less radiative energy from the sun due to this greater distance, which will cause the ice ages?
“The increase of temperature of a black lump of coal and a white snowball to a change of radiation falling on them is the same for both [if you put them out in space like the Earth is.”
“The black body is already warmer. If the radiation increases 10%, the temperature will increase 2.5%, no matter if the body was black or white.”
Both the above comments are from Leif with the second clarifying the former.
The first comment is misleading. The increase in temperature is not the same for both. In fact the proportionate increase in temperature is the same for both (2.5%) but because of the different starting points the actual temperature increase is not the same. 2.5% for one is not the same as 2.5% for the other.
Anyway back to the main point. The question as to how or why low solar activity seems, throughout history, to have affected global air temperatures is clearly not settled.
Without that question being settled the effect of more GHGs cannot be settled so we are all agreed on that.
I don’t see the observed 20th Century changes as being anything out of the ordinary and they can all be accounted for by the oceans and air both altering the rate of flow of solar energy as it passes through the Earth system.
The fact that overall global humidity changes hardly at all suggests that the stabilising factor is highly effective and more likely than not is the variable speed of the hydrological cycle. If that can prevent wide swings in water vapour from destabilising the Earth’s energy budget then it is well strong enough to prevent swings in other GHGs from destabilising the Earth’s energy budget.
That takes us back to the behaviour of the oceans as the only factor capable of altering the energy flow enough to alter the overall global temperature over multidecadal time periods with solar variation in the background taking centuries to have significant effects.
Stephen Wilde (23:35:40) :
In fact the proportionate increase in temperature is the same for both (2.5%) but because of the different starting points the actual temperature increase is not the same.
I was, in fact, talking about the relative increase, because if you go back to the original question it was framed in % not in W/m2.
That takes us back to the behaviour of the oceans as the only factor capable of altering the energy flow enough to alter the overall global temperature over multidecadal time periods with solar variation in the background taking centuries to have significant effects.
Now we can finally begin to agree. One problem is that we do not see much change in the Sun even over millennea. In the Scafetta thread I posted:
From 10Be cosmic ray fluxes Steinhilber et al. reports:
http://www.leif.org/EOS/Holocene-TSI.pdf
that
“The entire record of TSI covering the past 9300 years is shown in Figure 3. Throughout this period TSI has varied by approximately 2Wm−2″
This extreme variation was reached only rarely and most of the time TSI stays within +/-0.5 w/m2 of average. A variation much lower than normally assumed in climate studies.