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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Pamela Gray (16:15:49) :
Leif, you may have better information than I have gathered, but my understanding is that the Gyre contains freshwater from the Canadian basin (at variable amounts) but it is not strictly a fresh water gyre.
That is correct, but its conductivity is reduced and whatever small emf-induced braking there might be would be greater outside of the gyre. In any event, the electric force is so minute it doesn’t matter. Salinity changes and resulting density gradients seem to be the controlling forces. One might wonder why these people do not consider the electric aspect at all: http://www.whoi.edu/beaufortgyre/index.html
I did the calculation some years ago when somebody was trying to convince me that GW was caused by the solar wind driving electric currents in the ocean, thereby heating them [like current through a wire]. He was equally adamant, and eventually gave up on me and is now [I presume] happy on his island of certainty, knowing what is going on [always better than uncertainty, fear, and doubt].
Vuc be nice to our Leif please.
He’s losing his patience cause he’s afraid might kaput before the peak of sc2.
I’m glad I’ve been generally avoiding the issues as to WHY and HOW the oceans seem to change their rates of energy emission to the air on multidecadal time scales.
It’s enough for my current climate description that they do so.
I can see the problem of scale as regards electric currents and I see the chicken and egg problem as to whether ocean or air is the driver of those changes.
However the idea of the oceans as a variable resistor which receives energy from the sun and then releases it irregularly to the air has great appeal to me because it has the potential to explain so much of what we see happening in the air in climate terms.
In explaining any such irregular release of energy to the air one has to take account of the approximate 30 year phase changes between predominant El Nino and predominant La Nina events with a 60 year overall cycle.
There is nothing that happens in the air or involving the sun that matches a cycle on that time scale so I am forced to accept that the oceans have some internal characteristic that causes it.
Tallbloke has been having a go at explaining a possible mechanism inside the oceans and I am keeping an open mind on the issue.
vukcevic seems to have the germ of an idea linked to electrical and magnetic influences and on grounds of scale I share Leif’s doubts on that. However it does seem clear to me that it is the oceanic behaviour in acting rather similarly to a variable electrical resistor that seems to be at the heart of it so it may just be that a refinement of some of the terminology is required to overcome that problem.
I imagine that the cause is a combination of all factors such as Earth’s rotation, length of day, solar variability, density and salinity variations and so on and so forth but the outcome of the combination seems to be a 60 year cycle of varying rates of energy release from oceans to air and that is at the heart of all the climate shifts we ever see.
In itself that does not resolve the CO2 issue but it does reduce it to far less of a problem than alarmists would have us believe because natural forces are then very much back in control for many decades at a time.
Then one has to consider the slow general background trend and however it is caused it is there and pre exists significant human CO2 emissions so even there natural forces seem to be in control.
Finally the issue arises as to whether human CO2 emissions could EVER upset those natural forces and my current view is that if it could happen at all it could not happen on time scales that need concern us bearing in mind the speed of human technological progress and the likelihood that we will have to deal with overpopulation, resource depletion and pollution long before any human caused climate effects could ever become significant.
In fact I think the whole effect of extra GHGs in the air is just dealt with routinely by the speed of the hydrological cycle changing imperceptibly as I have explained elsewhere.
Leif Svalgaard (16:13:27) :
http://www.whoi.edu/beaufortgyre/results.html
From the link:
Dickson et al. (2000), Maslowski et al. (2000), Karcher et al. (2003), Häkkinen and Proshutinsky (2004), and many others. Proshutinsky et al., 2002, Proshutinsky, 2003 and Dukhovskoy et al., 2004 have speculated that these processes originate in the ,auto-oscillatory behavior of the system.
There’s a lot to read about there, but it seems the premise is that the energy which drives the oscillation of the system is ‘plucked out of thin air’.
I think it will be found in the real motion of heavy objects nearby. Eventually.
Stephen Wilde (23:01:27) :
There is nothing that happens in the air or involving the sun that matches a cycle on that time scale so I am forced to accept that the oceans have some internal characteristic that causes it.
Tallbloke has been having a go at explaining a possible mechanism inside the oceans and I am keeping an open mind on the issue.
I’m not alone. See Nicola Scafetta’s presentation to the EPA. He offers the same idea as an explanation . The motion of the sun WRT the centre of mass of the solar system which fits all the data, particularly the 60 year cycles and the peak around 2000AD. Also, I have found a correlation between the motion of the sun up and down in the z axis WRT the COM and the length of day variation.
The only thing missing is the physical mechanism for the energy transfer between the planetary motion and the sun and the other planets effects directly on each other. This is Leif’s sticking point and the reason why he won’t entertain ideas involving the solar-barycentric relative motion.
There are several lines of investigation into the physical basis, involving research into the effects of angular momentum changes on the sun’s differential rotation, the effect of Jupiter’s enormous magnetosphere (Jupiter emits net energy), the motion of the sun through it’s own magnetic field, and various other possible mechanisms.
Unfortunately, rather than lending his prodigious knowledge and intellect to assisting in the investigation, Leif, for whatever reason, actively suppresses it and denigrates those who discuss it.
It’s almost Wittgensteinian. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”
In a space-time where Einstein’s calculation for the perihelion of mercury doesn’t actually stand up to careful scrutiny, anything is possible.
Leif Svalgaard
“the Beaufort gyre is a result of the Coriolis force, driven by the prevailing winds, …The atmosphere is the driver of the gyre.”
Beaufort gyre most of the time is under solid ice. Only peripheral areas are occasionally exposed to winds. So circulation stops in the 8 months of the year when it is completely frozen over, or that is some wind!
“But since the gyre is freshwater, the whole emf thing is irrelevant to begin with…”
That is a “straw man”.
Fresh cold water is circulating at the top of the gyre, it is considerably slowed down by presence of floating ice and it is not particularly relevant in the respect of current induction. Saline water enters from North Atlantic as heavier, circulating at lower levels, where the strongest currents are induced.
Two major currents Transpolar and Gulf current flow at different depths. Transpolar current takes surface fresh cold Artic waters, entering North Atlantic on the surface and this process is probably less affected. What causes temperature deviation is the regulation of warm saline water inflow from Gulf current into Arctic Ocean., which eventually ends up in the lower saline levels of the gyre. http://web.mit.edu/12.000/www/m2011/finalwebsite/graphics/climate/atlanticmap.gif
The other major contributor to temperature deviation is taking place at Antarctic (where there is little fresh water inflow), regulating flow of cold currents out of Atlantic and inflow of warm waters from Indian Ocean into Atlantic.
Finally: http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/OTI.gif measured in the North Atlantic.
tallbloke (00:00:51) :
There are several lines of investigation into the physical basis, involving research into the effects of angular momentum changes on the sun’s differential rotation, the effect of Jupiter’s enormous magnetosphere (Jupiter emits net energy), the motion of the sun through it’s own magnetic field, and various other possible mechanisms.
Unfortunately, rather than lending his prodigious knowledge and intellect to assisting in the investigation, Leif, for whatever reason, actively suppresses it and denigrates those who discuss it.
I have looked into the various proposed ideas and found them all wanting. That is why. I have given more thought to this than most other physicists I know, who would never give any of this a second look. Show me something good and I’ll go with it. Show me junk and I’ll tell you. What is ‘junk’? For me, junk is what I consider junk. You may disagree and be happy with what you believe, but most peddlers of junk are not happy just to stay with their junk. They try to push it onto everybody else and tend to get upset if their brilliance is not recognized immediately. Why complain when I say your idea is junk? just write me off as a nut and go your merry way.
Leif Svalgaard (07:14:30) :
Richard (02:30:10) :
If they both started at the same temperature they would always remain the same according to you.
“Not at all. They have vastly different temperatures.”(????) “Increasing the radiation by 10% will increase the temperatures by 2.5% for both bodies.”
However I will let this go.
Then you admit that all we are talking about are the changes in insolation due to the change in the distance from the sun of the Northern winters. This is small.
“No, this is large, a hundred times larger than the solar cycle change.”
Leif you are wrong – The change in insolation for the 100,000 year cycle is very small. “1-2% of the the change caused by the 21,000-year precession and 41,000-year obliquity cycles”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100,000-year_problem
Also “For over a century it has been argued that changes in the Earth’s orbital eccentricity were responsible for the primary cycle of the ice ages (ref 1-4). Although the eccentricity changes were small (between 0.01 and 0.05), they can be calculated with good accuracy back at least several million years (ref 5, 6) and they show quasi-periodic behavior with a period of about 100 kyr. Milankovitch (ref 2) proposed that the eccentricity affected the climate through its effect on insolation, the average solar energy reaching the earth. The discovery (ref 3) of a strong quasi-periodic 100 kyr cycle in the climate data, in approximate phase coherence with the eccentricity, gave strong support to the theory. BUT THE CALCULATED INSOLATION CHANGES FROM ECCENTRICITY WERE TOO SMALL TO ACCOUNT FOR THE STRONG 100 KYR CYCLE…”
“We can draw the remarkably strong conclusion that VARIATIONS IN THE EARTH’S ECCENTRICITY CANNOT BE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE 100 KYR GLACIAL CYCLE.”
from here http://muller.lbl.gov/papers/nature.html#anchor29818
Another reason to say you are wrong – computing the change of insolation from the min winter to max winter due to changes in eccentricity is erroneous. It takes about 5,000 years for the ice-age to happen to at the very maximum we should take the change in insolation due to this for a few thousand years, which I am sure will be comparable to the change due to solar cycles, specially deep minimums like the maunder minimum.
Leif Svalgaard (20:06:17) :
I have looked into the various proposed ideas and found them all wanting. That is why. I have given more thought to this than most other physicists I know, who would never give any of this a second look. Show me something good and I’ll go with it.
Fair enough Leif, I anticipate it won’t be too long before a good new proposition is on the table. I’ll keep going with my merry way.
Firstly, I have found a correlation between variations in Earth’s Length of Day and the z axis motion of the suns equatorial plane with respect to the solar sytem centre of mass (COM).
http://s630.photobucket.com/albums/uu21/stroller-2009/?action=view¤t=lod-ssb.gif
There is a lag of around thirty years, but given that Dr Richard Gross of NASA states that most of earth’s LOD variation is due to the shifting of flows within earth’s mantle, I think it is not surprising that there is so much inertia in the system. The correlataion is not perfect as my graph shows. But since the curve is calculated from historical LOD data, which is also less than perfect prior to around 1962, and the earth is affected by other planets gravitation directly rather than simply being directly affected by the entire solar system centre of mass and the sun’s relationship to it, this may explain a lot of the discrepancy if the necessary calculations are performed. I believe those calcs will also show the different parts of the sun is affected and not in the perfect freefall you think it is. We will see.
Using a composite of TSI data and LOD data, I have also generated this curve,
http://s630.photobucket.com/albums/uu21/stroller-2009/?action=view¤t=glaam-lod-tsi.gif
which matches changes in Atmospheric Angular Momentum apart from the departures caused by el nino, which I see as a function of oceanic heat release roughly timed with solar minima. The solar data is lagged around 34 months from the LOD data and the composite lagged around a year from AAM data to get the match.