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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Alan the Brit
Its a standing joke amongst those of us using the line served via Dawlish that you check the weather forecast and tide tables before you check the train times!
If you live close by perhaps you would like to join our deputation to the Met office to deliver a piece of seaweed to help their predictions? We need to think of a suitable message from us all here though. Hmmmm… come to think of it we could present a toy mole holding the piece of sea weed…
Tonyb
WRT chlorine sales.
A great many people have made a great deal of money by paying attention to what people buy, and looking for the underlying reasons. Probably a greater number of people have lost a great deal of money listening to “experts”. So while sales of a mundane item may be under the radar, many times it’s these items that can indicate trends. Sometimes “experts” with their heads in the clouds, may not see the ground they stand on, much less where they are walking.
Again, Theodore Landeschidt absolutely NAILED this, decades ago. Those *experts” are getting schooled by a dead guy…..
I have just heard the BBC today saying that the forecast from the Met for a hot summer for the UK was now completely wrong and that it was the third time consecutively that the Met get it wrong about their seasonal forecast.
“There’s no visible reduction of SST outside of ENSO.”
hmmm
http://blog.sme.sk/blog/560/190772/hadsst2.JPG
I would say SST are quite good representing also global temperatures – if you combine HadCRUT with UAH since 1979, you will get almost exact copy of HadSST anomaly chart.
I just noticed Richard Heg’s comment above about the report of
“Global Ocean Surface Temperature Warmest On Record For June”
This brings me to the significant trend divergence between this NCDC data and the Uni Alabama data, especially into June.
Compare here: http://www.climate4you.com/SeaTemperatures.htm#Recent%20sea%20surface%20temperature
Have the reasons for this been discussed? It is particularly relevant to us down here in Australia because it just so happens that in June the Ministery for Climate Change shifted the emphasis of air temperature and onto ocean heat.
What I noted with the current records in the Willamette valley, was some of the all time record were from long ago. 1920’s and 30s’. Also, even in the 1980’s the UHE wasn’t nearly as effective as it is now. the Portland Airport is an asphalt sea. Troutdale, Hillsboro and McMinnville are surrounded by Homes, Highways and industrial parks.
The Valley is a heat and cold sink. Here in NE Oregon we are experiencing warm
90F. weather, but it is summer. 1933 was a very dry,warm year,that was the year of the Tillamook burn that devastated the coast timber and towns of the North Oregon
coast.It could happen again. Especailly with the “let burn” and road closure policy of the USFS…
“His chlorine sales have been falling for the last 12 years.”
As David noted above, pool chlorine sales are probably no worse a proxy than tree rings, and possibly better. Climatologists’ lust for proxies borders on sheer desperation. They’d use bat poop as a speleothem if it had annual strata.
In reference to the comment on Portland weather and the setting of record high temperatures, I live in Arkansas. It’s day after day of mid 80’s here. Every night is mid 60’s. The forecasts regularly miss the actual temps by a few degrees to the warm. It is a balm and a relief to have such mild Summers after so many harsh ones. Last Summer was equally as mild. It is a joy to be able to sit out on the deck in the afternoon and not sweat. There is a “coolness” in the air that I cannot explain. This is ABNORMAL for Summers here. I was born in this same county 40 years ago. Indeed, we’ve had some brutal Summers in the no so distant past, but the trend has definitely changed.
My experience? My neck of the woods ain’t heating up. It’s cooling off.
@ur momisugly J Gary Fox (05:46:53) :
Einstein replied, “If the theory were really wrong, just one would suffice.”
Do you mean one falsification?
In astronomy, many so-called “theories” have been falsified, not just once, but multiple times…still, astronomers cling to their “theories” because astronomy is a consensus science.
One example: So-called “gravitational waves” is a principle prediction of Einstein’s General Relativity theory, however, none has ever been detected despite multiple increasingly sensitive detection instruments developed and deployed for the express purpose of the detection of “gravitational waves”.
Still the “consensus” refuses to consider the possibility that a mathematical ‘thought experiment’ (Einstein never conducted any experiments and in fact disdained empirical laboratory experiments) could be wrong.
How many scientists in the AGW camp look at their models and blithely assume a theoretical model (a series of mathematical equations) has to be right because the “math” says so?
While everybody’s counting sunspots (or spotless days), or watching channel five
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps+002
or sst’s
http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/EPS/SST/data/anomnight.current.gif
http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sst_anom.html
I’ve been watching surface temps here:
http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/tcc/tcc/products/climate/synop/td20090729_e.png
Just eyeballing — and I think my eyeballing is at least as trustworthy as Hansen or Jones mangled data — I see the earth land masses covered roughly half and half with above and below average temperatures (the baseline is the standard WMO normal of 1971-2000, I believe).
Most of the southern hemisphere land masses south of the tropics are cooler than normal (and it is winter), and it looks bitterly cold in Chile and Argentina. It has been cooler than normal across most of the eastern US all month. Stations in north central Asia are spotty, but have been below normal. You can see the evidence for Great Britain’s summer without a BBQ, and the coast of China and Japan are cooler than normal.
Caused by the quite sun? Well, not directly. But surely indirectly. If we’re headed for a Dalton Minimum, expect maps like this to gradually turn bluer. Not ice age blue. Just cooler than 1971-2000.
That will not take much. 1971-2000 was probably a secular peak in global temperature variation, at least for a while. I would expect temperatures to come down from the peak (they already have) and then meander up and down at a lower step level like the mid-20th century, for the next couple of decades. A quiet sun will contribute to that.
“Dr Hathway says that we are not in for a Maunder Minimum and I agree with him.”
“So picking the month of minimum at the moment may just be guessing.”
A description of Dr Hathway’s approach is found at http://www.solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/predict.shtml. The basis of the predictions is based on observations of the Sun and are closely related to determining solar minimum. Without a better understanding of the physics of the Sun’s processes, how can one rule out a Maunder Minimum?
I might add to what I just posted, but when the WMO baseline is adjusted to 1980-2010, it should make maps like this go bluer just for that: the 1970’s were cooler than the first decade of 2000, so the baseline will shift up, making the recent cooling appear more dramatic, or remarkable. But in fact, that just emphasizes how dramatic, or remarkable, the last two decades of the 20th century were, temperature wise, ending as it did with the blast of the 1998 El Nino.
There’s an AGW effect of course, and we shouldn’t expect a Dalton Minimum in the 21st Century to cool the earth to the same degree the original Dalton Minimum did. You cannot pave over large portions of the earth, or slash and burn, or just add several billion people to the planet, without some effect. So the coming minimum may just work to offset (dare I say “mask”?) the effect of population growth during the second half of the 20th Century, to return us to temperatures varying in a range similar to what was experienced in the middle of the 20th Century. But we do not have to lose any sleep, or scare our children, about a runaway greenhouse effect from cow gas or burning fossil fuels. We have other reasons for why it is sane to look for alternatives to fossil fuels. Fear of GHG induced AGW is not one of them.
What is needed here is commentary from that reknowned Climatologist, Grace Adler, late of Will & Grace, specifically the “I Told You So” dance:
I Told You So, I Told You So,
Told Ya Told Ya Told Ya So!
It’s better when Debra Messing and her stage mom, Debbie Reynolds, do it.
So how did the heat get in the oceans?
Sunlight
Position a lightbulb over a glass of water at room temperature. After a couple of hours, you’ll find the water is noticeably warmer.
This is because light penetrates water for a distance before it is absorbed and becomes heat, warming the water.
As mentioned multiple times above, there are some problems with a single source reference, but it would be interesting to look at a controlled sample of pool chlorine usage.
For example a sample of municipal pools that have been in continuous use for several decades. Control the chlorine usage rates for things like changes in procedure (do they still attempt to achieve the same chlorine usage levels today as they did 20 years ago)? Chart the number of swim visitor days (might be an interesting proxy for the general discomfort level). During heat waves they always run news stories how municipal pool visits skyrocket.
Once you cast out or account for variables like above, chlorine usage like other chemical uses that are heat dependent might be useful “reasonableness checks” on the urban heat island effect for one thing. If the weather reporting system is reporting rising temperatures in cities, but pool usage is dropping or stagnant, then you have an interesting dilemma, are temperatures really going up in the cities? Are peoples swimming preferences changing? Are people not visiting pools because they are staying home in the AC and playing video games.
The comment does raise the issue, are there robust indicators of temperatures that are independent of the formal temperature reporting system. Chemical processes that have no political agenda would seem to be something good to look for in this case. If some chemical usage varies directly due to temperature, and the process is not dependent on human behavior (like swimming visits) it might serve as a useful proxy. In the building trades one reference point might be usage of calcium chloride in concrete to help it set in cold weather. Antifreeze sales in winter would be another possible reference point. Each alone would be a relatively weak proxy but a group of chemical process indicators might provide an interesting second source check against the reporting stations data.
I personally would like to see someone gather heating degree day and cooling degree day information from major cities and plot changes over time since perhaps the 1940’s. Many utilities quote heating and cooling degree day information on their heating bills as fuel usage tracks quite well with those numbers.
Larry
Finally … although by possible he could mean a 0.01% possibility.
Still, everyone is trying to complicate everything with fancy theories and the like; keep it simple!
Something is changing on the sun, Dalton or not, We are definitely not in territory considered “normal” for the last 100 years and many theories will be put to the test in the next few years.
I have been watching the sun closely since March 2008 and it amuses me that when the “experts” proudly announce the end of 23 and the beginning of 24 (putting all those “amateur Dalton Minimum-returns” type theories to rest) the sun goes promptly back to sleep!
False alarms in November 2008 and June/July 2009 spring to mind…
I am certainly no expert but I don’t think that matters because even the experts don’t know what the hell is going on.
Watch the sun, we have much to learn from it!
B.T.W. 19 days blank and counting so far, a 24 corpse is floating across the sun and a tiny tim (possibly 23 region) is being revealed near the equator…
I’ve been in agreement with Archibald ever since he began. He has connected (hindcasted is a great word) all the data I had at hand back in the early 60’s to more recent curves for solar activity. Meanwhile, though, people keep locking in on local anomalies as if they belie Archibald’s studies and graphs.
Let’s not forget that our planet is a giant dynamical system. Let’s not forget that someone (China) just inserted a HUGE strange attractor (or repeller, depending on whether hundreds of square miles of evaporation attract or repel air-streams, which in turn modify the oscillations of the jet streams).
What I am asserting is that all these incredibly destructive and uncomfortable “local” (like the ongoing Pacific Coast furnace or snow in Argentina) are the results of oscillations of the jet stream caused by the 3 Gorges anomaly. Meanwhile, if you just peer daily at http://www.intelliweather.net/imagery/intelliweather/templine_nat_640x480_img.htm you will see the HUGE southward swing of cooling temperatures.
It is those temperature swings (which have been there daily for months now) that encouraged me to not only get in my firewood (I’m done), but to get as much tamarak (highest BTU’s in our region) as possible. I also have amassed about 25% more than last year since I ran out, as did my neighbors, this spring after burning my stove (I heat with firewood) from about 10-1 last year until late APRIL this year…and my grape bushes have no grapes, and my plum tree has no plums.
I’m proposing that “Put another log on the fire” will be a rather frequently hummed tune early this fall.
Where do you pick this nonsense up from, Argo says no such thing. have you a reference to your claims?
Mary Hinge, your link isn’t a link to Argo data. It’s to a graph of vague provenance. Although I’ll note that the rising trend it shows in ocean heat content suddenly stops when the Argo data becomes available. Quite the coincidence don’t you think?
Here is a detailed discussion of ocean heat content including references to the Argo data from WUWT.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/06/the-global-warming-hypothesis-and-ocean-heat/
And…neutron cosmic rays Oulu count it is above 10%, the highest since 1964:
http://cosmicrays.oulu.fi/webform/query.cgi?startdate=1964/06/29&starttime=00:00&enddate=2009/07/29&endtime=18:59&resolution=Automatic choice&picture=on
Les Francis (05:01:37)
“I would suggest as Dr. Svalgaard has often mentioned. Solar physics is a field of science where little is known.”
Little is known, and yet Dr. Svalgaard has on a numerous occasions confidently rejected certain Solar theories outright… Hmm…
Perhaps D. A’s prediction of 2 degrees is a little bit extreme; slight cooling may be possible due to increased Volcanism (although perhaps this link has been disproved?). Maybe we should wait about 3-12 years…
Dalton-style Cooling (if it even happens) won’t be overnight; note that the current situation is similar to 1798, major cooling was only felt around 1810.
I believe Mikko’s points are valid.
And if you have a look at Leif’s charts you see that flux isn’t “flat” at all, it is pretty much right along the curve that Leif plotted months ago. Looks like as far as F10.7, things are pretty much on target.
Personally, I am taking Archibald’s forecasts with a grain of salt, as I am pretty much all such forecasts of solar activity. While a Dalton repeat is possible, so is getting hit in the noggin with a meteorite when I walk out my front door. So far the forecast that makes the most sense to me is Svalgaard’s. Hathaway has been all over the place but that isn’t so bad, really, I would tend to have more respect for someone able to modify their view as more is learned than someone who sticks to a position in the face of conflicting observations (as is common in another area of science frequently discussed on this blog).
Don’t any of you guys have a sense of humor? I’m sure Dr. Archibald knows the difference between anecdotal evidence and scientific evidence. At some point anecdotal evidence can become scientific evidence, if one has some imagination and cares to put in the effort to make it rigorous, but for the moment his anecdote about chliorine is just that, an illustrative anecdote with a dash of humor and malice. After all, tree rings are so much more scientific, right?
The Seattle area, generally very marine climate influenced is also experiencing very high to record highs ( regularly as much as 20+ degree’s above average), and record high-lows. They are forcasting triple digits at Sea-Tac today – which tends to be cooler than the city. Quite the contrast to last summer, when we were cool and moist well into June, and never did have many really hot days.
It has also been very dry (so dry, I’m shocked I’m not hearing cries of “drought” from the local ptb. They seem to love to cry drought in the summer.) with less than 0.09 inch of rain. Half an inch is normal for July.
Last winter was cooler than normal – though not record setting. We did have lots of snow over several different “events”.
Has anyone done a study of different climactic zone variation during the Dalton Minimum as opposed to an “average” cycle?
bill (04:42:32) :…so you were the guy who warms his feet using a bottle filled with hot air instead of hot water, in spite of the fact that water holds 3227 times more heat than air!. Believe me, “they”, have cheated you.