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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Looking at that chart, and seeing how high cycle 23 was, it looks like what we might see is maybe a 1 degree drop by the end of cycle 24 in some 11 years. This is a very slow process – a tiny lessing of solar radiation, but steady and for a decade or 2 if Archibald is right.
I keep hearing things like this in Seattle as well. But no one wants to say when those highs were set.
Geoff Sharp (05:14:50) :You are right!. I have always wondered why so a deep rejection against any greater laws whatsoever, it seems that whoever is behind such a ideology is in need of a randomness behind all nature´s phenomena.
Such a pretension of a “mini-reason” it is always behind those who want to change everything, as in the french revolution or as in the china´s cultural revolution. Fortunately life goes on following greater laws and not theirs.
All regular readers of WUWT should never accept a weather reports of temperature without knowing the location of the instrument source and the level of compliance with weather station installation and location criteria. Airport and downtown office building locations are warm biased. Home weather stations with amateur quality instruments are always suspect as are the persons reporting the information.
All such information should be suspect if it cannot be validated and verified. Filtering reported information would certainly reduce and focus many comments about posts on this blog.
Mary Hinge (03:07:09) :
Philip_B (23:24:40) :…(and the Argo data says the oceans aren’t warming)…
Where do you pick this nonsense up from, Argo says no such thing. have you a reference to your claims? http://www.argo.ucsd.edu/global_change_analysis.html#temp
From the Argo site –
http://www-argo.ucsd.edu/rey_line_atlas.gif
Ben Gallagher (05:16:53) :This water has now worked its way back to the S American side (through sub-surface currents) and re-surfaced creating the El Nino conditions.
Are you sure?…I am wrinting this blocks away from the supposed “el nino” (nino 1+2 area), low clouds cover it is the same 15 days ago, it is drizzling all the time by humidity oversaturation (sea losing heat) and having reached dew point because of relative low temperatures. It feels like being in a tub filled with water at 15-16°C, it takes you body heat away. Come and take a sea bath!
A concidence, correspondence, or whatever, but you have noticed that the prophet has not appeared yet again with The inconvenient Truth 1.2 version?
LOL in Oregon (06:18:12) :
Please don’t lump the State of Jefferson in with the rest of California. Their outlook is the same as the great valley they live in : flat. We have oft tried to get rid of them, but it’s like a bad penny.
Hey, AGW is wrong in my opinion, but I find it funny that when ‘weather is not climate’ is reported of cooler temperatures, many (including myself) jump on the band wagon and sing the praises of cooler temperatures, but when reports of hotter (record setting) temperatures are reported, a 101 reasons are offered for why they don’t matter.
It just goes to show human nature tends to lead to ‘confirmational bias’ and folks on all sides of the question should be conscious of that pitfall.
Science does not understand the Sun — Earth relationship, and a frank confession of that state of knowledge should always be the starting point for all sides of the question.
Why?
Because Science is about the unknown, engineering is about what we do know.
As much as I’d like to be like the harbinger of cold, I’m not going to say anything.
TonyB et al:-))
I have just downloaded Peirs Corbyn’s team effort for the July predictive forecast made in late June – uncannily accurate almost to the day! Well worth a wander over to Climaterealists.com for a look see!
Someone further up the chain (possibly on another post) mentioned that PC offered his services to the Wet Office years ago, they turned him down flat, as did the government of the day, presumably on the advice of “experts”. reminds me of the late great Sir Barnes Wallace & his fanciful swing-wing high-altitude super jet ideas, where we literally could breakfast in London, lunch in Sidney, & dine in New York, & sleep back in the UK! Britain is great at that kind of thing – losing brains I mean.
Just how would you demonstrate that a continued warming trend was “in response to increasing carbon dioxide”? Correlation is not causation, remember? Variations in Earth’s climate may be caused by multiple factors besides, or in addition to, observed ‘solar activity’ and measured CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. The evidence presented by many on this site and elsewhere suggests that CO2 concentration is at most a very minor factor.
/Mr Lynn
Leif’s plot of 10.7 and TSI show cycle 24 to be progressing nomally but slowly:
http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-SORCE-2008-now.png
Philip_B (08:27:01) :
Your bulb will heat the water by long wave radiation and most will be absorbed by the 1st few mm.
LW will also heat the air (and a lot quicker than water)
UV penetrates the ocean to greater depth and is mainly absorbed by ozone in the air.
From my post above:
Comparison between argo sea heat content to 700m and hadcrut3gl gives this
http://img140.imageshack.us/img140/6243/argovshadcrut3vgl.jpg
Comparison of tsi and SST
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1935/normalise/mean:50/plot/pmod/from:1935/normalise/mean:50/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1935/normalise/mean:50/plot/esrl-co2/from:1935/normalise/mean:50
So I ask again
The sea has gained 12*10^22 joules from some where and from the second plot it does not look like TS1
reference for argo data:
https://abstracts.congrex.com/scripts/jmevent/abstracts/FCXNL-09A02a-1661562-1-Obs_for_OHC_WhitePaper_v3.doc
“His chlorine sales have been falling for the last 12 years.”
A perfect proxy, sales of chlorine were perfectly constant at zero for thousands of years before dramatically increasing in the 20th century, this proves the hockey stick!!!!!!!!!!
Alan the Brit (10:10:35) :
“Britain is great at that kind of thing – losing brains I mean.”
It is all to do with this highly publicised ‘barbeque summer’ we are currently enjoying, curtsey of the Met office.
James F. Evans (10:02:09) :
Science does not understand the Sun — Earth relationship This is an improper generalization. Only “new age” “hollywood science” does.
Oulu monitor still up then solar cycle 24 still down. Big chief right again.
Mr. Alex (08:54:41) :
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.
Felt by whom – and where?
“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.”
Mr Archibald, you appear to have a hazy notion of what ‘predicting solar activity’ means. If you make a prediction three years before someone else makes a prediction, this does not make you ‘better’ at predicting than they are. You do actually have to wait until the thing you are predicting either occurs or does not occur.
“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.”
This figure of 2°C appears to be arbitrary. No calculations are presented. The observed climate response to the 11 year solar cycle has an amplitude of about 0.1°C.
“The climate science community was oblivious to this, despite billions being spent.”
Why should they have been anything other than oblivious to this number?
“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 Canadian wheat crop has not yet been harvested. The prediction is for a 20% drop compared to last year, but again, you should realise that to assess the accuracy of a prediction, you need to wait until the observational data is actually available.
“As Mark Steyn recently said, anyone under the age of 29 has not experienced global warming.”
Mark Steyn in fact said something different, but no less wrong. All temperature measurements show a warming of more than 0.3°C over the last 29 years.
“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.”
Who is this person? What is their model based on? Has it been published?
One prediction made for a date that has now passed, which I would be most interested in comments on, is described here.
Lee (09:15:29) :
Looking at that chart, and seeing how high cycle 23 was, it looks like what we might see is maybe a 1 degree drop by the end of cycle 24 in some 11 years. This is a very slow process – a tiny lessing of solar radiation, but steady and for a decade or 2 if Archibald is right.
I know of a way you can make a bit of money. Get in touch with James Annan and offer him a bet on cooling over the next decade. I’m fairly confident he will be only too willing to oblige. I’ll give Annan his due he does put his money where his mouth is.
Well, it’s been a pretty mild summer here in NW AL/MS so far. Plenty rain, temps in upper ’80’s mostly. No bad storms. Great weather actually. I vote we keep this weather permanently as the ideal and baseline for future generations. 🙂
San Antonio Triple Digit Days (1942 – 2009)*
2009 4x and counting (and it’s still only July)
1998 36
1948 33
1951 32
1980 31
2006 29
1994 29
1989 28
.
.
.
on the other hand:
1970 1
1971 3
1972 0
1973 0
1974 0
1975 0
1976 0
1977 0
1978 2
1979 0
*significant station move in 1942
John Finn (11:24:06) : “Felt by whom – and where?”
*Felt by whom : Europeans who kept temperature/weather records indicate so. Others unknown
*Where : Written records indicate Europe, other areas sparse information/unknown.
Retired Engineer John (08:15:31) :
“Dr Hathway says that we are not in for a Maunder Minimum and I agree with him.”
I also would like to know the reason(s) for the above speculation. Why drop the comment without any explanation?
Maybe Alert, Nunavut would be a good station to evaluate the “minimum”.
Arctic basin ice area increasing again:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/recent365.anom.region.1.html
Alert, Nunavut, Canada at 82degN at the freezing point, chance of snow Saturday:
http://www.wunderground.com/global/stations/71082.html