UPDATED: This opinion piece from Professor Henrik Svensmark was published September 9th in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Originally the translation was from Google translation with some post translation cleanup of jumbled words or phrases by myself. Now as of Sept 12, the translation is by Nigel Calder. Hat tip to Carsten Arnholm of Norway for bringing this to my attention and especially for translation facilitation by Ágúst H Bjarnason – Anthony
Translation approved by Henrik Svensmark
While the Sun sleeps
Henrik Svensmark, Professor, Technical University of Denmark, Copenhagen
“In fact global warming has stopped and a cooling is beginning. No climate model has predicted a cooling of the Earth – quite the contrary. And this means that the projections of future climate are unreliable,” writes Henrik Svensmark.
The star that keeps us alive has, over the last few years, been almost free of sunspots, which are the usual signs of the Sun’s magnetic activity. Last week [4 September 2009] the scientific team behind the satellite SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) reported, “It is likely that the current year’s number of blank days will be the longest in about 100 years.” Everything indicates that the Sun is going into some kind of hibernation, and the obvious question is what significance that has for us on Earth.
If you ask the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which represents the current consensus on climate change, the answer is a reassuring “nothing”. But history and recent research suggest that is probably completely wrong. Why? Let’s take a closer look.
Solar activity has always varied. Around the year 1000, we had a period of very high solar activity, which coincided with the Medieval Warm Period. It was a time when frosts in May were almost unknown – a matter of great importance for a good harvest. Vikings settled in Greenland and explored the coast of North America. On the whole it was a good time. For example, China’s population doubled in this period.
But after about 1300 solar activity declined and the world began to get colder. It was the beginning of the episode we now call the Little Ice Age. In this cold time, all the Viking settlements in Greenland disappeared. Sweden surprised Denmark by marching across the ice, and in London the Thames froze repeatedly. But more serious were the long periods of crop failures, which resulted in poorly nourished populations, reduced in Europe by about 30 per cent because of disease and hunger.
It’s important to realise that the Little Ice Age was a global event. It ended in the late 19th Century and was followed by increasing solar activity. Over the past 50 years solar activity has been at its highest since the medieval warmth of 1000 years ago. But now it appears that the Sun has changed again, and is returning towards what solar scientists call a “grand minimum” such as we saw in the Little Ice Age.
The match between solar activity and climate through the ages is sometimes explained away as coincidence. Yet it turns out that, almost no matter when you look and not just in the last 1000 years, there is a link. Solar activity has repeatedly fluctuated between high and low during the past 10,000 years. In fact the Sun spent about 17 per cent of those 10,000 years in a sleeping mode, with a cooling Earth the result.
You may wonder why the international climate panel IPCC does not believe that the Sun’s changing activity affects the climate. The reason is that it considers only changes in solar radiation. That would be the simplest way for the Sun to change the climate – a bit like turning up and down the brightness of a light bulb.
Satellite measurements have shown that the variations of solar radiation are too small to explain climate change. But the panel has closed its eyes to another, much more powerful way for the Sun to affect Earth’s climate. In 1996 we discovered a surprising influence of the Sun – its impact on Earth’s cloud cover. High-energy accelerated particles coming from exploded stars, the cosmic rays, help to form clouds.
When the Sun is active, its magnetic field is better at shielding us against the cosmic rays coming from outer space, before they reach our planet. By regulating the Earth’s cloud cover, the Sun can turn the temperature up and down. High solar activity means fewer clouds and and a warmer world. Low solar activity and poorer shielding against cosmic rays result in increased cloud cover and hence a cooling. As the Sun’s magnetism doubled in strength during the 20th century, this natural mechanism may be responsible for a large part of global warming seen then.
That also explains why most climate scientists try to ignore this possibility. It does not favour their idea that the 20th century temperature rise was mainly due to human emissions of CO2. If the Sun provoked a significant part of warming in the 20th Century, then the contribution by CO2 must necessarily be smaller.
Ever since we put forward our theory in 1996, it has been subjected to very sharp criticism, which is normal in science.
First it was said that a link between clouds and solar activity could not be correct, because no physical mechanism was known. But in 2006, after many years of work, we completed experiments at DTU Space that demonstrated the existence of a physical mechanism. The cosmic rays help to form aerosols, which are the seeds for cloud formation.
Then came the criticism that the mechanism we found in the laboratory could not work in the real atmosphere, and therefore had no practical significance. We have just rejected that criticism emphatically.
It turns out that the Sun itself performs what might be called natural experiments. Giant solar eruptions can cause the cosmic ray intensity on earth to dive suddenly over a few days. In the days following an eruption, cloud cover can fall by about 4 per cent. And the amount of liquid water in cloud droplets is reduced by almost 7 per cent. Here is a very large effect – indeed so great that in popular terms the Earth’s clouds originate in space.
So we have watched the Sun’s magnetic activity with increasing concern, since it began to wane in the mid-1990s.
That the Sun might now fall asleep in a deep minimum was suggested by solar scientists at a meeting in Kiruna in Sweden two years ago. So when Nigel Calder and I updated our book The Chilling Stars, we wrote a little provocatively that “we are advising our friends to enjoy global warming while it lasts.”
In fact global warming has stopped and a cooling is beginning. Mojib Latif from the University of Kiel argued at the recent UN World Climate Conference in Geneva that the cooling may continue through the next 10 to 20 years. His explanation was a natural change in the North Atlantic circulation, not in solar activity. But no matter how you interpret them, natural variations in climate are making a comeback.
The outcome may be that the Sun itself will demonstrate its importance for climate and so challenge the theories of global warming. No climate model has predicted a cooling of the Earth – quite the contrary. And this means that the projections of future climate are unreliable. A forecast saying it may be either warmer or colder for 50 years is not very useful, and science is not yet able to predict solar activity.
So in many ways we stand at a crossroads. The near future will be extremely interesting. I think it is important to accept that Nature pays no heed to what we humans think about it. Will the greenhouse theory survive a significant cooling of the Earth? Not in its current dominant form. Unfortunately, tomorrow’s climate challenges will be quite different from the greenhouse theory’s predictions. Perhaps it will become fashionable again to investigate the Sun’s impact on our climate.
–
Professor Henrik Svensmark is director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at DTU Space. His book The Chilling Stars has also been published in Danish as Klima og Kosmos Gads Forlag, DK ISBN 9788712043508)
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SPPI’s Monthly CO2 Report is now posted:
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monthly_report/august_co2_report.html
No heat buildup in the oceans = no global warming:
SPPI’s authoritative Monthly CO2 Report for August 2009 announces the publication of a major paper by Professors David Douglass and Robert Knox of the Physics Department in the University of Rochester, New York, demonstrating that the heat buildup in the oceans that is a necessary fingerprint of manmade global warming is not occurring. This is another mortal blow to the alarmist cause in the climate debate. Report, page 4.
“Science should be done by observation, meditation, calculation, and verification. Politicized science cannot usefully inform political decisions.” Editorial comment: Page 3.
The IPCC assumes CO2 concentration will reach 836 ppmv by 2100, but, for almost eight years, CO2 concentration has headed straight for only 570 ppmv by 2100. This alone halves all of the IPCC’s temperature projections. Pages 5-6.
Since 1980 temperature has risen at only 2.3 °F (1.4 °C)/century, not the 7 F° (3.9 C°) the IPCC predicts. Pages 7-9.
Sea level rose just 8 inches in the 20th century, and has scarcely risen since 2006. The oceans are not warming. Pages 10-11.
Arctic sea-ice extent is currently at its summer low, but there is more summer ice than there was in 2007 or 2008. In the Antarctic, sea ice extent reached a record high in 2007. Global sea ice extent shows little trend for 30 years. Pages 12-15.
Hurricane and tropical-cyclone activity is almost at its lowest since satellite measurement began. Pages 16-17.
The Sun is still very quiet. There were no sunspots in August at all. Page 18.
The (very few) benefits and the (very large) costs of the Waxman/Markey Bill are illustrated at Pages 19-21.
Science Focus this month reprints a paper giving the reasons why the great ice sheets will not collapse. Pages 22-28.
As always, there’s our “global warming” ready reckoner, and our monthly selection of scientific papers. Pages 29-34.
And finally, a Technical Note explains how we compile our state-of-the-art CO2 and temperature graphs. Page 35.
As Roy Orbison would have said, it’s over
Ron de Haan (08:53:29) :
Luboš Motl (07:55:34) :
“It must be annoying for Svensmark if their mechanism – which is almost certainly one of the most important insights of climatology in decades – is being largely ignored because of a paranoid politicized cult that prefers the explanations with a big potential to influence politics over the explanations that are supported by the objective evidence.
Nice article”.
Thanks Luboš, I could not agree more.
Jumping the gun a little, for example why do the nuclei supposedly generated by the Forbush events take a week to build into clouds whereas those released from jet engine exhausts produce clouds in a matter of seconds? Also the cloud cover decayed away measurably in a couple of days when air travel over the US was shut down 8 years ago.
Johnny Honda (00:34:23) :
See http://www.bluehill.org/instruments/instruments.html under “Sunshine Instruments” and click on the photos to see one of these.
Dolormin, answer my questions please, none of them has anything to do with stars. they have only to do with observable characteristics of our climate in the real world and in the past. No tipping points and no positive feedbacks
Why is it that whenever the key questions on AGW are asked such as prove it, nobody not even the cleverest physicists can answer them. They see warming for 20 years and CO2 rising at the same time and that is it. Of course you have to ignore periods last century when it cooled the MWP and LIA but never mind, what is a bit of scientific fraud compared to religious beliefs.
Have a look how the AGW sirens are changing their songs now after saying that warming would be forever with a little noise, the tune is now that it can stop and reverse without falsifying the hypothesis but one day it will start again. Well of course it will and it may just do so because of natural factors. As I say many times AGW is the ultimate busted flush, how can the world now step back from the nonsensical situation that it has got itself into in the main due to wholly unelected and totally incompetent bodies like the UN, puppet scientists like its IPCC and unelected left wing eco lobby groups. A worse case of the tail wagging the dog I have never seen.
Lucy’s data is for individual stations (via GISS/GHCN/CRU). GISS also produce the infamous gridded data product. If you want “nothing to see here – move along” use individual long standing records. If you want “alarming” increases over the last fifty years then the gridded product is the way to go. It’s all about choice.
Leif Svalgaard (12:23:50) :
“Chris Schoneveld (07:36:59) :
He won’t, as Al Gore won’t either.”
This very, very close to an ad hom. quite uncharacteristically for Leif.
I don’t know… Since when is just mentioning someone next to Al Gore an ad hom? 🙂
The point was that if you are at one pole of a very polarized issue, such debates are usually not of much use, as the pole sitter has too much tied up in his viewpoint.”
Nice Try.
Harold Ambler (05:22:10) :
http://cosmicrays.oulu.fi/
As I have pointed out so many times, one must look at many stations [just as with temperature]. Showing just one [or a cherry picked bunch] is quite meaningless. Figure 1 of http://neutronm.bartol.udel.edu/reprints/2007bieber.pdf shows some more stations. Including South Pole. From the article: “[1] The count rate recorded by a neutron monitor at South Pole, Antarctica, displays a long-term decline over the 32-year span from 1965 to 1997. “.
Chris Schoneveld (22:46:14) :
“The point was that if you are at one pole of a very polarized issue, such debates are usually not of much use, as the pole sitter has too much tied up in his viewpoint.”
Nice Try.
That was what I meant.
China seems to have us right where they want us. They own most of our debt and we can’t complain too loudly about human rights, support for N. Korea, Burma (I refuse to call it Myanmar until it’s so decided by a freely and fairly elected government), the Asia brown cloud, factory fishing, etc. They now own the means of production thanks to our migration of manufacturing to their shores, and although they will continue to want to sell us stuff, their people have had a much higher savings rate, and are beginning to consumerism by their own population so they will become increasingly less dependent on us. They, of course can’t let us go bankrupt until they have sold off most of their U.S. bonds, but after that we have little leverage. More ominously, they are in the process of moving all of their gold, stored mostly in London, to a new storage facility at the Hong Kong airport. It is shaping up to be the Chinese century, and where that leaves us is anybody’s guess. Long term investment in China and the rest of Asia is rapidly becoming more attractive than investing at home. We will only penalize further our economy by initiating cap-and-trade, because China isn’t about to fall for our nonsense.
Joel, on the GPL paper you referenced. WOW. Kinda small and lacking detail. I’m underwhelmed. I was expecting more.
Notice that the models used in the series presented were created around 2005. This is when the specter of the possibility of a cooling period was already entering the lexicon of the global warming debate, primarily because people were starting to notice that it wasn’t warming as expected. I would be more impressed with a model that was created during the 90’s, when the consensus was that there would be no more cooling. Also note that on the second graph there is absolutely NO cooling after 2030. Really? We are entering a period in the science of climate change where the powers that be now, finally, concede there will be long term cooling periods, yet these modelers still stick to the model that produces NO cooling trend for over seventy years? Really???????. The beauty of this is it will be 2080 or so before this particular model can possibly be verified.
Who wants to bet that by 2060 this particular model will be long forgotten and relegated to the dust bin of history as the climate will not have warmed nearly as much as this absurd prediction suggests.
As always Anthony, many thanks for your blog.
In my blog I used your translation from Danish to English in addition to the original Danish text, as most of us here can read and even speak a little Danish.
I only changed “Swedes [were surprised to see Denmark to freeze over in ice],…” to “Swedes surprised the Danes by walking over the ice,…”
http://agbjarn.blog.is/blog/agbjarn/entry/946551/
Best regards, Agust
REPLY: Thanks, I made that change. – Anthony
Robert E. Phelan (17:55:49) :
ann riley (16:54:05) :
What was your purpose in picking on that detail?
Maybe because I know something about it.
—————
That was a pretty dismissive response but it wasn’t an answer to the question.
Did you mean to say “…because I wanted to demonstrate that I know something about it.”?
Leif Svalgaard (14:13:03) :
The slope you should be recognizing is not any other cosmic ray graph, but a graph of an entirely different subject.
The clue was it starts around 1990…roughly.
Take a bunch of neutron monitor graphs extending back well before 1990.
Southern Hemisphere, Moscow, Oulu, Thule, etc.
From 1990 onwards, they all pretty much do the same general thing.
You pick one, you pick them all.
As you progress forward, there is an upper line, and a lower line. They both follow the same general slope.
What other graph have you seen that follows that same timeslice?
Agust Bjarnason (23:00:19) :
I only changed “Swedes [were surprised to see Denmark to freeze over in ice],…” to “Swedes surprised the Danes by walking over the ice,…”
The Danish text says “Svenskerne overraskede Danmark med at gå over isen” and translates: “The Swedes took [the nation] Denmark by surprise by walking over the ice”. Somewhat clumsy Danish, so the translation becomes clumsy too.
rbateman (23:49:56) :
What other graph have you seen that follows that same timeslice?
I’m trained to not overinterprete any trend of such short duration, so I don’t see anything of significance.
One of my problems with climate hysteria is that if you accept the LIA (and MWP) then there can be no doubt that the “average climate” has warmed over the last couple of hundred years or we would still be in the LIA (and nobody wants to go back there). The questions concern what drives these changes.
Faced with warming, should I be worried? My view is most certainly – no. Is mankind controlling the climate? Locally? Possibly. Globally? Not a chance. We are fleas on a Dog’s back claiming some significance to the Dog turning left or right. Water, it’s abundance and it’s many wonderful properties, governs the climate here.
I noticed earlier the statement by someone that .. in the absence of greenhouse gases the earth would be ~33ºC cooler
Such statements puzzle me. The dominant “greenhouse gas” (on earth, water vapour) wouldn’t exist if we were 33C cooler – chickens, eggs. “Greenhouse gas” is there because we receive enough energy from the Sun to keep it there. If we were 33C cooler it would be called “ice” and we would be in real trouble.
I also notice of late that more are coming around to the idea that we may see some cooling soon. Looking at long term (individual) station records – yes about every 60 years. Only if you feed on “pasteurised” data products and “Hockey Sticks” could you believe that “alarming” warming started in the 50’s. You don’t need to be a realclimatescinetist to see the pattern 30 “cool” 30 “warm” or that we have reached the current plateau and are about due for the down side. Who knows, if we do see cooling for a few decades, maybe we see a new theory that CO2 causes cooling. Wouldn’t supprise me at all, the correlation will be there, rising CO2 falling temps, re-write history.
As far as I am concerned CO2 is a bit part player at best. One of many. Hopefully Svensmark here has found another in GCR’s. Who knows? We may get a coherent climate model at some point.
For the moment, as a Carbon based life form – I’m voting for Carbon.
Joel Shore (20:20:28) :
(There have been a few papers recently that have tried to make decadal predictions of the climate by trying to initialize the models with the current ocean conditions…and there is some hope that this is possible because the timescales for some of the ocean processes are long enough that the divergence from perturbed initial conditions may be slow enough to allow prediction of the climate noise a decade or so into the future.
This complex sentence merits careful study. Joel seems to be saying, if I understand him correctly, that by finally acknowledging that there are longer term oceanic cycles, the models are becoming slightly more realistic in their projections.
My question for him is this: If the negative phases of oceanic cycles are able to overcome the alleged co2 forcing for a decade or more at a time, how much of the late C20th warming attributed to co2 was actually due to the positive phases of those same oceanic cycles?
I’v asked this question many times of proponents of the AGW hypothesis, but have never recieved a reply. It’s an issue they seem to avoid like the plague. I don’t expect a properly quantified answer. An acknowledgement that at least some of the warming attributed to co2 was due to cyclic oceanic behaviour would be a start.
Agust Bjarnason (23:00:19) :
As always Anthony, many thanks for your blog.
In my blog I used your translation from Danish to English in addition to the original Danish text, as most of us here can read and even speak a little Danish.
I only changed “Swedes [were surprised to see Denmark to freeze over in ice],…” to “Swedes surprised the Danes by walking over the ice,…”
http://agbjarn.blog.is/blog/agbjarn/entry/946551/
Best regards, Agust
REPLY: Thanks, I made that change. – Anthony
A little further up the thread, Henrik Svensmark himself has endorsed another translation:
Henrik Svensmark (15:01:28) :
Dear Anthony,
Nigel Calder has been so kind to translate my article. It is a good translation.
Best wishes,
Henrik
Published 9 September 2009 in Jyllands-Posten, Denmark’s best-selling newspaper.
Translation approved by Henrik Svensmark
Perhaps it would be best to post Nigel Calder’s translation at some point, since that is the one the Author himself prefers.
EM Smith: you know, you could be funny if you weren’t so obviously biased. The global temperature for 2009 so far, as calculated by satellites, is largely above the 1998-2008 average and much hotter than 2008. With the September we’re having it’s not going to be less hot!
Please do not come citing how cold it was in the winter in some places. India and China had sizzling temperatures, the summer in Europe was quite hot and Queensland, Australia is beating all records. Globally, it’s hot. See for example
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/amsutemps.html
Since Svensmark posted here his approved translation on WUWT, he must be aware of Leif’s persistent criticism of his theory and it would be appreciated by everybody if he and Leif cross swords at this forum. The floor is open!
global warming be stopped would be a good experiment. My wondering here is that what if the cooling keeps coming down to earth? Is it another Ice Age? I don’t know much about earth, I mean planets. Im kind of superstitious. Like I believed in that Maya calender predicted ending of the world in 2012. Now I see this article about cooling comes instead of global warming. Such thing happens suddenly. I would like to believe in sciences. Anyway, cooling down is not a bad thing. As long as it’s good for us, for this planet.
This may shocking opinion,
I wonder how much cost has been charge to implement greenhouse-theory based programs around the world.
If the sun theory is right, then why it published recently in a popular newspaper?
This aspect of science has puzzled me. How can intelligent people come to different conclusions about the same data? Surely if different conclusions are available, nobody should be coming to any one conclusion. Rather, we should add the two as two possibilities.
And given that data is often uncertain, neither possibility should be discounted too early. In fact, it has been noted that gifted people in the world of design are in the habit of keeping several possibilities in play for as long as possible, letting each one be developed and matured in parallel. It is a key to creative thought and development.
It was scientists claiming “the science is settled” that raised by sceptical curiosity.
It seems to me a lot of people have a faith in science, that science is the best method for obtaining true knowledge. But there then seems to come a little cognitive slip, and people go on to feel that science gives you true knowledge. It is science! They are scientists! They must be right!
Meanwhile, the scientists themselves are working on some really hard problems, and that’s what they love to do (I would imagine.) But again, something weird happens… perhaps because they have to publish papers… and how do you publish on a very hard problem that nobody, including yourself, has solved?
So this other weird thing seems to happen. All the evidence we have so far points to X, so scientifically, only X is likely true… but that’s a weird cognitive slip. It is like sending out a search party into a forest, and the search party covers 10% of the forest. You then report back “all the evidence we have is that the missing person in NOT in the forest”. And then even more weird, when you cover another 10% of the forest, and you find the missing person, people report, “all the evidence is that the person is NOT in the forest, and this one person we found was just a statistical anomaly, and they’re just someone who looks like the missing person, but it is not them, because all the previous literature on the subject is very unlikely to be wrong.”
Sure, people are clever, but it seems that the theory and ideals of science, are not easy to put into practice reliably. There is pressure to publish, there is pressure to survive, to build a reputation, and so on. Otherwise, why would people jump to conclusions when so many alternatives exist? And you don’t have to be a selfish career chaser either. You could be a very sincere and concerned person, someone who desperately wants to do the right thing and protect the environment. You know it is obvious that humanity’s presence, as population continues to grow, is placing a greater burden on the planet. And as a scientists, you feel it is your utmost moral and ethical obligation to bring ANY evidence of this to the public’s attention.
Now, you might not be certain about global warming, but you are certain about humanity’s dangerous impact in general, so even if global warming is not a watertight theory, your moral obligation–you couldn’t sleep at night otherwise–is to make as much of it as possible, and your fellow scientists–because remember, there isn’t just one person with a moral conscience, but a whole generation of people with an awakening ethical/planetary concern–all your fellow scientists agree the situation is dire, we’re heading for a disaster, and somehow, we need to change. Are you going to hang back and say, well gee, there is so little data, we just don’t understand the climate.
“UK Sceptic (01:05:16) :
If we are sliding into another LIA then is it possible we’ll see governments paying industry to pump out as much CO2 as it can?”
I really don’t know if we heading to a cold period anytime soon, but I suspect that, unfortunately, pumping out CO2 is not going to help.
It’s a pity really that all this CO2 hysteria has no basis, because Global Freezing is scarier than Global Warming. We don’t have any good solution for it when it comes. And it will come eventually. That’s for sure.
“E.M.Smith (14:26:36) :
Too late. It already is. Hundreds of children dead in Peru from early onset snow. Crops ripening slowly in Canada and late planting from persistent snows. Argentina talking about a complete embargo of wheat exports due to cold induced crop failure (they are one of the few major exporters in the world in normal years…) Exceptional skiing started in New Zealand and Australia, the list goes on.”
The only problem with this, and although the snow season did start weeks earlier than “usual” in Aus and NZ, and in Melbourne in particular was very cold just weeks after the bush fires entering into winter, August was 0.08c warmer than the long term average (According to the media and the BoM that is). Today, in Sydney’s inner west, it was 30c, quite nice actually.
Incidentally here in New South Wales, “authorities” are back-burning and creating firebrakes, errrm….that’s reducing fuel in my eyes. Seems “authorities” are learning. One commenter on the news tonight stated that (Not actual words but the sentiment is the same) “We’ve wanted to do this for many years.”. So “they” have been prevented, by others, from doing what is propper.