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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rbateman (14:17:31) :
Preposterous!
L&P is not about lack of solar activity and solar modulation of cosmic rays, just about visibility of sunspots. So, with L&P we still have modulation as before, but we just have a harder time seeing the spots.
Joel wrote:
I don’t see that at all. It looks to me like you could identify decent length periods after 2030 with cooling or essentially flat behavior (for example, periods starting in ~2034). They do become less likely in these later years because that is a run for the A2 scenario, which is a quite aggressive one in terms of future emissions growth, hence the general acceleration of the warming over time.
Isn’t this part of the problem? Using unrealistic projections to advance the science? Wouldn’t it have been better to use something less scary?
You don’t need to give the basic lecture of modeling and smoothing. BTW, I’ve been looking at these issues for a very long time and didn’t need the lecture about smoothing. It wasn’t relevant to the specifics of my comments anyway.
And, no, I’m not paranoid, just a realist. Not sure where you would get that idea. Of course climate scientists follow what the skeptics say, and desire to prove them wrong. If not, there would be no need to publish the GRL paper you cited, and the opening statement at Real Climate used to say that the blog was started to combat the misinformation on climate change spread by other blogs. Yes, that’s a while ago. I’ve been following this issue for a lot longer than that, and have watched the ebb and flow in this debate…. Oh, I’m sorry. There is no debate. The science is settled. Foolish me.
Got to go play a gig now.
Spotless Days
Current Stretch: 10 days
2009 total: 203 days (80%)
Since 2004: 714 days
Typical Solar Min: 485 days
The current solar minimum in combination with a regular occuring medium sized stratospheric volcanic eruptions, like the recent eruptions from Mt Redoubt in March this year, Sarychev Peak in June and Shiveluch, which erupted two day’s ago, make weather observations a lot more interesting.
Joseph D’Aleo stated that he regarded this summer to be a “volcanic summer”, see article here: http://icecap.us/index.php/go/joesblog/major_eruptions_continue_at_mt_redoubt1/
and with more restless volcano’s active, it is very well possible that our “volcanic summer” will be followed by a “volcanic winter”.
Bill P 10:05:42
Not scurrilous. Michael ‘Piltdown’ Mann is responsible for his phony statistics. If the lesson of the ‘censored’ file is that he knew his statistics were phony, then it was deliberate fraud, like the Piltdown Man was.
So you explain his statistics and his cryptic file. He hasn’t; the position of explainer is open. Tamino has failed.
====================================
Mark Bowlin 10:33:42
Oh, now I get it. Good one, Bill.
=====================
TonyB says:
I don’t know what you mean by “the models did not predict the (officially) admitted cooling and they are having to take ‘natural variability’ into greater account”. The models do in fact predict that there will be periods of cooling due to natural variability. And, the models are not being changed to take it into greater account. The Easterling and Wehner paper that I referenced ( http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/csi/images/GRL2009_ClimateWarming.pdf ) and the RealClimate blog post that I referenced don’t change the models. They just looked at the statistics of various length trends in individual runs of the models in the climate model archive.
Now what is true is that while the models can simulate similar natural variability to what is seen in the real world, they can’t actually match the particular ups-and-downs that the climate system follows because that is very sensitive to the initial conditions. So, they can’t predict in advance when the periods with little trend will occur (or when the periods with steep trend will occur) but they can predict things regarding the statistics of these periods and seem to be doing a reasonably good job doing so. (It is hard to say anything more precise because unfortunately our statistics for the real world are limited by the fact that we don’t have a whole ensemble of Earth’s each with perturbed initial conditions.)
Sonic Frog says:
Well, for the purposes of showing what they wanted to show, I think it is generous of them to use one of the scarier scenarios. If they had used one of the less dramatic ones, then the rate of warming would have been lower and presumably the occurrence of negative or near-zero trends would have been even more common. They probably chose the A2 scenario to dispel the notion that such occurrences are only possible in milder warming scenarios.
As to whether the A2 is unrealistic, I don’t think it necessarily is. The various scenarios are basically supposed to represent what would happen if we don’t take serious actions to constrain our emissions for the explicit purpose of stopping global warming. At the rate CO2 emissions have been increasing (and especially the rate at which China is building new coal plants), I’m not sure that the A2 scenario is at all unrealistic (and this is in a world in which there is already at least a lot of talk about constraining emissions). Hopefully, in the real world, we will end up constraining our emissions, although if this comes to pass, it will certainly be no thanks to people who are continuing to contest the basic science and to make alarmist predictions of how such constraints on emissions will lead to economic ruin.
It is one thing to say that a few climate scientists might write a paper or run a blog in response to “skeptics”. It is another to suggest that they are somehow markedly modifying the physics in their climate models. (And, as I also showed, it is utterly without foundation since even the earliest climate models runs showed natural variability that led to there being several year periods with little temperature trend.) Most climate scientists spend most of their time worrying about doing science and engaging with their colleagues who are also doing science and publishing, not gearing their entire research program around a few bloggers on the internet.
Ron de Haan (18:35:15) :
I have been searching for the graph I did that shows how bigger volcanic eruptions like to cloister around solar minmum, the bigger the better. Still digging.
The rest of the volcanic pops are more or less random distribution.
And that was the only thing that stood out.
RR Kampen (15:12:15) & RR Kampen (15:11:05) “Untenable? Maybe, but you can’t prove it. […] I’m sorry. The data are available, like a try? […] Snowball in hell. The data pass all tests for randomness.”
Any bright Stat 101 student can easily demonstrate a lack of random scatter in the residuals plots. The regression model assumptions are flawed; thus, inference based on the regression model is nonsense.
Also, since you appear to be making other false assumptions, please see my comments here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/09/arctic-temperatures-what-hockey-stick/
[Paul Vaughan (15:31:09) Sept. 10, 2009]
Consider contributing something positive to the enthusiasm here about natural climate variation.
All the best.
What Joel says about the models predicting long cooling periods is absolute cobblers (unless they are being adjusted yet again to show this). We’ve seen many graphs of the post 1999 Surface temp predicted by models climbing like a stairway to heaven with random up and down noise on the way but nothing like what is possibly 12 years of cooling. As the AGW “industry” now admits the cooling despite the use of adjusted data to try to disprove it and as such it has to admit the dominance of natural climate forcing over CO2 and the tiny part that Anthropogenic CO2 plays in that. May be I’ll start a basic science blog to explain things like the Carbon cycle and why AGW if it happens continues indepently from any other variable. It doesn’t stop for long periods. All that is happening now is a demonstration that AGW is falsified or as I believe just a weak phenomenon.
Joel, why don’t you answer questions regarding unequivocal demonstration that AGW (note the A) is real and a massive cause for concern and why its central tenets are falsified so easily?
Joel,
I have no doubt that by construction the models and old runs if one looks at them with a lens will show vairations since the end product depends on many input equations.
The facts are:
1) the models chose either to smooth the bumps or chose runs with no bumps to give to the IPCC
2) The IPCC took these modeler estimates at face value as if they were statistical variations and made an average
3) It presented this average as written in stone ( science settled)
4) and most important, it pushed a political taxing agenda based on these plots back in 2007
By navel gazing the various runs what is happening is, the game rules are changed continually ( the science not settled). But also it demonstrates in practice the cavalier fashion these runs have been used, with no error bars for the normal scientists to be able to judge coherence and meaning on a plot. I suspect, but cannot prove, that error bars put on the referenced plots would exceed the variations of bumps that are being pushed a proof of “natural variability” in models.
What do I mean by error propagation? I do not mean initial conditions of probability distributions.
I mean what a normal scientist/physicist means: Take all the input parameters? and assign them their errors. Use a minimizing program that will vary the error bars of the input parameters and come out with a chi square per degree of freedom for the given curve and an error bar for the given curve ( temperature).
From the simple model in junkscience.com, I thought that albedo was a parameter in the GCMs. You cleared that up for me, that it is an output in the GCMs, contrary to simplified black body models. Nevertheless there are a number of other parameters entering the GCMs and these need to be varied within their errors to give a true error estimate for each curve coming out of the models.
All the rest is like discussing the number of angels on the head of a pin.
repeat, correct emphasis
Joel,
I have no doubt that by construction the models and old runs if one looks at them with a lens will show vairations since the end product depends on many input equations.
The facts are:
1) the models chose either to smooth the bumps or chose runs with no bumps to give to the IPCC
2) The IPCC took these modeler estimates at face value as if they were statistical variations and made an average
3) It presented this average as written in stone ( science settled)
4) and most important, it pushed a political taxing agenda based on these plots back in 2007
By navel gazing the various runs what is happening is, the game rules are changed continually ( the science not settled). But also it demonstrates in practice the cavalier fashion these runs have been used, with no error bars for the normal scientists to be able to judge coherence and meaning on a plot. I suspect, but cannot prove, that error bars put on the referenced plots would exceed the variations of bumps that are being pushed a proof of “natural variability” in models.
What do I mean by error propagation? I do not mean initial conditions of probability distributions.
I mean what a normal scientist/physicist means: Take all the input parameters and assign them their errors. Use a minimizing program that will vary the error bars of the input parameters and come out with a chi square per degree of freedom for the given curve and an error bar for the given curve ( temperature).
From the simple model in junkscience.com, I thought that albedo was a parameter in the GCMs. You cleared that up for me, that it is an output in the GCMs, contrary to simplified black body models. Nevertheless there are a number of other parameters entering the GCMs and these need to be varied within their errors to give a true error estimate for each curve coming out of the models.
All the rest is like discussing the number of angels on the head of a pin.
It is one thing to say that a few climate scientists might write a paper or run a blog in response to “skeptics”. It is another to suggest that they are somehow markedly modifying the physics in their climate models.
Of course they are. They have to. That is the only way they can keep producing relevant models in accordance with previously unknown or unaccountable variations in the climate. They did changed the physics of the models to account for better understanding of the nature of aerosols. Now that scientists are realizing that oceanic phenomenon such as ENSO and PDO affect climate more than originally given credit (note that this paper was never mentioned in the press, and I didn’t see RC or Tamino try and discredit it… they simply ignored it), now that the recognize that convection currents in the ocean may not behave in the ways we assumed, now that there is increased focus on other solar phenomenon instead of singling out only TSI that you often will only see on WUWT. Of course they change the physics. Not to do so would make them completely irrelevant.
Dear WUWT
I have just copied the NCDC global temperature records from their website (ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/anomalies/monthly.land_ocean.90S.90N.df_1901-2000mean.dat) into Microsoft Excel. I took the global monthly land and ocean combined. Then I simply made a xy plot of the most recent 452 months – going back to about the start of the 1970s up to July 2009. Then I fitted a 5-order polynomial. The resulting equation was:
y = -9.2274E-13×5 + 9.7506E-10×4 – 3.6526E-07×3 + 5.8643E-05×2 – 2.4672E-03x + 4.7780E-02
R² = 7.0417E-01
This shows a distinct downturn in the last 4-5 years starting 2004-5. It would appear to be a straightforward interpretation of the data that global temperatures have inflected downwards, as described by the first term, -9.2274E-13 x^5. No doubt this will be attacked as naive and selective, but it seems real enough.
Fred Lightfoot (02:44:03) :
….
Now we get politicians (failed lawyers) offering mega $ for research to ”prove” that us humans are in charge of the climate, if these 25-39 IQ ”humans” went and experienced the world, (not visiting the local Hilton) and realized how big our planet is and how small the human presence is we would not be trying to get milk from butterflies.
Brilliant.
Hi Joel
I think we both had huge fun with my attached graph earlier in the year.
The CET records show the LIA and subsequent warm periods that were around as warm as today.
Looking at the figures where 280ppm is a constant co2 factor;
http://cadenzapress.co.uk/download/beck_mencken.xls
It appears that natural variability occurs without any help from enhanced co2 levels-The objective observer would perhaps remark that;
a) Either co2 doesn’t seem to have much to do with anything and natural variability is the over riding factor (as surely Vicky Pope of the Met office admitted)
OR
b) There are co2 plots missing that go up and down as temperatures change. The gold dots represent the historic co2 plots from Ernst Beck.
I am sure you are bored with this subject but I would be interested in comments from others here about the scenarios I pose.
tonyb
It is clear AGW theory is not disprovable using temperature data in the next 20 years.
That also means AGW theory has no track record to determine whether it should be trusted.
If the models were made right, they should give us useful predictions, but we won’t know if they are right until the decades have ticked by. People say they don’t have several Earths to test, so they built models. Well it doesn’t get you away from the problem that you need several Earths to test your models anway. But we only have one Earth. This undermines the whole enterprise.
It is not a scientific question. People simply have to make a judgement, do they trust the models or not? You can’t answer this scientifically, you have to answer it with wisdom and intuition. I haven’t read a single argument that can answer it scientifically. It is a question of wisdom.
For me today, only fools believe they’ve settled a prediction 50 years out about climate.
Please excuse my tone, but after all this time hearing about AGW, I’m getting bored with the lack of progress from that field on whether the threat is anywhere near as big, or believable, as we had been told.
Britain’s P.M. is giving cause for concern.
http://order-order.com/
It is possible now to understand why UK ZaNuLabour politicians cannot grasp the reality of global cooling. Their leader is barking.
TonyB (00:56:59) :
I had trouble seeing the chart, it was offscreen mostly with my version of exel (old).
I vote for a).
The up and down coincidences where they happen can be fortuitous for the time scales seen.
Of course there should be some effect of CO2.Maybe we need CO2 measurements exactly where temperature measurements are taken to see any strong correlation.
Take insulation: If half the house is insulated the insulation effect will be strong where it exists, even though it will be reflected in the average temperature of the whole house.
p.s.
come to think of it, CO2 is probably part of the UHI effect.
Paul Vaughan (20:46:56) :
“RR Kampen (15:12:15) & RR Kampen (15:11:05) “Untenable? Maybe, but you can’t prove it. […] I’m sorry. The data are available, like a try? […] Snowball in hell. The data pass all tests for randomness.”
Any bright Stat 101 student can easily demonstrate a lack of random scatter in the residuals plots.”
—
If it is so easy, don’t talk, shoot! Please demonstrate!! You cannot. The Dutch have tried, end of story. The data pass all tests for randomness. As a mathematician ànd meteorologist I tried to make the dream of regularity and prediction come true myself, for a dumb twenty years or so.
The data are simply Poisson-, almost Gaussian distributed around the average except for skew caused by the recent trend.
Phlogiston says:
What is real enough is that you are just fitting to noise. If you actually computed error bars in the coefficients that you came up with, it would show this. The reason that scientists fit just to a linear trend line is not that one expects it to be perfectly linear but rather that one does not have good enough data to do anything more.
TonyB:
(1) It is difficult to make global conclusions from a single temperature record in central England.
(2) That said, you are incorrect in your analysis of the CET record. While it may look like some peak years during some other times were as high as now, the difference is that in those cases there were nearby years that were much cooler whereas that has not been true for the latest data. So, as tamino shows here http://tamino.wordpress.com/2008/04/28/central-england-temperature/ , when you smooth the data, you find that the current warming is without precedent in the record.
(3) No scientist takes Beck’s paper seriously for several reasons: (a) There is no reason to believe that the CO2 measurements from the 1800s and early 1900s were accurate enough or taken in regions uncontaminated enough to reflect the true values for CO2 levels. You can see this just from the spread in the data and, in fact, the curve Beck tries to draw through the data still misses a lot of the points by quite a bit. (b) Believing Beck requires believing that the CO2 levels went up-and-down like crazy until we started measuring it by a new method at Mauna Lao after which it miraculously settled down. (c) Such wild ups-and-downs can not be reconciled with our understanding of the carbon cycle. (d) It disagrees with the values obtained from ice cores and although the ice core data does average over several years (decades, I think), one should still see more variation even smoothed over such times if Beck is correct (especially assuming that CO2 has generally varied up-and-down like this over the centuries).
Joel Shore (07:27:19) :
you find that the current warming is without precedent in the record.
Defining climate trend as a 30-yr trend one can plot the CET trends for a sliding 30-yr window:
http://www.leif.org/research/CET1.png
The current warming is clearly not unprecedented. Such swings occur regularly.
While rummaging around looking for a piece of information I found this statement from Ken Tapping back in April 2008:
http://solarscience.auditblogs.com/2008/04/22/ken-tapping-the-current-solar-minimum/
It’s not Dr. Tapping’s statement that is so much of interest (he was certainly not alone in his judgment) but the tenor of the comments that accompanied the article…
Not a big deal, just interesting.