Solar Science Bipolar Disorder
Guest post by Steven Goddard
About once every 11 years, the sun’s magnetic poles reverse. However some high profile solar scientists reverse their own polarity more frequently.
The BBC reported Wednesday that Mike Lockwood at the University of Reading has established a statistical link between cold weather and low solar activity.
The UK and continental Europe could be gripped by more frequent cold winters in the future as a result of low solar activity, say researchers.
“By recent standards, we have just had what could be called a very cold winter and I wanted to see if this was just another coincidence or statistically robust,” said lead author Mike Lockwood, professor of space environment physics at the University of Reading, UK.
To examine whether there was a link, Professor Lockwood and his co-authors compared past levels of solar activity with the Central England Temperature (CET) record, which is the world’s longest continuous instrumental record of such data.
The researchers used the 351-year CET record because it provided data that went back to the beginning of the Maunder Minimum, a prolonged period of very low activity on the Sun that lasted about half a century.
“Frost fayres” were held on the Thames during the Maunder Minimum
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The Maunder Minimum occurred in the latter half of the 17th Century – a period when Europe experienced a series of harsh winters, which has been dubbed by some as the Little Ice Age. Following this, there was a gradual increase in solar activity that lasted 300 years.
Professor Lockwood explained that studies of activity on the Sun, which provides data stretching back over 9,000 years, showed that it tended to “ramp up quite slowly over about a 300-year period, then drop quite quickly over about a 100-year period”.
He said the present decline started in 1985 and was currently about “half way back to a Maunder Minimum condition”. More at the BBC
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His study was basically a rehash of what many others have done previously over the past few centuries, but he has the BBC’s ear – because in 2007 he prominently claimed just the opposite.
No Sun link’ to climate change
Tuesday, 10 July 2007
“This should settle the debate,” said Mike Lockwood
Similarly, in 2006 David Hathaway at NASA reported that the Sun’s conveyor belt had “slowed to a record low.”
May 10, 2006: The Sun’s Great Conveyor Belt has slowed to a record-low crawl, according to research by NASA solar physicist David Hathaway. “It’s off the bottom of the charts,” he says. “This has important repercussions for future solar activity.”
Then on March 12, 2010 he reported the exact opposite:
March 12, 2010: In today’s issue of Science, NASA solar physicist David Hathaway reports that the top of the sun’s Great Conveyor Belt has been running at record-high speeds for the past five years.
In 1810, the great English astronomer William Herschel established a link between sunspot activity and the price of grain in Europe – a proxy for climate. As far as we know, he never reversed polarity on that belief. Modern solar science is just coming around to what Herschel hypothesized 200 years ago.
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UPDATE: Full Lockwood et al paper at Environmental Research Letters here
Abstract. Solar activity during the current sunspot minimum has fallen to levels unknown since the start of the 20th century. The Maunder minimum (about 1650–1700) was a prolonged episode of low solar activity which coincided with more severe winters in the United Kingdom and continental Europe. Motivated by recent relatively cold winters in the UK, we investigate the possible connection with solar activity. We identify regionally anomalous cold winters by detrending the Central England temperature (CET) record using reconstructions of the northern hemisphere mean temperature. We show that cold winter excursions from the hemispheric trend occur more commonly in the UK during low solar activity, consistent with the solar influence on the occurrence of persistent blocking events in the eastern Atlantic. We stress that this is a regional and seasonal effect relating to European winters and not a global effect. Average solar activity has declined rapidly since 1985 and cosmogenic isotopes suggest an 8% chance of a return to Maunder minimum conditions within the next 50 years (Lockwood 2010 Proc. R. Soc. A 466 303–29): the results presented here indicate that, despite hemispheric warming, the UK and Europe could experience more cold winters than during recent decades.
Figure 2 from the paper:
- Figure 2. Variations since the mid-17th century of the following. (a) The mean northern hemisphere temperature anomaly, ΔTN: black shows the HadCRUT3v compilation of observations [17, mauve shows the median of an ensemble of 11 reconstructions (individually intercalibrated with the HadCRUT3v NH data over the interval 1850–1950) based on tree ring and other proxy data [18–23]. The decile range is given by the area shaded grey (between upper and lower decile values of ΔTU and ΔTL). (b) Average winter Central England Temperatures (CET) [5, 6] for December, January and February, TDJF. (c) The open solar flux, FS, corrected for longitudinal solar wind structure: dots are annual means of interplanetary satellite data; the black line after 1905 is derived from ground-based geomagnetic data [1]; and the mauve line is a model based on observed sunspot numbers [14]. Both curves show 1 year means. (d) Detrended winter CET, δTDJF, obtained by subtracting the best-fit variation of ΔTN, derived using the regressions shown in figure 3(b): the width of the line shows the difference resulting from the use of ΔTN = ΔTU and ΔTN = ΔTL prior to 1850. In all panels, dots are for years with δTDJF < 1 °C (the dashed horizontal line in (d)), colour-coded by year using the scale in figure 3(a). Data for the winter 2009/10 are provisional.”]
Here’s a link to the Shindell et al paper (published in 2001) referenced in John Finn (01:05:53) :
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2001/2001_Shindell_etal_1.pdf
From the Abstract:
Shindell et al. 2001
Shindell, D.T., G.A. Schmidt, M.E. Mann, D. Rind, and A. Waple, 2001: Solar forcing of regional climate change during the Maunder Minimum. Science, 294, 2149-2152, doi:10.1126/science.1064363.
We examine the climate response to solar irradiance changes between the late 17th century Maunder Minimum and the late 18th century. Global average temperature changes are small (about 0.3° to 0.4°C) in both a climate model and empirical reconstructions. However, regional temperature changes are quite large. In the model, these occur primarily through a forced shift towards the low index state of the Arctic Oscillation/North Atlantic Oscillation as solar irradiation decreases. This leads to colder temperatures over the Northern Hemisphere continents, especially in winter (1-2°C), in agreement with historical records and proxy data for surface temperatures.
You must read the BBC’s hilarious report from one Mark Kinver, science and environment “reporter”. It’s here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8615789.stm
After the opening two paragraphs in which he reports the highly inconvenient truth that researchers have found that winters in Europe are going to get even colder, he quickly adds a third paragraph:
“But they added that the phenomenon only affected a limited region and would not alter the overall global warming trend”.
Why is this so hilarious? Recently, one of Kinver’s BBC colleagues, Justin Webb, conducted a fawning Radio 4 interview with Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society, which consisted of several pat-a-cake questions about how awful climate change was, leavened only by a couple of references to the Climategate scandal.
Nowhere was there a “third paragraph” equivalent in this interview offering the AGW sceptic position.
And needless to say, none of the BBC’s ‘nodding dog’ correspondents ever challenge the science. Neither Kinver, Webb, nor Roger Harrabin (environment “analyst”) display any journalistic enquiry or, indeed, ask any meaningful science-based questions.
I complained three weeks ago to the BBC about the lack of impartiality and the absence of balance and journalistic enquiry and received a fatuous and complacent response from a duty editor.
So now here we have a report which says that – wonder of wonders – the sun is seriously affecting the earth’s climate; indeed, the effect is so dramatic that it will create increasingly cold winters in Europe but that NONE of this has got anything to do with general global warming (because that, you see, is caused by minute increases in a trace gas).
And Kinver et all just sit there, having their heads patted and offered biscuits, in rapt attention as to what the nice professor is telling them.
Sadly, the BBC has lost all credibility in its reporting of AGW issues. Someone is clearly pulling the strings of these reporters and it is pathetic to see, particularly with journalists such as Roger Harrabin who I believe to be basically an honest reporter but who is clearly struggling within a BBC-imposed straitjacket as to what he can and cannot investigate and publish.
I am sorry to say, though, that my reaction as a former journalist, to Kinver’s po-faced acceptance of Lockwood’s bizarre explanation was hilarity. You really could not make this stuff up.
Steve,
In the WUWT article on 3/12/2010, Hathaway explained that the ‘top’ of the solar conveyor belt is moving fast while the bottom is moving slow… and no one understands/knows why.
“Sunspots are supposedly rooted to the bottom of the belt,” says Hathaway. “So the motion of sunspots tells us how fast the belt is moving down there.”
He’s done that—plotted sunspot speeds vs. time since 1996—and the results don’t make sense. “While the top of the conveyor belt has been moving at record-high speed, the bottom seems to be moving at record-low speed. Another contradiction.”
Leif Svalgaard (22:47:50) :
Would this not lend some more credance to the theoires of Svenmark et al?
Also, Mike Lockwood was the one last year who said something along the lines of “if the low solar activity was going to cause a cooling of temperatures we would have seen it by now”. Mind you that was when he was supposed to be at Southampton Univerisy, the fellow does get about a bit! His message does seem to be a tad inconsistent.
AtB:-)
Independent – 20 March 2000
Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past
“According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”.
“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/snowfalls-are-now-just-a-thing-of-the-past-724017.html
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BBC – 14 April 2010
Low solar activity link to cold UK winters
“The UK and continental Europe could be gripped by more frequent cold winters in the future as a result of low solar activity, say researchers.
……..
…said lead author Mike Lockwood, professor of space environment physics at the University of Reading, UK.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8615789.stm
The atmosphere warms and expands when the sun is more active.
The expansion then seems to facilitate an increased upward flow of energy from below. That increase in energy coming up from below adds to the solar warming effect in the upper layers which become warmer than they would have done just from the solar changes.
The extra warming of the upper layers is at the expense of cooling in the lowest layer, the stratosphere, so the stratosphere will cool when the upper layers warm and vice versa as per observations. Note that this is redistributive effect and not an offence against radiative physics.
The effect cannot have any significant impact below the tropopause because below the tropopause the heat transfers are dominated by convective and conductive processes rather than radiative processes.
The stratosphere is thus a varying buffer between the conductive and convective processes in the troposphere and the radiative processes from tropopause to space.
The changes in the stratosphere then feed back to variability in the intensity and size of the Arctic and Antarctic Oscillations.
When those oscillations are ‘negative’due to a quiet sun the polar high pressure cells migrate equatorward and mid latitudes become colder. Just as we have seen over recent seasons. The opposite happens when the sun is more active as per the late 20th century warming.
That is the concept already set out in various articles by me at climaterealists.com and this is yet another piece of research appearing to support it.
It is a global mechanism. It operates in addition to the variable rates of energy release from the oceans, sometimes offsetting the oceanic effect and sometimes supplementing it.
The combined solar and oceanic processes resulting in latitudinal shifts in the jets and all other air circulation systems provide a complete explanation for all observed climate variability with any CO2 effect either neutralised in the process or wholly unmeasurable compared to natural variability.
Sorry Leif but I don’t have any numbers just a logical interpretation of real world observations. Let the professionals work it out.
Cassandra King (23:55:42) :
“The vain attempt to somehow preserve a theory from falsification and critisism is merely delaying the eventual demise of that theory, when the protected theory falls it will fall harder and hurt those supporters harder…”
I said the same thing on another thread.
“LightRain (23:46:06) :
Yabut Hansen said 2009 was the hottest in 100’s of years!”
That’s because he hangs around in a trenchcoat and safari hat even in the summer.
At last some sense coming from the BBC regarding the shaky state of ‘consensus’ climate science! The whole of the NH has had a very cold winter. It would be useful to see if the same pattern of a strongly negative AO has had a wider area of impact than just N Europe. If this is the case, then over time the changes will have a big impact on global climate.
Here’s a bit more information about AO /polar vortex:-
http://air.geo.tsukuba.ac.jp/~tanaka/papers/paper112.pdf
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/daily_ao_index/hgt.shtml
I also don’t think that what Lockwood describes will turn out to be the only link between the sun and Earth’s climate. There will be multiple effects due to changes to the sun’s total energy emissions/spectrum as our planet has multiple connections to the sun.
Another possible albedo changing effect is the presence of varying levels of microscopic ice in the mesosphere, which are very reflective as evidenced by noctilucent clouds.
Paper here:-
http://www.terrapub.co.jp/journals/EPS/pdf/5107_08/51070799.pdf
We still have much learn and the climate change debate is far from over.
Lockwood demonstrates link between low sun and low temps.
Does that mean that as the sun has been at it`s most active since the mid 50`s than in the last 11,500 years there is now a link between an active sun and higher temps.
http://i446.photobucket.com/albums/qq187/bobclive/ThesunNOAA.jpg
rbateman (22:25:01) :
If it does, it’s mechanism unknown.
But pretty much everything has been ‘mechanism unknown’ at one time, especially my ability to get rich.
Fitzy writes tellingly … “Now that we kNOW/DON’T KNOW what effect the Sun IS/ISN’Thaving on the planet, we CAN/CAN’Tset a new tax regime that WILL/WON’T save the planet from GLOBAL WARMING/COOLING.” (etc)
This is the era of quantum politics – superpose all possible theories/conclusions/opinions and make sure you get the right (or more correctly the Left’s) answer. It’s a new(-ish) scientific+political uncertainty principle – the Science may be uncertain, but we know what we are going to do!
Leif Svalgaard (22:47:50)
ROTFL. I had to read line 222 to see what side you would take and you did not take either! I should have predicted that.
Thought you guys would pick this up, blogged it as:
“AGW news: cold weather caused by low solar activity [BBC] [categories: who knew; really; not news]”
with links to Beeb and here, gud werk 😉
Dear Leif,
Following the sun-earth connections since about 30 years, after reading a book about the influence of solar activity on earthly phenomenom (spelling?), I still don’t know what to think. Like you said, some correlations hold up, but a decade later vanish completely… Landscheidt showed some connections from solar cycles with ENSO, PDO,… which he could predict with reasonable accuracy years ahead. Don’t know if that still is true after he passed away…
The old book also showed an increase in earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and the solar cycle, with maxima at the end of solar minima. Seems to be confirmed these days. Have you any knowledge on the connection between solar (magnetic?) cycles and movements of the earth plates?
Sorry to dissappoint you guys but this is clearly propaganda designed to protect global warming theory. Read it again. What they are saying is “oh look, its getting cold in Europe so now Brits and Germans don’t believe us anymore!”. So they need to explain away the REALITY of colder snowier winters whilst leaving global warming theory and the dangers presented by AGW intact. So they tell us that global warming is real, but will be over-ridden by reducing incoming solar energy. However, they tell us that this will only affect UK and Europe and only during the winter. Say what? How can a reduction in solar energy only affect Europe and the UK???? Surely that is just an outright LIE!
It seems to me to be yet another one of those deliberate attempts to propagandise AGW and this time they have used a popular theory from the sceptic camp to bolster it. They hoped we would fall for this hook line and sinker and we have.
It astonishes me what these guys will stoop to. Why are they so strongly driven to behave this way???
I’m really, really confused. How can any changes in the sun have only a small regional effect on earth?
Is this an attempt to prove that the MWP and LIA were also regional and also caused by solar variations?
Leif Svalgaard (00:36:26) :
cite, please. I bet it is based on Hoyt and Schatten’s obsolete TSI.
Thanks for that chart,. That quote was pasted straight out of the Wikipedia article which says citation needed 🙂 The article reads fairly well for a Wikipedia article but I can’t comment on the accuracy.
My guess is that the weather is sensitive to changes in the sun but nothing correlates because, as Lindzen says, the climate is never at equilibrium. The overall temperature then becomes a running mean.
John Finn (01:05:53)
Finally there is the mistaken belief on this blog that AGWers don’t accept a solar-climate link. This is WRONG
Without solar variability they would have to admit they didn’t know what was responsible for previous changes. Be warned!
BBC – 14 April 2010
Low solar activity link to cold UK winters
“The UK and continental Europe could be gripped by more frequent cold winters in the future as a result of low solar activity, say researchers.
We are duly warned
Incidentally, the coldest period of the entire holocene was 1850-1870’s, so nothing from the last 40 years is above natural variability. Just a perfectly normal climate within the historical range
[off topic. how about tips and notes? oh and it’s on the front page of every news site ~ ctm]
O.T.
[yes it is ~ ctm]
Of course Real Climate knew it was the sun all along. Look at their homepage banner: a raging, boiling sun at solar maximum.
Ryan (03:05:08) :
“However, they tell us that this will only affect UK and Europe and only during the winter. Say what? How can a reduction in solar energy only affect Europe and the UK???? Surely that is just an outright LIE!”
Exactly the same thought here. Have they studied other similar regions of the earth for this effect. I bet in a few years time he will expand this effect to other parts of the globe and win a Nobel Prize (along with Gore). One blaming the the sun for colder winters and one blaming CO2 for warmer winters and hotter summers.
oldgifford (00:56:38)
re North Magnetic Pole speeding and temperatures raising:
here they show that NMP wandered since 1600 to Canada, then it made an about-face approx. at 1850 and since then it heads to Siberia.
Any thoughts about the temp and NMP movements in these older times?
http://www.tgo.uit.no/articl/roadto.html#map
And now this!
Iceland volcano erupts…
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/world/iceland-volcano-brings-floods-travel-chaos-to-europe/story-e6frf7lf-1225854273572