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.”]
Dr. Hathaway’s two observations may not be contradictory because he is referencing the solar conveyer at two different locations. The quote from the first NASA report which should have been included in this article is the following:
Quote:
“Normally, the conveyor belt moves about 1 meter per second—walking pace,” says Hathaway. “That’s how it has been since the late 19th century.” In recent years, however, the belt has decelerated to 0.75 m/s in the north and 0.35 m/s in the south. “We’ve never seen speeds so low.”
In 2006 Dr. Hathaway was observing a high level of asymmetry between the northern and southern hemispheres of the sun as measured by the speeds of the respective solar conveyers. So why is this important? The southern hemisphere of the sun continues in a quest state while the northern hemisphere is exhibiting increased activity relative to the south.
On Dr. Hathaway’s website there are several solar butterfly diagrams which I would like to call to your attention. First there is the classic long-term solar butterfly diagram based on the daily sunspot area which suggests diminished activity in the southerner hemisphere during this cycle; both the GIF and PDF files can be expanded for better viewing of the current cycle.
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/bfly.gif
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/BFLY.pdf
There is a solar butterfly diagram of recent activity but it is too small to be of any real value.
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/bfly_recent.gif
In addition to solar butterfly diagrams based on the daily sunspot area, Dr, Hathaway also maintains a solar butterfly diagram based on solar magnetic activity and it is here where things become interesting; unfortunately this diagram was last updated on January 4, 2010.
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/magbfly.jpg
I would very much like to see an update of this diagram over the last three months as it suggests a magnetic asymmetry in the sun which was not observed in Solar Cycles 22 and 23. The sun may not be returning to “normal” as much as some people would like it to.
I would also be interested in any hemisphere asymmetry in the recent L&P observations. Unfortunately the publically available data doesn’t track by sunspot number although a number can be inferred from some observation dates.
Michael Ronayne
Nutley, NJ
IF CORRECT, even on a European scale only for the next 100 years, this is very interesting for the EU policy on climate change.
The EU bureaucrats has been to the forefront in pushing the climate change agenda on behalf of its citizens with major cross subsidies of green technologies and higher taxes on carbon fuels.
But if the study is shown to be correct, Why should Europeans try to reduce production of CO2 when doing so will have no or minimal impact on their climate.
Furthermore given that Greenland would remain deeply frozen as well for the next 100 years due to this regional change, the risk of rising sea levels for developing or other countries would be low to non-existent.
Given that the Peak oil doomsayers project that fossil fuels will be depleted by the end of the 21st century, then the production of CO2 from these depleting fuels could if anything have a slightly mitigating impact on the solar cooling.
Plenty of time then to develop renewable energy sources that do not involve taxes and scaremongering.
Again though only if the deductions are correct (it could just have been an unusually cold winter).
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2006/21dec_cycle24/
Lockwood starting to appear to come on board. What next, Mann, Jones, Briffa or even Svalgaard?
We do live in interesting times.
Meanwhile the Sun remains blank, 6 days and counting.
The real question s not what is happening but how do you tax it. Taxing the sun seems to lack PC but who knows maybe that is next.
Lockwood said THAT??? I can’t believe a purported climate expert would say that maritime air is clean. Obviously the guy has never watched a car disappear from rust or battle the constant filmy windows that those who live next to the ocean have to deal with.
Catlin update: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1265734/Pictured-Arctic-Survey-team-escape-disaster-ice-cracks-tent.html
I have noticed that much was written since early 2009 about the impending SC 24 but have seen nothing of substance since. Is it that, despite all we learned about previous cycles over the past 40 years using the latest technological gizmos, we cannot predict or explain accurately what we are seeing now because it is part of a longer cycle and our current base line is too small? I’m confused (more so than I normally am).
Steven Goddard–the “prognosticators” sure got that one wrong! Note that your reference predicing a strong Cycle 24 is circa 2006, way before they had a clue what this next cycle was/is going to do.
I’m now reading where, at the rate the current cycle is going, the intensity might be only half what they predicted four years ago. They can’t predict solar cycles any better than they can predict weather a month out, or climate 100 years out.
pgosselin (04:11:01) :
And now this!
Iceland volcano erupts…
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/world/iceland-volcano-brings-floods-travel-chaos-to-europe/story-e6frf7lf-1225854273572
Today’s MODIS shows the plume heading over to Norway:
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/realtime/single.php?T101051135
Is this Gaiaesque performance irrlevalent?
…-
“Ash from Icelandic volcano grounds flights across northern Europe”
“The wind is blowing the ash to the east,” Hjordis Gudmundsdottir of the Icelandic Airport Authority told AFP, adding: “It’s amazing really.”
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=2909631
Stephen, you say the atmosphere warms and expands under solar mediated conditions and that this causes a change in upward air flow. I question the mathematical strength of this expansion to do this. Just estimating, I fail to see how a very tiny solar mediated expansion of the stratosphere can influence the troposphere with such a magnitude of change in density that columns of air originating at the surface of the Earth reach higher. That is not to say that columns of air cannot reach higher. My hunch is that this happens within the troposphere-Earth coupling and is mediated by Earth bound pressure gradients and storm cells, which may be tied to Earth bound oscillations in such pressure gradients. We are a leaky valved planet without the additional help from some variation in solar mechanisms. And not to overuse a hated phrase, but the idea of a “tipping point” is probably a normal part of our atmosphere’s cyclic behavior. The tipping points bring us back to cold which allows us to heat up again, like the bucket garden fountain that fills the bucket up to its tipping point, only to have it tip over and start again.
Notice to all Climate Scientist:
The suns waxing and waning will only be allowed to occur over Europe. We have only permitted this to assure UK children will know what snow is. The sun will radiate at stable rate over the rest of the globe where CO2 will cause global warming.
Volcanic eruptions will only be allowed to occur where they do not exceed our estimated amount. Supervolcanic eruptions are hereby banned for the next 1000 years.
References to Arctic sea ice are banned until they reflect the Global Warming Narrative. Ice sheets are strictly prohibited from entering New York City limits.
The only areas that will be allowed to not participate in Global Warming are where there are rural unadjusted temperature data sets. However, Nasa and CRU are making sure that these obviously unimportant data sets are deleted so Global Warming will be available to everyone.
sarc/off
Did anyone see the BBC program about the Wonders of the Solar system where Brian Cox showed the Flow of Rivers is directly related to the Sun?
John V. Wright (01:18:14) :
I can’t agree with you. Harabin, Black et al are, IMHO, as far from honest as Zebra, and that’s at the end of the alphabet. The BBC gave up impartiel reporting a very long time ago. It has been taken over by liberals more liberal than the LibDems.
jinki (06:02:37) :
Which sun are you looking at?
http://spaceweather.com/index.php
The list of scientists from all over the world predicting cooler weather for the world for the next several decades continues to grow .The current El Nino will likely go neutral by May/June of this year . North and South Pacific are cooling and the PDO will likey resume its cool phase . The Arctic SST is cooling. Just some signs that confirm what all these scientists have been saying.
Various global cooling forecasts for the next 1-3 decades
William M Gray, Professor Emeritus, Dept of Atmospheric sciences, Colorado State University
“A weak global cooling began from the mid-1940’s and lasted until mid-1970’s. I predict this is what we will see in the next few decades”
http://tropical.atmos.colostate.edu/Includes/Documents/Publications/gray2009.pdf
Don Easterbrook, Professor Emeritus, Dept of Geology, Western Washington University.
“Setting up of the PDO cold phase assures global cooling for next approx. 30 years.
Global warming is over. Expect 30 years of global cooling, perhaps severe [2-5
Degrees F]”
He predicts several cooling scenarios
The first is similar to 1945-1977 trends, the second is similar to 1880-1915 trends and the third is similar to 1790-1820 trends.
http://www.heartland.org/bin/media/newyork09/PowerPoint/Don_Easterbrook.ppt#630,38,Projected global temp to 2100
and
http://www.heartland.org/bin/media/newyork09/PowerPoint/Don_Easterbrook.ppt#608,49,Implications
Syun Akasofu, Professor of Geophysics, Emeritus , University of Alaska, also founding director of ARC
He predicts the current pattern of temperature increase of 0.5C /100 years resulting from natural causes will continue with alternating cooling as well as warming phases. He shows cooling for the next cycle until about 2030/ 2040.
http://www.heartland.org/bin/media/newyork09/PowerPoint/Syun_Akasofu.ppt#524,30,Slide%2030
Mojib Latif, Professor, Kiel University, Germany
He makes a prediction for one decade namely the next decade [2009-2019] and he basically shows the global average temperatures to decline to a range of about 14.18 C to 14.28 C from 14.39 C in 2008 [ I don’t have final figures for 2009]. I eyeballed the numbers from his graphs
He also said that you may well enter a decade or two of cooling relative to the present temperature level, however he did not indicate when any two continous decades of cooling would happen or whether the second decade after the next decade was cooling.
http://www.wcc3.org/sessions.php?session_list=PS-3
Noel Keenlyside, Dr., from the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University.
Quote from BBC article
The Earth’s temperature may stay roughly the same for a decade, as natural climate cycles enter a cooling phase, scientists have predicted.
A new computer model developed by German researchers, reported in the journal Nature, suggests the cooling will counter greenhouse warming.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7376301.stm
Anastasios, Tsonis, Professor and Head of Atmospheric Sciences Group University of Wisconsin, US
“We have such a change now and can therefore expect 20 -30 years of cooler temperatures”
This is nothing like anything we’ve seen since 1950,” Kyle Swanson of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee said. “Cooling events since then had firm causes, like eruptions or large-magnitude La Ninas. This current cooling doesn’t have one.”
Swanson thinks the trend could continue for up to 30 years. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29469287/from/ET/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1242011/DAVID-ROSE-The-mini-ice-age-starts-here.html
Henrik Svensmark , Professor DTU, Copenhagen
Indeed, global warming stopped and a cooling is beginning. No climate model has predicted a cooling of the Earth, on the contrary. This means that projections of future climate is unpredictable, writes Henrik Svensmark.
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fjp.dk%2Fopinion%2Fkronik%2Farticle1809681.ece&sl=da&tl=en&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
Jarl R. AHLBECK, D.Sc., AboAkademi University, Finland
Therefore, prolonged low solar activity periods in the future may cause the domination of a strongly negative AO and extremely cold winters in North America, Europe and Russia.
http://www.factsandarts.com/articles/future-low-solar-activity-periods-may-cause-extremely-cold-winters-in-north-america-europe-and-russia/
Alexander Frolov, Dr Head of Russia’s state Meteorological Service Rosgidromet
‘From the scientific point of view, in terms of large scale climate cycles, we are in a period of cooling.
‘The last three years of low temperatures in Siberia, the Arctic and number of Russia mountainous regions prove that, as does the recovery of ice in the Arctic Ocean and the absence of warming signs in Siberia.’
Mr. Tishkov, deputy head of the Geography Institute at Russian Academy of Science, said: ‘What we have been watching recently is comparatively fast changes of climate to warming, but within the framework of an overall long-term period of cooling. This is a proven scientific fact.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1260132/Russian-weatherman-strikes-blow-climate-change-lobby-announcing-winter-Siberia-coldest-record.html#ixzz0jEmocuXH
Mike Lockwood, Professor of Space Enviornmental Physics , University of Reading, UK
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.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8615789.stm
jinki (06:02:37) :
Lockwood starting to appear to come on board. What next, Mann, Jones, Briffa or even Svalgaard?
We do live in interesting times.
Meanwhile the Sun remains blank, 6 days and counting.
Mann and Gavin Schmidt were on board nearly a decade ago as I pointed out earlier. See this paper
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.
The Abstract reads
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.
Wake up people. You’re being set up for a mighty fall. If it does get a bit colder across Europe – well that’s what was expected; If not – then CO2 forcing is overcoming natural cycles. Win-Win for the AGWers.
The Sun is the sole source of energy into our Earth-atmosphere system. It is what drives the Earths atmospheric and oceanic circulation whose main role is to transport the excess heat that arrives at the equator towards the poles. Every climate scientist knows this basic truth. And that there needs be a balance between what comes in (from the sun) and what goes out (infrared radiation from the Earth and atmosphere back out to space) or else we would heat up or cool down.
The planet and our weather is very sensitive to small variations in solar input and where this input is received, otherwise we wouldn’t have gone from glacial to interglacial periods. What this study is saying (that many seem to be missing in their understanding) is that the solar activity during the last solar minimum was anomalously low (below normal). This lower than normal solar input is received by the entire planet, which will affect the transport of that incoming heat within the atmosphere. This study is focusing on how this lower than normal solar input affected atmospheric circulation what directly affect the weather in the UK during winter. That’s all the study is looking at.
>>> Stephen
>>>” more research is needed” … oh dear……….
Erm. More funding is needed….
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From their paper…
The results presented in section 4 allow rejection of the null hypothesis, and hence colder UK winters (relative to the longer-term trend) can therefore be associated with lower open solar flux (and hence with lower solar irradiance and higher cosmic ray flux). A number of mechanisms are possible. For example, enhanced cooling through an increase in maritime clouds may have resulted from the cosmic ray flux increase [25]. Alternatively, tropospheric jet streams have been shown to be sensitive to the solar forcing of stratospheric temperatures [26]. This could occur through disturbances to the stratospheric polar vortex [27] which can propagate downwards to affect the tropospheric jets, or through the effects of tropical stratospheric temperature changes on the refraction of tropospheric eddies [28]. Interestingly, early instrumental records from the end of the 17th century indicate an increased frequency of easterly winds influencing the UK temperatures [29]. This has also been deduced from indirect proxies [30, 31], including the spatial patterns of changes in recorded harvest dates [32]. This suggests a link with the incidence of long-lived winter blocking events in the eastern Atlantic at low solar activity [33, 34]. These extensive and quasi-stationary anticyclones are characterized by a reversed meridional gradient of geopotential height and easterly winds [7, 33, 35]. Blocking episodes can persist for several weeks, leading to extended cold periods in winter as the mild maritime westerly winds are replaced by continental north-easterlies and the land surface cools under cloudless skies. In particular, long-lived Atlantic blocking events at more eastward locations have been found to be more prevalent at sunspot minimum than at higher solar activity, an asymmetry that is enhanced by the phase of the quasi-biennial oscillation, and this leads to colder winters in Europe [7]. This evidence suggests that changes in the occurrence of blocking could be acting to amplify the solar-induced perturbations to the tropospheric jet stream [26]. Blocking events have been shown to modulate the stratosphere via upward propagating planetary wave disturbances, but the magnitude, extent and lag of the correlations over Europe strongly suggest that the perturbation to the stratospheric wind pattern can, in turn, influence the blocking [35]. This feedback may be the mechanism by which solar-induced changes to the stratosphere influence European blocking events. Other evidence supports this idea. For example, changed position and frequency of blocking events may be seen as a manifestation of modes of low-frequency circulation variability which have been found to respond to solar activity [36] giving increased/decreased frequencies of easterly/westerly circulation patterns over Europe under conditions of low solar activity [37]. Winter CET values are known to be strongly modulated by the NAO [8] and modelling has shown that stratospheric trends over recent decades, along with downward links to surface, are indeed strong enough to explain much of the prominent trend in the NAO and hence regional winter climate in Europe between the 1960s and the 1990s [9]. It has been reported that geomagnetic activity rather than solar activity has a stronger statistical relationship to the NAO [38] which, given that the former is highly correlated with FS (indeed FS used here is derived from geomagnetic activity data) is consistent with the effect of FS on Central England Temperatures revealed here. Our subsequent studies (not reported here) on solar modulation of various blocking indices have confirmed previous studies [7], and we stress that this phenomenon is largely restricted to Europe and not global in extent [41].
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On a more serious note, I m still looking for a link between solar activity and the path of the jetstreams.
This cold (N. Hem) winter was caused more by the jetstreams running more south than usual, not be a general cooling of the atmosphere. Magnetic flux will cause changes in the Earth’s magnetosphere, but can it also change the path of jetstreams?
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Fitzy (22:05:08) :
WAS/IS funny.
How the hell did Butterlies get in this discussion, we are talking about Mermaids with slippery tails.
Everyone knows the sun is hot, that is not rocket science, but the trick is getting to Cancun and a Spring Break.
I sailed to Copenhagen and had an awesome holiday but some clown told me a short cut north of Canada. On the way home .
Anyway Captain Jack is going to Cancun, even if he has to sail the Horn and Good hope.
Some one has to look for Merminks with fishy tails.
STEPHEN PARKER (22:21:04) :
” more research is needed” oh dear……….
If they were actually studying something that had a use for making life better I wouldn’t mind sending them a bit of money. But global warming study isn’t doing much but giving the promise of raising the cost of everything. So I’m sending a bit of my money (through taxes) to find reasons to tax me more and raise the price of everything. (scratches head)