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.”]
>>Michael (01:14:25) :
>>Iceland just farted on England. I’m sorry, I couldn’t help
>>myself. ROTFLMAO. Check the news.
Thats was Iceland’s way of getting its own back We closed their banks down and demanded all our money back (how, why?), so Iceland closed down our entire airspace to commercial aviation.
Quid pro quo, I presume.
.
I forgot, Aaargh. Me Mateys.
Dont tell shiela boffins, you know what they are like. Jealous like.
Mateys.
Wont be free worken girls, girls in gee strings aargh and looking for man snorkelling.
Aargh.
rbateman (23:39:49) :
Lots and lots of lag…….
One time I bought a birthday present for a friend. Some days later I gave it to him on his birthday. He was happy when he got it. He wasn’t happy on the day I bought it though. So there is no connection between me buying the present and my friend being happy because they didn’t happen at the same time.
That’s the science! Look at the data! 😉
But who done Zen and Butterfly clapping.
stevengoddard (06:01:28) :
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2006/21dec_cycle24/
Dec. 21, 2006: Evidence is mounting: the next solar cycle is going to be a big one.
Solar cycle 24, due to peak in 2010 or 2011 “looks like its going to be one of the most intense cycles since record-keeping began almost 400 years ago,”
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
This isn’t your father’s NASA.
What I found annoying in Lockwood’s appraisal of his study results was his unsupported assertion (assuming the report faithfully reflects his appraisal):
“Professor Lockwood was keen to stress that “blocking” only affected a limited geographical region, and would not have a widespread impact on the global climate system.
To illustrate the point, he said that while the CET record showed that this winter was the UK’s 14th coldest in 160 years, global figures listed it as the fifth warmest.
He said that one of his colleagues at the University of Reading referred to Europe as “blocking central”.”
I attribute his ‘limited regional affect’ to his limited regional look at the “blocking” affect, because there were numerous weather reports here in the US of this same “blocking” affect being the cause of a lot of the severely cold weather in the midwest and across the south, not to mention several of the east coast winter storms.
The ash cloud from the Iceland volcano is visible on Modis. The ash cloud is more significant than the description of the size of the eruption in the media.
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/realtime/single.php?2010105/crefl1_143.A2010105113500-2010105114000.4km.jpg
or
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/realtime/single.php?T101051135
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/realtime/2010105/crefl1_143.A2010105113500-2010105114000.2km.jpg
“We stress that this is a regional and seasonal effect”
Yeah, changes in solar output are only going to effect England. What is this guy smoking?
Bipolarity is between post-modern agnosticism vs. reality gnosticism, among the prophets of uncertainty and lie and men of certitude and truth, in between evil and good, darkness and ligh. The battle of the end of times.
Solar Minimum, plates movements, big earthquakes, volcanic eruptions.
All this bother over AGW when the real deal is tectonic activity picking up intensity.
Iceland’s volcanic rant is dancing a jig over the friendly EU skies well over 1,000 mi. distant. Air travel grounded.
It was a cold winter only in places where it was winter, like Siberia, Europe and the US.
Oddly enough, it was not a cold winter in the Southern Hemisphere, where it was summer.
Does anyone else have a problem with the data bases used in the article to arrive at these results?: Tree rings mixed with HadCRUT, mixed with sunspots counts, mixed with modern solar flux data, mixed with detrending adjustments, but no UHI adjustments, all to produce a conclusion of a small effect that is supposedly limited to Europe…..and robustly asserted as usual.
And what about the statement “….cosmogenic isotopes suggest an 8% chance of return to a Maunder minimum within the next 50 years…” Really?, not 7% or 9%? Or a more reasonable range of say 2 to 12%? Fancy words to cover fuzzy data forced into creative analysis producing pseudocertainty, robustly asserted.
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If the cooling will only affect the UK and Europe, better open up those old coal pits again ‘cuz I don’t think all those windmills and solar panels going to do much good.
Fitzy, I have to say that’s probably the best comment I’ve read on the global warming stupidity in the past year.
Tilo Reber (08:03:20) :
with all due respect, changes in solar output do affect the entire planet, but will be manifested in different ways via atmospheric and oceanic circulation. The amount of solar energy reaching the Earth’s surface is not equal everywhere, more is received at the tropics than at the poles, so our weather is driven by the need to redistribute this energy. I’m not an atmospheric scientist so I don’t understand all the blocking mechanisms in the atmosphere, I know some basic things like how winter in the Northern Hemisphere is dominated by high pressure over Siberia (the Siberian High), high pressure over the Beaufort Sea, low pressure on the Atlantic and Pacific sides (including Alaska and Canada). Depending on the strength and and locations of these pressure cells, ridges and troughs will form that impact the jet stream.
Surely there is going to be a link to how much input the earth receives from the sun and atmospheric circulation patterns. It would be important for science to understand exactly what happens when there is less or more solar input than normal. A study like this gives 1 view, and then what typically happens is more scientists will look into the problem, either finding a similar conclusion or a different mechanism responsible for the observed cooler UK winter temperatures. And so goes the process of scientific discovery, whether it is in climate science, space science, medicine, etc.
@Ryan Spear
“It astonishes me what these guys will stoop to. Why are they so strongly driven to behave this way???”
Follow the money.
For many centuries my ancestors passed on the myth that it was cooler in the shade. I find it to be cooler but at the same time a tradition that is hard to break. If less light comes past the clouds of the volcanic ash, Europe could be cooler. That will mess up the anamolay records. The warmistas need heat for validation.
The obvious is sinking in. The sun’s heating capacity of the earth (atmosphere) consists of two important components: The light (infra-red) component and the magnetic component, responsible for the heating of water. Water vapor is in “classical terms” a very potent greenhouse gas; its formation and distribution aropund the globe is heavily influencing the distribution of weather systems; therefore influencing the climate. The average temperature of the earth from the point of view has not changed much at all.
Steve Goddard:
I hear ya.
I think that climatologists fall into the “It’s Not the Sun Stupid” category, on the whole, because of their predilection for studying atmospheric events, and the competition for funding among solar and atmospheric scientists and others is ever paramount.
There is a lot more money to be made in CO2 as the culprit. Although Leif, a most honorable scientist, has mostly been above the politics of the fray, I believe that he is still somewhat dependent on seeing the atmosphere as the predominant driver, when we all intuitively recognize that the sun is the boss of us! [Just my opinionated observation]
I point out two fallacies that may or may not be operative:
1) A fallacy about our perception of the suns variability. Surely in Europe, where taxes approach 70%, a 2 or 3% variation in various wavelengths from solar highs to lows does not seem like much. But, without the sun as the center of our solar system, what would earth’s temperature be? Ignoring tidal or radioactive decay for a moment, the answer is -270°C or thereabouts. Earth’s temperature, let’s take it at 300°C higher than that (30°) for ease of calculation. Work with me here, please. 0.1% of this amount is 0.3°C. A fluctuation of 2% is 6°C! This number accounts for between one and two standard deviations from what we GUESS are normal temp. boundaries over the past millenia.
2) Correlation vs. causality – We are an impatient species. We look for solar effects to show some statistical trend within a year or ten [see John Finn et.al. @ur momisugly (01:05:53)]. However, we know that there are many thermal sinks on land and deep oceans that resist changes that would be instantaneous otherwise. The sea gobbles up excess heat and spits it out at a later time, such as the PDO, farting excess heat out of the atmosphere when it needs to, as one example. The Coriolis effect distributes heat pole to pole. The poles seesaw. Etc.
We all have our axes to grind, and our livelihoods to ensure. Nothing wrong with that, as long as we keep the honor of science at the forefront of our behaviors. I appreciate the insight of the WUWT blogs very much, keep the back-and-forth going!
stevengoddard (08:15:19) :
Truth is stranger than fiction rides again.
They forecast Spring for Winter, Summer for Spring and Barbecue for Summer.
A hockey-sticked forecast.
Not happening.
There is, however, a whole lot of shakin’ going on.
So, it’s the sun…..except that it only has a regional effect….except that this last harsh winter also occurred across North America and several other regions…and the (Land Based) Global Mean Temp record is a construct of ALL regions stitched together to represent a global mean. Perfectly clear now.
Clarifying….Land Mass regional temps extrapolated across vast open oceans where no record exists.
All very interesting and a good discussion. I think we do need to recognize that Lockwood et al. are only reporting what they found and have not attempted to extrapolate it further then the data is believed to represent. Pielke Sr. has been advocating for years that regional things must be taken first regionally and that those things can influence the whole. This work and many of your comments strongly reinforce the idea that we don’t know way more then we think we do. Hershel’s hypothesis is not yet falsified and stands. Now we need to stop speculating and understand the processes behind it before we run off making predictions that will only embarrass the predictor in the future.
Taxing the Sun is more difficult than taxing innocent people that has been told that they are responsible and that they will have to pay, for the Sun’s action?
I can see how solar physicists got fooled into thinking the sun was not a player in the climate change debate. Plotting the HadCrut 350 years of DJF, the linear trend is +1.5C in that period. Plotting the trend with a polynomial fit (more likely for a recovery from LIA) gives 1.25C over 350 years. It can be seen that when the AGW climatideologists were examining this unimpressive temp rise they could see that they had their work cut out for them. This couldn’t be allowed to stand. Moreover, when someone drew to their attention a book or two from the middle ages on proper trimming of Scottish grape vines for maximum yield, they realized that the MWP had to be pushed down below today’s temps and the little Ice Age stretched forward to tilt the line back more. It turned out that given the variability of tree growth in a given grove due to microclimatic affects, one could select trees to bend the lines all they needed and when these pesky trees showed “divergence” after 1960, heck, they could replace this stretch with downtown thermometer records. Solar physicists were provided with this handcraft and saw that the sun had no effect. After the CRUemails, they have come back out of the woodwork to find that yes there is, indeed, a clear effect.