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.”]
#Mike Lockwood : 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.
When will the honourable Mr. Lockwood discover that he is living on an island, at the edge of a big ocean basin and the North Sea, that are used to store a lot of incoming sun ray and deliver it at another time, but only according the rate of solar activities admitted, either high or low. My suggestion to Dr. Lockwood is to define “Climate as the continuation of the oceans “ , http://www.whatisclimate.com/ and he would not question that sun activities and air temperatures are closely related.
bubbagyro (10:30:41) :
but “apart from the obvious solar cycle effect” says that cosmic ray effects are apparent
What I meant was that at each solar minimum, the cosmic ray flux that we have observed since the early 1950s have returned to the same same [averaged over many stations – that can show small individual differences], so there has been no trend to explain any temperature trends.
E.g. http://www.leif.org/research/CosmicRayFlux.png
or Figures 7 and 8 in http://www.leif.org/research/Historical%20Solar%20Cycle%20Context.pdf
wws (04:41:08)
I am amazed by the continued claim that the effects of the Maunder Minimum were “european only”. This has always been a bit of handwaving to try and help explain away the MWP – if they admitted that the Maunder effects were global, they would have to admit that the sun affects global temperatures. No, no, can’t do that.
From http://www.co2science.org
Medieval Warm Period Project
Was there a Medieval Warm Period? YES, according to data published by 819 individual scientists from 487 separate research institutions in 43 different countries … and counting! This issue’s Medieval Warm Period Record of the Week comes from Smreczynski Straw Lake, Tatra Mountains, Southern Poland. To access the entire Medieval Warm Period Project’s database,
ArndB 10:31:47
I want to thank you for your witty insight of two decades ago. That one phrase opened a lot of my eyes.
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I suspect maybe, Leif, a correlative trend will never be found, because so many different processes are responding to the many orders of energy transfer from the sun. And yet, it integrates.
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Gary Pearse (09:42:15) :
This is a paragraph of an arcticle I wrote for a newspaper in 2007 that rejected it:
“…The first time the Thames froze in recorded history was in 1607 and the last in 1814.
Perhaps it was rejected because it’s wrong. You may be confusing the first recorded Frost Fair with the first recorded freezing of the Thames. The Thames has been frozen on several occasions throughout the last 2000 years – even during the MWP.
Antonio San (09:56:09) :
John Finn (01:05:53) :
“I think people might be reading more into this than they should. Lockwood is not suggesting that solar activity is going to increase earth’s temperature – just that it may trigger the (well-known) cycles which affect ‘regional’ climate. Note that although it was a cold winter in *some* parts of the NH, the earth, as a whole, was particularly warm.”
Excellent! So the sun activity as described by Lockwood is really so specific that it distinguishes where to affect the -well known to boot!- regional climate! And Lockwood & Johnny Finn can write this with a straight face!
What is it you find hard to understand? Lockwood belives that changes in solar activity affect circulation patterns which will result in a ‘blocking’ of the warm atlantic air which ensures winters in the UK and Europe are milder than they would otherwise be.
Do ask questions if you’re not sure about anything.
James F. Evans (10:27:39) :
Lockwood is making a “yes, but” argument.
Yes, the Sun impacts climate, but only in Europe.
He is not saying that at all. He is saying that low solar activity will trigger a shift in atmospheric circulation patterns which may cause cooling over western europe. The same shift may cause warming elsewhere. A bit like what we’ve experienced during the recent winter.
David Jones (10:48:32) :
wws (04:41:08)
I am amazed by the continued claim that the effects of the Maunder Minimum were “european only”. This has always been a bit of handwaving to try and help explain away the MWP – if they admitted that the Maunder effects were global, they would have to admit that the sun affects global temperatures. No, no, can’t do that.
“They” have already admitted that – several years ago. I don’t suppose it’ll hurt to post the link again:
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2001/2001_Shindell_etal_1.pdf
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.
The problem is that there has been very little change in solar activity over the past ~50 years, so we need something else to explain the late 20th century warming.
John Finn (11:50:13) :
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.
That old paper used the invalid Hoyt&Schatten TSI reconstruction and should not be referenced any more.
Are Livingstone and Penns sunspots still on course to “disappear” in the next decade
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2009/03sep_sunspots/
Can’t find anything new since this from nasa
John Finn (11:50:13) :
The problem is that there has been very little change in solar activity over the past ~50 years, so we need something else to explain the late 20th century warming.
The authors (Lockwood et al ) raise interesting problems in the last paragraph.
Lastly, one can invert the title of this paper and ask `Does the occurrence of lower/higher solar activity make a cold/warm winter in Europe more likely (than the climatological mean)?’ Our results strongly suggest that it does, which has implications for seasonal predictions
Implications are then are how do we distinguish between the ‘agw” forcing signal and what seems to be perturbation to dissipative process’s by dynamical effects,eg Egrova et al 2004
Atmospheric effects of the solar irradiance variations
during 11-year solar cycle are investigated using a chemistryclimate
model. The model is enhanced by a more detailed
parameterization of the oxygen and ozone UV heating rates.
The simulated ozone response to the imposed solar forcing
shows a positive correlation in the tropical stratosphere and a
negative correlation in the tropical mesosphere, in agreement
with theoretical expectation. The model suggests an
acceleration of the polar night jets in both hemispheres and
a dipole structure in the temperature changes at high latitudes.
The model results also show an alteration of the tropospheric
circulation air resulting in a statistically significant warming
of 1 K in the annual mean surface air temperature over North
America and Siberia. This supports the idea of a solar-climate
connection
Rozanov et al. (2005) in a CCM examined the effect of continuous, low intensity, electron precipitation on the atmosphere. They predicted that the EPP{NOx increases would result in up to 30 % annual ozone decreases in the polar stratosphere. This would lead to cooling of the polar middle stratosphere by up to 2 K, with detectable changes in the surface air temperature (SAT).
Questions arise.
Finn:
Little changes? I thought we were on the verge of putting soot on the north pole to stop the imminent ice age?
Average temp. changes are small? By models? Reconstructions?
Are you being sarcastic? Is 50 years enough to establish any earth-solar system correlations? This is the crux of man’s problem with climate, IMO. He is the center of all things but cannot see the big picture of geologic time scales.
The measurers of all things climate have had their pinkies on the weighing balances. One recent development I have looked into is the measurement of the amount of CO2 in millennia past. Ice core bubbles were examined and CO2 measured. The samples were lower than some imagined – until a group at Scripps found that CO2 permeated solid ice slowly, but inexorably.
I knew this had to be true from basic physical chemistry, that all gases diffuse through solids, but the 2008 Scripps work was the first to demonstrate that principle with CO2 and ice.
So the magnitude was off, is that it? But the trend was there, correct, and current CO2 levels are nearing unprecedented? Not at all. Fick’s first and second laws of diffusion state that permeation depends on initial concentration of the thing. Rate of diffusion, then, is the differential of concentration over time, dc/dt. What that means is that a higher concentration of CO2 in ice initially depletes faster than a lower concentration would, so that diffusion, given enough time, equilibrates until the final concentration of the outside is reached. So, given enough time, all Vostok ice samples will have the same concentration as the atmosphere outside, more accurately stated, approach the outside concentration as a limit, in a non-linear regression.
Now, this was all obvious to me, as a physical chemist. But not to the climatologists who were writing peer-reviewed paper after paper expounding on the ice-bubble data showing the past CO2 was the same as today. What were they paying attention to when they studied basic physics in high school and college?
John Finn (11:31:31) :
Gary Pearse (09:42:15) :
This is a paragraph of an arcticle I wrote for a newspaper in 2007 that rejected it:
“…The first time the Thames froze in recorded history was in 1607 and the last in 1814.
Perhaps it was rejected because it’s wrong. You may be confusing the first recorded Frost Fair with the first recorded freezing of the Thames. The Thames has been frozen on several occasions throughout the last 2000 years – even during the MWP”
I guess I trusted other’s work and would agree to stand corrected if you could direct me to information on the earlier freezing of the Thames. I don’t feel so bad knowing that so many high profile scientists appear to also have erred on even such a matter as the existence of the MWP. I do think your remark is unnecessarily unkind in saying that “perhaps it was rejected because it was wrong….” Since the CRU tapes, we see that not only did the leading climate scientists get it wrong, they even cooked the science.
[quote Leif Svalgaard (10:46:05) :
bubbagyro (10:30:41) :
What I meant was that at each solar minimum, the cosmic ray flux that we have observed since the early 1950s have returned to the same same [averaged over many stations – that can show small individual differences], so there has been no trend to explain any temperature trends.
E.g. http://www.leif.org/research/CosmicRayFlux.png
or Figures 7 and 8 in http://www.leif.org/research/Historical%20Solar%20Cycle%20Context.pdf
[/quote]
Dr. Svalgaard, you’re comparing local changes in cosmic rays to global changes in temperature.
I though it might be interesting to compare local changes in cosmic rays to local changes in clouds (as cosmic rays are said to directly affect clouds, not temperature).
The results do show a trend and the trends are in the same direction.
Southern Extra Tropics
http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a378/magicj/SoExt1.jpg?t=1271362270
South Pole
http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a378/magicj/SoPol1.jpg?t=1271362266
Northern Extra Tropics
http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a378/magicj/NorExt1.jpg?t=1271362278
North Pole
http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a378/magicj/NorPole1.jpg?t=1271362273
Now if you look closely at those graphs, you’ll notice that in the 2000s you’ll see cosmic rays going up without clouds going up. So I took a look at water vapor during the same time. It’s going down, apparently preventing clouds from increasing with cosmic rays. The sole exception to this is the North Pole.
South Extra Tropics w/ Water Vapor
http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a378/magicj/SoExt2.jpg?t=1271362268
South Pole w/ Water Vapor
http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a378/magicj/SoPol2.jpg?t=1271362265
Northern Extra Tropics w/ Water Vapor
http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a378/magicj/NorExt2.jpg?t=1271362276
North Pole w/ Water Vapor
http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a378/magicj/NorPol2.jpg?t=1271362274
Sorry if a commenter has already said this, i didn’t read them all…
The sun’s lack of activity causes cold winters in Europe but the rest of the globe stays unaffected, says Lockwood.
Let’s just say that this sounds unlikely to me.
CRS, Dr.P.H. (22:26:17) :
this sucker is nowhere near to being out of its minimum!! I think it’s broken but good!!
Well, a wee bit out 🙂
http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-SORCE-2008-now.png
———-
Hah!! I’m in the process of writing a science fiction novel called “Return to Stockholm,” about the travels of a young, handsome astrophysicist named Leif who travels the earth, providing guidance as the planet reels from a dimming sun and slips into a new ice age!
I’m having a tough time on the romance parts though….Pachuri is a tough act to follow!
Thanks, Leif!
Ok, i just repeated what others said and because it’s so good i also repeat this link:
http://www.thegwpf.org/the-observatory/817-link-between-low-sun-and-low-temperatures.html
which talks about the weakness of the conclusion.
magicjava (13:24:15)
I’m not qualified to assess the quality of your data but it is very convenient for me.
While the sun was more active and the ocean surfaces warm there were more clouds and more water vapour (faster hydrological cycle)
With the sun starting to get less active and the ocean surfaces cooling we see less clouds and less water vapour (slower hydrological cycle).
The consequent disjunction with cosmic rays seems to falsify the Svensmark proposal and of course there is also now a growing disjunction between temperatures and CO2 quantities. During the warming spell the correlation between cosmic rays and the rising temperatures appears to have been coincidental and easily reversed subsequently.
So my idea about the speed of the hydrological cycle varying to balance out disequilibria between oceanic and solar forcings appears to be holding whilst other ideas fall by the wayside.
Cassandra King (23:55:42) :
==============================
Well said!
Chris
Norfolk Virginia USA
Leif Svalgaard (12:23:02) :
John Finn (11:50:13) :
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.
That old paper used the invalid Hoyt&Schatten TSI reconstruction and should not be referenced any more.
I know, but my point was to show that Gavin Schmidt and Mike Mann etc were perfectly prepared to embrace the solar-climate link. The fact that the link may not exist is as damaging to the AGW case as it is to the sceptics case.
Gary Pearse (13:21:04) :
I guess I trusted other’s work and would agree to stand corrected if you could direct me to information on the earlier freezing of the Thames. I don’t feel so bad knowing that so many high profile scientists appear to also have erred on even such a matter as the existence of the MWP. I do think your remark is unnecessarily unkind in saying that “perhaps it was rejected because it was wrong….” Since the CRU tapes, we see that not only did the leading climate scientists get it wrong, they even cooked the science.
Sorry for the apparent tone of the remark.
If you google “thames frozen over” you should get a number of links. The Wikipaedia link actually mentions the first and last Frost Fairs in 1608 and 1814 respectively. However it also states that “One of the earliest accounts of the Thames freezing comes from AD 250”
The londonline link, i.e. http://www.londononline.co.uk/history/thames/3/ gives a history of thames freezing events which should be reasonably reliable.
Interesting article. Thanks for sharing.
John Finn your description of atmospheric patterns needs updating. Ask if you don’t know.
Stephen Parker.
You should always say “more research is needed” at the end of a paper. You are going to apply for a new research grant, more laboratory space, more post-grad research assistants (at least 4 of them must be Chinese or Korean) and air fares and hotel fees for you and the two prettiest research assistants at international conferences. You can’t do that if you give the implication that the problem is solved.