Guest post by David Archibald
Professor Jan-Erik Solheim of the University of Oslo recently contributed an article to the Norwegian magazine Astronomi with the title: “The Sun predicts a colder (next) decennium”. Oddbjorn Engvold, a Norwegian solar physicist, has summarised the article in English:
In the first section he refers to the earlier work by Eigil Friis-Christensen and Knud Lassen who showed a connection between the length of a solar cycle and temperature in the northern hemisphere.
The next section deals with “sunspot periods and temperatures in Norway”. He selected series of temperatures for a total of 10 locations in Norway. In these series of temperature he detected no, or hardly any, correlation between length of the sunspot cycle and temperatures averaged over the cycles. On the other hand, he found a strong dependence between the length of the sunspot cycles and the mean temperatures in the following period.
The diagrams shown on the following pages should be self explaining. The ledger at the bottom of the pages containing a map of Norway and the 10 diagrams says:
The red dots shows the measured temperatures at ten place in Norway (averaged for the sunspot periods; y-axis) and the length of the preceding sunspot periods (x-axis). The dark ellipses represent the predicted mean temperatures for the coming 11 years, while the mean measured temperatures for cycle 23 (1996-2008) are indicated with the circles.
If one trusts these findings, Solheim mentions that since the period length of previous cycle (no 23) is at least 3 years longer than for cycle no 22, the temperature is expected to decrease by 0.6 – 1.8 degrees over the following 10-12 years, relative to the mean values for period no 23.
Jan-Erik Solheim asks readers of this magazine to search for long temperature series in their home places and check whether or not the published correlation can be confirmed.
The table in the lower right on third page gives the starting years and lengths of the solar cycles from no 5 to no 24.
The final subsection discusses briefly possible explanations for the puzzling correlation that he presents here. I shall rather leave it to Jan-Erik himself discuss his ideas directly with you and others once he returns from his travel around 25 July.
It is my personal view that Jan-Erik’s results are astonishing and could potentially represent a breakthrough in our understanding of the Sun’s influence on climate.
The results that Professor Solheim got for the west coast of Norway are very similar to what Butler and Johnson found for Armagh in Northern Ireland in their 1996 paper.
I derive a steeper correlation for a number of sites in the north-eastern US, such as Hanover, New Hampshire.
Of course Norway has been at the forefront of wasting money on the global warming scare. It has been storing CO2 at the Sleipner gas field off the Norwegian coast since 1996, and more recently built another facility to waste money at Mongstad in 2008. Now comes a big whacking from the Sun.
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Note: There is no English version of the article, but you can try your luck reading it here with Google Translate. Messy, but best I can do.
Also for those that wished to order Archibald’s latest book covering many of these elements, but could not, there is good news.
He now has PayPal ordering available on his website here Direct by mail/personal check orders are also accepted via this order form – Anthony
@Geoff Sharp says:
July 14, 2010 at 7:57 am
“Once again grand statements without substance.”
Speak for yourself, the quality of my temperature forecasts speaks for itself, no else one even gets close.
Norway has roughly the same length as the US east coast and the N-S distance is roughly the same as that between DC and Daytona but its lowest point is much nearer the Arctic Circle than say Florida. I would think all of the temperatures in Norway are mutually correlated so I don’t find it remarkable that they all show the same correlation to sunspot level.
Henry@Gail
http://jrscience.wcp.muohio.edu/studentresearch/climate_projects_04/glacial_cycles/web/index.html”>The Milankovitch Cycles
does not work for me?
Anyway, I doubt that we need to be alarmed about global cooling. I am thinking that if people see too much snow heaping up around them, they will do something about it to try and melt it down. The Creator meticulously made earth to be at the exact right temperature for life to exist and develop and then He gave us the ability and means to stop earth from falling back into an ice age again…..
@ur momisugly Robert of Ottawa
“Hey, as a Norwegian, it would have been fun for him to reference King Cnut’s practical experiment in climate change.”
It would have been fun but for two things. First of all, Cnut was a Dane, not a Norwegian. Second, the tides are caused by the gravitational attraction of the moon and, to a lesser extent, the sun and have no connection with climate change (apart from the fact that if mean sea levels rise the maximum heights reached at high tides will also rise).
rbateman says:
July 14, 2010 at 3:26 am
Steinar Midtskogen says:
July 13, 2010 at 11:55 pm
This article was discussed in the Armagh discussion recently. The trouble is that the plots don’t say much more than that there was a shift in solar cycle lengths about 1/3 into the rising temperature trend. So even if there is a real correlation, it can’t be convincingly shown until we have seen the temperature follow some more cycle length shifts.
What David is showing us is a fully testable theory plus an adjustment double-check.
And the beauty of it is we don’t have to wait in order to test the theory, so here goes. According to David Archibald, Professor Solheim
Right then, Solar Cycle 19 was 10.5 years long and solar cycle 20 was 11.7 years long – so that’s 1.2 years longer. Therefore, the temperatures in the decade or so following 1976 should have been 0.24 – 0.72 degrees lower than the mean temperatures for 1964 -1976. Anyone know if this is what happened? Perhaps we should leave that one – let’s try a bit earlier in the century.
SC 15 was 10 years long (1913-1923) and SC 16 was 10.1 years long (1923-33). Theoretically then, 1933-1943 should have been slightly cooler than 1923-1933. Let’s be generous and say the trend should have been zero. Again this seems a bit at odds with reality. There are numerous (more often than not) examples where David’s simple rule breaks down. This is probably the reason Friis-Christensen and Lassen used their bizarre 1-2-2-2-1 filtering technique.
If you plot solar cycle length and temperature over time (e.g. 1850 to present) there is clearly no relationship.
In the 19th century there were a cluster of relatively long cycles (11+ years) while in the 20th century there was a cluster of relatively short cycles (~10 years). The 20th century was warmer than the 19th cenury so quite naturally we get an apparent correlation. However, this seems to be little more than a coincidence.
The quality of Ulric Lyons temperature forecasts are quite good from what I’ve seen.
A rather amusing combination of solar cycle 24 predictions.
http://www.physorg.com/news11434.html
“The next sunspot cycle will be 30-50% stronger than the last one and begin as much as a year late…………the newly developed model simulated the strength of the past eight solar cycles with more than 98% accuracy.”
http://www.physorg.com/news187855329.html
The recent solar minimum extended fifteen months longer than predicted, and a new study may explain why, and improve the predictions for future solar cycles.