This story was previously covered on Sept 24 on WUWT, but because it appeared in Nature today, everybody is exploding my inbox like maybe I’ve never seen it before. Thanks. 😉 So in hopes of avoiding more flooding, here it is again.
Be sure to read the essay by David Archibald on the Hathaway SC24 prediction.
Also please please pay attention to the bolded (mine) caveat by professor Haigh below about the duration of the study. Link to the paper follows also, though it is missing figures for some reason.
From Imperial College, London via Eurekalert:
The sun’s activity has recently affected the Earth’s atmosphere and climate in unexpected ways, according to a new study published today in the journal Nature
The Sun’s activity has recently affected the Earth’s atmosphere and climate in unexpected ways, according to a new study published today in the journal Nature. The study, by researchers from Imperial College London and the University of Colorado, shows that a decline in the Sun’s activity does not always mean that the Earth becomes cooler.
It is well established that the Sun’s activity waxes and wanes over an 11-year cycle and that as its activity wanes, the overall amount of radiation reaching the Earth decreases. Today’s study looked at the Sun’s activity over the period 2004-2007, when it was in a declining part of its 11-year activity cycle.
Although the Sun’s activity declined over this period, the new research shows that it may have actually caused the Earth to become warmer. Contrary to expectations, the amount of energy reaching the Earth at visible wavelengths increased rather than decreased as the Sun’s activity declined, causing this warming effect.
Following this surprising finding, the researchers behind the study believe it is possible that the inverse is also true and that in periods when the Sun’s activity increases, it tends to cool, rather than warm, the Earth. This is based on what is already known about the relationship between the Sun’s activity and its total energy output.
Overall solar activity has been increasing over the past century, so the researchers believe it is possible that during this period, the Sun has been contributing a small cooling effect, rather than a small warming effect as had previously been thought.
Professor Joanna Haigh, the lead author of the study who is Head of the Department of Physics and member of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London, said:
“These results are challenging what we thought we knew about the Sun’s effect on our climate. However, they only show us a snapshot of the Sun’s activity and its behaviour over the three years of our study could be an anomaly.
“We cannot jump to any conclusions based on what we have found during this comparatively short period and we need to carry out further studies to explore the Sun’s activity, and the patterns that we have uncovered, on longer timescales. However, if further studies find the same pattern over a longer period of time, this could suggest that we may have overestimated the Sun’s role in warming the planet, rather than underestimating it.”
Professor Sir Brian Hoskins, the Director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London, added: “We know that the Earth’s climate is affected both by human activity and by natural forces and today’s study improves our understanding of how the Sun influences our climate. Studies like this are vital for helping us to create a clear picture of how our climate is changing and through this, to work out how we can best protect our planet.”
The researchers used satellite data and computer modelling to analyse how the spectrum of radiation and the amount of energy from the Sun has been changing since 2004. Instruments on the SORCE satellite have been measuring the Sun’s energy output at many different wavelengths. The researchers fed the data from SORCE into an existing computer model of the Earth’s atmosphere and compared their results with the results obtained using earlier, less comprehensive, data on the solar spectrum.
For further information please contact:
Laura Gallagher
Research Media Relations Manager
Imperial College London
email: l.gallagher@imperial.ac.uk
Tel: +44(0)20 7594 8432
Out of hours duty press officer: +44(0)7803 886 248
Notes to editors:
1. “An influence of solar spectral variations on radiative forcing of climate” Nature, 7 October 2010
Corresponding author: J.D. Haigh, Imperial College London.
For full list of authors please see paper.
Download a copy of the study using this link: https://fileexchange.imperial.ac.uk/files/ed69e40f87b/SIMpaper_5.pdf
2. The SORCE satellite (Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment) is a NASA-sponsored satellite that is measuring incoming x-ray, ultraviolet, visible, near-infrared, and total solar radiation. The measurements from SORCE’s instruments will help us address long-term climate change, natural climate variability, enhanced climate prediction, atmospheric ozone and UV-B radiation.
Stratosphere/mesosphere. The stratosphere is a layer in the atmosphere that begins about 6-8km above the Earth’s surface and extends to an altitude of 50km. The mesosphere lies above the stratosphere and extends to an altitude of 95-120km.
3. The University of Colorado was founded in 1876 in Boulder and is nested in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. CU-Boulder is a national public research institution with an enrollment of more than 30,000 students, both undergraduates and graduates. The student population comes from all 50 American states and from more than 100 foreign countries.
4. About Imperial College London
Consistently rated amongst the world’s best universities, Imperial College London is a science-based institution with a reputation for excellence in teaching and research that attracts 14,000 students and 6,000 staff of the highest international quality. Innovative research at the College explores the interface between science, medicine, engineering and business, delivering practical solutions that improve quality of life and the environment – underpinned by a dynamic enterprise culture.
Since its foundation in 1907, Imperial’s contributions to society have included the discovery of penicillin, the development of holography and the foundations of fibre optics. This commitment to the application of research for the benefit of all continues today, with current focuses including interdisciplinary collaborations to improve global health, tackle climate change, develop sustainable sources of energy and address security challenges.
In 2007, Imperial College London and Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust formed the UK’s first Academic Health Science Centre. This unique partnership aims to improve the quality of life of patients and populations by taking new discoveries and translating them into new therapies as quickly as possible.
Website: www.imperial.ac.uk
I’m sure many posed the question before but I missed the answer.
What would be the temp. of the earth if there was no Sun?
If we take the CO2 hypotheses at face value, would we need only a minimal input from the Sun to maintain our climate provided we keep producing more and more CO2?
I read many of the posts and linked PDFs etc. but I still come back to this basic question.
What if the Sun would reduce its output by half?
I’m not trying to be funny.
Thanks
What about how the previous solar maximum caused greater heat storage in the oceans which takes time to be released. As the sun cools of course there will be a delayed response by the oceans and thus the atmosphere. As the oceans cool (which they are doing) whilst the sun goes on with low activity – then we will see some serious cooling of the atmosphere (based on raw figures of properly calibrated records of course).
And right on cue over at the Guardian …
Sun’s role in warming the planet may be overestimated, study finds
Martin C says:
October 6, 2010 at 5:21 pm
I agree, not worth publishing, but “no problem”.
The idea that a “Climate Scientist” has anywhere near the credentials to muse about solar physics is astoundingly lame. The word hubris was used in another post today, perhaps it is more applicable here. By the way, where is that button?
Pamela Gray says:
October 6, 2010 at 5:37 pm
Except that the oceans are the storage battery, the trade winds are the wiring, but it is ultimately the Sun + tidal forces that is the alternator (strong nuclear/gravity). How it gets here and is distributed is another story.
“The researchers used satellite data and computer modelling to analyse how the spectrum of radiation and the amount of energy from the Sun has been changing since 2004.”
……………………………………………………………………………..
Well this explains everything… its done by computer modeling
AJB says:
October 6, 2010 at 8:28 pm
There they go again: Without sunlight generated by fusion in the Sun to ostensibly provide the energy that is held by combined elements formed in stellar cores which is released by ignition of biomass from ancient photosynthesis in turn energized by the Sun…
What was it that the Sun is overestimated to have caused???
Whoop, there it is: The Sun is nothing more than a stellar show off, always hogging the limelight.
If I remember correctly, the sun’s minimums show correlation with the Maunder and
Dalton minimums. Can anyone find that graph? That should be a refutation of this 3 year study.
In the early 1990s, the NSF published a pamphlet of about 100 pages relating the sun’s activity to temperatures as known then (and now as well, unless you are on the hockey team).
The paper showed that two ions whose abundance are affected by the amount of solar radiation — 10Be and 14C — were correlated with the higher temperatures of the Medieval Warm Period and the colder temperatures of the Little Ice Age. That is to say, the levels of each rose and fell with the temperatures. (I forget which was correlated and which was anti-correlated, but both moved in concert with temperatures.)
This study, which admittedly is only 3 years long, goes against that earlier study, which covered over 1,000 years.
I haven’t been able to access the paper itself, so this may be in error — but if there is more energy from the sun reaching the earth when the sun is sending less energy to the earth, then doesn’t that speak to reasons other than the sun’s activity for the increase in energy from the sun reaching the earth?
The sun activity goes down and there is nothing that the AGW crowd can do about it. Therefore they have to find a way to make the sun going down warm the Earth, so eternal global warming rides in the sunset, literally.
They are going to have to get Winston Smith from the Department of Truth to destroy all the previous papers, and for Squeeler to change the rules and issue an ‘adjustment’ from Comrade Napolean.
Now, now, calm down people. We do not wish to suffer from sunstroke.
So don you solar toupees and remember only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.
And then cooled by a splendid gin sling you can consider carefully how an observation is matched to an unknown computer model over a very short period and is claimed to be evidence of something.
And wonder why the claimant is so uncertain about it, it might be an anomaly she says. Amazing word anomaly, it is used for all sorts of things: you might wish to contemplate how uncertain so many uses of it are too. Especially in so called climate science.
On the other hand you might prefer to sip your cool gin sling and let the whole thing drift away from your mind. After all it is hardly worth thinking about: and I am sure you have better things to ponder upon.
Kindest Regards
The short duration of the MODELING in this study is suspicious as well as the timing of the “sun affects the Earth’s climate” study release, sounds like desperation to me!
Have you notices the rash, onslaught/flood of remodelled, regurgitated doom and gloom climate disasters and end time scenarios on every media outlet of late?
They are priming the uninformed up for the Cancun climate disruption conference, the bad news the hand wringing and phoney tears of the pampered delegates.
There is a choking desperation in the warmist rehashed end time releases and articles, the pitiful cries of foul and how nasty those rotten cheating oil rich sceptics are.
The warmist are in panic mode, so for them were no amount of distortion is to much, as evidenced in every foolish thing they say and every idiotic move they make!
On a bright note the US midterm elections are going to drop a huge brick on this whole global warming or climate change or climate disruption crowd and the greedy power hungry politicos who desperately want maximum control and money from the taxpayers of the west.
Watch out the climate crazy governments of the UK, New Zealand and Australia, the climate jig is almost up for you too without the USA, China, India and a host of others country’s just starting to realize the real cost of this whole CO2 rush off the cliff madness.
For example see:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,691194,00.html
Merkel Abandons Aim of Binding Climate Agreement
A big change is coming and it’s not just the weather.
I’ll keep an open mind on this, its too early to see which way their modeled/hypotheses (guess?) is going to pan out in the long term. The last thing we want to spur on is the climate modification dabblers wanting to artificially interfere with natural climate variations.
Worth watching, thinking, time and climate will tell its own story.
I would be upset to have my name associated with this abortion of scientific malfeasance.
just wow…. round file basket ball anyone?
Citizens,
It has been known for MANY YEARS that solar activity (eg sunspot numbers or ANYTHING which follows the 11 year cycle) is NOT a detailed driver of world temperatures (ie on time scales of less than one solar cycle); this is evidenced by the FACT that the main signal in world temperatures is the magnetic ‘Hale’ (22 yr) cycle.
SO – and this would be grasped by an 8 year old – for about half the time solar activity (eg smoothed on 3 year moving averages) and temperatures move together, and about half the time they move oppositely. THIS IS NOT NEW but the fact that temperatures and solar activity do not always move together is “rediscovered” and restated at approximately 6 monthly intervals (most notably Professor Lockwood but the Grantham Institute will rope in anyone they can). It is utterly pathetic that Nature publishes this piffle as ‘new’; but then where do they stand in the fight to defend evidence based science?
The purpose of their misinformation is of course to undermine the observed fact of EXCELLENT correlation between smoothed-out solar activity** (on all time scales of more than the Hale cycle) and world temperatures; and these ‘experts’ move on (or imply) “It’s not solar activity so it must be CO2” (using its not a dog so it must be a cat, logic).
It’s wonderous – no completely unsurprising – that the same ‘experts’ have yet to “discover” that world temperatures don’t always follow CO2.
In fact temperatures statistically DON’T follow CO2 on ANY time scale:- years, decades, centuries, millennia, millions, or hundreds of millions of years. Now there IS something for Nature to “discover”.
This campaign to mislead was the original subject of the ongoing post on Climate Realists (where RED BOLD highlights in the Comments indicate key items which I think help get to key points quickly) – “World cooling has……” =
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=3307&linkbox=true&position=5
** Importantly a better correlation is found between temperatures & geomagnetic activity than temperature and solar activity (eg on 22 yr smoothing).
Peaks of temperatures are around peaks of odd sunspot cycles and troughs in temps are around peaks in even cycles.
The DETAILS of temperature in the world or any region are NOT in general correlated in any simple way to sunspot counts on short time scales (of say months or a year). The proper relationships are complicated but very real and make solar based prediction possible.
Examples of the chain of causality:-
major events on the sun => events in the ionosphere & geomagnetic activity
=> jet stream changes => significant PREDICTED weather events are documented in Eg WeatherAction news no 31 –
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=6165
and the RTV film via
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=6173
Thanks, Piers
‘…Professor Sir Brian Hoskins, the Director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London, added: “We know that the Earth’s climate is affected both by human activity and by natural forces and today’s study improves our understanding of how the Sun influences our climate. Studies like this are vital for helping us to create a clear picture of how our climate is changing and through this, to work out how we can best protect our planet.”’
There is no instrument or technique for determining the effect of human activity — it is implied by correlation or by trying to exclude all other known factors which are separately and together causal fallacies (non causa pro causa).
I’d like to know how Sir Brian thinks the planet can be protected from the Sun’s influences or why it needs that protection.
Of course, whatever they discover about the effect of solar activity on the climate, nothing prior to c. 1945 can be attributed to fossil fuel use.
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/graphics/global_ff_1751_2006.jpg
Never underestimate the ability of dung to grow things in the dark.
All this wonderful information on global warming baffles me as to why the normal condition for this planet is ice ages. How come they get all that warming information from ice cores tens of thousands of years old?
A poor excuse of a paper.
Now isnt this curious. I dunno any of the in and outs of the current science debate over this, but I do know that 100 years ago the solar cycle hypothesis was exactly this.
A E Douglass invented tree ring analysis in order to show a correlation with 11 year climate cycles. The idea back then was that there were cycles of cooler-wetter to warmer-dryer. The warmer-wetter cycles were ‘optimal’ for high latitudes and the cooler cycles optimal for agriculture on the desert fringes (like the mid-west & middle east). In the 1880s Bruckner found a cycle varying in length from 20 to 50 years. Huntington proposed modulations across the centuries. Douglass was looking for evidence of 11 year cycles with the warmer periods coming in the sunspot minimums. (The science of natural climate variations that was booming back then is now obscured by the predominence of the AGW hypothesis and the history of its discovery – more on this on my latest blog-post, and more to come)
So you now proclaim that the sun has influence on our climate but the opposite effect we are told/know by real data evidence.
Let me get this right, it now cools us at it’s Max and warms us when it slumbers . Explaining why they see warming from proxies influenced computer models with bad data excluding the suns forces you say it has that aren’t seen in data reality.
TO summarize, we(they, scientists) who said the sun had no influence on our climate, just AGW CO2 from computer models. Admit that there IS a solar force influencing the earths climate, but in the opposite direction creating heat proving the old model right, though no real data shows this…..
BWAAHAHAH! LMFAOMFC!!
But HEY, there is always a made up El Niño/La Niña ace in the hole explaining predictions that don’t quite panout or fit eh? No sun effect there…of course not, sorry, has no effect unless it is what the models say doen’t exist but now say has an influence… saying it doesn’t have a big influence?!?!!!!
*head explodes
Same old, same GIGO, trying to explain their belief in creationism/God/flat earth/AGW religion.
So when the sun turns into a red giant I need to buy some furs to keep warm. This makes sense to me and the man in the white coat agreed.
Stephen Wilde says: October 6, 2010 at 5:07 pm
“When the sun is more active energy escapes to space faster and the stratosphere cools naturally.”
Hmm.. The study is just 3 years long, and in the retreating phase of the Sun’s cycle. That would suggest a cooling phase. However, their study points to a warming, which I’d say is likely due to the oceans finally delivering the warming they received several years prior in the sunspot increasing phase.
Energy will only escape faster if there’s more energy available to begin with. I did read the formula somewhere that it takes some 4x the energy to maintain a heat of double? Correct me if I’m wrong.
However, it was always previously noted (in the ’70’s, from what I recall my mother teaching me) that more sunspots = more and different radiative energy = more energetic climatic conditions, or more turbulent weather.
The oceans have a huge part to play in this. Again, my mother told me that when we have a strong El Nino off South America, here in Australia temperature will rise to somewhat above normal.
The Sun and oceans are often in and out of sync. One will begin an effect and the other will either increase it, nullify it or be completely overshadowed. It must remain clear that the atmosphere simply slows down heat retransmission. If the Sun were to suddenly wink out permanently, the oceans could only keep us above freezing for about a week, considering you could be in a 50C desert during the day, and reach barely above freezing at night. Yes, CO2 isn’t much of a blanket at all.
D. Patterson says:
October 6, 2010 at 10:30 pm…..
Another terrific comment.
This mushroom has now been exposed to the light. “Nature” loves it.
So this is a truly well fertilized cave offering that may attract future NASSA $’s, but I suspect that it will likely wilt before long. Afterall, it now carries the “no problem” slogan, and people will be looking for the button. And papers like this carry the theme of the button holders. Talk about a backfire with collateral damage.