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
Read this a few hours ago but was busy on other things, (communicating with R. North, & NotoO2.org, some other stuff too,) but my immediate thought was, ‘Oh NO, it’s worse than we thought!
DaveE.
Stephen Wilde wrote: “Because the oceans are so powerful the short term effects are small and chaotic. It takes a century or more for solar induced changes to become significant.”
The lag between solar variations and ocean lag is approximately 3 months. It’s visible in the seasonal cycle of SST.
“The lag between solar variations and ocean lag is approximately 3 months. It’s visible in the seasonal cycle of SST”.
Apples and pears, Bob. You’ll be asking me to consider diurnal variations next.
I call the seasonal changes small compared to the changes from MWP to LIA to date.
I regard the changes caused by individual solar events within a single year as chaotic and even smaller. Only on a multidecadal basis does the underlying signal start to emerge and on a multicentennial basis it becomes clear enough to anyone prepared to see what is in front of their noses.
It is the major long term background trends and the timing of changes in those trends that I am concerned with. I have tried to get you to look at the broader long term picture several times already but you told me you have no interest in that and I accept your decision.
See Nigel Calder’s response to the Nature paper
http://calderup.wordpress.com/2010/10/07/sun-cools-how-daft/
Sun cools? How daft!
Sounds to me like this paper is actually setting the stage for hedging their bets in preparation for the possibility of an up and coming cooling phase… ie: the next solar cycle is expected to be a strong one, so hence they’ll be able to say that the “temporary” cooling glitch is “explained” via the sun.
The exact same way they’ve hedged their bets with : drought/rain, more storms/less storms, more snow/less snow, extreme heat/extreme cold, etc etc.
The IPCC credits ONLY solar irradiance in the AR4… meanwhile solar physicists understand there’s a hell of a lot more to solar output than just that. These guys are just simply trying to now slip the physics in under the radar in baby steps.
Watch and see how some of these solar physics will be accounted for in the IPCC’s AR5 (in the ‘uncertainties’ section)… I don’t know about you guys, but I’ll be laughing my butt off watching the IPCC try to play catch up with real science – otherwise known as, physics.
Pass the popcorn.
“Toto says:
October 7, 2010 at 11:22 pm
See Nigel Calder’s response to the Nature paper
http://calderup.wordpress.com/2010/10/07/sun-cools-how-daft/
Sun cools? How daft!”
Our Nige regaled us all with a horrendously alarmist TV tirade about the coming new ice age back in the 70s so I don’t listen to him much.
In this case he is one of those who have read Joanna’s observations about effects in the upper atmosphere as a comment about the energy content of the Earth system as a whole.
The active sun does not cool the entire system in a fast acting process. It just alters the temperature at the tropopause which strengthens or weakens the temperature inversion and that affects the latitudinal position of the air circulation systems with certain climate consequences.
All it does, therefore is slightly modulate the rate of energy loss to space thus in turn modulating the climate effect of the primary driver of change which appears to be ocean oscillations.
So called Bond Events occur every 1500 years or so and that equates nicely to the length of time water takes to travel the length of the thermohaline circulation which is estimated at 1000 to 1500 years.
In changing the rate of energy loss to space and shifting the jetstreams those solar changes also alter global albedo via a shift in cloud band positioning.
That affects the rate at which energy enters the oceans and then the thermohaline circulation.
So the solar changes set up a series of pulses of water with slightly differing temperatures along the line of the thermohaline circulation and 1000 to 1500 years later those pulses resurface again, modify the climate and in turn that oceanic climate modification is itself affected by whatever level of activity the sun happens to be displaying at the time.
It may only be a hypothesis at this stage but the observations from Jo Haigh make it all a lot more likely to be true. I needed her confirmation of the sign of the solar effect on the atmosphere to verify my earlier proposition that currently solar events mostly offset oceanic events rather than compounding them.
I must stop right now and clear up some statements I made here on WUWT way back in last winter. On some story of the sun’s influence on the climate I stated that this minimum if real would likely last to 209x something and even made some remarks about the likely repeat near mid 2390’s.
MVB just placed some links to some very interesting articles and papers and one by Willie Soon, physicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Steven H. Yaskell, Ericsson Radio Systems in Sweden titled “Year with out a Summer” (https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~wsoon/GoldbergMay05-d/Summer_of_1816.pdf) rather startled me. Within the text I came across the same dates and at first thought they might just have read my statements here. Silly me. It was written in 2003 so I must tell everyone that my research pointing to those dates did not come form their paper and had nothing to do with the center of mass inertia as they were questionably mentioning of all possibilities. It is curious though how those dates fall so very close to each other. That is interesting and deserves some deeper peering.
My study has been more on solar harmonics. Since my major was physiology I have study an incredible number of wave or harmonic functions from most areas of any living creature. Why do these processes exist? It’s physics at the lowest level. This is one area I can say a rather firm ‘belief’ in. I don’t care if you are speaking of the universe, a galaxy, solar system, or the bodies that form them, there is always many harmonic processes in play. Many are like clockwork, the tides, the seasons, the diurnal cycle, on larger to the Milankovitch cycles.
These are all real with real physics reasons for their cyclic nature and that is the only one’s I will even consider real. Cycles have gotten a bad rap due to the millions of different cycles you can create, especially now with a computer on your desk, that have no proven effect and no physics behind the cause. Those are out of my realm and the one I’m about to describe might fall right in that basket.
Some cycles, as volcano’s eruptions or tropical storms that though we know the physics behind the cause, there are too many unknown or poorly measured parameters to ever get an remotely real answer let alone predict them. Others are accurate to a very fine factor as the tides.
But it seems real to know that our sun, inherently simple in principle, being a ball of gases with a fusion reactor at it’s core has some internal cyclic processes in play. Everyone knows of the 11 year cycle. But there are deeper cycles and overlying harmonics that vary from about two years to four hundred years to take one beat or cycle best I can tell. Overlay this with the fact that the internal heat takes a long, long time to reach the surface which smoothes any sharp divisions you would see if deep within and near the fusion core.
I’m going to throw some results I have come up with and any solar physicist that want to delve deeper or just keep in the back of your mind to help me see if this is real or not, have at it. Seems there is a sub-harmonic or beat of some 2.776 years the best I can compute it beginning in September 1699. This beat is not always in phase with the realized cycle we see in the sunspot counts as a proxy to the magnetic activity. This misalignment might have something to do with these periods of extreme suppression (grand minimums) or enhancement (super maximums) in the magnetic or thermal activity. And if you have not multiplied, four of these beats are 11.1 years or the established 11 year cycle.
One thing I have noticed though is these beats tend to fall nearly exactly on the edges (mid of last maximum and next minimum) between all major transition as out of Maunder, into and out of the Dalton period or in mid-1936 that began the grand maximum period we just exited from or January 2008 when the sun went quiet. If you average all 28 past 11 year cycles since 1700 that puts an average length at 11.107 years. It also places one of these divisions at the end of September 2010, could be extra active, totally quite, or anything in between. I simply don’t know. Need some physics and observation help.
Well, there it is, there have been 112 of these beats between September 1699 and September 2010 and I simply don’t know why they seem to be there with some possible physics behind them. If not, they are just another curiosity. BTW, within these beat’s harmonics there seems to be major ones falling within months of 1711, 1811, 1911, 201? which prompted my extension to 209? and the perk-up of the sun again and if the 400 years is cyclical holds, 239?. Of course, this is if the sun does actually have deep regular cycles in it’s convection layer and/or the core.
So Drs Soon and Yaskell, I didn’t mean to appear that I was merely taking your numbers from your paper and merely posting here as mine.
If any real science could emerge from WUWT, that would be so fantastic! (but it has to be real, and proper)
Wayne
I perked up when you mentioned 1699 for I would put the end of the most severe period of the LIA as 1698-thereafter the intensity of it decreased markedly.
See also my jont article here which found a sine like wave pattern
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/04/in-search-of-cooling-trends/
An interesting post Wayne, pity it went up as everyone leaves the room to go to the next story 🙂
Hope someone remains here to comment further.
tonyb
vukcevic says:
October 7, 2010 at 4:45 am
Hi Tony
Mr Wild is welcome to it. I don’t mind occasionally being shot at, but facing whole firing squad, no thanks.
giggling..
Where is the interstellar background in all this.. well Carla it isn’t mentioned. But.. why not? They keep talking about cosmic rays like some how these cosmic rays are evenly distrubted in the interstellar regions around the solar system. Must be there is no interstellar background.. what are you talking about?
An even distribution of cosmic rays on all time scales modulated by solar cycles..hahahhahahhaha
Are you happy now? .. yes thank you. And a Happy Friday to all.
Stephen Wilde replied, “I call the seasonal changes small compared to the changes from MWP to LIA to date.”
Really? Show me a graph of Northern Hemisphere SST anomalies from the MWP to the LIA to date that shows a 4.5 deg C swing. That’s the seasonal variation. And it only lags by a few months:
http://i51.tinypic.com/8yyez5.jpg
You wrote, “Only on a multidecadal basis does the underlying signal start to emerge and on a multicentennial basis it becomes clear enough to anyone prepared to see what is in front of their noses.”
Please feel free to link data or a study that confirms your claim, “Because the oceans are so powerful the short term effects are small and chaotic. It takes a century or more for solar induced changes to become significant.”
This multicentennial ocean lag you claim was the common misunderstanding during the 1980s and early 1990s. Are you attempting to resurrect it again?
Again, it appears that if your model fails to work on an annual to decadal basis, you proclaim multidecadal of centennial timescales–timescales for which there is no data to confirm or refute your claims. Interesting the way your model works.
Bob,
The solar effect is slow and gradual over a 1000 year cycle or more with much variability along the way. The issue of short term lagging effects is not relevant on such timescales and in any event I have already often proposed a high degree of independence in the long term ocean cycles that overrides the issue of lags.
The only multicentennial lag that I have proposed is that a period of high solar activity moves the jets poleward to allow more energy into the oceans and then that pulse travels the length of the thermohaline circulation to emerge 1000 to 1500 years later when it’s climate effects are themselves modified by the state of the sun at that time
The total temperature swing over the period is not as large as you say the seasonal swing is but it is far larger in terms of accumulation and dissipation of total ocean heat content. The main effect on climate is not from a large change in the temperature of the entire system but lies in the latitudinal position of the jets relative to the regions below them. The system works to smooth out variability in total system energy content and is very effective at doing so.
We are not discussing comparable phenomena. Apples and Pears.
tonyb says:
October 8, 2010 at 3:12 am
See also my jont article here which found a sine like wave pattern
Tony, I do remember your article. A very good analysis, that pattern is there. I wish our records went a bit further back and you might find that the cool/warm cycle you showed reaches all the way back to the Maunder period. It’s amazing that this ringing is very close to one hundred years as nine times 11.x years, and the fourth back was the Maunder period with little activity at all. I can’t seem to answer it. Is the next four hundred back the dark ages cooling, was it also a grand minimum with the medieval warming in between? it would take someone with more records into the past than I can find.
Your right about a blog, sometimes I feel like a snail, seems by the time you get the time, read all of the links, and write something back of any depth everyone has left the thread, oh well. Just wanted the chance to get a thought out there that has been bugging me for nearly a year now. This record from the sun has something like a ringing overtone imprinted over the eleven year pattern but I know little of proper harmonic analysis, just reaching for some help. Possibly three or more longer and longer term sinusoidal processes and we just see in the combination in the activity, for one in the sunspot records.
It seems the inverse sign problem is indeed one of Houston proportions as Gavin admits
What is a surprise is that for the visible wavelengths, SIM seems to suggest that the irradiance changes are opposite in sign to the changes in the TSI. To be clear, while the TSI has decreased since 2003 (as part of the descent into the current solar minimum), SIM seems to indicate that the UV decreases are much larger than expected, while irradiance in visible bands has actually increased! This is counter to any current understanding of what controls irradiance on solar cycle timescales.
What are the implications of such a phenomena? Well, since the UV portion of the solar input is mostly absorbed in stratosphere, it is the visible and near-IR portions of the irradiance change that directly influence the lower atmosphere. Bigger changes in the UV also imply bigger changes in stratospheric ozone and temperature, and this influences the tropospheric radiative forcing too. Indeed, according to Haigh’s calculations, the combination of the two effects means that the net radiative forcing at the tropopause is opposite in sign to the TSI change. So during a solar minimum you would expect a warmer surface!
Much of the longer term variance in solar output has been hypothesised to follow what happens over the solar cycle and so if verified, this result would imply that all current attributions to solar variability of temperature changes in the lower atmosphere and surface ocean would be of the wrong sign. Mechanisms elucidated in multiple models from multiple groups would no longer have any validity. It would be shocking stuff indeed.
Conceivably, there might be another missing element (such as a cosmic-ray/cloud connection) that would counteract this physics and restore the expected sign of the change, but no-one has succeeded in finding any mechanism that would quantitatively give anything close the size of effect that would now be required
Stephen Wilde wrote, “The solar effect is slow and gradual over a 1000 year cycle or more with much variability along the way.”
Again, I will ask for documentation of this lag that you now claim is as long as or longer than 1000 years. Seems as though your ocean lag is growing with every reply on this thread, Stephen.
The issue of the correct sign for the solar effect on stratospheric temperatures is now gaining some momentum so let me try to share my reasoning in terms that are as simple as possible because I’m not currently aware of anyone else who figured it out before Joanna’s findings came to light.
i) I noted the poleward drift of the jets throughout the late 20th Century warming spell and on the face of it that was consistent with a warming troposphere. Clearly a warmer troposphere would invigorate the hydrological cycle and push the jets poleward and AGW theory recognised that with the models supporting just such a poleward shift. Indeed that poleward shift was supposed to be accompanied by a tropospheric hot spot as the enhanced upward energy flux was then constrained by extra GHGs so that the ‘surplus’ energy was retained in the troposphere and thereby denied to the stratosphere which then cooled as per observations and despite the ‘normal’ warming of the stratosphere that would otherwise have been expected from the highly active sun at the time. So far so good.
ii) But then around 2000 I noted that the jets had started moving equatorward again and no one said anything about it. To my mind that broke the expected (AGW) pattern and I was puzzled so I watched and thought and read but no one ever picked up on the point and not being a climate professional and being otherwise occupied in earning a living I did not raise the issue with anyone.
iii) Then the AGW thing reached a crescendo with Al Gore’s film and I felt that something was not right and started participating on the blogs.
iv) It soon became clear to me that the essential point was being missed by everyone, AGW proponents and sceptics alike. That is, if the poleward jets represent a faster hydrological cycle with energy being propelled upward faster yet no tropospheric hotspot where the energy is being backed up then how the hell can anyone assert that the energy being supplied to the stratosphere from below has been reduced by the presence of more CO2 in the troposphere. If anything the poleward shift of the jets inevitably implies that more CO2 results in energy being propelled upward faster not slower and of course that would be consistent with the observation that more downward IR from any additional CO2 gets converted instantly into latent heat by enhanced evaporation to be released higher up when condensation occurs. So for AGW theory to have been correct we would have to have seen that hot spot at the top of the troposphere and the presence of that hotspot would have prevented the jets moving poleward, indeed it should have sent them equatorward instead because it would have had the same effect as a reduction of the height of the tropopause and an enhancement of the intensity of the tropopause.
v) So if the stratosphere was not being cooled by a dearth of energy from below it must be cooling from an even greater increase of energy flowing upward.
vi) Joanna Haigh’s observations, if verified, prove that to be the case. Thus AGW theory collapses totally and we have to dump all existing climate models and theories except mine which is the only hypothesis that anticipated those observations and accommodates them in the overall narrative.
At the base of all this is the simple failure of anyone to note the start of the equatorward shift in the jets around 2000. Everything I say is a simple logical extrapolation from what should have been the obvious implications of that change in trend as regards jetstream behaviour . The climate establishment clearly took it’s eye off the ball and has led us a merry dance for at least ten years.
It is for others to decide whether there has been fraud or simply gross negligence.
“Bob Tisdale says:
October 8, 2010 at 2:28 pm
Stephen Wilde wrote, “The solar effect is slow and gradual over a 1000 year cycle or more with much variability along the way.”
Again, I will ask for documentation of this lag that you now claim is as long as or longer than 1000 years. Seems as though your ocean lag is growing with every reply on this thread, Stephen”
Please stop wasting my time.
The issue of the correct sign for the solar effect on stratospheric temperatures is now gaining some momentum so let me try to share my reasoning in terms that are as simple as possible because I’m not currently aware of anyone else who figured it out before Joanna’s findings came to light.
i) I noted the poleward drift of the jets throughout the late 20th Century warming spell and on the face of it that was consistent with a warming troposphere. Clearly a warmer troposphere would invigorate the hydrological cycle and push the jets poleward and AGW theory recognised that with the models supporting just such a poleward shift. Indeed that poleward shift was supposed to be accompanied by a tropospheric hot spot as the enhanced upward energy flux was then constrained by extra GHGs so that the ‘surplus’ energy was retained in the troposphere and thereby denied to the stratosphere which then cooled as per observations and despite the ‘normal’ warming of the stratosphere that would otherwise have been expected from the highly active sun at the time. So far so good.
ii) But then around 2000 I noted that the jets had started moving equatorward again and no one said anything about it. To my mind that broke the expected (AGW) pattern and I was puzzled so I watched and thought and read but no one ever picked up on the point and not being a climate professional and being otherwise occupied in earning a living I did not raise the issue with anyone.
iii) Then the AGW thing reached a crescendo with Al Gore’s film and I felt that something was not right and started participating on the blogs.
iv) It soon became clear to me that the essential point was being missed by everyone, AGW proponents and sceptics alike. That is, if the poleward jets represent a faster hydrological cycle with energy being propelled upward faster yet no tropospheric hotspot where the energy is being backed up then how the hell can anyone assert that the energy being supplied to the stratosphere from below has been reduced by the presence of more CO2 in the troposphere. If anything the poleward shift of the jets inevitably implies that more CO2 results in energy being propelled upward faster not slower and of course that would be consistent with the observation that more downward IR from any additional CO2 gets converted instantly into latent heat by enhanced evaporation to be released higher up when condensation occurs. So for AGW theory to have been correct we would have to have seen that hot spot at the top of the troposphere and the presence of that hotspot would have prevented the jets moving poleward, indeed it should have sent them equatorward instead because it would have had the same effect as a reduction of the height of the tropopause and an enhancement of the intensity of the tropopause.
v) So if the stratosphere was not being cooled by a dearth of energy from below it must be cooling from an even greater increase of energy flowing upward.
vi) Joanna Haigh’s observations, if verified, prove that to be the case. Thus AGW theory collapses totally and we have to dump all existing climate models and theories except mine which is the only hypothesis that anticipated those observations and accommodates them in the overall narrative.
At the base of all this is the simple failure of anyone to note the start of the equatorward shift in the jets around 2000. Everything I say is a simple logical extrapolation from what should have been the obvious implications of that change in trend as regards jetstream behaviour . The climate establishment clearly took it’s eye off the ball and has led us a merry dance for at least ten years.
It is for others to decide whether there has been fraud or simply gross negligence.
Stephen Wilde says:
October 8, 2010 at 3:48 pm
………………………………………………………..
As i have watched the weather patterns change over the last three or four years I was astounded that the diminished size and speed of the equatorial streams was mirrored in the polar jets size increases and depth of penetration of the equatorial regions. As the Globe begins to cool from diminished solar output in the UV/IR bands and magnetic waves (Solar Wind) is diminished, how does the earths own magnetic fields shift?
i would suppose they would expand at the equatorial regions and thin at the polar. this would cause the advanced cooling in high latitudes which in turn would drive the temperature imbalance as the cause for the change in heat distribution.
the weighting factors on the teeter toter have changed.. and the Sun is the master of the weight…
Is this a correct path of explanation?
Bill H
You’ve got the basic essentials but I’m not sure that it is necessary to invoke a shift in magnetic fields though such shifts may occur.
The observed effects seem to be adequately explained by differential heating effects and a combination of fluid dynamics with radiative characteristics.
Still, I’m open to suggestions and some are very keen on magnetic explanations. Generally though I share Leif Svalgaards view that the effects would be too small.