The sun went spotless yesterday, the first time in quite awhile. It seems like a good time to present this analysis from my friend David Archibald. For those not familiar with the Dalton Minimum, here’s some background info from Wiki:
The Dalton Minimum was a period of low solar activity, named after the English meteorologist John Dalton, lasting from about 1790 to 1830.[1] Like the Maunder Minimum and Spörer Minimum, the Dalton Minimum coincided with a period of lower-than-average global temperatures. The Oberlach Station in Germany, for example, experienced a 2.0°C decline over 20 years.[2] The Year Without a Summer, in 1816, also occurred during the Dalton Minimum. Solar cycles 5 and 6, as shown below, were greatly reduced in amplitude. – Anthony
Guest post by David Archibald
James Marusek emailed me to ask if I could update a particular graph. Now that it is a full two years since the month of solar minimum, this was a good opportunity to update a lot of graphs of solar activity.
Figure 1: Solar Polar Magnetic Field Strength
The Sun’s current low level of activity starts from the low level of solar polar magnetic field strength at the 23/24 minimum. This was half the level at the previous minimum, and Solar Cycle 24 is expected to be just under half the amplitude of Solar Cycle 23.
Figure 2: Heliospheric Current Sheet Tilt Angle
It is said that solar minimum isn’t reached until the heliospheric current sheet tilt angle has flattened. While the month of minimum for the 23/24 transition is considered to be December 2008, the heliospheric current sheet didn’t flatten until June 2009.
Figure 3: Interplanetary Magnetic Field
The Interplanetary Magnetic Field remains very weak. It is almost back to the levels reached in previous solar minima.
Figure 4: Ap Index 1932 – 2010
The Ap Index remains under the levels of previous solar minima.
Figure 5: F10.7 Flux 1948 – 2010
The F10.7 Flux is a more accurate indicator of solar activity than the sunspot number. It remains low.
Figure 6: F10.7 Flux aligned on solar minima
In this figure, the F10.7 flux of the last six solar minima are aligned on the month of minimum, with the two years of decline to the minimum and three years of subsequent rise. The Solar Cycle 24 trajectory is much lower and flatter than the rises of the five previous cycles.
Figure 7: Oulu Neutron Count 1964 – 210
A weaker interplanetary magnetic field means more cosmic rays reach the inner planets of the solar system. The neutron count was higher this minimum than in the previous record. Thanks to the correlation between the F10.7 Flux and the neutron count in Figure 8 following, we now have a target for the Oulu neutron count at Solar Cycle 24 maximum in late 2014 of 6,150.
Figure 8: Oulu Neutron Flux plotted against lagged F10.7 flux
Neutron count tends to peak one year after solar minimum. Figure 8 was created by plotting Oulu neutron count against the F10.7 flux lagged by one year. The relationship demonstrated by this graph indicates that the most likely value for the Oulu neutron count at the Solar Cycle 24 maximum expected to be a F10.7 flux value of 100 in late 2014 will be 6,150.
Figure 9: Solar Cycle 24 compared to Solar Cycle 5
I predicted in a paper published in March 2006 that Solar Cycles 24 and 25 would repeat the experience of the Dalton Minimum. With two years of Solar Cycle 24 data in hand, the trajectory established is repeating the rise of Solar Cycle 5, the first half of the Dalton Minimum. The prediction is confirmed. Like Solar Cycles 5 and 6, Solar Cycle 24 is expected to be 12 years long. Solar maximum will be in late 2014/early 2015.
Figure 10: North America Snow Cover Ex-Greenland
The northern hemisphere is experiencing its fourth consecutive cold winter. The current winter is one of the coldest for a hundred years or more. For cold winters to provide positive feedback, snow cover has to survive from one winter to the next so that snow’s higher albedo relative to bare rock will reflect sunlight into space, causing cooler summers. The month of snow cover minimum is most often August, sometimes July. We have to wait another eight months to find out how this winter went in terms of retained snow cover. The 1970s cooling period had much higher snow cover minima than the last thirty years. Despite the last few cold winters, there was no increase in the snow cover minima. The snow cover minimum may have to get to over two million square kilometres before it starts having a significant effect.
David Archibald
December 2010
No, no, no, fellas, it’ll be the Eddy Minimum. His love of words eddyfied the world’s men and women.
============
Sense Seeker says:
December 20, 2010 at 4:04 am
Baa, a lag effect of the oceans is not a very plausible explanation (not to say humbug). Solar activity has at best been essentially flat since at least 1980, so the oceans should have caught up by now. You can see that the ’1970s cooling period’ followed a period of low solar activity with a lag time of 10 years at the very most.
Also, since 1980 temperature has gone up by about 0.5 degrees Celsius, you’d need a very impressive lag effect to explain that, given flat solar activity.
There’s gotta be something else that explains this temperature pattern. (And the rest of the world knows what it is. You know it makes sense.)
______
Sense Seeker, you are asking some very valid questions, but don’t expect to get a sympathetic ear here. To follow up on those:
1) Suppose we are going in to a Dalton (or even Maunder) type of solar minimum, which looks increasingly likely– how much colder would we be without the additional 40% or so CO2 we added to the troposphere since these last solar minimums?
2) A period of cooling related to a quiet sun (or even a flat-line) does not in any way disprove or even create a serious problem for the science behind the longer term effects of CO2. I am still trying to understand how certain AGW skeptics think that fluctuations is solar cycles creates a problem for the science behind the greenhouse effects of CO2? They are not mutually exclusive.
Unfortunately, we don’t have a second earth that we could lower the CO2 back to 280 ppm (and reduce methane back to 1800’s levels as well) and see how the current quiet sun affects it.
Having said all this however, I do feel that current GCM’s have not fully taken into account some of the potential secondary effects of solar cycles, looking beyond simple TSI, and looked at the relationship between GCR’s, high energy UV, cloud cover etc., as these effects are just now becoming better known. These may prove that indeed, solar cycles play a greater role in climate than fully realized such that even though solar changes may still not dominate over the 40% increase in anthropogenic CO2 we’ve seen.
vukcevic says:
December 20, 2010 at 9:14 am
Frosty says:
December 20, 2010 at 4:46 am
……………..
Useful reference list, it does confirm that the Dalton min ( 1800-1830) was not to bad. Number of winters you listed can be easily identified in :
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CET-D.htm
Interestingly, the warmings and coolings are mainly spring/summer, contrary to AGW theory.
Leif Svalgaard says:
December 20, 2010 at 11:11 am
“Any changes to the ‘sacred’ historical record are bound to be met with stiff resistance because of the impact that such ‘revisionism’ might have on people’s pet theories and ingrained dogmas.”
————
On the other hand, the ongoing sub-zero temperatures along the English Channel in Devon might have an even greater impact on people’s pet theories and ingrained dogmas, Leif! I’d hate to have my boat tied to a climatology department in the UK right now….
@Murray Sandland Duffin
Dalton minimum was between 1790 -1830 so the figures I linked to are up to 1950.
The series of reconstructed 10-yr averaged sunspot numbers with their 68% uncertainty.
Years are given BP (before present), i.e. the calendar AD year, Yad, is related to the
BP year, Ybp, as Yc=1950-Ybp.
The tabulated years correspond to centers of the corresponding 10-year intervals.
Negative values are artifacts and are consistent with zero within the error limits.
So the figure for 55 is 1950
235 to 285 are dalton minimum?
Oh, man, just when I thought all the “minimum” talk was over… Let’s go back to making cracks on Al Gore and polar bears. I don’t want to hear about (gulp) persistent solar minimums. We’ve had a few spots, haven’t we? Every day we’ve a spot or two to look at. Isn’t that enough? So what if it’s taking a day or so for the spots to come back around. Go back to talking about the earth warming up. That’s what I like to hear about. Warming. Warming is better.
I guess I can go over to some climate change sites and warm up. All this “minimum” talk is giving me a chill…
Theo Goodwin.
You miss the point. you will note the following inconsistency in some skeptical arguments.
When the topic is the increase in the “global average” you will find people:
1. Claiming that it doesnt exist
2. Claiming that there are too few thermometers to measure it
3. Claiming that the thermometers lack the accuracy to determine the number
4. Claiming that there are huge amounts of bias in that number
When the topic is correlation of temperature with Sun spots you will find
1. Nobody claiming the global average doesnt make sense
2. Nobody claiming there are two few thermometers
3. Nobody complaining about the accuracy
4. Nobody talking about bias.
When the Topic is the LIA ( whatever that is) you will also find that the skepticism
about the temperature record flies out the window.
When the Topic is the MWP ( whatever that is) you will also find selective skepticism. lack of Scepticism about proxies used to establish a LIA suddedly becomes skepticism about proxies used to estimate a lower MWP.
As for the definition of “global average” I think many people are mislead by the idea that it is a physical thing. It’s not. It’s operational.
When I tell you that the gloabl average 100 years from now will be 2C warmer (+-) I am telling you that if you take the average temperature where you stand today, and you take the same average 100 years from now in the same place the best estimate of the temperature difference will be 2C. To be sure some places wil be higher other will be lower, but if you want to minimize your error of estimation you will pick 2C. If you pick -2C your total error will be bigger, if you pick 0c it will be bigger. That is what is meant by the “global” average. Its the number you would pick to minimize the error in predicting the temperature at N random locations
Mosher: “yes, if we banish the idea of a global average …”
Good idea. The idea of a global average temperature is as dumb as a “global average elevation”. If someone told you the GAE was 250m it wouldn’t help you if you are trekking in the himilayas.
Whay not temperature lines graded on whether the change in temperature was a fantasy concocted by hansen (quick — make the 1930s cooler so it aappears the 90s were warmer) or contaminated by UHI ( 7 – 9C in some cities we have discovered recently).
Quit INFILLING. Show the actual point on a map. Compare the modern 1000 point map to the older maps with 6000 points. Maybe color code it with little marks that say: fictional, really fictional, LOL fictional.
Skeptics:
Get your arguments straight. Low climate sensitivity means small lags between forcing and response (Lindzen & Giannitsis, 1998). If you think the response to doubled CO2 will be small, but you think that solar forcing is somehow larger than CO2 forcing (some kind of cosmic ray effect, or whatever) then the prediction is that a period of low solar forcing in 2008-2012 would yield a period of globally cool temperatures in the years 2010-2014. If the effective heat capacity were large enough to delay the response by 20 years, the result would be very small variability over the solar cycle (since it’s shorter than 20 years!).
Steven Mosher says:
December 20, 2010 at 12:24 pm
………………
I have no idea how global grids are organised, what weighting are given, and how the temperatures are averaged over what surface or volume, but I can firmly state that whatever is calculated is unlikely to be either accurate or much meaningful on the global scale.
Only measure that would have meaning is the global heat content, but I would suspect that would be even more difficult to calculate.
To make sense, within reason, is a reasonable size area average temperatures; even so they oscillate widely in subsequent years seasons. In the last 30 years it is that the winters CE temperatures have been least consistent, while the autumn temperatures have been pretty steady and relatively high.
See last block ‘1950-2010’ in http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CET-D.htm
Knowledge is power!
Theodore Landscheidt predicted a Grand Solar Minimum starting in 1990 bottoming out in 2030 and ending by 2070. This isn’t guess work or hyperbole. This is very predictable planetary mechanics controlling the weather on the Sun, which in turn controls our weather here. It is well underway as demonstrated by the decade of recent cooling.
We are on course for brutally cold winters, getting worse and worse by the year. We had better prepare for fuel shortages, power interruptions, crop failures, and famines. Great Britian is only beginning to get a taste of things to come for the entire Northern Hemisphere.
Climate change is , indeed, on the way. Please, do not be fooled by the global warming baloney of Al Gore, the UN IPCC, Dr. James “Thumbs On The Temperature Scale” Hansen, and the cadre of scientists feeding at the public trough of grant money.
The next few decades are going to be killers, and it will not be due to increasing CO2!
Steven,
Please.
Many of our sceptical leanings in favor of assuming
qualities of natural variation when accepting the LIA or MWP
are based on historical accounts more than proxies or measurements made at the time.
I have made a certain amount of noise about adjustments to the historical record and the current stats.
I believe that these adjustments do not contribute to the accuracy of the reported conditions and tend to confuse rather than clarify things,
I think I am not alone in this.
Isn’t it really the epitome of scientific hubris to
declare that you can derive the temperature 100 years hence ?
If this were a court I would have to say that it assumes facts that are not in evidence.
Really, for all you or any of us know, in 100 years there may be Ice sheets bearing down upon us .
Certainly one would have to take pause at the fact ( with which I assume you would not argue) that the inexorable warming predicted for the last decade failed to
have the effects projected . And though the temnperature may still be above the norm favored by climate scientists ( coincidentally the same time that all of them were young bucks, cool and care free and healthy ) I think there is strong evidence that it has headed down of late, despite the statistical efforts given to maintain the upward trend.
Could this not happen again in 90 years of 11, 30, and, 60 year oscillations which are only now becoming clear ( not to mention the unknown unknowns) ?
Leif Svalgaard says:
December 20, 2010 at 11:11 am
“I’m working on an article on this. Some links to my previous studies [that have some overlap] of this:”
What a treat. You should have said Merry Christmas! Thanks so very much. I understand the care you must take to avoid being pilloried as a revisionist. I look forward to the completion of your article.
kim says:
December 20, 2010 at 11:51 am
it’ll be the Eddy Minimum.
There is already a proposal for the Solar Physics Division of the AAS to name it the ‘Eddy Minimum’.
vukcevic says:
December 20, 2010 at 12:54 pm
I have no idea […] but I can firmly state
seems to be a frequent modus operandi around here.
Steven Mosher says:
December 20, 2010 at 12:24 pm
“As for the definition of “global average” I think many people are mislead by the idea that it is a physical thing. It’s not. It’s operational.”
I thank you for you frankness. You just said that the global average temperature does not measure something physical. No doubt all of your critics will be pleased with that. I believe it is a creature of computer models and worth just as much as they are. I understand that it can have an operational role in computer models.
Whenever I see the phrase, I am reminded of the ancient joke about the farmers whose chickens stop laying eggs. After months of research by the county agriculture agent, the state agriculture team, a poultry researcher at the university, a biologist, a chemist, and finally a physicist, the physicst solves the problem and calls a meeting to explain his solution. The farmers are ecstatic. The physicist begins his presentation by drawing a circle on the blackboard and saying “Assume a spherical chicken…”
[Reply – funny you should mention that: http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/03/08/assume-a-spherical-cow-therefore-all-steaks-are-round/ re the very global average temperature you are talking about. ~jove, mod]
That sure sounds to me like something that would have been caused by better resolution. “But you see professor, when viewed in this new other scope that single spot is actually made of 5 spots!” I mean if the same scope was used, everything should look the same, so why was a spot that was 1 before 1945 suddenly made into 5? Did contact lenses come into use in 1945? Not sure how else to account for that. Sure it was a human decision that caused an issue, but only improved telescope resolution could make it possible, unless whoever is using this older scope is just deciding to imagine things.
That said, the ‘undercounting’ in Brussels is interesting. It is not what I would have expected.
“The idea of a global average temperature is as dumb as a “global average elevation”. ”
Actually, both the reference ellipsoid and geoid are very useful indeed.
Instead of a global temperature, one can look at an anomaly map: http://iridl.ldeo.columbia.edu/maproom/.Global/.Atm_Temp/Anomaly.html
While that may show it as being quite cold in the British Isles and Scandinavia, I see it’s been quite warm in northern Canada. Resolute, Nunavut is about 35F warmer than average today.
Leif Svalgaard says: December 20, 2010 at 11:11 am
…………
Good luck with upgrading the SSN, a minor irritation you may have not counted on, my SSN formula
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC11.htm
would have closer correlation during the 19th century.
“Sense Seeker says:
December 20, 2010 at 3:10 am
And assuming that solar activity has inadequately been accounted for in climate models, does this imply that the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide on world average temperature may have been underestimated?”
I’ll give a different answer from David Corcoran’s a short while back. It is: no, the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide on world average temperature may have been overestimated. The logic is that the sun, with short vigorous cycles to 1996, contributed to global warming, so the contribution needed from CO2 to explain the observed warming is less than it would be otherwise. It’s so simple. Then during the long cycle 23 (1996-2009) temperatures flattened, and now they should fall. Let’s put IPCC on hold for 5 years while we see whether we do.
Re Steven Mosher’s explanation of global average, I don’t think he meant to be understood as predicting it will be 2 degC higher in 2100, but was just using it as an example. It wasn’t the most enlightening piece I’ve seen him write – with the supposed polar amplification it is important to know the expected increase as a function of latitude. My own prediction is that 2100 will be 0.5-1.0 degC warmer in 2100, but will your grandchildren believe me?
Rich.
Well, I was going to respond to Sense Seeker’s thinly veiled claim that only CO2 can explain our recent warming changes in “climate.” Yet, kudos to the many other readers/commenters who pointed out the major flaw in his/her analysis: the global temperature record is corrupt. The fact is, no one knows if the world is warmer/colder/the same as any period from the past because the keepers of the data have manipulated and massaged, and at times made up the data.
In my own view, I suspect it is quite a bit warmer world-wide today than in the 1850-1860 period based on the reports of ice, snow, and very cold winters 150 years ago. But, is it warmer today than in the 1930s? How would we know? There were no satellite records from then and the temperature records are not trustworthy.
Also, is it warmer today than when Greenland was settled? We certainly do not see anybody today making settlements on the coast of Greenland like they did back then. Is it warmer today than in the prehistoric period when the hunter died in the Alpine pass and was buried by tons of snow and ice? His body was recently discovered when a glacier melted. It seems rather odd to me that he dug a hole down through the glacier of his day in order to die at the bottom of it. And he did his digging after being mortally wounded. He was one tough customer! No, a better explanation is he died in an ice-free pass and was covered by snow that later became the glacier.
Given all the above, one must seriously question the entire role of CO2, that magical little molecule that has dramatic properties that cause so many people to proclaim that our modern world is “the hottest decade on record.” To believe that, one must explain how CO2 is highly selective in what it heats, and where it heats, because the temperature records we have that are fairly unadulterated show large inconsistencies between cities at similar latitudes. In real physics, a valid physical phenomenon is not capricious, but performs the same way in each application. I wrote on this on my blog at
http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/usa-cities-hadcrut3-temperatures.html
One small nit, re oceans and heat content. Oceans do not have any “latent” heat unless one is referring to ice caps. Liquid oceans have sensible heat.
“Since the AGW alarmists have savaged the reputations of anyone who maintains that the sun has an influence on weather,…”
Nonsense. Climate scientists have not ‘savaged the reputations of anyone who maintains that the sun has an influence on weather’. Scientists agree that solar activity has a very important influence on climate, and that until about 1950 it was the main factor determining global average temperatures, toghether with volcanic activity.
However, solar activity cannot explain the warming seen over the past 30 years. This has been snown in countless peer-reviewed papers. Those who still maintain that ‘it is the sun’ are flogging a dead horse. Such people are rightly ridiculed in science. Only on blogs like these are they still believed.
Yes, the sun has an influence, but that is now dwarfed by the effect of CO2.
Dave Springer says:
December 20, 2010 at 10:41 am (Edit)
@tallbloke
“Enhanced co2 Greenhouse conjecture is dead in the water, because Trenberth’s ‘missing heat’ isn’t hiding in the system, it is the figment of a failed model. There is no missing heat, we will have to make do with what heat the oceans are still retaining.”
Hard to hide much heat in the ocean with good sea level measurement. Just a matter of splitting it between thermal expansion and change in mass. IIRC it’s presumed to be about half thermal and on the rise 2-3mm/year which is not at all outside the bounds of natural rate of change. If we start cooling off for real rate of sea level rise will decrease accordingly. It may go negative and stay negative
http://www.john-daly.com/altimetry/topex.htm
Basically, satellite altimetry determines sea level rise over the last 17 years to be around 3.2mm/year +/-75mm
And that error term is probably on the very generous side, it should probably be a good deal bigger.
I’ve given up trying to measure energy input to the oceans with satellite altimetry for now. Though with suitable ‘adjustment’ it may still be useful.
At least ARGO seems to be working pretty well.
THANKS David Archibald for a series of exceedingly clear and accurate postings and predictions, and for your latest and most excellent posting. Let us hope you are correct that we are now in at least a slight Global Cooling period that, over the coming decades, will lower the temperature of Global Warming Alarm and lead us to a better understanding of what humans can and cannot do to affect Climate.
Indeed, we may come to welcome the slight cushion of warmth, perhaps 0.1 to 0.2ºC, that may be due to recent and ongoing human activities. (The IPCC Climate “Team” claims 0.6 to 0.8ºC rise mostly due to human-caused Global Warming, but that is certainly a politically-motivated over-estimate.)
I have graphed NASA’s incredible string of highly incorrect Sunspot Cycle #24 peak predictions from 2006 (156) to most recent (90) on top of your Figure 9, along with my (also high) prediction, almost two years ago, of a peak of 80 (when NASA was predicting 104!) and my most recent predicted peak of 60.
The Dalton Minimum was marked by peaks of 45 and the Maunder of under 10. If we are headed for those numbers, will there be calls, a decade or so hence, for smudge pots to increase carbon emissions to solve the “Global Cooling problem”? Remember, all those Climate Models are over-sensitive to Carbon gasses and will (incorrectly) predict that burning Carbon will solve that problem. OY!